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4.1.3 Reflection on IM3Professionally speaking, no moment in my autobiography has been more reflected on than this.I used it as part of the formative process for the study and I refer to aspects of it extensively inother sections of the thesis (see e.g. chapter 2.1 on Polsani's influence on my epistemology andin chapter 2.3 on the development of the framework)One of the reasons for this is that although academic tourism (i.e. the practice of travelling toplaces far and wide to participate in conferences) is a well-known phenomenon, I considermyself lucky that I was granted permission and funding to attend ICCE 2002. There was someaudacity in tagging a week's holiday onto the trip so that I could explore New Zealand, and I hada great time. My learning was nonetheless rich, profound and abiding. Happily, on thisoccasion I have plenty of firsthand evidence of the value of the trip and I was delighted to find inmy notes the handwritten statement of what I had learned (see appendix 1) which I must havejotted down in the airport at Auckland before embarking on the flight home.My erstwhile head of department and close friend, Prof Kit Field, used to tease me, that I wasthe only person working on e-learning that had to physically travel to the other side of the worldto learn more about the phenomenon. 'Surely', he argued 'you could do all this from your desk';meaning, of course that the world was already connected via the internet, obviating the need forinternational travel. Nonetheless, such was the enormity of what I learned that I would not havemissed it for the world. I acknowledge, however, that this does beg the question of the rectitudeof e-learning only modes of study. It is why I dropped the notion of e-learning in my discourses- I can evidence (see Appendix 1 and 2) the profundity of learning in multi-modal settings.205Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)