APSA Roundup Part Two

After my panel finished on Thursday morning, I had a chance to leisurely attend other panels. I went to a number of media and/or technology panels all of which were relatively well attended. Even my panel, which was over before most people arrived, had about 30 in the audience. It was nothing like the panel from three years back that had 100 in the audience, but Wonkette was on the stage with us back then.

Some highlights from the tech panels — Stu Shulman explained that the form letter, e-mail campaigns from activist groups are swamping government offices and slowing down good policy making. Toni Pole talked about Latino blogs. Matt Hindman and others on his panel discussed the failure of the democratic promise of the Internet. Matt explained that most bloggers and the writers of open source software are actually quite an elite group. I walked out of that panel with the idea for my next paper.

So, new media and politics and technology seemed to attract a lot of interest. Education and policy was another story. A few years back, there were a number of excellent panels on charter schools and vouchers and NCLB. This year, there were only two education panels. One was so poorly attended that the presenters got off the dais, made a circle, and read to each other. This was the first time that I saw one presenter walk out of the room after a discussant trashed her paper. For the most part, the quality of the education papers was good, but there just wasn’t anything new to talk about. The most interesting angle was a paper that brought together immigration issues and education.

I also saw an excellent roundtable about what to do in Iraq. Basically, we’re stuck. We stuck in this "shithole" as one panelist said, with no hope of winning and no hope of leaving. Depressing, but good. Rob Farley took notes.