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Do you attend conferences? If so, I'm sure you have experienced a number of barriers like traveling to a distant location, struggling with your schedule and managing your budget. Is there a way to avoid these difficulties? Yes, go online! Attend an online conference!
Professionals go to conferences to present new ideas, to exchange information and to keep pace with the latest developments of the field. Although conferences are an important forum for professional development, there are barriers to attending conferences, for example, distance, time and cost. However, the Internet, one of the greatest human inventions, brings another type of conference to our desktop: the online conference. Online in cyberspace, busy professionals can attend conferences without having to endure those common barriers.
Recently, I participated in an online conference entitled "Trends and Issues in Online Instruction." Here I will share my experience and offer some insights about online conferences from a participant's perspective.
History of Online Conferences
The online conference or virtual conference is "a professional education conference - with some changes in the technology that supports interaction and communication" (Anderson 1996). To be more specific, I would define the online conference as one organized and attended exclusively through the Internet.
The online conference has a rather brief history. Consequently, there is scarcely any literature documenting this topic. The International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) organized the first international online conference in 1992. The results of this experimental project were encouraging. "This project showed that electronic networking can provide cost-effective, yet meaningful, interaction among distance education professionals" (Anderson 1993,15). Since then, other organizations have sponsored numerous online conferences. Nevertheless, these conferences have rarely been documented in print.
Earlier online conferences were entirely email based because of the limitation of network capabilities. Anderson and Mason (1993) described the technical set-up of the first international online conference as follows: "A central mail distribution list was established at the University of Calgary in Canada. All conference messages were posted to this central list, from which they were fed to approximately twenty-five different networks or mail discussion lists for further distribution" (p. 6).
The rapid development of computer network technology has since offered online conferences a larger pool of delivery tools. For instance, the ICDE 95 online conference used...