I'm John Wilson. I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally we prefer to work with what we feel is ethical industries, obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms, easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilise. What we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas. By investing in broadband in these local areas we can attract more talent, we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland. Ready to get started and go on the road with the go-to of Arts and World Conference 2018 and coming up on stage right now and who we're going to give a very warm welcome to in a minute are our coaches for the day. So, as we said to you yesterday, Board of Trustees is taking a very active lead in one of those events. So we're going to change in personnel each day, that means for some of us, and we're welcoming a new coach for the day this morning. So, if you could both please put your hands together and give a very warm welcome to Sheila McNeill, women there from Westdale and also James Clay. Good morning everybody and welcome to everyone that was here yesterday and I know we have a few more delegates in the room who've just joined us today, so it's fantastic to have you all. We had a great start to the conference yesterday and I think everyone was here would agree that there was a really fantastic atmosphere, a huge amount of collaboration and sharing and a lot of thinking about the context of where we were all working and a great keynote yesterday and we're going to have another great keynote speaker this morning. I just want to cover a couple of things that we're doing later today, but before we do that I'm going to hand over to James to do a little bit more of an introduction. Hello, Manchester. Right. Okay, it's day two. So, who here is just here for day two? If you could just stand up, show yourselves.  So, welcome. Now, stay standing if this is your first alt. So, there's a few people. So, everyone that has been here for a long time and many years, go and say hello to these people at some point. So, welcome to day two, another exciting, amazing day of ed tech. I'm not going to go for everything, I think, because you've all got the menu. But what I would like you to do is, well, I saw some amazing stuff yesterday. What I'd like you to do is to turn to your neighbour, not the person you walked in with, and say what your highlight was of yesterday. So, if you just talk to each other, what was your highlight of yesterday?  What you got from day one, I'm sure you're going to get even more with today as well. But just a couple of things we want to highlight that are happening today. Again, we've got an action-packed programme. But today, for the first time, we're going to have a celebration for all our Seamalt award winners, people who have gained their Seamalt accreditation this year. So, just again, just because we don't want you to sit still for very long here, if you've recently got your Seamalt, could you just stand up and say hello? And just if you have your badge, well done. Obviously, be celebrating your achievements later today as well at our AGN. Manchester holds a special place in my heart, because nine years ago, I was awarded the Learning Technologist of the Year award in 2009 along with Viv Rolf. And tonight, we will find out who the Learning Technologist of the Year is for 2018. So, I'd like to give a big warm welcome to all the Learning Technologists of the Year finalists. Stand up, make yourselves known. There is none here, right? As you will know, it is not too late to vote for the community awards. So, please check out the website, find out how you can vote for the Learning Technologist of the Year community award. The awards we will find out tonight, both for that winner and the other winners. So, vote, vote, vote. It's great. And also, as a previous winner of the Learning Technologist of the Year, I'm really looking forward to the awards tonight. But yeah, please vote, because the Community Choice Award is a really special award for the winner as well. But we're now going to hand it over to Nick Whitten, who's going to give us an update from the Games from yesterday. Well, I've never won Learning Technologist of the Year, and I'm feeling a bit inadequate. But thank you for listening anyway. So, discovered something about failure yesterday, when we thought put together what was an incredibly difficult puzzle on our playing cards, only for somebody to actually crack it before the end of the note. See? Which meant desperate scrabbling round for the made-up prize. So, please join me with congratulating Julie Vos for that. If you haven't solved it yet, there is a secret puzzle. Julie's worked out how to do it. We'd be really interested in anyone who could tweet the answer to the puzzle. There might be other prizes. Thank you very much. Now, we're just going to hand back to Marin. Again, we're really lucky that we have some fantastic sponsors at the conference today, and we're going to be hearing from a couple of them as well. But I'll hand it over to you. Thank you. Before we get to hear from more people, there is some activity for you. So, yesterday we all started being encouraged going to Wikipedia and get editing, but today we have something else which is to give you an opportunity to help us celebrate 25 years of art in real style. And as you can see, we have a number of mail-back delivery this morning, as some of our participants and members from around the world have started making their own birthday cards and sending them to us. This has been a bit of a birthday present from Brian Mothers, who many of you will know, and I want to give a big shout out to Brian and his work for visual thinkery who's really helped us as an organisation to communicate more about what we do. So, we'll be tweeting out the link via the alt account, and you can also find it on Brian's own Twitter, and we hope that you take this opportunity to remix your own card with your own picture and message for us to have a really full pinboard of all of these. As usual with Brian's work, it's all openly licensed, so you can see, you can share and download these images and edit them yourself. So, hopefully you'll have a bit of fun with this today and help us send many messages. This will stay available throughout the conference and I know that some of our delegates in far flung places who are joining us remotely have started sending us mail as well. So, a big wave to them too. Now, just as yesterday, we're here to help you make the conference the best experience that we can, but if you haven't met anybody yet and I think in a moment we'll find out to see who's been doing well with all their networking, do come to the alt stand and we'll try and introduce you to some colleagues, and also we're here to help at the help desk in case you have any questions. So, with that, I'm going to hand over to John now who's going to get me to share a few highlights from your first day. And give a warm welcome to John please, thank you. Right, good morning everyone. I'm just going to, actually, for the benefit of those people who are here today as day one, I'm just going to quickly explain how you get connected with me too. I know a number of you participated yesterday so thank you for that. But for those of you that are here on your first day, in order for you to join in with the activity that we're about to do here, I need you to go to a browser on your device, be that a laptop, tablet or phone, and if you could enter the web address web.metoo.com, we'll just give you a couple of minutes to do that, web.metoo.com.  