As editor, I quickly found myself overwhelmed with requests for personal appearances and invited to participate on projects, including my strong involvement with Fort Hays State University as an ESL teacher educator and leadership roles in Kansas TESOL from 2003 to 2006. As a result of these competing obligations, the ESL MiniConference newsletter was converted from a weekly to a monthly, and eventually a quarterly online publication.
Since the summer of 2005, I have been a doctoral student in special education at Kansas State University, and a board member of the Kansas Federation of the Council for Exceptional Children, and I have found it increasingly difficult to find time to devote to the ESL MiniConference project. I did attend the February 2009 TALGS Conference in North Carolina to report on it for the newsletter, but have not been able to find more time for this activity.
I passed my preliminary exams in the summer of 2008, and have spent the past year getting everything squared away for my dissertation research. Now the time is here, and I have decided to put the ESL MiniConference Online newsletter on a hiatus for 2010, with the possibility that there will be an edition published very late in the year, but only if I have completed my doctorate by then.
Thank you for reading. Our articles from earlier years are accessed regularly by 10,000+ monthly visitors, and hopefully we are making and will continue to make a positive difference for prospective, new, and veteran ESL/EFL teachers. I look forward to giving this service project more attention in years to come, and hope to eventually pull together a second batch of Achievement Profiles to summarize recent developments in our field.
Until then,
Robb Scott
Robb@eslminiconf.net