LSA tutorial comments

[Heidi Johnson]

Since I stuck Jeff with the moderating, I was able to
look at the crowd now and then to see how it was going.
First, we had quite a good crowd. I'm not good at estimating,
but it was at least 60 people. The room was full nearly the
whole time.

Second, I think the time slot was actually very good. I suspect
we got our crowd in part because there wasn't much else happening!
(It also doesn't hurt to have major funders speaking on your
program :-).

Third, several people lingered after 6:00 to ask questions of
particular panel members. There was a respectable number of good
questions after each speaker, I thought. And a few people even
came to the booth to tell me how much they appreciated the information
we dished out in the tutorial. We got Rosemary Beam de Azcoma so
fired up, she started sending me tapes and metadata the week
after the conference!

Jeff wrote:
> In my own view, this is certainly something to try again--maybe next time
> getting a better slot. One idea Heidi and I talked about  is that, to
> decrease administrative load, we should plan LSA Convention tutorials to
> alternate with LSA Summer Institutes where, hopefully, there'll be
> archiving classes. 2006 is an even year and therefore not a Summer
> Institute year--so, we should plan on something.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think this tutorial was a great success
and should definitely be repeated, with shifts in emphasis of course.
Alternating with Institute workshops makes a lot of sense.

We could even think about doing a whole-day thing - a pre-conference
workshop - in the conference years. That would let us be even more
concrete and even include a good how-to talk about becoming an OLAC
provider.

Peter Austin & Nick Thieberger & I talked about taking this show on
the road, somehow: basically organizing a courselet that we could
all teach and go forth and teach it widely. Nick already does this
in Australia - lucky them! Maybe we could think in terms of using
this tutorial, and perhaps another one or several ones conducted
in other places, as a way of keeping ourselves up-to-date with each
other?

Also, Nick & Jeff and others talked about putting together a
collaboratively-written sort of handbook on Technologies for
Language Documentation. My dream would be a handy little pdf
booklet, not more than 50 pp, easy to download and print, that
we could update annually to keep up with changes in technologies.
Jeff (or Nick?) suggested Wiki, which I am unfamiliar with.
What do y'all think?

FELS might be a good place for a widely-roving program... the
DELAMAN subgroup should definitely try to participate with that one.

So now there are four ideas on the table:
1. having an OLAC tutorial at the LSA meeting every even year
2. having an OLAC/language technology course at the LSA Institute
every odd year
3. collaboratively designing a short (symposium-length?) course that
could be taught at the drop of a hat
4. collaboratively designing a handy booklet of some sort.

Whew!

Heidi