Symposium Report

Symposium Committee
Suzanne Hidi & Daphne Maurer, Co-Chairs
Members: John Kennedy, Peter Russell, Merrijoy Kellner, Scott Rogers, Harold Atwood, Cornelia Baines, Larry Bourne, Ken Rae
May 28, 2017

The Symposium took place at the Faculty Club on 6 on the theme of The New Technology: Good, Bad or Just Different? There were 8 speakers and 125 attendees, including a table of students from the University-in-the-Community program, invited at no charge. A few students/unemployed were also admitted at no charge. A video of the event will be available for distribution.

We were pleased to once again receive a $5000 donation from the Bank of Montreal. The 100 paid registrations comprised 85 at the early bird rate of $45 and 15 at the regular rate of $50, for a total of $4,575 in registration income. The bill from the Faculty Club of $6976.17 has been paid. After paying the other expenses (media services for video recording, honoraria for the musicians, books for the speakers), we estimate that there will be a surplus of about $500.

The evaluations were quite positive: 9 ratings of 5 (the highest), 15 ratings of 4, and 2 ratings of 3. Every talk was mentioned at least twice in the section on which aspects were most interesting. People liked the variety of talks and the food!

There were a number of suggestions for improving future symposia: decrease the number of speakers (and keep them within their time allocation) so that there is time for more discussion, improve the sound quality, increase the size of type on slides and nametags, and eliminate AV glitches.

This year we rented the AV equipment from the Faculty Club and contracted with Media Services for the audio systems and the video recording .A suggestion for next year is to hire Media Services to handle all aspects of AV so that they are responsible for troubleshooting any problems.

The Symposium Committee met on May 30 to consider the topics for next year and decided on:

Inequality: Origins and Consequences

Alexander Gregor was invited to join the committee because he was instrumental in suggesting this topic.