Association of Biology Laboratory Education
Minutes of the General Business Meeting
31st Annual Workshop/Conference
University of Delaware
June 10, 2009, 12:30-1:30pm
- Call to order and approval of agenda
- Mike O’Donnell called the meeting to order at 12:35 pm and the agenda below was approved
- Announcements and welcome from 2009 host (Bob Hodson)
- There were 166 attendees at the meeting, 1/3 of which were making presentations during the workshop
- Reports from Officers and Committee Chairs
- President (Mike O’Donnell)
- Mike thanked Bob Hodson and his team for all the work they did to prepare a wonderful conference. He also thanked Board members and committee members for all of their hard work. He urged all members to bring a colleague to the next meeting, and to become involved in ABLE by offering workshops, serving on committees, etc.
- Treasurer (Alec Motten)
- ABLE financial position is very favorable due to conservative investments, increase in membership/renewals, and returns from the past two conferences
- Membership (Maggie Haag)
- ABLE membership is increasing. There are currently 286 active members, including 63 new members from last year, and 43 for this year
- There is a membership category for post-docs and student memberships of $15 to join. Maggie encouraged members to recruit new student and post-doc members
- All of the hardcopies of old ABLE Proceedings have now been distributed
- Nominations – including election results (Dan Johnson)
- In Spring, 2009, Alec Motten was re-elected as treasurer, and a new member-at-large, Janice Bonner, won the most votes in a close race
- The results of the survey of ABLE membership have been compiled. Dan thanked the members for their participation. Most members indicated that they like the current format of the conference. As a result of some comments, Dan will be developing a mini-workshop on preparing to offer a workshop.
- Nominations are being accepted this year for a member-at-large, a secretary, and a president-elect. Joy Perry is the new chair of the nominations committee.
- Major Workshops (Donna Bozzone/Kate Verville)
- Donna thanked Kate Verville, Marielle Hoefnagels, Joy Perry, Anne Cordon, and Bob Hodson for all of their efforts this year
- ABLE needs more members to submit major workshops. Donna suggested that members could nominate others that might have ideas, volunteer themselves, re-offer successful workshops from previous years
- ABLE will be surveying the members to find out what types of labs they would like to see offered, to ask members to identify themselves and areas of interest so that they might team up with others to offer workshops, and to find mentors for potential new presenters
- Mini workshops (Ralph Preszler)
- Ralph thanked this year’s presenters and asked for members that might be interested in joining the mini-workshop committee to identify themselves
- Posters (Tom Fogle)
- Twenty-four posters were presented at this year’s meeting, which is up from last year. Tom announced that poster applications can be submitted online
- Proceedings (Mike O’Donnell for Kari Clase)
- Kari is looking for help with proceedings editing. Mike asked for members interested in helping, or with comments on the Proceedings CD to contact him.
- Labstracts (Barbara Stegenga)
- Members are needed to submit articles for Labstracts. The deadline for the next issue is early September
- Grants-in-Aid (Kathy Nolan)
- Seven people received grants-in-aid awards this year. There was one application for a Laboratory Initiative award
- Publicity (Kathy Nolan)
- The current ABLE publicity flyer will be updated
- ABLE Web Site (Mark Walvoord)
- The ABLE website now contains pictures of elected board members
- Mark has started a blog to encourage interactions among the members
- The ABLE LISTSERV is now set up
- Regional Workshops (Ruth Beattie)
- These are an option for smaller schools to host regional meeting over a weekend. At these meetings, four major workshops from full ABLE conferences are re-presented. Guidelines for hosting regional workshops are available
- New Business
- ABLE proceedings linked from Open Educational Resources (OER Commons; www.oercommons.org)
- ABLE is a member of BEN but future funding for BEN is uncertain. The Board voted to link ABLE Proceedings to Open Educational Resources and to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Cool Science site.
- ABLE becomes AIBS member (Mark Walvoord)
- The board voted for ABLE to AIBS as an institutional member for a cost of $200/year. Benefits of this would include the ability to participate in a grant (written by Gordon Uno of CUR) to link biological educational organizations across the nation, the ability to advertise ABLE through AIBS, as well as having access to other benefits (financial, legal) offered by AIBS
- Resources for teaching students with disabilities (Bill Glider)
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln has received a U.S. Department of Education for $1.1 mil to focus on biology education servicing students with disabilities. The purpose is to help instructors by providing training videos (web and DVD based). Bill would like to involve interested ABLE faculty. He encouraged members to complete an online survey about teaching and learning methods and materials at (www.bacc.unl.edu/survey), and to contact him if they wished to become involved in other ways.
- 2010 Conference (Jennifer Van Dommelen, Mindy McCarville)
- The 2010 ABLE Conference will be held June 22 – 26, at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Jennifer and Mindy discussed plans for the conference including facilities, lodging, field trips and other activities.
- Adjournment – the meeting adjourned at 1:30pm
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