Rick West

Michael Barbour, one of the AECT interns this year, is trying to
understand why graduate students seem to be participating less and less
in AECT. He and I both believe that it is partly because of cost. As
Michael writes:

The volunteer commitment for AECT is 12 hours over a two and a half day conference. Let’s compare:

• AERA - student rate $50 (add $35 for non-member)
• SITE - student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days
• e-Learn - student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days
• ED-Media - student rate $155 (add $20 for non-member) / volunteer rate $0 with eight hours over three days

We both feel that AECT is building up barriers to its student
population. Wal-mart pays its employees more than AECT pays its
volunteer graduate students! That’s why I’m not serving as a volunteer
this year, even though financially, I could sure use a break as much as
any other grad student. Yes, I am at the conference, because I have
other things that have drawn me into this community. But that’s not the
case for all students.

So if you feel that part of the reason for the
attrition rate of graduate students leaving AECT is because of the
difficult volunteering situation, then see Michael Barbour to sign a
paper petition, or sign an electronic petition at:

http://mkbabd.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-im-finally-at-aect.html

technorati tags:AECT, AECT2006, graduate, students

Blogged with Flock

This entry was posted on October 12, 2006 at 4:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.