And now, a
message from our Co-Chairs…
Welcome to HCTD
HCTD Co-Chairs Report: Spring, 2007
Happy New Year to all! We are very thankful for another great year in 2006, but we want to continue to strive to improve in 2007. Our membership continues to hover around the 500-member level and we hope to solidify this in the coming months as to ensure our strong presence at the annual NCA Legislative Assembly. At our meeting in San Antonio, we heard from a number of members on a variety of issues and ideas that we think will not only make our division stronger, but more widely recognized for the breadth, depth, and quality of our work in the field of communication.
To that end, we have several goals and projects in mind for 2007. First, we will strive to improve and solidify our relationship with the NCA National Office and Executive Director. The focus of this effort is to smooth out the annual administrative processes such as management of the membership lists, recognition of our division officers, and a general understanding of how our division operates.
Second, as was voted upon at our last meeting, we are instituting a $75 cash prize to the top student paper of the division. It is hoped that this will draw both an increase in submissions as well as broader selection of papers that in the past may have been submitted to other divisions where cash prizes are awarded. We encourage advisors to encourage their students to submit their work, which, as past conferences have shown, is both of great interest and high quality.
Third, we want to invite all members to strongly consider making a conference submission for the 2007 convention in Chicago. Whether this is a scholar-to-scholar or full paper submission, we want to hear from you this year. There were many communication technology related papers and presentations at last year’s convention, but unfortunately, many were submitted to other divisions. If you have a paper appropriate to the division, or know of an author who is working on one, we ask that you submit your work to HCTD and/or encourage others to do so as well.
Fourth, we are embarking on an effort to raise the visibility of our field and are seeking your input. We are in the process of contacting several of the most prominent figures in our field, not only for their input, but also to develop a pre-conference seminar devoted to this issue. Human communication and technology issues abound in not only our research, but in society as well. As a community of researchers, it is our responsibility to promote the importance of this line of work to NCA, the communication field, and the public at large. We hope to have more information for you in the next newsletter.
Finally, while we hope these above efforts will help increase and stabilize our membership, we want to encourage each of our members (and potential members) to not only renew your membership, but to recruit at least one new member in the upcoming year. By taking this “Plus-One” recruiting effort to the membership, it should be possible to reinvigorate the membership and to demonstrate the division’s importance to NCA.
We look forward to hearing from you! We wish you all the best.
Scott C. D'Urso and Yun Xia
Co-Chairs, Human Communication and Technology Division