The Conference Ends without Closing…

Now that we’ve come to the end, the Compass team would like to say a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to everyone who has participated and made our first virtual conference an overwhelming success. The authors and presenters have been, without exception, engaging and professional to the last. We’d also like to extend a special note of thanks to our virtual attendees, who have kept the discussions alive with insightful commentary, and their openness to explore issues across disciplines.

There will be no new content uploaded to the site after Friday 30th October, but there is still much to discuss. All of the presentations and comments will remain on the website indefinitely, and we’d encourage you all to keep engaging with the content so long as there are issues to be explored, and interdisciplinary barriers to be broken down! If you sign up to receive email alerts of new comments, you can keep up with any ongoing conversations.

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed the conference – here are some things that you can do to stay in touch:

• Check out the Compass journals and recommend to your librarian. Researchers, teaching faculty, and advanced students will all benefit from the accessible, informative articles that provide overviews of current research. Personal subscriptions are now also available.
• Complete the post-conference opinion survey, coming to you next week. Your thoughts will help us make decisions about future conferences.
• If you have suggestions, or even just a short comment, you can pop it in our Suggestion Box or Email us
• Access the Publishing Workshops and Keynotes via iTunes (as from the conference website). The raw feed for the podcasts can be found here.
• Share our keynote video lectures via our Vimeo channel
• Tell others about your experience of the conference!

Final reminder: your 20% book discount token is valid until 15th November, so visit the book exhibit before then.

Until next time…?

Thanks again,

The Compass Team
www.blackwell-compass.com

Join us in the Second Life Cocktail Bar!

It’s the end of the first week of the Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference – many thanks to all of you who have attended. We look forward to presenting the rest of the program next week for your discussion.

This is a quick post to encourage you to join us on Monday 29th for our ‘Meet the Speaker’ session at the Second Life cocktail bar:

Keynote speaker:
Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University)
Virtual Communities, Virtual Cultures, Virtual Governance

Time: 1pm EDT / 5pm GMT

We’ve found this week that talking with each other in there with your avatars really does make a difference, especially if you have a microphone and speakers. It’s an odd experience at first but the sense of virtual reality, to go back to that old term, is quite compelling.

How to ‘Second Life’ in 10 minutes –

Step 1 – Go to http://secondlife.com and click on ‘Join Now’ top right
Step 2 – Choose a username, password and one of the template ‘looks’ for your avatar
Step 3 – Download and install the Second Life software
Step 4 – Login and go to this ‘Slurl’ -
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Abracadabra/201/90/31.

We hope to meet some of you in there on Monday!

Update: Battle of The Bands

We would like to remind all delegates that our Academic Battle of the Bands is still open.  Just head to http://compassconference.wordpress.com/entertainment/ to listen to the entrants and cast your vote.

Fracture Pattern are currently in the lead with 56 votes (54%), but anything could happen with a week left of voting!

Battle of the Bands – Voting Now Open!

Head to http://compassconference.wordpress.com/entertainment/ to vote for your favourite!