Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 11―13, 2012
The 13th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education and the 1st Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology will be hosted by Mount Royal University and be held at the Hotel Arts in the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. These dual conferences are sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education (SIGITE). One registration fee pays for both conferences. The integrated program contains keynote lectures, paper sessions, panels, posters, and exhibits and provides a forum for sharing and developing ideas relating to Information Technology research, education, applications, IT‐industry‐academia relationships and our roles as professionals, educators, and advocates for the effective use of Information Technology.
This year features the inauguration of a new conference, emphasizing research in information technology. As a new computing discipline, IT found its initial focus in the training of future IT professionals, and “teaching IT” received strong emphasis. IT faculty, however, frequently had strong research programs that fell across a wide range of specialties within computer science, Information systems, computer engineering, and others. As time has gone on, there has been an increasing need to recognize “research in IT” as more than a fragmented collection of pursuits in other computing disciplines. We are seeing a body of research developing that is uniquely characteristic of information technology. We anticipate that this dual conference will reveal a deeper synergy between teaching and research in IT, and will further encourage the recognition of this new body of research that is taking place around the world.
Calgary is a vibrant modern city with a population over 1.2 million, making it the fourth largest city in Canada. Host of the 1988 Winter Olympics, Calgary has an exciting cultural scene, ample shopping, and world-renowned restaurants. Whether it be rugged mountain parks, rolling prairies, boreal forests, or desert Badlands, there is no shortage of natural recreations in the near vicinity of Calgary. And in October, the weather should be beautiful!
Conference Site
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.