My debut conference experience was a bit anti-climatic, unless you count the part where I woke up the next morning (ie, today) vomiting with a fever and had to leave early to come home. But, we won’t dwell on that. I’m still running a low fever but managed to have a light dinner and kept it down, so we’ll call that a big improvement.

My panel session yesterday morning went very well. We had a very low turn-out, but I was forewarned by some scholarly friends not to take it personally if few (or no) audience members arrived. We still had a lively discussion, and I received some great suggestions for further research. Once I walked into the room, my nervousness started to melt away, and I felt confident about the material that I was presenting. One of my fellow panelists walked up to meet me, and when she noticed my name tag, she exclaimed that she found my paper fascinating! I was just so pleased that someone bothered to read it. 😉

I will admit that it made me feel much better about the lack of audience when I attended other panels with just a handful of people in the room. They had so many sessions running concurrently; I don’t think anyone had a full house.

It was a great experience, all in all, and I was encouraged to delve into the topic a little further. I’m going to try to expand the paper and see if I can submit it to a journal. There are so many policy implications to explore within persistent worlds (“virtual” environments), and it’s a relatively under-researched area that is ripe for new input. So … we’ll see!