At the end of last week I was at a conference in Paphos, Cyprus. It was the first iPads in Higher Education Conference (#iphe2014) with representatives of 14 different countries. I had written a paper with my colleague Tamsyn Smith called “iPads, Coffee & Cake: Becoming experts together”. This was about our IPAD (iPads and Alternative Devices) Coffee Club which we have built up over the last year or so. We stayed at the Almyra Hotel in Paphos which was lovely. There were some really lovely people there and we have made new friends as a consequence. I’ve never been to Cyprus before and we only had a few days there, so I’d like to go back.
Each morning, I got up at 6am to restart my running again, with Tamsyn as my running coach. She was very good and the first day we ran, in glorious sunshine a 6km route around the town. That was fine, I didn’t have any water with me and I’d guess that the temperature was about 21c. The next day we did 4km.
The conference was two and a half intense days of listening to the presentations. There was an evening reception on the Thursday evening and Friday evening there was a conference dinner at a Greek resturant. Unfortunately, due to all the running and lack of water I got heatstroke, so by the morning of the third day I was very ill. I still got up at 6am and tried to go with Tamsyn but she was very sensible and said that we shouldn’t run, I insisted on walking but then we had to stop every 5 mins so I could sit down. Great, such a lightweight! But I have to say I never felt so ill. There was nothing I could do but go back to my room and try and sleep it off. I did go to my colleague Steve Furnell’s session on security of iPads and then went back to my room. I was disappointed because I wanted to make the most of the conference! We did tweet a lot and capture via Storify though, so it wasn’t a total disaster!
One other thing about Paphos – cats, everywhere! There were loads of them, no dogs just cats. I get easily distracted so I wanted to chat with them (like a crazy cat lady) but I was aware that they were strays so I tried not to.
Overall though, it was lovely. Great weather and company, and a lovely location. I’m looking forward to the next conference.
Double Digit Education 