AERA info architecture

AERA was certainly quite overwhelming! I went to a bunch of sessions, which resulted in me being exhausted, and not always making it out for all the social activities in the evenings where the “real learning” was taking place — not sure what’s the better approach… but it was great to get a solid overview over the field, given that it was my first AERA.

I really enjoyed taking notes in my wiki – it kept it very organized, made it easy to share with others, and I can now go back and explore some of the topics further, read papers by some of the authors, etc. My notes from AERA are here: http://reganmian.net/wiki/aera11:start

I hate that my battery always runs out though, and of course big conferences never take care to provide enough outlets. I am seriously thinking about buying an external battery, because I got a lot more out of the sessions when I was taking notes, etc.

Would be really interesting to think about ways in which we could more easily share our notes – I’d like to see other people who went to the same sessions as me, and the notes that they took etc. Maybe if we could have some kind of a microtag, or unique ID for each session/presenter, which we could embed in whatever wiki/blog post etc, and then Google could search for them. Or we could even submit one URL for our site, and have a web crawler that went through the site and found all the relevant pages, and displayed them together, including Twitter-links etc. It wouldn’t actually be that hard to build… Not sure if enough people would use it, though.

Also, would be great if AERA would release their entire program as XML or some other structured format, so others could experiment with building APIs, different representations, etc.