Will Crichton

I'm feeling a bit despondent about publishing in computing education research (CER) right now. This spring we expect to have three very good results in the field. The problem is where to send them. »

Right now, there's really only one good conference in the field: ICER. In contrast, SIGCSE is a largely "tainted brand", ITiCSE is pretty weak, and the rest are essentially invisible to computer science. Not saying that's how it should be, just how it is. »

Of our three results, one is a good fit for ICER, but the second is somewhat iffy (given the CS1-and-lower obsession of CER, it might seem like "this isn't an issue we have"), and the third is definitely far too sophisticated for ICER; simply no CS expertise there to review. »

But even if those things aren't an issue (let's say all three are perfectly in the ambit of ICER reviewers), they're in a small part of the CER space, and would hence compete with each other. The conference has only about 25 papers/year, so no real room for all of them. »

Even getting past all that, this year ICER is in NZ. I fully support the idea of circulating conferences, but when there's only one, that's really tough. I can't afford to fly 5 people to NZ. (And the CO2!) The lack of anything closer for a long time is … very tough. »

I have various issues with ICER and its quality, but I still think we produce more than ~25 results a year. Having one outlet, 2/3 of the time *at least* one continent away, with huge travel costs much of the time, is just not viable. »