Yesterday as well, we had another first, this is a lovely photograph, we had our first sea malt ceremony here so we had a lot of new sea malt winners, people who received their sea malt certification this year and that was just some of them on stage yesterday so that was a really fantastic thing and again it's so good to see that award being more recognised and more and more people being successful and wanting to get that award and of course I'm sure some of you realise that we're now doing some new pathways towards sea malt so we've got once for more new people into the profession and for those of us who might have been in the profession for a few more years than that as well so the senior fellowship and we awarded our first senior fellow senior sea malt award yesterday as well so that was wonderful too. First of many I'm sure so we've been sharing a lot in the sessions and obviously through the keynotes as well but yesterday Maran introduced our fun postcard feature from from Brian Mathers so it's been lovely to see all the memories of alts over the years and from this year so if you have any memories of alts or something you want to share I know I've been looking on Instagram and Twitter and there's some wonderful pictures coming through from everybody so if there's anything you want to share please send us a postcard that would be fantastic and there are lovely things coming through but now it gives me pleasure to welcome on stage a well-kent face to his old Catherine Cronan who's going to give us a bit of an overview because as this conference is nearing its end we've got something really exciting to look forward to next year with OER 19 but I'm going to hand over to Catherine to tell us a bit more about that. Good morning Manchester. On behalf of Lola Chernywych my co-chair and all the wonderful people in ALT we would like to invite each of you to come to Galway next April for the OER 19 conference so this will be the 10th annual open education conference and we Laura and I have been very excited about having discussions with ALT about what that conference might be and we feel like we are building on the great work of previous open education conferences so a lot of the chairs are in the room here so I want to acknowledge last year's co-chairs David Curnahan and Vivian Rolf and prior to that was Lorna Campbell and Josie Fraser, Martin Weller, many I can't name all the co-chairs but I know it has always been a very exciting space for the kinds of critical and urgent conversations we need to have about open so it's a little bit of a smaller conference some of you may know than ALT but that's our intention is to create that space in Galway for two days to talk about critical and global perspectives around openness so we have wonderful stickers which represent the work of a lot of people so there's an open access image that we chose Brian Mathers remixed the image Martin Hoxie had the idea of putting them on stickers so we have a few more left today if anyone would like one please see me or Martin and I'd be happy to answer any questions or speak with anyone in detail about the conference. All I can say is that the call for proposals will be out within the next couple of weeks and in addition to having some really provocative themes we also have some opportunities for people to contribute in novel ways not just in papers or presentations but in some kind of interesting ways so please keep an eye on the OER19 hashtag. Okay and not only does that conference get better and better every year the stickers just get better I think that's amazing so just a little bit of housekeeping over the last couple of days obviously if you need an alt desk has been the place to meet and ask any questions so again today if there's anything you're not sure of then please do go to the desk and the conference help desk and we'll try and help you as much as we can but as it is the final day there are a couple of thank yous that we need to say to people because this conference doesn't come together by itself there are many many people that are involved in it I get the easy job really of standing here with my cup of tea and just talking but there are many people who do that and just thinking about the old stand there I think sometimes we forget how smaller team actually we have an alt so I want to take I'm not going to embarrass them too much but I think some of the staff here so I would like Tom, Emma, Jane, Jane, Susan, Martin, Ann, Maron just to stand up and if we could all give them a round of applause because they really put up so thank you it's an amazing amount of work that these guys do but we have some other people who've been helping getting the conference together as well and we've had a meet an amazing conference committee so I would just like again if there's anyone in the conference committee that's here did you thought you were going to get away with not standing up today but anyone is in the conference committee if you could just stand up and thank you all you've been amazing and of course my fellow trustees who've along with Martin have really coach here at the conference so I won't make the trustees stand up again but thank you too. Now one of the things that we do and I think we're getting progressively better at over the years as well is our online presence and we've been streaming more of the sessions than ever this year and also I think we've had this for a long time now we have an amazing Twitter presence but that's down to a couple of people who really make that happen so again I would like to thank Lorna Rich and Scott who are central to that if you could all come down on stage and we could all say a big thank you to those fingers so we have a couple of program changes that I'll just go through and yeah I'm trying to be Maron this morning and probably feeling miserably but I'll try my best so yeah and I have failed because the note I had I'll get that from her so we have some cancellations and there was another session that has changed but I think I have just inadvertently cut out of my iPad but I will get that for you but again just as this is our final session we've done a bit of Q&A before in the session so I'm just going to invite John back on stage and just to have another couple of interactive elements to just kind of summarise what's been happening for you at the conference. Good morning everyone I know a number of you have been here all week so I'm going to keep this introduction quite brief because I know you know how to use Me Too by now but I know there are a few people here as their first day so very very quickly Me Too is being used for Q&A in this main lecture theatre and also for some polling in order for you to participate if you could go to your browser on whatever device you're using and enter web.meToo.com. I'll give you a few seconds to do that as web.meToo.com. You'll also see in front of you there are some cards that have these instructions but once you've