Singer and songwriter Christie Hennessy was to be the star attraction at a recent adult education conference, when he was to talk about his personal experiences of coping with reading and writing problems. In the event, the weather and the foot-and-mouth crisis conspired to prevent him attending. If the 200 people from adult education centres all over Dublin who gathered in the Royal Dublin Hotel to hear Hennessey speak were disappointed, they didn't show it. Instead they settled down to discuss Howard Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences before embarking on a series of workshops based on the conference's theme - creative learning. The workshops explored different ways of learning - through art, drama, music, photography, creative thinking and writing. Yeats's poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, provided a focus. "It's not about learning the poem," said Maureen Nevile, deputy director of the Dublin Adult Learning Centre, Mountjoy Square, which organised the conference, "it's about depicting your understanding of it by using a variety of methods - art, drama, music and lateral thinking."