Welcome from the President and Board of ISSOTL
I am happy to welcome you to ISSOTL 2012, the ninth annual conference of our organization. We are delighted with the outstanding preparation done by the organizing committee at McMaster University, and we especially appreciate the vision and energy demonstrated by Beth Marquis and Susan Vajoczki from the Centre for Leadership in Learning. We convene a gathering of members and colleagues each year because face-to-face conversations and interactions support development of teaching and learning in open-ended and generative ways. I believe you will find the program has a rich range of topics across the scholarship of teaching and learning, with sessions that connect with a wide spectrum of interests and activities.
We are also happy to have launched the ISSOTL journal, Teaching and Learning Inquiry, which will provide a second venue for the exchange of ideas, research, practices, and examples of evidence-based scholarship. Through the leadership of editors Nancy Chick and Gary Poole, the journal will twice a year provide an account of our colleagues’ work in a format that reaches an audience beyond those who attend the annual conference. A permanent record also allows for more extended reflection and consideration of the content, and more people can use and build upon the work of scholars in our part of the teaching and learning professional arena. I hope you will find the new journal to be a useful extension of the intellectual community we sustain through our annual conference.
Looking ahead, ISSOTL is also working on identifying a next-generation online communication and collaboration space. While our journal will appear twice a year, we hope that our community can also engage the issues and topics of our field within an even shorter turnaround cycle. If possible, we hope to promote and capture the kind of high quality interactions that abound during the annual meeting, but have those opportunities continue throughout the time between conferences. Tools for such exchange are available, and we invite members to help identify the most effective and user-friendly formats possible for this next extension of our community’s activities.
Please enjoy this gathering of SOTL scholars from around the world, and I look forward to seeing you again next year in Raleigh, North Carolina, when we celebrate the 10th annual ISSOTL conference, hosted by a consortium of schools led by Elon University.