EBSI-SIS Student Symposium 2013: "Diving Into New Ideas: Collaboration as a Springboard"
The ASIS&T McGill student chapter is pleased to announce that the annual EBSI-SIS student symposium will be held this year on Friday, March 15th, at the SIS mansion, 3661 Peel, on the McGill University campus from 9 am to 4 pm. This annual event is shared between the Information Studies program at McGill and EBSI at the Université de Montréal. This year's theme will be "Diving Into New Ideas: Collaboration as a Springboard" and will take a different format than that seen in previous years.
The purpose of the symposium is to provide both PhD and Master's level students with the opportunity to present work that can then appear on CVs.
Students can solicit feedback from symposium attendees in order to improve papers, posters, and presentations for later use in academic and professional conferences and journals, if desired. The symposium also provides an opportunity to discover what research is being done by other students and make connections in your area of interest. To meet these purposes, the symposium will have the following events.
The morning is designed to provide Master's students and new PhDs an opportunity to start presenting and discussing their work.
1. A formal presentation for Master's students and new PhD students to present work completed or ideas for research. Students interested in participating in this session are asked to submit a proposal of 500 words (title, name of authors, contact information, and abstract) to the symposium committee by February 15th.
2. A poster session during lunch for Master's and PhD students. Posters previously presented in other venues are also welcome. Poster descriptions of no more than 150 words will need to be sent to the symposium committee by February 15th.
The afternoon has the radical change from previous symposiums, intended to draw a larger audience of PhD candidates and faculty who might not have attended the past couple of years:
3. A research PechaKucha session. Presenters are asked to present and discuss 20 images, each lasting for 20 seconds. This is particularly targeted toward PhD candidates and and students working on research projects with faculty. Prospective presenters are asked to submit their names, subject, and title of their presentations by the symposium deadline to the symposium committee. If you would like to know more about this format, please check out www.pechakucha.org.
4. A game of Battledecks. In this 'game' - it may have been first developed at the SXSW conference - contestants are given a set of powerpoint slides they have never seen before. Prepare to see at least one image of a kitten in the rain. Each presenter has to then relate each never-before-seen image, on the fly and in front of an audience, to the field of library and information studies and/or their own particular research. Each presenter has a time limit. A judging panel will award points to contestants based on adherence to the topic, ingenuity, wit, and completing the set of images within the time limit. A YouTube search of 'battledecks SXSW' will give you some video if you are interested.
5. Time has been set aside for activities proposed by you. If you have a workshop idea, a panel you want to put on, or just another fun game to play that revolves around research, we definitely want to hear from you. The only requirements for the afternoon is that it is in some way interactive with the audience and relates to research in the field of library and information studies.
Expressions of interest or proposed activities for the afternoon need to be received by February 15th. If you have an idea for item #5, contact us sooner!
Administrative issues:
To contact the symposium committee, please submit proposals, questions, and ideas to our email address at: mcgillstudentchapter [at] gmail.com. Remember we need to have submissions by February 15th. We will respond to submissions by February 28th and notify you whether your proposal has been accepted for the symposium.
Please note that those who present slides will be asked to provide the text of their slides in French, if they speak English, or slide text in English, if they speak French. In this way we can help attendees who are not fluently bilingual.
If you are interested in volunteering to help at the symposium, you do not need to be a member of ASIS&T or even a SIS student. Volunteers are needed and of course helping out at symposiums and conferences looks great on your CV. Whether you are a SIS or EBSI student, let us know if their is a particular event or activity with which you would like to help.
In addition to a free lunch, the symposium committee anticipates a lot of high quality jokes about research methodology. We can't say anything more tempting than that.