AEJMC Winter Planning

Well, I'm a little late posting this, but I'll go ahead and do a summary of the Winter Planning Meeting for AEJMC that took place the first weekend of December in Louisville. I've done several of these now, and I really like this aspect of AEJMC. I was there this time as the Head of the Internships and Careers Interest Group (ICIG). This planning meeting takes place every year on the first weekend of December to plan the AEJMC Convention that will take place the following August--in this case, August 2009 in Boston.

ICIG did pretty well in scheduling sessions for Boston. As it stands right now, we have a pre-conference session on Tuesday, August 4 from 1-5 p.m. that will be led by ICIG member John Chapin from Penn State. It's scheduled to be a round-table discussion of best practices and challenges in integrating internship and career skills into the curriculum in Journalism and Mass Communication programs. Panelists represent internship coordinators, department heads and faculty in large and small communications programs, and it will be a good --and free to attend -- pre-conference workshop for any JMC educator. We have two panels on Wednesday, 8/5--one co-sponsored with the Small Programs Interest Group and the other with the Radio Television Journalism Division; Thursday we have a panel at 11:45 a.m. and our Scholar to Scholar slot is at 1:30 p.m.; Friday we have a panel at 1:45, our Peer Reviewed Research Session at 5:15 p.m., then our Business Meeting at 7:00 p.m.; then Saturday we have a session co-sponsored by the International Communication Division at 10:00 a.m.

The Winter Meeting is all about planning, and I once again thoroughly enjoyed seeing how well structured the upcoming AEJMC Convention will be. Find out more at www.aejmc.org.

Now, I'm about to head out to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Maybe I'll find some time to write about it this year; I attended CES for the first time last year and was overwhelmed, but never found the time to write about it.