And can I ask if there are opinions on whether Australia is close enough to several important centres of research/scholarship (ie Singapore, Thailand, Korea and others) to provide some relief from the difficulties of long flights to Europe or the USA? (I should add that Australia's visa laws can also be quite onerous but not as bad as the USA and no fingerprinting/photos - not yet anyway) Matt Dr Matthew Allen Associate Professor Internet Studies Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, Humanities Curtin University of Technology, CRICOS 00301J Australia m.allen@curtin.edu.au http://smi.curtin.edu.au/netstudies/allen.htm +61 8 92663511 (v) +61 8 9266 3166 (f) Vice-President, Association of Internet Researchers http://www.aoir.org -----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Soraj Hongladarom Sent: Friday, 8 October 2004 3:13 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference' Dear all, I just would like to add my two cents on Prof. Wu's comments on virtual conferences. I used to attend several of them, but my experience is that I could not find enough time to read all the papers and to follow all the discussions sitting in my office. There are a lot of distractions -- students coming in demanding answers, committee meetings, phone calls, etc. These are the normal aspects of life in the office. But when I am away on a trip to a conference, I can leave all that away and focus on the papers being presented. And I come back feeling much freshened up. At first I thought I could focus more on the papers being presented online, but I just found myself downloading most of the papers for later reading, and the discussion aspect is limited to posting on email lists. One way to solve the issue of international travelling, visas, etc. is to hold an AoIR conference closer to home. In my and Prof. Wu's case that would be in Asia. Trip to HK for me is not as daunting as one to the US. Perhaps someone might want to propose that there be 'regional' conferences such that those in Asia could attend them. Cheers, Soraj -- Soraj Hongladarom Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330, Thailand Tel. +66(0)22 18 47 56; Fax +66(0)22 18 47 55 ASEAN-EU LEMLIFE Project: http://www.asean-eu-lemlife.org/ The 2nd Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference: http://www.stc.arts.chula.ac.th/CAP/AP-CAP.html Personal: http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/web/soraj.html _______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org/airjoin.html