A large amount of work has finally culminated in the preliminary conference program. The program looks very good (to me, at least!), and I am sure that it will also find a good interest in the SIGCSE crowd and beyond. At the moment, we only provide the "short look" at the program, which shows the schedule and the session names - the basics for planning, and for keeping the suspense high: both on "what is meant by (for example) "Environments for Motivating Students?", and "has my paper been accepted or rejected?".
As you can tell from the title of this blog entry, the actual preliminary program is not yet available for everybody - but this is expected to change either late tonight ("German time") or in the afternoon ("US time"). Why do we delay publishing the program, although the program is already finished? (To be precise, neither posters nor tips, techniques & courseware have had their submission deadline yet, so they cannot appear in the program beyond a placeholder entry).
The reason for that lies in the way we have split our work. The conference chair and the two paper co-chairs have been working together intensively on determining the best papers and meshing them together into interesting sessions. The final touches on the database will be discussed later today between our US-based program co-chair and Henry Walker, the database administrator. After this, the acceptance and rejection emails will be sent out, because we want to be 100% sure that no author receives an incorrect message.
And this is also the reason why we do not yet publish the "final preliminary program". Speaking as an author, I would really not like to learn that my paper was rejected by not finding it in the program, rather than by being able to read a rejection email and examining the reviews! To me, this is similar to students looking over a sheet of paper in apparently random order, hunting for the student ID and hoping to find a good (or at least passing) grade next to it - they would also much rather not have their friend telling them "you failed the exam; I just saw that on the list" if they did not know about this!
Thus, once the review result emails have been sent out, we will shortly follow up on this by making the program available. Depending on when this is done exactly (at GMT-6), I will link the online program today (Monday GMT+1) or tomorrow morning (Tuesday GMT+1 and for most regions of the USA). Thank you for your understanding, and I hope that if you submitted something, you will appreciate the reviews!
Dr. Guido Rößling, March 7, 2011