Literature obtained during the NAFSA Annual Conference & IHEC Blog Posts this Week

During the NAFSA conference I always find time to stroll through the exhibit hall.  I sometimes find it to be the most educational part of the conference.  To be sure, I’m always on the hunt for chotchkies for my kids and I think this year I did not disappoint!  I also started collecting pins (not buttons) from all of the various booths and I have a nice little collection going for the past three years.  More important, however, is that strolling through the exhibit hall provides an excellent opportunity for me to brush up on my anthropological and field/observational research skills (though I have no formal training in this area).  I find it very educational to see how various institutions, organizations, companies and countries present themselves to the field and I always find it fascinating to sit back and watch all of the people from all over the world interacting and working to establish exchanges/agreements as the exhibit hall is so much more than an us [U.S.] and them transaction.

Another practice of mine in the exhibit hall is searching for and collecting reports and books for my various research activities and to be housed in my Bury Book International Education Library & Archive.  NAFSA 2010 was exceptionally good to me as you can see from the photo pictured with this post (includes much of the literature I picked-up).  This week I will be highlighting some of literature I picked-up in the exhibit hall as well as some of the literature I was given (Many thanks IIE and MIUSA).  Additionally, I hope to post about a new publication about study abroad in the U.S. that I recently received.  To end this week I plan to post my video interview with Christopher Murphy, Senior Publications Director at NAFSA, as we discussed writing and publishing with NAFSA.

In case you missed my tweet (with photo) from #nafsa10 about the new CIEE Occasional Paper #32 titled “Study Abroad and its Transformative Power” by Gerald W. Fry, R. Michael Paige, Jae-Eun Jon, Jon Dillow and Kyoung-Ah Nam I thought I would put this great new publication on your radar.  CIEE has resurrected their popular Occasional Papers series and based on my conversation with a colleague at CIEE involved with bringing this new Occasional Paper to the field there will hopefully be more to come in the future!  You can access the Study Abroad and its Transformative Power Occasional Paper #32 here and all of the CIEE Occasional Papers here.