21st Century Scholar

I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the issues the AERA Council is tackling over the next year. I was fortunate to have Arnetha Ball precede me as president who encouraged me to plan ahead. We have three task forces already up and running. One of them, chaired by Dorothy Espalage and [...]

Did you know that Anaheim offers residents wireless capabilities throughout the city? Austin, too. Not so in Vancouver. This post is inspired, in part, by the unforeseen Internet access challenges I experienced at AERA 2012. I’m not complaining. On the contrary, my intent is to investigate connectivity options outside the home computer environment so as to [...]

A young man arrived in the United States and moved with his family to one of the poorest sections of Los Angeles. The violence and poverty that surrounded him was a surprise. In his application for a scholarship to Stanford University he wrote, “I thought America was a land of riches and pleasures because of [...]

Vancouver has come and gone, and I am now home to catch my breath for a moment before the school year comes to a close. While the conference is still fresh in our minds I’d like to offer a request and invitation: Send us ten sentences. Write five sentences about what you liked at the [...]

Hold onto your Power Points, Prezis, and Silde Rockets, there’s a new presentation resource in town. It’s called Projeqt, and last month it won a SXSW Interactive Award in the category of Educational Resource. What is it? Reuters claims, “Projeqt allows users to pull real-time content into a presentation, including feeds from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, [...]

by Bill Tierney This is my third term on the AERA board. I was vice president of Division J about 13 years ago and then about five years ago I was at-large. Now I am President Elect. The Council meets three times a year—once in June, again in February, and then at the annual meeting. [...]

by Randy Clemens This past week, Bill and I participated in a symposium about qualitative research and public policy in the 21st century. The panel went well and included a variety of perspectives from the field. Ed St. John considered the role of qualitative research as either a tool of the state or method for [...]

by Bill Tierney Much to my considerable surprise I was elected President of AERA a month or so ago.  The honor was in the nomination, and when Kris Gutierrez called me I thought it was to offer condolences informing me that one of the two other candidates had won.   Instead, I learned that after our [...]

by Randy Clemens Last year, after attending AERA’s conference in Denver, I wrote about the need for a digital makeover. I made several suggestions for the meeting: (1), provide free wifi, (2), embrace microblogging, and (3), stream symposiums online. My blog was mainly focused on uses of technology to not just improve the experience but [...]

by Bill Tierney AERA is the conference people love to hate:  It’s too large.  It’s too ideological.  It’s too non-ideological.  They privilege goofy qualitative research; they exclude experimental forms of qualitative research.  It’s too white.  It’s too pc.  It excludes younger scholars.  It bends over backwards to include younger scholars who aren’t ready to present [...]