got to the screen that invites you to enter the meeting ID if you get into the following number it's 1-5-2-7-8-8-9-2-7 that's 1-5-2-7-8-8-9-2-7. Just a final comment as well to the reverse of the card ALTC Bingo if you want to participate it's a bit of fun you can do this via the hashtag hashtag ALTC Bingo so please give that a go. Now yesterday we asked you a question which we thought we would revisit again today so I would like to ask you and this will appear on the outer screen now how many people have you how many new people have you connected with at this year's conference so if you could respond to that question that would be great just a couple more coming in okay we'll take it there see if we've shifted it from yesterday which I think we have so we've got maybe 47% of people saying that they've met more than 10 people which I think is fantastic so that's great to see. Now this final little exercise we want to do slightly risky I'm just going to go to our Q&A board and we would like you to participate by answering this which I'm just going to move across okay if that's appearing on-screen let me just could you just shift the display for us slightly the one at the bottom sorry so we can see that on-screen okay so I'd like you to in three words sum up your experience of the conference so far there is no moderation in place so I'm a warning if you could just shift that back down Amy please thank you so three words that sum up your experience of the conference very awesome keynotes one of regards coffee excellent community I'm not going to be able to read these it's coming in so quickly hopefully you can see some of the themes up there lovely I think we can leave those scrolling thank you very much Q&A will be available all day so um hope you participate enjoy the day um so thank you that was great and some lovely things coming there I don't think the cake was a lie I've had quite nice cake here again another part of the conference that makes the conference happen is the sponsorship that we have so I'm just going to invite a couple of our sponsors to come up and say hello in a few words so first off I'll ask John to come and say a few words thank you hi everybody not too many hungover faces in the audience today I expected more but this is the first time I've come to an ALT event so I didn't know what to expect just on that it's been a great opportunity for us to be involved in the association learning technology in general it's been a very great experience for us we do a lot of ed tech events and I'd probably say that this has been the most welcoming everybody here has been extremely supportive of us so we'll definitely be participating as much as we can in the future um in case you didn't know me I mean you've seen my face on screens throughout the whole place which is quite disconcernt for me um I'm John Wilson I'm the co-agenta we run the precinct service um in case you don't know what that is and you've not had the opportunity to pop by the stand and speak to us precinct used to be called Janet video conference and services along running service from from jist we took over ownership of the service and operation of the service just over a year ago our plan with the service is to expand it more um for as a tool for teaching and learning um for the delivery of immersive classrooms interactive collaboration and we've got ambitious plans for the service over the next couple of years um doing a talk later today um with one of our clients Sean Farrell a learning technologist at Harriet Watt and part of the Scottish University Physics Alliance they've been using the VC service to deliver all of their classes quantum theory quantum physics astrophysics that kind of thing very exciting opportunity for us to explain the use of VC and also within the session I'm going to take some time to explain our ambitious plans for the VC service over the next couple of years there's some quite exciting features that we're going to be focused on so I'd just like to thank you again for such a welcome um and we look forward to to next year thank you very much and I'd just like to invite news from why I spoke to just say a few words to you just have some quick notes said I'm good I'm I'm Danish so English is not my first language so I've learned over the time that notes are quite important for me to have so I'm Mils I'm the head of sales at the company called Uniwise we're Danish if you can't understand what I'm saying then please raise your hand and I'll try to make my English better and thank you very much for the warm warm welcome this is our second year at the conference last year we were here said as exhibitors in Liverpool it's nice we enjoyed it immensely enjoyed the great talks and the community we've actually taken some of the feedback back and the discussions back and then develop something in our platform to reflect sort of what the what the discussions are that we are doing this year as well so we are going back to the drawing board and seeing what can what can we learn from the community and from the network of all these brilliant people so thank you thank you very much for having us sponsor this event and we're kind of in as as you might have heard from my accent we're Danish so we are looking very much forward to Brexit so we can go into the the UK market and be a sort of welcomed a bit more than than after so we'll we're swimming upstream and opening an office in next year here in the UK so for us it's really important to understand sort of the enhanced learning and technology enhanced learning what is enhanced learning what can we do around a digital platform ours is for assessment so how can we close the gap from just being assessed on criteria that are not transparent not fair for the students can we sort of close that gap and can we make that gap a lot smaller so that we do through the platform wise flow so we support and improve the academic content we support student learning of course taking all the different exams not only doing three hour essay not handwriting anymore so because how many of you will hand write or how many students will hand write when they go into a working place and all my bosses would not take a 10 page report written by my handwriting as legible and sort of work document so we're trying to alleviate that and trying to do everything by a computer so right now we've had the last year we've done 70 000 exams in the UK for seven at seven institutions so we're quite proud of that so we've shown that it's definitely possible to digitize some sort of exams and we we work within the framework of the UK high education so coming from Scandinavia of course we have learned a lot of things and this is our sort of the market we are now targeting so we are trying to wrap our heads around that UK high education like Danish high education like Swedish high education like Norwegian high education is very much same same but very very different from institution to institution