I have just returned from the ASFLA conference where I gave my first ever keynote paper. I have to say I was terribly anxious before my talk - I was sitting in the empty lecture theatre 2 hours prior to starting going over my notes (ummm and should I confess to the fact that I was still making notes right up til a few minutes before I started?!) and checking that all the technical things were working!!! Fortunately it went really well and I had lovely feedback from lots of people! PHEW!!
The loveliest feedback I had about my talk came from Len, who said it was the best talk he’d ever heard me give! Len has heard pretty much every talk I have ever given dating back to hmmmm… 1997 I think!! So I thought that was a great compliment. I also inspired several people to run off and sign up with Second Life and/or Kahootz - I think I should be on commission!
It was great to meet up with friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, not to mention the stimulating and inspiring sessions I managed to attend. I also got to meet several people who read my blog - HELLO!!! The comments ranged from: “Ohhh I recognise you from your blog”, “Hello, I’ve been reading your blog for ages!” and “You’re different to what I expected from your blog” (not sure how I should take that last comment!)
I was very excited to meet Jo’s mother, Rita (who gave me lots of great bribery material I can now use on Jo *grin*), and famous ed-tech blogger Scott.
Special thanks to my wonderful friend Brian who gave me lots of moral support, and my poor brother Matthew, who I called at 11:30pm the night before my presentation asking numerous musical questions to make absolutely 100% certain that the musical aspects of my multimodal analyses were accurate!!!
Now I have to finalise the paper for the proceedings - I can’t upload my slides because I don’t have copyright permissions for all of the images I used, but for anybody interested in my paper about machinima let me know and when its all done I’ll send you a copy.