ILAC Newsletter April edition

ILAC Newsletter April edition

For Presenters


Dear Presenters

Welcome to the Independent Learning Association Conference 2009 newsletter April edition. (Don't worry, there was no March edition we only publish when there's something important to tell you.)

At the moment we have 110 paper presentations, 9 workshops, and about a dozen posters / e-posters scheduled.

Audience
The number of registrations at the end of the early-bird period was 240. Since we are planning to use 8 rooms with a capacity of either 50 or 120 people, although clearly some topics will attract a larger audience than others, you might expect an average of about 30 people in each session. Our estimate of the very maximum number of conference participants is 320, which would give an average of 40 in your audience. Photos of the rooms are available on the website: click on Venue Photos at the bottom of the Conference Content menu on the left-hand side.

Tidy Up
We will soon start working on the conference booklet which will contain your abstract and your bio-statement. If you would like to tidy these up, perhaps adding capital letters or updating your details, please do so before 13 April.

Presentation Files
For those planning to use programs in their presentations, such as PowerPoint, if you are worried that you might arrive at the conference and find that the beautifully designed PowerPoint presentation that you spent ages creating doesn't work, we encourage you to upload your PowerPoint to our website. We can then test it and get back to you if there are problems. The computers in the conference rooms currently use Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Microsoft Office 2003, set to English language, and IE6, (not Vista).

To upload your files, go to the conference site at http://ilac2009.elc.polyu.edu.hk , log in, click Presenter and then click 'UPLOAD FILES FOR PRESENTATION'. You can upload multiple files. At the bottom of the page click Choose File, select your file, and then press the upload button.




Computer Facilities
Also regarding computer facilities, we will provide free computer facilities in our Self-access Centre (SAC) for participants who want to use their web-based e-mail etc. The SAC is about a 5-minute walk from the conference venue. You can kill two birds with one stone and have a look round the SAC at the same time. Its web page is http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/C_Overview.htm We hope that it wont be necessary for you to bring your laptop, because the conference rooms have computers with a USB cable, and we will give you Internet access in the SAC. However, if you want to play a CD or DVD you will need one, because the conference computers don't have the right drives. The conference building does have Wi-Fi, but you would need to see our technical staff to set up a temporary account on your laptop.




Comment Function
To encourage sharing between presenters and other participants, we have provided a comment function on the website for commenting on abstracts. If you are logged in, and you click on Accepted Abstracts, and then ABSTRACT, there is a comment area at the bottom of the page. Please feel free to use this for supportive messages, congratulations, invitations to your own presentation on a similar topic, and questions about the presentation etc.

Timetabling
Compiling of the conference session timetable is in progress at the moment. If you have any unavoidable limitations, please e-mail us and we will try to schedule you accordingly.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference.

Best wishes

The ILAC 2009 Conference Team