so that's our main focus in the coming years is to support the UK community the tel community and sort of the high education here in the UK in the various processes so that was all for me come by our stand say hi take a cup of coffee with you or tea or whatever you prefer for your hangover so i hope to see you all and thank you very much for your time so yes as Nilsa said you can catch up with all our sponsors in the exhibition area as well so i have found my notes and put my maryn head back on so a couple of announcements so all the sessions that were due to be in room 3204 have been moved to room 4206 so that's all the sessions that were in room 3204 have been moved to 4206 and also we just have a couple of lost property announcements somebody left an ipad and a hat i don't know if it was the same person but if you have lost an ipad or a hat then go down to the the desk and and claim them um so that's it we've got a couple of minutes um till our keynote so i think i'll just give everyone a little chance to say hello maybe finish your tea and then we'll get on to our keynote and i'll get maryn to okay thank you we're ready to get going again um i hope everyone's in the room that needs to be in the room now um it's great to see so many people again say that's great to see so many people here on our final day and i know that we'll have many more people watching online so as you probably realise this is our 25th anniversary um and that's provided us with the opportunity to do things slightly differently at this conference and i hope you'll agree that i think it's it's gone off really well i've really really enjoyed the conference so far and a lot of that has been down to all of you so thank you for that so as we've said throughout the conference martin myself and the other trustees have been far more involved in the organisation of the conference this year and there's been a bit more focus on all itself and we felt that was very appropriate because it was our 25th anniversary and over the past couple of years there's been quite a few changes to all as an organisation we've changed our charitable status um we've developed and launched a new strategy and if you were at the AGM yesterday you will have seen that we've passed a resolution to update our governance structures to keep us in line with other charitable organisations that are similar to us and also in terms of our responsibility and the guidance laid down by the charities commission and i think these changes and the other big change i should have mentioned there as well is we've become a fully virtual organisation as well over the past year and all of these changes are providing a really firm foundation for the association to move forward and grow for the next 25 years and i think it's fair to say that as board of trustees we've been very active in in all of these developments but they have really been driven by our CEO marin deepwell and when we were thinking of keynotes for the conference both martin and i were almost in one mind about this that we both thought it would be a great opportunity for marin to speak at the conference um marin as you know has been our ceo for six years but this is actually her 10th year working at ALT so it's a bit of an anniversary year for marin as well and i think what this conference has shown is that ALT really is greater than the sum of its part and community is really important to me as i think that came through from all of you as well and on the q&a that we did earlier there and certainly as part of my tenure as chair of the association i really want to support the community because i feel immensely pride and privileged to be your representatives and to chair our organization um but marin represents and in many ways is the voice of our community on many many stages and to that we are all very grateful as you can have seen from this morning i'm not very good at being marin at times um but you know we're grateful for the work that marin does she's a wonderful ambassador and advocate for the association um and the work of our community but marin is also uniquely placed now um to give her own insights into the role of learning technology and leadership i mean marin plays is a fantastic leader as well and her own voice is becoming increasingly visible through her blog many of you might have seen the article that she published for wonk he on tuesday if you haven't i urge you to go and go and read it um so on our 25th anniversary it gives me great great pleasure to invite marin on the stage not to organize me or anybody else but to share her words of wisdom with you about and advocacy on learning technology so please give a warm welcome for today's keynote marin deepwell i'm really excited and i have to say that amber and tressie have set the bar pretty high i'm really grateful to my team and the trustees to make it possible for me to take a step back from organizing this event and for being the face of out i sometimes feel like i'm a building or a piece of paper when i walk into a room because most people say hello are you out and i'm like um yes first day in the job that was a bit of a shock but um i don't think we're going to take a leaf out of giving you a marketing talk or i've not brought any breakdowns of our pricing structure i've also not brought any solutions instead i thought i'm going to take the opportunity to share with you who i am and what insight i gain working at the heart of what you do so i wanted to introduce myself by showing you um a very tattered old laptop that i used to do most of my work on and that i love dearly and that from all of the contributions from member organizations over the last few years has become more and more colorful and the captain pickard badge is my own addition because i'm a star trek fan at height and when i was little captain pickard and the enterprise was my blueprint for what it was like to be a leader i'm pleased to say that since then i've met many wonderful inspiring individuals and many of them are here in the room today who've diversified my role models of what it means to lead in learning technology and i hope that in turn i help to inspire some more diversity in our leadership but i have a very privileged position and i think that's one of the things i'm going to come back to speaking about later standing in my shoes is a very unique perspective as shila mentioned i get to work with everyone from ministers and policy makers in the uk and also internationally to individuals who use a gadget for the first time who might be struggling with powerpoint you know underneath desk trying frantically to plug things in and all of the members from across sectors in the uk and internationally really inform my perspective and inform my work and my practice as a learning technology uh learning technologist i can't cover all of that in less than an hour but i do hope that i can give you some insight in what it means to stand in my shoes i'm not from