So once you're on that browser you're going to need to enter the meeting ID which is its follows. It's 152-788-927. I'll read that one more time. It's 152-788-927. And just while you're doing that I will just mention on the reverse of the cars I know a number of you have been participating in ALTC Bingo. I'd encourage you to get involved in that today. It's a bit of fun. So please get involved with that if you can. Right, so as Mary mentioned we're just going to touch on a couple of questions from day one. And firstly we're keen to ask you the following poll. How many people have you connected with at this year's conference? So two of us, three to five, six to nine, ten or more. So how are you doing with that? We'll just give you a few seconds to make your selections. Okay, if we're done, I'll close it one more. Close it there. Let's have a little look. Very good. So we've got nearly 30% of people who have met ten or more people here for the first time. Good spread of responses there. Very good. And you've already done your homework on this one. You were asked the question what was your highlight from day one? You've already communicated this with your neighbour. If you want to share it with the room. So in one or two words, what was your highlight from day one of the conference? If I could ask you to just respond now. Okay, just give you a few more seconds to finish off.  Still a couple more coming in. Right, if everyone is done I'm going to take it there. Okay. So keynote coming out live and clear there. But lots of really good interesting things here. I'm sure Marilyn will have some comments on this. We're going to share this. We're going to tweet this out. So thank you all for getting involved there. The final thing to say just to finish off is in this room throughout the day we will have the Q&A available through Me Too. We encourage you to use Me Too to ask your questions. If you have any questions, please write on the side screens. Enjoy day two of the conference. It's great to have you here and hear that. Last yesterday someone asked about the word cloud and how you can get that. But we will tweet that out as well so you can see. And it's wonderful to hear so many highlights from yesterday. But moving on now, we are going to say thank you to all of our sponsors and exhibitors again who are supporting the event so strongly. I'm really pleased to introduce to you our first speaker to give his welcome because Catalyst, the open source technologist have been huge supporters in the headline sponsor of this event. And also, as we mentioned earlier, today is really a day that's supported by them as they've also supported the awards this year. And without their support wouldn't be possible for us to really give that recognition on a national scale to all the individuals, teams and research projects we're going to be celebrating this evening. Sir, please give a very warm welcome to Jerry from Catalyst. Good morning. Thank you, Maren, and thank you very much to the old team specifically who've worked very hard with us in preparing to kind of sponsor and be involved in this event. We're very proud to be sponsored this event and I'm going to share the reasons for that with you. I'd also like to say a big congratulations to every one of the finalists which will be awarding this evening. And we're very much looking forward to that. And of course to those who've just been accredited CMOL this year, well done. Catalyst are an organisation that partners with educators and we see ourselves as enablers of education. We provide services around open source technologies. We build on the principles of open standards and open source and that's at the heart of who we are as an organisation. For example, we seek to attain no IP in any of the things that we deliver and any of the solutions that we provide and we shameably stand on the shoulders of others who've gone before us in open source. We use features, functionality, code tools and technologies that they've built and we enhance them and we further them and then we welcome others standing on our shoulders to continue that journey. True open source if you will. Why did we choose ALT? Well, we were introduced to this event last year by one of our customers Bath University and in particular somebody that many of you may know, who used to be at Bath but has since moved on. We attended last year's event as an exhibitor and to be honest, we were belled over by the community, the sharing and the collaboration that takes place and the great work that all of you do. Then this year, in warming up towards our conference planning for the year, we recognise that the themes of this year's conference in particular were so closely aligned to some of Catalyst's values or mission statement. As techies, we have a Catalyst code rather than a Catalyst mission statement but it's the same thing. Three particular themes in this year's event stood out for us, participation collaboration and openness. Three of the five key themes are basically directly aligned with what Catalyst has at its heart as its core ethos. For example, three key elements of Catalyst code are to champion the freedom to innovate and empowering people like yourselves to try new things and succeed through new innovations. We deliver solutions that create opportunities and they are collaborative thinkers and doers with the use of technology. Three things that seem to align perfectly not only with the kind of ALT group but particularly this year's event. In short, you are all enablers and we believe we are enablers too enablers of you. So, what do we do and what services do we provide or how can we be of assistance to you? A quick show of hands how many people in this room in their institution or in their daily lives use Moodle? A reasonable chunk. Probably a little smaller. How many use Mahara? Still a significant chunk. One more that you may have seen on our stand this year but it's probably slightly less in use. Or Totara if you put an English slant on that. A couple. What we offer to many of our partners and our clients is that we wrap services around those open source tools and technologies. Everything from hosting support, maintenance or if needed, custom development enhancement and furthering of those platforms so that you can deliver more to your end users, to your customers We develop new stuff. We guarantee your virtual learning environments under a service level agreement and we share and collaborate with others under your permission. If any of those sound like things that you'd like to be involved with please do come and talk to us at our stand. I think maybe it was James Clay who said that our hashtag oldsy is not just for September it's all year round and indeed in recent years we've started being very active and one of the highlights outside of the annual conference that we're enjoying this week is our winter conference which as I was updating our website recently, I realized it's now in its fifth year I remember when this was kind of like the low key sandbox event and now it's like over 500 people joining globally so no pressure then for whoever's helping us deliver that each year. That's where Blackboard come in because Blackboard are strong supporters of our annual conference and have been for many years but they also provide the webinar platform that we use to deliver a lot of our webinars for our member groups and in particular the winter conference in recent years. So I think it's great for us to have member organizations support this conference as we saw yesterday as well throughout the year and particularly around these three days here today. So please put your hands together for Gillian from Blackboard. I'm Gillian from Blackboard and from Manchester and I'm Evie Gillian's PA and in the spirit of collaboration I have brought my colleague my colleague who is also a client success advocate for Evie. Sorry, yes my name is Evie did you cook so I'm not