The ambience

of the UKLA conference was, as anticipated, everything you could dream of.

Exciting, scintillating, stimulating, silly , fashionable, superficial, deep and meaningful.
Yeah.
It was.

So I am going to talk you through a few snaps just to give you a flavour. I will begin with the fact that I have a famous friend who was asked for her autograph. I will let you see if you can guess who it is ...



And next I want to show you that academics also have an eye for fashion - not least in being able to spot a trend in coiffeur.

I know!!
Let's do a quiz.

See if you can guess who is the owner of each 'chignon'.

Actually, I wll make it easier. Guess which one belongs to Kate.
(sorry Kate you are actually exempt from this quiz.)

1.

2.

3.


4.


5.


6.


When we went on our little opentop bus ride I was very afraid as Muriel was trying to terrorise me with her hoody. (She is a Professor and you would have hoped she would be MUCH more sensible.)




We were in fact a very multimodal group and not only was one of our number able to read during the bus tour:



Someone else was able to text during a keynote session whilst also listening very carefully:



But most impressively one deleagte was able to talk on his mobile, write in his book and prepare to do squat jumps at the same time:

Quite frankly he was the most multimodal of all.

I do need to tell you though, that Muriel, Rebekkah, Jackie and I were able to KICK ASS at the skittles. We came second to

this motley crew

who had the unfair advantage of being less drunk than we were.
They kept brandishing their medals in our faces in a most ungainly (not to say unladylike) manner.

As I was leaving I took the opportunity to photograph some of the lovely bicycles parked near me:





Oh yes.. before I go, I need to give out one or two little notices:

1. Rebekah and Muriel were sucessful in heading up an ESRC bid for a group of us to be funded in organising a seminar series focussed on

'children’s digital cultures, specifically examining the role of play and creativity in learning with new media technologies'

2. I heard that the proposal I wrote with Guy to give a paper at the National Reading Conference in Miami in September has been accepted.

3. Theo is leaving Cardiff for warmer and wonderfully stimulating climes in Sydney. Thank goodness Anya will be there to work with him.

As if these notices were not enough, you really need to check out these sites:

1. Go here for setting up a special blog for your holidays and let your mates get jealous.com. (I am sure you are allowed to keepone for Study leave too.)

2. Go here for the TIME OF YOUR LIFE, playing fashion with dolls from real life. There are some very cool outfits to sort out. This is the site Rebekah is researching.

3. Clare sent me her excellent paper which talks about girls being mean on Bebo. (Hmm. I notice Clare is a qualified aerobics instructor. That must be why she did a little dancey skippy thing before she threw her skittles ball.)

4. And there is a new blog that has been set up by a Flickr group, featuring the colour Green.

5. Thanks to Kate for the address of this site which claims quite bravely that We are not Afraid.

And as you can have too much of a good thing, I am saving the information about Margaret, George and Mabel until tomorrow.