Dreamsongs Wiki

PractitionersCantWrite

Force: practitioners are not able to write academicly acceptable submissions

We could address this by offering a mentoring programme.

CHI does this: people apply at least three months in advance of the deadline.

I've already missed out reminding my students for CHI 2005.

Nonono. It is less an issue of ability. It is more an issue of what people are working on. The problems practitioners solve are not considered relevant most of the time for academic/scientific progress. Or, the problems practitioners solve, are never abstracted from enough to be relevant for science. --DirkRiehle

I agree that practitioners usually don't have time to abstract enough from their particular problem. Some do, though. And I disagree completely that practioners don't solve problems that are relevant to academic progress.

One of things that I've noticed is that Americans notice the gap between

industry and academia and think something should be done to bridge it.

Europeans notice the gap and think it is hopeless and not worth trying.

That is why OOPSLA is an American conference.

From the times I have been on the program committee, I think that lack of

knowledge about how to write an academic paper hurts most papers from

non-academics (and many from academics!)

A paper mentoring program would be great, but it would be a lot of work to run it.- RalphJohnson

Just to let people know, all Practitioner Reports have a shepherd this year, but this was started after the initial submission. And yes, it is a lot of work. Over a 10 week period, each shepherd will likely spend a minimum of 3 to 5 hours on each paper, reading drafts and communicating feedback. Each shepherd has at least 2 papers. And all this work is strictly volunteer, with very little recognition!

- GailHarris

You know, my experience from reviewing papers for IEEE is that it is often the academic papers that are poorly written. I have seen some interesting information, but written in a way that it is a lot more work than necessary to extract it. I suspect that neither academics and practitioners (when they form a mutually exclusive set) do not have lots of time, but if we are talking about bridging the gap between academia and practice, encouraging good writing cannot hurt.

-SteveBerczuk

ironically, if if they can write, they are clueless about presenting -- this is a multi-flawed process (as most things human) -- CeciliaHaskins

I would feel more comfortable if we would not use THEY and ALL and NONE... to have this kind of discussion. I know professors and academics who cannot write, I know people in industry who cannot, and I have excellent counterexamples of both. And I know European and Americans who have not given up on working with industry. To give one example: at Argo we did a joint project academia (VUB) and government. We published and both authors were pretty louzy writers. We got an incredible amount of Ralph's time (thanks) to help us publish.

I think we should not distinguish in shepherding between academics and practitioners. Some academics have ideas that are difficult to position in any conference, get little time and may not be the best writers in the world. we could offer help there too. -- Martine