from Manchester as you can guess from my accent but more later. Indeed so welcome to my home city I lived just outside of Manchester I'm actually from a place called Ramsbottom but as a child I got a real phobia about telling people about that you'll understand why. So Herve and I are part of the client success team do you just want to quickly explain about that? Yes so we do two things basically we work on the shop floor with academics looking at how our solution can support their teaching and learning objective and at the same time which I also engage in a strategy conversation with the senior leadership they have a teaching and learning strategy or digital strategy they might want to go mobile I can see the look on your face how do we get there so that's what we do within client success and basically we have colleagues, by being a global company what is pretty amazing is that we have colleagues on the four or five continents with whom we can share best practice very much like what you do within OLD Okay, so thank you for the plug about Blackboard Collaborate which will be what you're using for the winter conference and it's good to be here again supporting OLD when we were asking the question yesterday about how many years I can't remember but I think it's my third one in Manchester so it's been a long time I'm proud to support OLD we're not quite as old as OLD Blackboard is 20 years old this year and we've been innovating education technology for that long but you'll find with the Blackboard staff many of from universities I've only been with Blackboard for three years I was at Salford University for a long time and Hervé I've been living in the UK for almost 30 years I haven't been kicked out yet but I've got my residence permit as a French citizen so should Boris Johnson become Prime Minister should be all right should I? I don't know Well, that's a tough one so one of the benefits of working for Blackboard I mentioned that about our backgrounds because we've all been in it many of us have been in classrooms teaching the backgrounds so we know what it's like to lecture to workers learning technologists and so on and often what drives us is that belief that education technology is benefits students and can really bring together many students so that is really our driving passion and the fact that we work with so many countries across the world is unique there's no other companies that do that in education technology with the world's biggest providers and it's been for me working at Blackboard a great learning experience in sharing what my colleagues do in different markets whether Australia or Mexico but there are things that we can learn from each other and to illustrate that in mature markets like the UK and the US it's often about we're having very in depth discussions about how do we improve the recruitment process yesterday we were talking about virtual use and collaborate for virtual open days to help students get access to universities particularly those who maybe can't afford to come to universities it's a very expensive experience to go to visit universities for open days in the mature markets we look at retention and results in Latin America emerging market we're looking at massive on-scale learning for huge numbers and we've got other countries where it's war-torn and there's conflict so we've got to put solutions in place there that is working in that environment and to ensure that through that so all that experience impacts each other it's not a tie's back a bit to what Tracey was saying yesterday in her keynote presentation so as I said we all really believe in the power of ed tech to change education for all notice my colours today they're for white and green regardless of background we're all very passionate about access to education for all learners regardless of where they live how much money they've got what stage of life they're at time a mature student what disability they've got I'm still very young well no so our mission is to work together with you my favourite part of the job is where I work very closely with clients to help get bring those stories to bear and share those stories across the world for students and academics and administrators in universities so just one thing before we say that though I think that a main point I wanted to make is that Blackboard is often seen as just a VLE you may be using learn the VLE the Blackboard VLE in your institution it may just be called Blackboard but that's at the core of it that's just one thing that we do we've got a whole ecosystem I'm not going to say that word that's on the bus card it's an egg tech platform that's much broader for future students and lecturers and open source with Mooder rooms we do indeed and we've got web conferencing tools which will collaborate we've got Blackboard Ally it was a year old this year because the product manager stood here in April and announced his birthday we've got eTeacher recent product to help academics with their deliverance yeah yeah so basically to wrap it up come and visit us on our stand because we can show you very quickly what these solutions are about but we can also talk about Brexit and pedagogy don't let anyone break it thank you very much it's very nearly time for the moment we've all been waiting for and if you're just coming to join us please do come and find a seat now is the perfect time to do so because I wanted to just make you aware of some late program changes so please don't feel shy just come through there's loads of seats everywhere for Amber Thomas taking centre stage you're going to want to be comfortable to sit back and listen and enjoy and decide for some late program changes for today and while everyone is getting seated and please don't be shy do get seated where you're comfortable I wanted to just invite you all here today to come to our AGM today followed by a GASTA session and many of you may not know what a GASTA is but all will be revealed this afternoon when Ilta's very own Tom Farrelly from Ireland is going to host five amazing speaker sessions that are going to be hopefully the essence of what GASTA means so hopefully that's tickled your curiosity a little bit but also at the AGM we're going to find out who's won this year's honorary life membership and the chairs award will be announced as well this is an inaugural award that Sheila is going to reveal this afternoon so there's lots to look forward to and we're back here in Plunary this afternoon so welcome, pleased to come and join us and with that I'm going to hand over to Sheila to make a very special introduction well choosing a keynote as I found out over the past year is one of the best parts of being a conference co-chair I've never chaired a conference before but that's been really exciting and along with my fellow trustees when we were discussing the conference keynotes we had quite a hit list of people that we wanted to invite and I was absolutely delighted when this name was pretty high up on the list but also I was even more pleased when Amber said yes to the invitation to come and speak here today Amber currently heads the academic technology team at the University of Warwick and she leads her team in the role and implementation of many learning technologies she's also over the past year in the head to be learning forum so for those of you in the UK that are involved in the strategic direction and implementation of learning technology she will realise how important that group is to all of us but before moving to Warwick Amber's had quite a long and veiled career that I think has touched on practically all sectors of the education system here in the UK through her work in Bechta through her work with colleges and more recently with her work at Jisk when she was a programme manager and I think it's fair to say that Amber was quite a pivotal figure in the UK OER programme I've been really fortunate in my working life that our paths have crossed on several occasions and I think Amber is just one of those people I always really really like getting the opportunity to speak to and to listen to what Amber has to say I like getting her advice and occasionally like last year to hear her sing which is quite a treat as well but more importantly I think Amber's knowledge, her vision her criticality and her pragmatism make her an outstanding professional in learning technology she also has a great sense of humour and she's just a great person to be around I heart Amber but I remember in the learning days in the early days of learning analytics I think Amber came up with the phrases about Pimpact and Vanlytics when we were all slightly obsessed by our social media scores how many of us remember clout how many of us still check our clout score but I know this morning Amber's reflection on 20 years of her experiences of 20 years of learning technology I'm sure will resonate with me and many of you in the audience and for those of you who are a bit younger listen to Amber I'm sure what she's going to say will resonate with you too so I would like you all to please join with me in welcoming our keynote for today Amber Thomas Honoured and terrified genuinely terrified to speak to you today my peer community and I'd like to start by saying a big hello to everyone in the room and everyone watching online as you'll see I've got a lot to say and I've squished many thoughts into this talk I'm going to start by telling you a bit about my journey to this point and then I've got some thoughts about and change and how to be a good institutional learning technologist and I'll end with some thoughts about our community more broadly so first a bit about me I thought that I would map my history against well as 25 year timeline and I confess I actually went a bit further than that I marked myself out 0 to 3 on all of these but that's for another blog post I put it in a spreadsheet and it's a star system and everything but here we go so I'm 42 years old it's the magic number and in 1993 I was nowhere near educational technology I was finishing my A levels and discovering beer and boys okay my degree was in philosophy and literature so like many of you I didn't come to this through computer sciences route and in fact when I graduated I realised I did not have a clue what I was going to do next I was lucky enough that my first role I had a really good staff development boss and she really developed me and encouraged me to go and take all the courses and get involved with all the things and I actually started off in university administration and went to a administrator's conference where I first heard about lots of things including the idea of process improvement and systems and corporate information systems and for some reason I thought that was really really interesting and then I had an opportunity to go and work for JISC for the person that I had seen speaking at that conference in fact on information strategies and that was a real privilege because I got to go around probably 25, 30 institutions mainly HE at that point and learn about how those different organisations operated from there I then went to BECTA where I worked on the National Grid for Learning content portal which was all about schools content development and then to Furl which I recognise many faces from those days of working with FE brief stint at University of Worcester on a JISC funded project about sharing teaching and learning materials and then considerable amount of time at JISC when I worked with many people on a whole range of projects a very privileged position to work on a whole range of projects there and services and then 2012 I came to the University of Worc where I'm now head of academic technology and digital transformation I did do a bit of life in the meantime thinking of personal political history I did get married and I had somehow I had two babies during that time while I was working at JISC in between all the conferences I think that my first Altsie was 2001 which very memorable that was in Edinburgh and it was I was at Altsie in Edinburgh when it was 9-11 so Altsie was sort of a bonding experience I think for those of us that were there and since then I've been to a number of Altsies and I'm not entirely sure which years I went to hence the question marks but my big contribution probably to Altsie so far was 2011 where we had the first time there we did a fancy dress session so you can see there Helen Beatham, David Kernhan David White and myself and sorry to my colleagues for showing that picture fancy dress at Altsie that's the first time for everything okay so I'm going to talk to you from that bracket one of the brackets that Tressie talked about in her keynote yesterday I think I'm a learning technologist I think I am and thank you to Laurie for that book cover we discussed don't we what it means to be a learning technologist there's been a recent discussion on the old members list about what it actually means to be a learning technologist we asked ourselves a lot of questions about what that means and especially as institutional learning technologists so hold that thought because I often don't feel like I am a proper learning technologist I'm in an academic institution but I'm not an academic I'm a learning technologist who's not a teacher researcher or staff developer and like many of my peers I don't have a master's degree in ed tech I'm a manager of people who do things that I can't do I'm a woman in IT and I'm an IT manager an IT person who's not a programmer so it all stacks up to quite a lot of imposter syndrome and according to Kiriakki's research I'm not alone it's very common for heads of e learning a senior learning technologists to have a touch of imposter syndrome so looked at like this I would place myself somewhere outside that I don't do and I'm not expert in any of those things but then perhaps over the 20 years I've been working in educational technology I have gained expertise and experience in a whole number of overlapping fields and when I look at it that way I'm kind of at the centre of my own little bend diagram there and actually on a day to day basis many of the things that I do require me to travel between and across these areas to listen and translate between them to recognise what kind of problem we're talking about at any one kind and therefore what our options are for how to solve it so maybe that imposter syndrome that feeling of being on the edge is a characteristic of needing to travel between those domains I wonder how many of you feel the same and maybe this is okay so I'm going to start with some thoughts about innovation that's a bingo word isn't it innovation bingo so in my career I've heard predictions that we're on the edge of a revolution or on the brink of a landslide and there's certainly been plenty of moral panics in the meantime and as Martin Weller points out in the digital scholar in our discourse there's much talk about utopian or dystopian visions of the future in educational technology now at the moment everyone's talking about disruptive innovation and what I wanted to highlight is that people often assume that innovation will come on the outside that new technologies will be brought into education there will be new suppliers to the market that change will come from private sector new business models coming in I wanted to bring your attention to this concept of the entrepreneurial state and Mazikatu wrote about how often the state creates the conditions for innovation how often the state funds the R&D and creates the market I'm going to talk about future learn so future learn was launched late 2012 and the media covered it as a new entrant to the HE market a disruptive innovation those of us who've been in the field quite a long time will remember another attempt to package UK HE courses for online consumption the E University I think some people have got the scars to prove it but back to 2012, here we go here's another go, enter future learn mainly 6 to 12 week courses entirely online modelled obviously on existing platforms such as Coursera and edX its products were free at the point of use but here's the thing they weren't free to create they weren't free to produce they were created by staff in existing institutions Pat Loughley at Peagoggy Consulting here at the Penguins sampled universities with a freedom of information request on what they'd spent on producing courses for future learn now 19 institutions reported their spend and that doesn't include the open university but of those 19 institutions they reported £3.5 million spent on the courses that they produced for future learn my question is not whether they got return on investment my point is that they spent a lot of money on future learn so how much have UK universities spent on making this happen and that's even without talking about the open university's role in this in many ways there's been a huge subsidy for future learn and probably that's the right thing to do but what interests me is that somehow the media narrative was one of disruptive innovation you'd read the articles in the newspapers and it made it sound as if this was entirely coming from outside of our sector that it was a new entrant to the market it was these new people teaching stale old UKHE a thing or two about digital social learning but we did it so that's kind of outcheater here so I think we've got a lot to learn there's no doubt about that and there's many areas where we need to change but I question the popular narrative that all the change is going to come from outside I've been lucky enough as Sheila introduced me and as I mentioned on my timeline to have been involved with a whole range of agencies over my 20 years in ed tech just to give a bit background a vector there was the national grid for learning which brought broadband to schools and then had a number of regional and national initiatives to help schools benefit from that alongside that there were initiatives like curriculum online, national curriculum ICT expertise, assistive technology computer games in education all kinds of state funded initiatives and in FE we had FOIL and the information learning technology ILT champions and the FOIL practitioners program and the national learning network materials and worked alongside them and Bechtors community and adult learning team and in universities I helped to develop the open access research repository network and worked on the UK open education resources program particularly with the journal repository of sharing learning materials and it wasn't just about the agencies that you see on those slides because we also worked with the HEA subject centres and organisations like NILTA and NIACE I'm curious how many people in this room and watching online have been involved with these sorts of agencies so we've got a quick poll for you we've got a quick poll hadn't warned you at the back so going to ask you about your experience via MeToo so some of you will see it already you see the questions on the MeToo interested to know in the room and online how many have been involved with the ILT champions or national learning network because I recognise lots of faces how many of you have been involved with projects funded by JISC or other government or EU projects just give you another half a minute we've got results coming in brilliant now the first one's really interesting because that's a higher proportion of people who've been involved with those initiatives than are currently FE members of ALT so it goes to show that we're overlapping and connected communities that second one's incredible 80% of people who've responded have been involved in some way by projects funded by JISC and pretty impressive as well look at that other government funded or EU government funded projects thank you so these were state funded sector wide change programs in the history of edtech governments are often referred to as slow to change as blockers to innovation as regulators that are too late but if you look at what we've achieved in the UK it tells a slightly different story there's a long tradition of influencing the marketplace stimulating demand for new types of digital products setting and nurturing standards and improving supply there's a lot of collective endeavour so not strictly edtech but look into library loans open access repositories look at the Janet network itself and open standards IMS content packaging experience API and open source look at Zertie close to home look at H5P, Scandinavia and look at Moodle around the world there's so many examples of collective endeavour so there's a lot of talk at the moment about disruptive innovation and we can be quite critical of our ability to change but the point I want to make is it's not all commercial vendors and market forces imposed on us we've actually done some really great things together HE is not unique and maybe we should stop talking about how unique we are and we should listen we should listen to schools to FE but we should also listen to healthcare because so many sectors are having a digital turn digital transformation is a thing we don't own it it's not just our challenge thinking of healthcare I sometimes imagine a new tool being introduced into a hospital and I wonder whether consultants and surgeons could say it doesn't really fit my practice I prefer traditional methods there might be some lessons about practice change that we could learn from healthcare this is the best I could find but I challenged someone to do one of these for institutional learning technologists I think the things that we discuss as a community of practice are not always the things that we're doing or at least they're not always the things that we're spending most of our time on I was looking at the data from the old members survey and I know it's quite hard to read on the slide but a wide range of things that people are spending their time doing there and in the top 5 that looks pretty much like my top 5 as well actually content management systems, BLEs electronic assessment blended learning and so on and in the bottom 5 are a lot of the things that we talk about at conferences so that's interesting and let's have a particular look at learning analytics which comes there somewhere near the middle of concerns so old members have reported for themselves that this is an area of growth and importance and the heads of the learning forum has also done a survey on how important and what stage of maturity learning analytics are at so this is one person replying on behalf of their institution with a sort of bird's eye view and you'll see there 62% the vast majority that's a really bad pie diagram isn't it working towards implementation and some partially implemented and fair number not implemented at all so we're talking about it a lot and that's right and we need to understand what that is but we mustn't confuse that with representing what we're spending our time doing couldn't resist sharing that one and a serious point there is that we won't get traction just because something is interesting to us it has to be the right time and it has to be the point at which this is useful to us and to our institutions because learning analytics are still emerging and that's okay and meanwhile we're pretty busy with our VLEs and our E-assessment I sometimes hear people saying why are we still talking about this why are we still talking about this like why are we still talking about how to use a VLE and roll out a VLE why are we still talking about active learning in the classroom because this isn't it so who is we because at this conference there will be some people here for the first time some people new to this field and we come from different fields we converge together and participation is always in flux second point I also commend to you Martin well as concluding post in his 25 year series he points out that for example intelligent tutoring systems sometimes you need a few cycles that's an idea to get it accepted so we do need to go round things a few times but thirdly and most importantly what kind of practice based knowledge can just be solved that's it we worked out there we go example so project managers lots of us work with project managers there's professional frameworks for project management there are courses, qualifications conferences, communities it's a practice people are inducted into the practice they use the concepts, they continue to learn develop those concepts they never stop learning about how to do good project management and where I'm based on campus I work near our centre for teacher training and obviously they're just giving a single textbook on classroom behaviour management and they pass a test and they're done they never need to discuss classroom behaviour management again no it's a topic that they continue to develop their practice in so we're a learning community and next time you catch yourself saying why are we still talking about this I'd suggest there might not be a learning opportunity for you but someone's probably learning and actually we still should be change takes time does all of this mean that we're being slow to respond it's worth thinking about how long it takes to identify opportunities for a change to a module for example that module in a HE sense might only run once a year you might be thinking about it that first year you try and pilot things the second year you make the changes the third year that's three years that's quite a significant cycle does that sound too long well of course it takes a while for innovations to be adopted I'm going to quote Weller again he says change in universities is no game for the impatient there was a really good series of podcasts by Tim Harford about 50 things that made the modern economy one of them is about electrification and he says that they built the infrastructure for mains electricity in Manhattan in about 1881 it was already awaiting for the factories but it took over 30 years to exploit it I quote factory owners hesitated for understandable reasons you couldn't just rip out the steam engine and replace it with an electric motor you needed to change everything the architecture and the production process and because workers had more autonomy and flexibility you even had to change the way they were recruited trained and paid of course they didn't want to scrap their existing capital but maybe too they simply struggled to think through the implication of a world where everything needed to adapt to the new technology in the end change happened and it was unavoidable does that sound familiar is this where we are with blended learning are we still talking about blended learning after 30 years yes yes we are 2018 is a challenging year in many ways I'm wearing my anti-bugsit badge there we've got Trump looming in many ways it feels like dangerous times but it also seems to be a period of intense reflection for our community the year of critical ed tech it can be hard to be an institutional learning technologist in 2018 and sometimes I wonder are we the baddies so how can we be a force for good it's not about the technology many of the conversations I have start with someone saying the tool will do this and I say no you will do this using the tool or someone says and this tool will make sure everybody shares all the information and I say do they already share the information they said no no no they don't but when they've got this tool they'll share the information I think hmm at the end of the day digital is people it's made of our labour digital education particularly is made of academic labour certainly not just about the technology but there's no digital education without technology and I quote Anne-Marie Scott here put the quote on the slide on a post that she did around next generation digital learning environments and she's pointing out all the things that we do have to worry about actually to make sure that that technology is working and as she says high maintenance costs and the student experience just isn't something that institutions find easy to stomach but talking for this talking about this makes for rubbish conference presentation though so we rarely do sorry but technology knowledge definitely matters money matters as well money definitely matters I ran a panel session at last alt C called evidence bases and business cases and I said then it's fashionable management concerns makes it sound like it's somebody else's problem but when you get to a certain level as a learning technologist you have to develop some understanding of costs and by that I don't mean that we should do things because they might be profitable or because they might save money I mean that we work in education systems and organisations that have limited budgets and we need to understand what the role of the finances and those projects we need to understand what the constraints are and all of this feels quite alien when you start having to write the options appraisal and the business case but I think we shouldn't be silenced by it I think we probably need to learn it and we need to speak it right disciplines matter I've seen a lot of learning technology conference presentations and I've got a particular bugbear a particular kind of project that get a lot of airtime in our literature and it's often small cohorts masters level and disproportionately education and then in the evidence base we see a lot of noise from those sorts of scenarios and a lot less from others now this is quite unscientific I have to say not scientifically proven but in my literature review and have a look at that and I'm particularly intrigued as well there's some really good work that comes out of chemistry why is that chemistry as a discipline is really interesting and it comes out with quite different models and conclusions to those that come from that bit on the other side so discipline definitely matters it's also important to recognise that different disciplines are facing different challenges so when you need to teach 500 people it's easy to criticise people who are trying to work at how to teach 500 people in a lecture theatre and if you're in a discipline where it's about reading one text a week and discussing it at a seminar sure, optimise around that but recognise that other people in other subjects have got different challenges because if on the other hand you need lab skills and you've got the challenge of fitting people into the timetable you've got different challenges so be careful as a community to state our constraints and our disciplinary assumptions a particular point on that is that a lot of the critical digital pedagogy voices that I've heard over the last couple of years have come from the liberal arts but they're extrapolating quite widely from the liberal arts and the challenges in those disciplines are not the same as maths or sociology or manufacturing discipline does matter and evidence matters we can't all be researchers and evaluators though and that's where as someone in an institutional learning technology team I'm very grateful for the old community because my stakeholders can ask me a question about evidence and I can ask all