The SIGITE Conference on Information Technology Education occurs every year in late October. The conference generally runs mid-day Thursday through mid-day Saturday. Calls for papers to this conference generally go out in February with papers being due in the Spring.
Average paper acceptance rate recently (2006-2010) has been 54%. Papers published in the Proceedings of the SIGITE Information Technology Education Conference primarily address issues around teaching and learning (pedagogy) of IT but also have focused on traditional research. Authors consist of IT faculty, professionals, as well as graduate and undergraduate students.
Depending on the conference organizers, these conferences also sometimes have tours of local IT facilities (campus labs or local IT companies) and/or pre or post-conference workshops relating to IT or education.
Preceding the conference, a special meeting is held for Department Chairs of IT academic departments within academic institutions. These IT Department Chairs’ meetings have been growing in popularity each year as they discuss issues related to leading academic IT departments.
Travel stipends are available to undergraduate or graduate students whose papers are accepted for publication in the proceedings.
SIGITE 2013
Central Florida
Hosted by the University of South Florida
This past weekend I attended and presented at the SIGITE Conference located in Midland, Michigan. It was the second weekend in a row that I was going to be gone, and all of that in the middle of the quarter, so I wasn’t as enthusiastic going into it as I normally am about conferences. As it turns out it was the best conference experience I’ve had in a long time!
The sessions at the conference are scheduled so that each talk has a 45-minute slot, with 30 minutes for the presentation and 15 minutes for questions. In most of the sessions I attended, including my own, the questions were in fact intermixed with the presentation. And what a difference it makes to have more time and a more interactive environment. I got excellent feedback on my work and was able to provide a lot more background information than was on my slides because of the questions. The questions themselves were also terrific. I was impressed by the insight that the audience members had into the work. I also got good questions and offers for collaborations after the talk, but it was the interactive presentations that really had me hooked.
On top of that, I met friendly, intelligent, and insightful people during the breaks, meals, and the reception. I had some of the best conference conversations ever, and I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to stay in touch with the people I met. So overall, I highly recommend SIGITE as a conference. Next year it will be at West Point in New York, and they’ve promised private tours of things that even tourists don’t get to see. That combined with the lively and friendly experience make it don’t miss opportunity.SIGITE is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education. Our members include information technology faculty (teachers and researchers), students, and industry professionals.
With over 400 members worldwide, SIGITE drives the creation and dissemination of the computing discipline of information technology. The organization has created a model undergraduate curriculum and helped create accreditation guidelines for IT programs, and is now defining and promoting IT research.