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Editor’s Note: A version of the following was originally published in Educational Technology. The full citation is:
For more information on upcoming PIDT conferences, see the active Facebook page or the official website.
PIDT is an annual meeting that has become a favorite for many faculty to discuss issues related to curriculum, doctoral student advising and teaching, research, professional service, and emerging theories and technologies. By design a small conference, focused on networking, discussion, informality, and professional growth, but still a conference from which a large number of initiatives and defining publications have emerged. The following is a brief history of this unique and important conference in our field.
PIDT History
In 2004, Wineburg poetically lamented the state of presentations at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference. He described his first AERA conference in 1985, and his excitement to attend a session where four “luminaries” in his field would be presenting. Enthusiastically, he squeezed into the packed room, only to hear one esteemed professor read her notes verbatim. The second speaker did have visuals, but after “firing slides like an Uzi fires rounds,” Wineburg realized few were actually paying attention or learning from the presentation. He asked, “Must it be this way?” (p. 13).
That same year, 1985, a group of instructional systems technology professors quietly answered, “No!” and formed a unique, new conference, which was really more of a professional meeting than a conference. This “unconference” emphasized everything traditional conferences were not, including a priority on discussion, interaction, networking, mentoring, and action. “The main focus was primarily social and professional interaction on an individual/small group basis. The remote, rural settings provided opportunities for much more conversation and interaction than would be available at larger, more structured conferences,” Mike Moore of Virginia Tech said. A focus on balancing structure with informal conversations is a tradition that lives on in the PIDT meetings, which have been held annually except for 1997. The group originally called themselves Professors of Instructional Systems Technology, which reflected the direction of the field at the time, but which formed an awkward acronym that only persisted for a few years before becoming PIDT. Sleeping in cabins that for the first few years did not have indoor plumbing or heating, and meeting at a rustic retreat at Shawnee Bluffs in Indiana, on the banks of Lake Monroe, the original group (led by Dr. Thomas Schwen of Indiana University) met to discuss curriculum, research, and the emerging directions of the field.
“We were a new enough field that maybe people wanted to share information,” Rhonda Robinson, of Northern Illinois, said. Robinson added that PIDT especially provided a way for female professors, who were fewer at the time, to associate and mentor each othe