within one of organization i don't work in one college or in one university although i have done my part of lecturing and being at the front of classrooms and supporting staff in the past but i have the privilege to journey all across our membership and meet many of you in person and so all the photographs in my presentation today are taken from work trips that i've done over the last year because as i'm trained as an artist and an anthropologist as well i thought i'd show you in material and visual terms exactly what my perspective is made of but the title of my talk and the theme for today is beyond advocacy and i'm particularly interested in looking at the horizon and what's on on the horizon i'm going to start by quoting Audrey Waters his keynote a few years with us um ago has really inspired me and also informs my thinking and Audrey's work in particular her work analyzing the recent horizon report has um has i think been really interesting and Audrey's looking at the horizon reports each year when they get published and look what's on the prediction curve so look at what's ahead and then actually check back and see has that come true how many times have we predicted the same things coming up again and again on the horizon and so Audrey wrote that after doing her analysis which she's published as well and I urge you to read she writes that i'll take away now and then and always do not worry about what this report says is on the horizon i'll bet you in five 10 20 years time folks will still be predicting that it's almost here nothing in ed tech ever dies it just gets renamed rebranded as innovative in stays in circulation forever it's a zombie ed tech always on the horizon and given that i did my phd in cemeteries and i'm fully versed in all burial culture sundries i think zombie ed tech is right up my street and i'm incredibly frustrated at times with this narrative about what's always on the horizon and how that's going to solve all the problems that we have and that's one of the questions that i hope to get to explore with you today because ed tech does keep promising us and i think being locked into a sort of perpetual cycle of not arriving of just advocacy for tech that does not deliver to its full potential that's never really quite there where we think it could go that's i think causing us some issues and we can go back through the history of learning technology and come across countless solutions of solving problems and i think some of the sessions at this conference will have been looking back into the history of learning technology some from a more personal feminist perspective others more from a straight historical critical perspective have helped really highlight that there's always promises of cutting costs or reteaching teacher workloads to improve learning outcomes or to increase student satisfaction but this outlook on a global scale i think places the uk on a national level in a policy context that i heard a Finnish education expert Pasi Saarberg at OEB last year describe as follows he had this wonderful diagram and in my notes you'll see links to that and Pasi's shared some of the wisdom of why Finland is top of all the the education league table and he says there's two types of education policy making and the type that he feels we have in the uk is characterized as market led privatization text based accountability deprofessionalization standardization and competition resulting in his view in unsuccessful policy making and i think for me there is part of our reliance on what the future might hold and the potential that might bring is partly responsible for our policy making not maybe taking a challenge now now advocating for what's just beyond the horizon i think brings three problems with it and on this slide which is from my visit to launch out northern island earlier this year and i've highlighted three that i feel are particularly key first it gives us the sense that technological innovation is the driver behind change the only solution to solving issues that we face i think the dominant narrative the way i see it is that we are at the mercy we're not empowered of we're at the mercy of inevitable innovation of the march of the machine so the robot that's marching towards taking your role all the data that's going to control the rest of your life and that we need to keep running in order to keep pace and this in turn highlights the second problem that a perspective informed by advocacy focuses only on what's ahead that increases our perception to compete harder with each other both as individuals and between different institutions we're always running to keep up and the third issue that i've identified and that i think comes out again and again is that this perspective of continual advocacy for technology to solve our problems tends to ignore history the research and the evidence that we now have and we do have 25 years and more of research that old and other bodies have collated and individuals like yourselves have contributed to so i think one of the questions i want us to think about is whether being focused on advocating what's always just on the horizon what's always just beyond our ability to make happen now whether we're using that to observe us from some of the ethical responsibility we have to really actively solve some of the issues now and also from not being focused on some of the problems that we have right now and some of the real challenges i think we're facing here in the uk but also as educators as part of a global community so i do promise there are some more cheerful parts of this talk as well but the beginning of it is all a little bit more critical now i've heard i'd make it three out of three for martin weller to be quoted in keynotes so i think he does definitely owe us a book particularly as he is not here now but like you all i've been following his blog posts on the 25 years of edtech and i found them really inspiring i'm not going to be able to follow unvers example and chart my timeline in learning technology against his blog posts because i'm a little bit behind the curve 25 years ago and haven't discovered edtech at that point but um i have followed his blog posts with great interest so one of the um quotes that i've drawn out is around how important criticality is to the role of learning technology and society at larger at large and martin says that there's an increasing number of voices that articulate how things are changing who are shifting the discourse to more critical ground and he emphasizes our need to take a critical approach in our thinking to examine the commercial interest that influence its development for example while learning analytics have gained a good deal of positive coverage regarding their ability to aid learners and educators others have questioned their role in learner agency and monitoring and ethics and i think that's just one example martin's drawn out of where it's useful and constructive for us