On 09/10/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The cheap
accomodation is usually flooded well in advance by foreign
students (summer schools, etc - the name sells very well) and the
university is quite good at squeezing money out of visitors.
Mind you, we managed MIT, so...
Not that the person with the Dunelm email address is at all biased. ;)
Hmm? I live in south Oxford and work quite closely with the academic
community here... I certainly wouldn't recommend a conference in
Durham ;-)
I imagine Oxford is one of the most expensive unis for
holding
conferences in, simply because it's Oxford.
You might have a decent shot at Brookes, but they are likely to have
the same summer-schools issue. (It's hard to realise the sheer scale
of "Oxford language courses" and so on in academic off-season until
you've seen the proliferation of summer students...)
MIT has a strong interest in things like Wikipedia, so
that probably
helped there. Oxford has no such interest...
You'd be surprised. It's not quite as staid a place as it seems,
there's a couple of good specialist bodies around, and I've got v.
good reactions to mentioning Wiki[p/m]edia in conversation with
academics in the past. In fact, I've never met an academic who was
immediately dismissive from a standing start.
Fundamentally, from the academic standpoint, we have a prominent name
even if it has an asterisk next to it. People don't always like our
end product, but they do usually respect what we're trying to do and
get intrigued by the way and the scale we go about it.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk