i-Anya

Today I attended the ISFC2005 conference. The day went like this:

First up, Frances Christie delivered a keynote address and traced the history of systemics in education, and then spoke about some of the current and future directions of research in this area. It was really interesting to hear her speak about the changing nature of language, metalanguage and the effect of the digital world on literacy.

Len Unsworth spoke about an intermodal metalanguage using children’s picture books and digital fiction as a focus. It was brilliant as Len always is, but what was especially good was that I’d had a sneak preview a couple of weeks ago so I could concentrate on specific details better - his talks are always so lexically dense that sometimes hearing it a second time is a necessity :>

Len’s talk was a preface to the next two workshops about digital literacies: Alyson Simpson spoke about book raps and then I spoke about online fan fiction. I am pleased to say that I had MEGA LOTS of questions afterwards by people intrigued by my research participants and the amazing writing they co-create.

Jim Martin came to my session and said that the data made his head spin :>

He also gave me some very very useful feedback about my register analysis and mentioned some additional resources that would suit the angle I was taking.

My favourite talk of the day was by my friend and colleague Sally Humphrey:

because she spoke about discourses of resistance and activism and used a text from a young adolescent girl’s blog as a focus text for analysis:

Sally is writing up this paper for a special journal edition I am editing - her work is very exciting and I am really looking forward to reading the final thing! One of the most interesting things Sally foregrounded was the notion of positive critical discouse analysis. The theme of the conference was “Discourses of Hope” and the idea was that we shouldn’t always be critically analysing texts which are “negative” but we should be looking at those texts which challenge, subvert, and work towards positive societal change, and analysing what makes them successful texts. I didn’t really “get” that until I heard Sally speak so eloquently.

The lovely side of the conference (well, so far anyway) has been the social side of it. I met up with old friends from my Multimodal Discourse Analysis research group that I hadn’t seen in over a year, I met people I had only previously communicated with via email, and… I bumped into a very good friend and colleague I used to teach with at a previous University that I’d lost touch with! I also met people I’d heard about or whose work I had used, which was lovely!! Oh, and I had a very good conversation with my friend Marie from Melbourne about Big Brother *grin*

THE BOOK LAUNCH

At the end of the day we had our double book launch. Len launched Fran’s book about Language in the Primary School:

Then Fran launched our book and very generously mentioned how much she especially enjoyed the MUDs and palaces chapters (they were mine)!!

I loved her coat so here is a better look:

I was really happy that quite a few of my friends, colleagues, current students and even former students who were not actually at the SFL conference came in especially for the book launch to share the evening with us.