to take a more critical approach i want to i think emphasize that this isn't critical against technology but it is to be critical towards our use of it and our relationship to it and reflect on it more because i don't think anyone here would deny it a huge potential of technology going forward but also how much it's changed our lives all throughout human history and particularly with digital technology in more recent times so thinking about the voices that shape our discourse and maybe whom we're not hearing so much i wanted to draw on the work of kathryn Cronan who's been a huge inspiration to me and who's helped find some really helpful references for my talk um in the run up to this and kathryn and francis ran a great session at the start of this conference around personal feminist perspectives on the history of learning technology and alongside them practitioners and professors like mahal bali or bond steward and claire tomson and helen betham and laura cernovich all inspired me alongside keynotes like tressie and umber here in thinking more about what we maybe don't read about maybe the voices that we still need to be drawing out more and kathryn wrote in her blog post before the conference that longstanding work in critical and feminist pedagogy for example is not often cited in later work about morks online open teaching pedagogy acknowledgement and analysis of earlier work is vital in the importance in important in education so i think i want to acknowledge and i want to use this platform and this privilege of having a keynote to talk to you today to also acknowledge some of the voices that are maybe more marginalized and that we aren't um listening to enough that we don't hear enough so my vision my hope what i work for is to move us and to contribute to moving us to a more empowered and critical practice that enables us to negotiate and articulate our relationship with technology and how we use it for learning and teaching because with the ever-growing challenges facing us and decades of research and practice to inform our thinking it seems clear that ed tech won't save us and i think some of you might have the t-shirt to prove that um it won't save us and it shouldn't be the driving force in my mind behind what we do instead i think we have to move beyond advocacy for tech that is the answer to all our problems and towards a more empowered and critical perspective this isn't to say as i mentioned earlier and i want to emphasize this point that technology doesn't have a significant potential and i don't mean to dismiss in any way the role of industry that plays in the work we do or how much technology can bring benefits for learners and in education and generally but i feel strongly that it needs to be an empowered relationship instead of us being threatened to be buried under an avalanche so my questions are how do we move beyond advocacy how do we realise our potential and the potential of our professional practice for the benefit of learners and for the greater good world peace i think was one of the wishes that one of the delegates shared while twitter for the future so i'm going with that and how do we move to using learning technology to meet some of the biggest challenges we're facing globally and i'd like to explore those and leadership are a really good reflection of how our professional practice is embracing bigger questions and a more diverse kind of practice iteration which is to be tech support for all my family and friends so i'm pretty sure some of you have had phone calls and like my email doesn't work or how do you connect the tv to you know the new fangol something that's arrived i've failed explaining to my father how wi-fi works we're still not sure what the cloud might be in my household but also i think particularly for anyone who works in the civil service i would have suggested learning technology for ministers 101 a recurring course every time someone new comes in and then inspired by Lorna's sensational tweet of her wonderful keynote shoes um Lorna respect to you for those wonderful shoe tweets um to increase impact i think that was the most widely tweeted tweet that ever came out of any of our events so um i'm expecting to see many examples of creatively translating our practice into portfolios soon but also i wanted to highlight that management and leadership one of the areas that we've looked at throughout this conference a bit more has really increased and by really increased i mean you need to see this in perspective there's a few hundred people in this scheme really increase it's like in the single figures so i um i don't want to give you the impression that there's a large amount of people as yet but we do see more and more learning technology professionals choosing management or leadership specialisms as they move into new and more senior roles because their expertise in learning technology becomes more important as technology becomes more complex and our demands of what can be achieved for students and staff on a large scale become more ambitious and i think very exemplary leaders that we have in the community such as Melissa Highton who's sitting here with us are great examples leading the way in what leadership in learning technology looks like in practice and many of you have taken part in the consultation to make a new pathway for C mold to enhance the professional recognition that Sheila mentioned earlier and we've also been or i've also been having a little peek at what that looks like what the senior C mold professionalization looks like and i wanted to share with you just a brief glimpse of some of the specialist areas that are coming out from those individuals who are starting to pilot that scheme itself and i'm not sure if it's quite big enough for you to read but it includes scholarship of learning of technology enhanced learning and open access publishing assessment online courses and mobile learning and also staff development training and leadership and similar to the earlier chart where we had a look at when first specialisms appeared in our timeline i think these choices reflect how our more senior roles in learning technology are developing their focus now one of the big differentiators between this senior pathway and the existing framework is that you have to demonstrate an advanced area of practice and it's very similar to the specialisms that we're familiar with but you are specifically asked to relate it to the core principles of C mold and i wanted to include this slide in my deck because i think it's really interesting when our members came together to try and articulate what the core principles were which have not changed for over 10 years it's actually took a lot of discussion to come to a consensus of what these core principles are and how we interpret them so following the maxim that visual thinkery can probably express it a little bit more succinctly than we could with words here the core principles as articulated