of you and communities of practice can be very efficient like this but it also avoids this scenario I've summarised on the slide there I think sometimes we should save ourselves the effort of giving people evidence but then that's not really what they meant I'll come back to that one last point about evidence is that the evidence of benefits the benefits might not be pedagogical and that's okay it might be time saving affordability might be data quality and that's all okay I think that we can't afford to only care about the pedagogical evidence I think we will sideline ourselves as a profession if we don't engage in the challenges of scale and sustainability it's not about perfect Diana Lorela described learning designers and that analogous to building bridges but I'd go further and say a lot of learning technology is about building bridges from here to there using available materials different terrain constrained by time cost and quality and some of our bridges will not win prizes but that's not the point there about getting people from here to there so it's not about perfect we only bring our best examples to conferences but it's not the only thing that we care about the important thing is that we're building those bridges and that we're being useful another point don't design services for early adopters I think we do this quite a lot we design services based on pilots and that's the early users but the early market have different drivers for change and different tolerances for risk so in early VLEs people are interested in social and collaborative learning and their mainstream uptake people are interested in using it for document management early lecture capture everyone's talking about flipped classroom mainstream uptake of lecture capture we're concentrating on frictionless recording administrative benefits as well same technology different benefits and often the mainstream prefer less choice and simpler defaults and our systems may need to become simpler over time perhaps that's partly what's happening with next generation digital learning environments as my colleague Kerry Piny puts it there is a silent majority versus the deafening minority and it can be hard to hear the mainstream voices emerging be the one to ask the stupid question this is definitely something that I've learnt I remember asking I think it was a CETIS special interest group they were showing the learning activity management system LAMS and it's like a design tool for sequencing learning activities in a VLE and I said do you mean it's like a lesson planner and a lot of people look very embarrassed and slightly patronising and the answer from the presenter was yeah it's like a lesson planner so I think say the things be the one to ask the stupid question and especially at this conference and this community you're here you've earned the right to put your hand up and say what is it for why did you do it like that what does that word mean ask the question because someone else was probably thinking it too dead birds not that kind of dead birds that kind of dead birds so this is a metaphor that I came up with a few years ago and Laurie Phipps has embellished it and here's what I'm talking about so cats sometimes bring humans dead birds they're being their best cat selves and doing what they can do and showing us with their gifts or we don't want their gifts think back to when you handed in that project report you'd worked on so hard and seen your management smiled and thanked you but did they really want it to quote Laurie you need to be grounded in what is happening and what is needed and especially what your peers and senior managers want without that it's another dead bird don't create a problem out of a solution or solve something that isn't a problem recognise the dead birds so this is from a future happens hack a few years ago and one of the things that we discussed there was that some of us are at the table actually we're not all powerless also sometimes your voice has more currency outside the institution than inside and something we can all do is amplify the good work of colleagues across the sector so when you're invited to the meeting about the thing lean in they might expect you to put forward a simple advocacy about the new thing the new tool don't don't be simple give them something more nuanced you're invited to the meeting say the things if you think that they're heading up the wrong path name the unicorns say the things and recognise your power we design tools to support workflows and we're part of those workflows and in many ways digital education is made of labour academic labour and our labour some academics don't like to think that the organisation has a say in their workflows but they do and we do and some academics also like to assume that their needs are always aligned with the needs of students but sometimes they aren't and lecture capture has been a real battleground for this some of you will have been at Melissa Highton's talk yesterday around lecture capture that time of industrial action and to quote Melissa if we work with technology for teaching and learning then all our technology comes into contention during a strike and I've certainly learnt that the hard way and Melissa's made the point before that perhaps we're at a bit of a pivot point here where our power within institutions is being recognised and we need to recognise it and we need to learn how to navigate these issues so as institutional learning technologists I think we need to be ethical respectful but most of all I think we need to be useful we really need to make sure that we're being useful and thinking of us as a community come back to my Venn diagram our field is big and wide and deep and no one person can be experts in all these things but maybe this is the job and perhaps these edges are where we're learning and perhaps most importantly these edges are where we are useful and that's okay and as I've put this talk together I've reflected that perhaps the idea that learning technologies is a single field is an illusion perhaps it's not perhaps it never was a single field never will be perhaps we're not a single field but an intersect of many many specialisms bound by a common purpose but whatever we are I do think that we are really important to the future of education and I'll leave you with this thank you very much I think your applause said it all about what a fantastic keynote thank you so much Amber I'm sure there are some questions I think we've got some questions coming up from the app but also is there anyone who can ask the question we'll take that first then we'll give you some do you want to have a quick shot thank you so much Amber I would just ask if you were to design a undergrad degree for learning technology practitioners which we don't I guess we don't really have them what would you include how much philosophy how much computers how much chemistry how much theology what would you include that is a very terrifying question that would be an amazing shared project would be to just design the curriculum even if we didn't actually build the course to collectively design the curriculum fascinating and I suspect that the actual computing bit would probably be about 20-30% and a lot of it would be about how decisions are made how people teach and that kind of issue but that's a brilliant idea who's a project for us all any more questions from the room just now okay I think we've got a few online so I'm going to let Amber choose the question she wants to answer that's only fear as well so a couple of points have been asked about the imposter syndrome saying it's very common what can we do to change this I've read a bit about imposter syndrome and I've heard that one of the things to do to change this is that anyone