The university annual learning and teaching conference today.

(The one I submitted a paper for I may have mentioned but they had too many contributions to include everything - and I was a day after the deadline thanks to illness etc).

The opening panel session where students were grilled for 45 minutes was interesting. But possibly not in the way intended. I felt for the students who got some pretty convulted and poorly expressed questions from the 200+ academics (and others) in attendance. On the other hand, they gave some pretty unclear answers as well. (Never mind revealing that none of them knew what the word 'values' meant).

In retrospect, were it my show I'd have appointed a properly neutral 'moderator' to field the questions and support the students. And I've have considered having either prepared questions or questions submitted during the session (on paper) or via phone text or twitter or some such and then 'vetted' for clarity before being passed onto the chair.

Then two sessions to attend - but with 6 options to choose from both times it was a nightmare of wanting to go to everything and feeling you'd not made the best choice after the session. Each session consisted of two papers/presenters or whatever. Both times I felt that I'd got much more out of the one I got be virtue of having chosen the session for the other option! But all four items I caught were interesting in their own way.

The highlight for me though was the keynote speech after lunch from an external speaker who'd traveled some way to be with us. He talked about 'troublesome knowledge' and the conceptual breakthroughs that students need to make to achieve understanding. Knowledge you can't 'return from'. (And having explained to my boss why I found having a laptop to take notes and with live internet useful during such sessions - rather than just taking pen and paper notes - it was fun to do as I'd suggested and find his PowerPoint slides from a previous iteration of the presentation on the web - meant I could annotate them directly and bypass the whole dead tree part of the process.) (Perhaps she finally got the larger point that my office isn't big enough to cope with even a tiny amount of paper!)

I probably should have gone home after the conference finished, but it seemed a fractionally early and besides I was looking forward to my 'bird of the day' so went back to the office to get some clearing up done.