by members and captured by Brian mothers and that's hopefully going to help make our core principles more easily understood for our profession and i think to me they reflect professional practice beyond advocacy they are very much a reflection of a more critical a more reflective approach to professional practice and so these new advanced areas of practice which you have to relate to these core areas there's only a handful of those because the pilot's being quite small that we know of thus far but i wanted to share with you the topics that participants have chosen from the pilot group and they include research in postgraduate distance learning or blended professional development to leadership of cpd programmes and leadership in the development of research and practice communities and i wanted to mention the work of tom cochran here who is one of an outstanding a longstanding member of altus based in new zealand who's not with us today but i think he's demonstrated in his portfolio what a research approach to professional professional accreditation with seamal days and i wanted to acknowledge that because very few individuals are as research intensive as tom and have gone through this accreditation so i think his portfolio is a real area of inspiration for us as we make the most of our research and practice so while at the moment it is still quite a limited insight that we are gaging it does give us a glimpse of what the kind of empowered critical approaches to professional practice in learning technology may develop into and hopefully that will grow as a pathway now given that this is keynote for me i thought i want to also contribute a bit of my own perspective on how i tried to go down the senior seamalt pathway and i think when i gained seamalt two years ago i thought it was really rewarding but i was also really relieved having advocated for a scheme for years i put it to the test and found it to be a valuable and rewarding experience and in retrospect i felt all the more honest and frank about all the advocating that i'd been doing on behalf of the scheme in the years before and so when i started thinking about my senior seamalt submission i decided that i wanted to chose promoting equality in learning technology as my advanced area of practice because that's one of the causes that i'm really passionate about and that i feel we have a long way to go in and as soon as i'd done that and i looked at providing evidence and description of what i'd done i realized that my fantasy seamalt specialism might easily turn into a nightmare and so before i go and share a little bit more about this with you i just wanted to unpack this part of my work and why i think it's really important and why i specifically chose it to feature it and i mentioned at the very start that i feel i have a real position of relative privilege but i'm nonetheless experienced in equality all the time and every day and in the space in which we work learning technology sits at the intersection of the tech industry of education politics in the third sector and when i started working in this space i had no concept of how much inequality i was going to encounter and how much more inequality other people were going to be faced with and you can tell already that i found it quite hard to write about this dispassionately and i had a very friendly critical friend and editor who helped me try and edit this into something that is other than just a complete rant and becomes more of a sort of dispassionate statement of professional practice and one of the inspirations that kathryn reminded me of was laura cernovich really inspiring keynote here three years ago where laura stood on this stage herself and talked to us about inequalities in higher education and she made us reflect on the structural nature of inequality thinking about it on a national and on a global scale and not just in the global north or in the west but all across the world and thinking really about the bigger picture because it's very important for us to look at the examples of inequality from a global perspective but not to be blind to what's closer to home because there's still a long way to go and i think any person working through the strikes and through the disputes over recent years will see that there is a lot where we can still fight for and i also feel really passionately about the fact that equality is for everyone it isn't a women's thing this isn't for some of us this involves all of us and i gave a talk at ilta a few years ago which was all about that it was a five minute gasta which was just about the fact that equality was everyone's responsibility so i thought the need to promote equality would and my practice response to that would be a great example of practice to include in my portfolio and i specifically chose it because i think it's important for us to highlight that this is an area of learning technology that we're not going to really find on job descriptions that is not usually going to turn up in a sort of record of achievements or at annual appraisals and i'm very fortunate that i'm in a position where i can hopefully demonstrate it hasn't been assessed yet so it might all turn into nothing but i'm hoping to have demonstrated that this is an legitimate and integral part of professional practice as a learning technologist and at this point i wanted to show you two examples of the initiatives that i've supported and included as evidence in my portfolio so i'd like to give a big wave to every famed tech participant in the room and i know there's quite a few of you out there and i think initiatives like famed tech really help us create more diverse a more inclusive perspective and community and this isn't an effort that's only relevant to those involved but hopefully one that will reach out because many initiatives come and go and there isn't enough in my view joined up thinking and we've done some joined up thinking with uncommon women as well grassroots project that we've been supporting and maybe we can also see some familiar faces i've watercoloured in but projects like uncommon women demonstrates that one of the key ways in which we can achieve a greater critical perspective is through more collaboration more knowledge exchange and openness our practice is political it's personal and active participation in any of these initiatives does make a difference and if i've learned anything from the individuals who lead these initiatives who've inspired me to be active and to participate and to give my time and my effort and my voice to these courses is that it does make a difference it helps us articulate a narrative that isn't dominated by tech advocacy alone and expands our personal learning networks beyond those we already know and feel comfortable with help us burst those filter bubbles that surround us so this is my favorite slide oh no oh i'm missing my favorite slide great i clearly have deleted that sorry about that i was going