A chair on its last legs

Yep. It's conference season again.

I have spent most of the day (and all of yesterday and the weekend) reviewing papers for a variety of conferences, and it's beginning to take it's toll. I will probably wake up in the middle of the night tonight, and reach out into space, to try to click the send button on my umpteenth e-mail. I'm fed up telling someone that their paper has been rejected, and I'm sorry and all that, but there it is. Or that it has been accepted, but can they ammend it so that it has Harvard referencing, double line spacing and finer detail about the research method that was used .... oh ..... and there's a punctuation mark missing. Each conference has its own particular online submission and reviewing systems are set up differently, and each password and username pairing is different and has to be remembered. My head is swimming. To be honest, I'm knackered.

I'm taking time out to write this blog post so I don't go completely stir crazy - it's a brief moment of respite. The conferences in question are the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 'Digital Learning: Repurposing Education' (for which I am the chair - one with only two legs, and these are my last by the way), the Joint Open and Working IFIP conference 'ICT and Learning for the Net Generation' (for which I am an editor) and the AICT Conference on Advanced Telecommunications (for which I am merely a skivvy).

<<Phew>>.

Once I have put these to bed, another lot will come along. Next I will be looking forward to reviewing a shed load of papers for ALT-C 2008: 'Rethinking the Digital Divide' when the doors shut on submissions later this month. And then there's ICICTE 2008 with it's deadlines also fast approaching.....

I probably won't sign up for any more conference committees for a while. Is there a tall building around here anywhere....?