Conference Information

Overview | Conference Facilities | Who Should Attend

Overview

Leaders in higher education are interested in trends that will be affecting their institutions and those they serve. The Outreach Scholarship: Learning, Discovery, and Engagement conference has been designed to provide you with an opportunity to learn about the marketplace trends that impact public policy, higher education, and our communities. The conference will be held October 14–16, 2001, at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Don’t miss this opportunity to informally benchmark with some of the nation’s outreach leaders. This conference is intended to create a leadership dialogue—promoting an open discussion of the issues affecting the future of our institutions. This conference will also provide practical tools for implementing change in our institutions.

This is the second conference focusing on best practices in outreach and public service held at The Pennsylvania State University. The 1999’s conference attracted over 300 people to more than seventy sessions, including key note addresses, and a variety of special events. Planning is underway to make this year’s gathering more comprehensive and dynamic than ever. This year, Penn State is joined by Ohio State University and University of Wisconsin Extension in offering university and college faculty, administrators, and community leaders an opportunity to share strategies on how to build creative, effective partnerships and sustainable outreach and engagement initiatives. We invite you and your colleagues to participate in this dialogue for engagement.

The conference will:

• Provide a forum for participants to exchange knowledge, insights, and experiences related to outreach initiatives
• Focus on practical applications; providing the participants with usable tools to implement in their respective institutions
• Promote closer collaborative linkages among outreach personnel, faculty, individuals, communities, organizations, and government officials
• Encourage open discussion on issues of common concern to leaders and practitioners regarding outreach and engagement
• Examine successful outreach initiatives from the perspective of the community and the outreach recipient
• Offer evidence that creating an outreach culture is beneficial to college and university communities and the larger communities they serve
• Create opportunities to informally benchmark with some of the nation’s outreach leaders in creating an agenda for the engaged university
• Support the development and advancement of the knowledge base and theory behind successful outreach in the changing society.
  

This conference is targeted to college and university leaders and faculty interested in engaging their discipline with those outside the academic community and with cooperative extension, continuing education, distance education, technology transfer, governmental affairs, university relations, and public broadcasting. The presentations will focus on the following important areas:

• Involving community stakeholders and faculty in outreach initiatives
• Measuring quality and impact
• Delivering key programmatic areas or initiatives at your institutions (e.g., P-12 education, business and technology, health and science, workforce and community development)
• Funding outreach initiatives
• Using information technology and electronic commerce to serve constituencies
• Fostering support of technology transfer
• Building innovative outreach initiatives
• Building collaborations and partnerships
• Assisting urban and rural communities
• Enhancing program development and marketing
• Supporting public policy and engagement
• Delivering distance education and public broadcasting
• Promoting outreach scholarship

Join us in October 2001 to participate in the dialogue of engagement—a dialogue of change in higher education, outreach, and public service.

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