to show you a picture i'm just going to talk through it i'm going i was going to show you a picture of a box that i got through the mail a few months ago from my mentor margret who i've known for six years and i had a big day coming up at work i was nervous about and there was a little blue and white striped box made up in a sort of super man style um sort of superhero style and on the cover it said empowerment pants super undies for the hero in you and um i was so thrilled to receive that it's from a charity project in scotland that supports women and girls and you buy the pants and it's a charitable donation but you also get a pair of pants that say empowerment pants on them and um you can wear them on special days and um i'm not wearing them today just in case you're wondering but um i thought it was a wonderful gesture because the the person in us that needs some encouragement that needs some empowerment you know i might get that in any way possible and i thought it brought a humorous and charming and very personal way of sending me some encouragement through the mail so the point i did want to make telling you about empowerment pants is that criticality and collaboration are at the heart of our professional practice and that it enables us to work in partnership with industry to inform how the products and services that we use are developed and to influence policy that effectively governs our relationship with technology and the tech industry we do have the power we do have a voice to shape what the future will look like and the last part of my talk i wanted to share with you a little bit about what i think others have said to that but i also wanted to highlight just before i go and do that one more example of practice that i haven't really mentioned which is around the collaboration aspect and that i also used in my portfolio and as well as the Fem Ed Tech project i mentioned i wanted to mention and collaboration to make a policy paper for policy makers and give them a call to action for openness and education i wanted to give an example as collaboration working with startups which i did this year um with some of the community where we worked on a guide on how technologists and startups can work together and one project that's close to my heart is on open leadership because when i became a CEO and i looked around for examples of how CEOs do their business and how they get work done i couldn't really find a lot of open leadership all i could find this you know i've really polished marketing written blog posts about charity fundraising or success and i found that really off-putting and i thought where are the reflective blogs of people in my position and and so i thought we must start a senior staff and lead the way so martin and hoaxie and i for the last six months have been blogging on the go about our efforts to lead a new virtual team with the consent of all of our colleagues which we are grateful for and we share our very much our work in progress with that so all these sparks of openness and all the sparks of collaboration that networks like the uncommon women network and femat tech and collaborations such as these and all the events such as this as well bring together i hope will spark some openness and bring us towards being more critical together oh there are the pants you see um so you get my favorite slide after all right so now to close i wanted to share with you what the future might look like and i particularly wanted to not do that in my own voice because while i do have a strong vision for the future and when i first came to the alt conference in this venue and in 2009 certainly things look different and now much of that has come true it is really your voices and your action that is going to shape what we do next where we go in learning technology not just as a sector but as professionals as individuals as people and so martin hoaxie and i were invited to give and to host the lthee chat so a shout out to all of you who participate in that i am a frequent lurker sometimes participant and i absolutely love this Wednesday evening twitter chat and we asked as a topic we gave developing critical and open approaches to learning technology and at the very end of the talk we had a question for all the participants and the question was to share a hope their hope for the future of learning technology and i hope you can read these tweets yourself but i also want to emphasize some of what they say because their vision for the future of learning technology is to be inclusive not a bolt-on not an alternative lesser experience that all education is open that we will scrutinize the result no sorry that we will have greater scrutiny of results and greater understanding of the process followed to produce the results and they also highlighted the need to raise the lowest level of engagement with technology and pedagogy as well as supporting doors at the cutting edge and i think this conference is a great example of bringing all of those different perspectives together but i think my favorite hope of that evening that really struck a chord with me was from Simon Lancaster and he wrote that he hopes for a symbiotic and ultimately synergetic relationship with pedagogy to be established which facilitates a revolution in society's objectives for our education system so in case you were wondering what you were going to be doing in the future i hope you take Simon's hope to heart and as you can see from this wonderful messy graph of our conversation that you can explore yourself online with tags explorer we have had so much responses to this conversation that i felt it was only fitting to bring my keynote on beyond advocacy to a close by asking you to share your vision and by inviting you to share your hope because i hope to do a even better job next year around advocating for you and representing you and contributing to the work of the association but i want you to hopefully also have a voice in this keynote and in this vision going forward now i mentioned that 10 years ago i came and started working for alt in 2009 in Manchester this was my first conference i have to say i was thoroughly intimidated after three days i think i went home and i thought never again and never did i think that only nine years later i would stand on the stage and have the privilege of talking to you and sharing some of my thoughts and my vision so now it's over to you and before we go and have questions i'm hoping that you will be able to share your hopes and we'll leave them up on screen so what is your hope for the future of learning technology and just to close a final thought from me and thanks for all the badges that i received as part of my travels recently i just wanted to encourage you all to use your platforms and use your voice and use that inspiring approach that umber talked to us yesterday that if you are invited to the meeting and you have a voice that you can lean in that you can make your