Educators' Symposium

Theme: Active Learning in Industry and Academe

Important Dates
Deadline for FORMAL submissions: March 19, 2007
Notifications for FORMAL submissions: May 11, 2007
Deadline for INFORMAL submissions: July 2, 2007
Deadline for Educator Scholarship applications: July 20, 2007
Notifications for INFORMAL submissions: July 23, 2007
Deadline for camera-ready copy: July 30, 2007
Conference begins: October 21, 2007

Overview
Join us at OOPSLA's 16th Educators' Symposium, the premier forum for educators in academia and industry with an interest in object-oriented and other related technologies. This one-day symposium offers a venue for consultants and academics to share experiences and to explore new ideas that can help us understand and teach better. It achieves these goals through featured talks, paper presentations, interactive sessions, demonstrations, posters, and group discussions.

OOPSLA is delighted to announce the availability of scholarships for educators from 2— and 4—year colleges to attend OOPSLA 2007 and the Educators' Symposium. These scholarships are sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN). For more information, see the Educator Scholarship page. In addition, sharply reduced fees are available to Secondary Education teachers, including CEGEP educators from Quebec.

Submission Process
Electronic submission of proposals is required through the OOPSLA submission system.

OOPSLA invites educators and trainers from all levels of academia and industry to submit papers and proposals in any area relevant to teaching and learning computing. The committee will give extra consideration for new ideas in active learning. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• Teaching and learning techniques
• Facilitating active learning
• Innovative use of educational materials, such as software
• Learner-centered education
• New thinking about objects
• Analysis
• Design
• Modeling
• Programming
• Service-oriented architectures (SOA)
• Services sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME)
• Integrating advanced technologies
• Dynamic languages
• Software development
• Agile practices and processes
• Patterns
• Impact and use of Pedagogical Patterns
• Assessment

The committee that evaluates all submissions consists of members from academia and industry with extensive teaching experience. The committee will base its decisions on the following criteria:

• Potential value to trainers and educators
• Clarity
• Technical and educational merit
• Originality
• Relevance to the theme: Active Learning

Ultimately, the committee's focus will be on proposals that symposium attendees can use to improve how students learn. The program committee solicits a variety of submissions that can help educators and trainers do their jobs better. Feel free to contact the symposium co-chairs to request clarification or to propose a type of submission not listed here.

Formal Submissions: Formal submissions are those intended to be both presented during the Educators' Symposium and also published in the OOPSLA Companion and must be formatted according to the ACM Proceedings guidelines. All formal submissions will be made through the OOPSLA online submission system by 19 March 2007. Those that are accepted by the committee will be published in the OOPSLA Companion. Submissions in the following categories have been contributed successfully to past symposia:

• An experience paper that discusses a challenge encountered teaching in an academic or industrial setting and how the instructor addressed that challenge.
• A description of an active learning exercise that can be used to introduce or consolidate learning of an important topic.
• A research paper that reports a contribution to knowledge in the field of computing education and training.

Informal Submissions: All informal submissions will be made through the OOPSLA online submission system by 02 July 2007. Informal submissions are those intended to be presented during the Educators' Symposium. Although accepted informal submissions will not be published, the committee will review all proposals. An informal submission might include:

• A description and demonstration of a new teaching technique that you've employed.
• A report of a 2005-2007 education/training event, such as a workshop, working group, or conference during the year, even those from OOPSLA 2007
• A proposal for a poster or demonstration that shares a technique or resource with the OOPSLA community
• A discussion of the practical use of theory in creating learning games, learning centers, or frame games
• A proposal for a panel that discusses a topic of current interest from several viewpoints
• A description of the use of killer examples and nifty assignments in your teaching
• A film that demonstrates an aspect of active learning
• An in-class activity or educational game that would be of interest to OOPSLA Educator Symposium Attendees
• An interactive activity for all attendees that lasts a few minutes or up to an hour.

For additional information, clarifications, or questions, please contact the Educators' Symposium chairs, Joe Bergin and Steve Metsker, at educators_symposium@oopsla.org. We will be looking especially for proposals that lend themselves to an Active Learning environment at the symposium itself.

Program Committee

• Joe Bergin (co-chair), Pace University, US
• Jutta Eckstein, IT-communication, DE
• Ed Gehringer, North Carolina State University, US
• Neil Harrison, Utah Valley State College, US
• Jim Heliotis, Rochester Institute of Technology, US
• Kevlin Henney, Curbralan, UK
• Joshua Kerievsky, Industrial Logic, US
• Grigori Melnik, University of Calgary, CA
• Rick Mercer, University of Arizona, US
• Steve Metsker (co-chair), Dominion Digital, US
• Venkat Subramaniam, Agile Developer, US
• Eugene Wallingford, University of Northern Iowa, US