ALTA Postmortem

ALTA is over for another year and it is a good time for some reflections. I stayed pretty close to the teaching and learning sessions and this demonstrated what is to me the best thing about ALTA, a chance to catch up with what is happening in innovations around the local law schools, and to meet face to face with those I have only had email contact with before.

The legal T&L community is a group which is impressive in its scholarship, innovation and commitment to students but also in the generous and supportive community. A lot of warmth, good will and a remarkable lack of the competitive politicking that you get in some conferences. Teaching and learning people are just better human beings, clearly.

The black cloud of ERA cast a bit of a pall over proceedings. Legal education journals have been poorly treated by the process and there was a fear that scholarship would suffer as researchers are being coerced to seek A star journals instead. Personally (and admittedly with the luxury of a permanent position) I think the ERA storm will pass and be replaced by something just as silly, researchers will continue to work in areas that they love and want to contribute to. The incentives may be thin on the ground, but that is hardly new in the teaching and learning field.

The worst thing about ERA is the corrosive effect on morale and community, we all have much more interesting things to talk about and yet it is so easy to fall back into bitching about the funding aspects of our work. I think this also stirs up the anxieties about journals as a form of publishing and ERA will accelerate the deaths of some journals. But since the journal is a fairly obsolete form of information building this is inevitable (and a topic for another time).

I wish I could make it to more ALTA conferences, but conference funding being what it is I simply cannot afford the $1000 conference fees each year. I am fairly concerned that this will limit the effectiveness of ALTA as a community, preventing academics from the poorer universities (and many junior academics) from attending. This is especially true for those trying to maintain research currency by going to at least one specialist conference each year.

Nevertheless, I will be keen to attend again. Maybe not next year, not unless I manage to get three A star journal articles and two books published this year (or, technically, last year because of the funding lag). Hopefully the ALTC exchange will fill the gap until I can get to ALTA again.