#icldc4

I had a great time at ICLDC4 - and not just because it was in Honolulu, with its sunny days and (for a Singaporean resident) cool nights. The conference has become a highlight of my calendar, because of the opportunity to see the great work being done by so many committed and enthusiastic academics and communities from around the world. I've storifed some of the Twitter traffic from the conference to give you an idea of the range of presentations, and people's opinions (it was also nice that there was a real Twitter community online at the conference this year!)

I loved many of the presentations I saw, but I also just liked speaking to people and discovering what they were working on. One minute you'd be in a presntation about using Harry Potter to encourage students to develop their Cook Islands Maori language skills, the next you'd be talking to someone about the Taku River Tlingit Place names map or how researchers should use social media to encourage good habits #GetYourLangDocOut, so that good work doesn't languish on a computer where it's of no use to communities.

My own presentations went well - people were particularly interested in the work on setting benchmarks for good methodology writing in grammar writing, you can download the slides here, and when the ICLDC team upload the recordings I'll let you know! We're also working on getting a written version of the paper together, which I'm really enjoying working on, and will keep you updated about as well. 

It was also a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones. It was good to see lots of people from Melbourne and other parts of the world, and it was also great to meet some twitter people as well.

Thank you so much to the team at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa for organising the event - I'm always particularly impressed by the number of engaged students who do so much work making the conference happen.

ICLDC4 kicks off today, and I'm back after having a great time at ICLDC3 in 2013. Last time I had just submitted my PhD for examination the day before the conference and was exhausted and slightly hysterical. This time I'm looking forward to catching up with lots of good people and hearing lots of great talks.

I'll be giving two papers, the first is with Andrea Berez, Barb Kelly and Tyler Heston Thursday morning. This is some work we have been doing for the last year or so looking at how people present their methodology when writing grammars and how we can improve that (answer: a lot!). The second paper is with Ham Morales and Jill Wigglesworth as part of a special session on Indigenous language acquisition in Australia on the Sunday looking at bilingual primary school program. There is also a talk from Alec Coupe and Joan Kelly from NTU that touches on some work I've been doing while here in Singapore, and Steven Bird and Matt Bettinson are both giving presentations about Aikuma and recent developments in that project.