The weather is Oxford was beautiful and although the coach journey there almost killed me (4,5h!), it was great to meet other young researchers who are involved in education. It's really interesting that when you go to an education conference of this kind most of the people who attend are international women in their late 20s/ early 30s.
In Oxford I learned two very useful things. Although most of the sessions did not feel particularly relevant to my research, this was the first time that I went to a conference which was put on for research students by research students and it taught me a lot about how to structure a conference presentation. I have got my first own presentation in London in two weeks time and I am glad I had this experience before I went. Secondly, the Department for Education at Oxford uni also had some brilliant posters on display and they showed me that posters at conferences are not at all second class to presentations.
Where STORIES looked at all kinds of educational topics, the UKLA conference was much more focused on research which is connected to my work. I finally met the Media Literacy heroes Jackie Marsh and Guy Merchant and also encountered a very interesting project by Petula Bhojwani, who also wrote her PhD about using films to motivate boys to write.
The best speaker of the day was David Mitchell, who spoke about the use of blogs in classrooms and how using internet technology had transformed his students and the school as a whole. His presentation style was really entertaining and reminded me a lot of Ken Robinson. It's always refreshing to have a very academic conference broken up by a few laughs! Thanks to David, I have finally started to tweet a bit more about my PhD and I am hoping to update this blog more frequently, too!
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