The global EDUCON conference, organized by IEEE (the institution for electrical and electronics engineers) is underway on Kos island, just off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey.

I’m here this week with my colleagues Inês Direito (University of Aveiro and UCL), John Mitchell and Diana Martin (UCL). Across the four of us, we’re facilitating 5 of the 16 workshops scheduled for this conference.

We’ve been having a great time connecting with colleagues from the University of Monterey (Mexico), EPFL (Switzerland), India, Singapore, across Europe and the Americas.

I had great fun interacting with participants at my grants and fellowships workshop, the systematic literature review session I delivered with Inês, the ethics handbook session I delivered with Diana, and supporting the publications and research design workshops spearheaded by John.

I’ve never attended EDUCON before and there’s a more technical bent to it than the more education research focused conferences I typically attend, so I met many new people in addition to reconnecting with friends I mead recently at REES (in India) and SEFI (locations across Europe).

I’m headed home shortly, for end-of-academic-year wrap up and catching up on loads of tasks that have piled up while I was networking and collaboratively generating new knowledge. I’m full of inspiration and optimism!

I even met colleagues organizing the LACCEI conference I’ll attend in Costa Rica this summer, and coordinated to provide a couple extra workshops there, in addition to the papers my PhD student Sandra Cruz and I are delivering.