All day at in internal conference on teaching and learning today. The theme of this year's event was 'assessment' so I nearly decided not to sign up several weeks back. I'm glad I did, however. Not only because I do have colleagues that are involved in assessment - so it may come my way yet, but because the were many ideas and papers that were of interest and inspiration in what I already do.

It was well put together and the keynote speakers were both excellent. The only real complaint was that with seven strands to choose from you felt as if you were missing a huge amount. Although all the papers were published in a volume we could carry around with us, it was hard to digest that much very quickly. On the other hand, there were three awards for 'best paper' that were kept a secret till the end of the day and I found I'd managed to pick two of them to attend. The overall winner was one I quite agreed was excellent - it's presentation had been great too. One of the others I had to admit had worthy content but had been presented very dully.

Actually, I say I spent the day there but having started at 8 it went on till a little after 2 when it broke for lunch. And that was it! Lunch was nothing to write home about but by the time that was over at a little after 3, it was clear that colleagues (and my boss) weren't returning to work. It had been a pretty intense day so I decided not to show them up and headed home as well. Nice to do that in the daylight.

On the whole though, the day had been very similar to such events at TheOldPlace and perhaps next time, when the theme isn't assessment I'll feel braver about looking at the possibility of presenting something. In fact, H and our boss had done something on e-literacy but very few had turned up. We decided that it was more to do with the fact that they'd been allotted a double session (which meant, presumably, people felt they'd be missing two other possible papers) rather than reluctance to attend anything libraryish. In fact, they'd not mentioned the 'l' word!

But good for H being brave enough to contribute so early on!