AAUP Conference: Presentation Day

The three and a half hour long train excursion down to Washington, DC did nothing to lessen my exhaustion of the last few days. Even though, I have to admit the the seating room on the Amtrak trains allowed me to sleep quite easily. Those big reclining chairs are way more comfortable than the JetBlue airline seats that I almost purchased. The good thing is that despite the bleary eyes, my afternoon presentation on “Redefining Tenure and Promotion Standards for Multimedia and Digital Arts Faculty” was fairly well received at the annual AAUP national conference on the State of Higher Education. The only major problem with

the presentation was that I absentmindedly left the batteries for my video camera in my other bag. As a result, the camera that I took to the conference had no power to record by the time the presentation started.

Also I was disappointed that there were very few digital media people in the audience. Most of the crowd was made up of traditional liberal arts and sciences academics, with not much background in multimedia pedagogy. The upside of this occurrence was that the crowd makeup underscored one of the major points of my presentation argument that digital media faculty generally do not use the same venues for scholarship adopted by the more traditional disciplines.

The presentation is based on a recent article that I will be submitting for publication.