Western Australian Institute for Educational Research Fellowship 2008: Dr Roger Atkinson WAIER initiated the awarding of Fellowships and Life Memberships in 2004.

My membership of WAIER commenced in 1994, when with Clare McBeath I presented a WAIER Forum 1994 paper, titled An Internet listserver for WAIER? The idea did not "catch on" at the time, probably because the Internet, then more commonly referred to in Australia as AARNet, was a very new and raw innovation. However, the next wave of Internet innovation, represented by World Wide Web servers and and clients such as Netscape, was put into service for WAIER purposes very rapidly. After only about one year's experience with web site hosting and publishing, in 1997 I commenced placing WAIER's journal, Issues in Educational Research on its own website, and soon after that started WAIER's website.

After more than a decade of conducting the IIER and WAIER websites, I'm very pleased with the outcomes and the value that these sites have added to the journal and the association. WAIER and IIER "got into the web" at an earlier time than many other associations and journals and that has contributed quite significantly to our viability, professional standing and the prospects for future growth.

From about 2002 my website activities became more formalised when I was coopted to the WAIER Executive Committee, and in recent times I have added a new formal role as archivist for WAIER.

After a long period of contributing research conference papers and a few papers in journals, my educational research activities are now directed very much towards facilitating research publishing by others, particularly by new and novice researchers. The principal avenues that I support through editorial work and writing are the journals Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) and IIER, the ASCILITE Conference series, most recently Singapore 2007 and Melbourne 2008, the Teaching and Learning Forum conference series in Perth, and HERDSA's Newsletter. Links to these activities and to individual articles are available at http://www.roger-atkinson.id.au/pubs/conts-all.html.

Editorial work for the journals, especially AJET, and for ASCILITE's conferences and the TL Forum, is to a large extent a mentoring activity directed towards improving authors presentation of their research, and helping them to plan additional research observations in order to advance their work to an enhanced and publishable standard. Each year I work intensively on about 100 papers, mainly for AJET, plus undertaking smaller involvements with about 250 papers for conferences, mainly ASCILITE and TL Forum.

I continue to make a small contribution towards professional development for school teachers. Since December 1994 I have conducted the email list echalk in collaboration with the Educational Computing Association of Western Australia (ECAWA). It is an active list with over 350 subscribers [http://www.ecawa.asn.au/home/echalk/]