Well I am back from the conference in Barcelona now. The conference itself varied a lot in quality, especially between the different days. The first whole day of the conference I went to a lot of sessions which I found interesting, and made me think about different ways of approaching e-learning. The second day was basically a bust with barely any sessions that in retrospect I would go to again. I'm not sure whether it is a custom in some countries when presenting, but a couple of the presenters decided to tell a story about their country for about 10 minutes at the start of the presentation. It happened for someone from Saudi Arabia and someone from Belgium. They seem to assume the audience is full of idiots ("Here is Saudi Arabia in a map, here is its flag, it exports a lot of oil, Mecca is in Saudi Arabia, etc."). Might be fine if it was a geography conference, but to spend the first part of your presentation doing it seemed ridiculous. I mostly just need to know what might be different in e-learning about your context. The person from Belgium who did it made me laugh as she was talking to us like we had never heard of Belgium before, despite a huge number of attendees being from the Netherlands, and the rest from the UK.

Outside of the conference I went around with Richard and Helen and we saw the typical sites. I did my best to find them some nice places to eat away from the touristy areas too. I also hung out with Nadia and Jonatan who I stayed with in December, though they have moved house since then. Jonatan has been sick for the last month or so, so I just went over to their house as he is low on energy. He seemed to be doing ok when I was there though.

Now I'm back in Sheffield to work on my dissertation proposal, which is due on Sunday.