Moodlemoot France 2023
Vive la France! This year’s Moodlemoot France was held in Troyes, which is about an hour and a half outside of Paris by train.
I had never heard of Troyes before, and when I saw that it was the location, I looked it up online straightaway. It’s a beautiful university city, a designated City of Art and History, with amazing architecture, lovely wine, champagne, and food, and amazing people too.
As Troyes had previously hosted the MoodleMoot, they had a great graphical homage to the classic “Back to the Future” 80s film, in the info posters, the lanyard badges, even the lunch vouchers! The highlight was the Soirée de Gala, or Evening Gala, with a wonderful relaxed ambience, incredible food and drink, and where we could stand right next to a real Dolorian car and channel our inner Marty McFly in style. Magnifique! Equal measures of work and play, so onto the work aspects…
Brickfield had a stand in the exhibition space, with myself (Gavin), Karen Holland, co-founder and Jean-Marc Doucet, our French affiliate and ambassador in attendance.
The conference was fully in French – naturellement!
Although Karen and I spent some years learning French in school, our French is nearly non-existent with lack of practice, something we will work on in the coming year.
Having Jean-Marc on the stand with us was really awesome, as this enabled the attendees to converse in depth, have great conversations, and ask lots of questions!!! We also had lots of fantastic introductory discussions with those attendees who were multilingual enough to converse with us using their English skills.
Jean-Marc also gave two presentations, introducing the Accessibility+ Toolkit, its benefits, and its impact on an institution’s accessibility journey.
We also handed out many of our popular Accessibility Tips cubes, great training aids, translated into French, and ready to travel! Thanks to all who took them home with them.
We were asked multiple times as to what was inside the cube. Our answer to everyone was “égalité” – such a lovely word to sum up such an important human value! Inclusion, accessibility, equality: part of the rationale behind education itself, we’d say!
Merci beaucoup tout le monde for such an amazing MoodleMoot, and au revoir until the next time!