who's got it should admit it so hence why I'm admitting it but also to recognise that other people can often see your value in ways that you might not be able to so I think it's one of those things about if you're invited to say the things if you're invited to go to the meeting you're invited to contribute to the project that's because people know that you will be useful can I just ask at this point can anyone who has imposter syndrome just stand up okay stand up okay standing now you might have noticed that in my lanyard underneath my name it says the boss I am the boss and I tell each and every one of you none of you are imposters so please you have to remember that because I've said it now so it's true none of us are imposters any questions coming from the audience now that you're not imposters you can ask a question oh here Mary thanks Emma what an inspiring talk I've been looking forward to this to a long time you have so much experience and you've shared a lot about the different perspectives that you've had in your role what do you think we've heard a lot about this is more a critical age of ed tech if you were looking ahead at all is there anything you think you'd really like to see happen or you'd like to put out as a call to action to the audience sort of something to take action on that's a really good question I wonder if it's something to do with demystifying things so there's a lot of experience in the room in the community about these things that we've circled around again and again like social learning as it manifests itself through our tools like group work and peer collaboration I can support that online and I wonder if a very useful thing that we could do would be to have a main English entry level introduction into what it means to do these things well in a way that doesn't alienate people by referring to articles that they must go and read that is actually at more of the practical level and there's clearly been some really good work on the MOOCs and the shared courses but even then I wonder if there's something even more simpler, more distilled underneath that which means that we don't have to be at the meeting about the thing because someone else kind of digested that and take ownership of it and going back to Tressie's keynote yesterday I think that example of at first we work in partnership but then if these approaches become embedded and owned in each of those disciplines and each of those departments we don't even need to be at the meeting because we will have framed the issues right and allowed people to learn those things themselves I'm just going to take one of the questions here and just embellish it as you were representing Amber and you made some very good points about state funding and I think many of us in the room have been recipients of that and certainly my career is developed hugely influenced by that that seems to have changed now so I think just as a reflection with that and this question here someone says as the education sector is becoming more like like a business how do you think we can continue to share our knowledge whilst our business managers are trying to make us compete rather than share and collaborate and I think the wonderful thing about all those projects that we were all involved in was that collaboration, that sharing that shared risk as well learning from failure which we don't seem to be we don't want to talk about that or some people don't want to do that I suppose there might be a strange paradox there that the way in which communities can carry on talking is actually to close the door because then it's reducing the risk of institutional secrets being shared with people outside of that level of trust outside of those trust communities but that pushes against our openness ethos and I'm not sure quite how we navigate that but in my experience of senior managers a whole range of institutions is that they're really grateful that the people in their institutions are reaching out to expertise from other institutions just rather that their own dirty linen wasn't aired in the process so there's something about Chatham House rules I think and I know that's a challenge when we're trying to be as open as we can and I suppose just another question that's coming there and I think you've touched on it oh sorry I'm just saying there's another question coming through there so how can we be both grounded in what institutions need solving the problems for today and at the same time explore new ideas and new technologies that's the perennial challenge for us all I suppose part of that is being brave enough that if we if we think hey this would be a really good thing to do and we think this will take us in a good direction and I haven't learnt this lesson yet myself but it's being brave enough to really go and check with your stakeholders whether they agree and to accept that if there's a number of people kind of shrugging their shoulders and say yeah you could do that that maybe it's not going to get traction however hard you work I think it's a continuous process isn't it okay now I'm going to this is quite a tricky one but hey we're just going to put you on the spot so someone says the learning technologies profession isn't known by the wider community the amount of times I've had to explain what I've had to do I think we've probably all been there a firefighter never has to explain their job could you succinctly learning technologies I think there might be a general challenge to us all and Susan a 140 characters please but there are a few definitions coming through so I usually say to the stranger I usually say I manage a team who help people use technology in their teaching just going to ask you any questions from the floor no well I think you've given us all a huge amount to think about Amber fascinating talk I really love the way that you framed that in your timeline I know lots of people are now creating their own timeline so thank you for that and again can I just ask everyone to put their hands together and thank our fantastic team I'm John Wilson I'm the CEO at Agenta we're a technology company that focuses on education and learning we build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries obviously education teaching, learning, healthcare we feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilise what we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas by investing in broadband in these local areas we can attract more talent we can attract more companies we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools within disparate regions within Scotland


If the contracting earth hypothesis were true, then what you'd expect is a random distribution of elevations of the Earth's surface. So on this plot, I've got elevation on the y-axis, and that thick line represents c-level, and then I've got sort of an arbitrary frequency axis on the x. So here's what a random distribution would look like. In fact, the mean elevation on Earth is actually about two kilometers below c-level. And so if the contracting earth hypothesis were right, this distribution is what we'd expect to find. But in fact, this isn't the real distribution. The real distribution looks like this. It's a bimodal, and there are actually two peaks. One is near c-level, which is the average elevation of continents, and then the other one, the peak at about almost negative five kilometers, corresponds to the abyssal c-floor. So statistically what this tells you is that the process by which these elevations are distributed was not random. In fact, there's probably two different processes, one that makes continental crust and one that makes oceanic crust. And once you take that into account, you realize that the contracting earth hypothesis doesn't really work very well.