voices heard not everyone has the privilege to stand up here but we all have a voice that makes a difference and so inspired by martin wella and um my early morning running where i like to listen to quite a lot of public enemy i'm going to leave you with that quote and say thank you very much well i think that was a wonderful keynote to finish um i or to get our third day started i'm sure there are many questions from the audience um and there'll be many questions coming through online but is there anyone here in the room that would like to ask marina a question first come on it's the last day somebody take the mic come on no well they're all hungover they're all hungover okay well we've got lots of questions coming through so um i'm going to let marine maybe have the prorogative of choosing one of the questions that she would like to to answer there was a lot in that back keynote so i think it's an interesting point about diversity um i think some of us discussed this yesterday what the relationship is between collaboration and diversity and bringing in different voices to the work that we do as professionals i think it's really important particularly at conferences like this that we're seeing increasing participation from students we're seeing increasing participation from people who might have not been part of this conversation 10 years ago it's a really important survival strategy for us to reach out and to engage more people all of you've got the challenge of implementing and working learning technology at scale we're far beyond the just the pilot study just one room just the enthusiasts for for learning technology i feel to to reach its real potential for us to make happen what we think is possible we do need to be more diverse be more inclusive so i feel that's a really strong point to be making yeah yeah it's nice to read your hopes as well um um should we read any out at all well i think this is my hope is that we can engage with academics on a living level playing field without having to declare our credentials first or just be seen as the people who do the tech stuff and i think there's many people who feel like that well i think there's one thing that's come through for me over the past three days is um i suppose a confirmation of that need for balance and for mutual respect and i'm really pleased that we are looking at things more critically but there is a balance to be struck in terms of what we're all ultimately trying to do which is to support staff and learners um and engage you know the educational process so it's quite a fine balancing line but yes i don't think any of us should have to justify anything that we do that there should be mutual respect for everyone in the profession and again i just want to say i told you all eight uh earlier on that none of you are imposter so i don't want any more of this imposter syndrome talk okay um so my last day is the boss so i'm making the most of it um i think we're all quite enjoying it yeah yeah yeah obviously more cake is great um yeah well well this is a good question will learning tech become its own academic field in time oh that's an interesting question that's quite a tricky question actually because whatever i say half of you are going to disagree entirely um so i suppose one perspective is to say learning technology as a professional discipline has existed for a long time and the fact that we celebrate our 25th birthday is testament to that there is other organisations like us all across the world although we don't all use the same terms to describe what we do indeed i think not even within this one country we have less than 10 terms to describe learning technologists um even just a core role one of the one of the strengths i feel with learning technology is that we do borrow and work with other academic disciplines we we get a lot from social sciences but also from education and computer science learning technology is very much part of the fabric of all learning and teaching i'm not sure if i feel that it should be its own necessarily its own academic discipline because i feel it's very overarching it's very embracing and the research that i've seen published comes from a lot of different backgrounds and disciplines but it's right what amber said yesterday that there is huge differences between the disciplines so i think working across the different disciplines in order to gain different perspectives um is one of the the key importance absolutely and i think again as the you know alts develops we have quite strong partnerships with other member organisations as well and other organizations in the uk and internationally and i think we can link in and actually make a fantastic contribution to scholarly practice across the disciplines which maybe comes from our own tail background but then can be applied to other areas as well so i think that just extends our collaboration and and the power that we all have and the great the great work that is being done across all our institutions there's some great question coming through i'm enjoying the we are rebels we should rebel but also i think there's some interesting questions around if we are being more critical in our approach is there still a role for advocacy and also do we have to mention learning technology if it's just integral maybe we can pick up both of those points so on the first one i think there is a very strong case for advocacy for learning technology absolutely um i'm i feel personally critical towards advocacy for ed tech without questions asked so i'd like us to be more discerning in what we ask of our educational technology not be um not be opponents to it indeed we we that's our bread and butter but in terms of being integral that's a really interesting question and one of the winners from last year's from yesterday's awards actually analyse strategies from higher education institutions in the uk and look at their strategies for learning technology or if they have strategies and he came across this problem very strongly so if it's integral do you still need a strategy do you need to mention it so i think you should read his paper to find the answer to that question but also it's important to remember that being integral doesn't mean that the work is done i think in some ways it's even more difficult when it is integral becomes more complicated more complex and the role of the learner and their rights and their concerns i think needs to be integral regardless of how explicit or implicit our use of learning technology is and i think it goes back to some of the things that tressie was highlighting on on monday about context and i think at different times well you have to think of advocacy in terms of the context in which you are going to be using technology or when someone is suggesting the use of of technology as well so i think context is is key in that and that does change and we have to be aware of our own context some of the institutional context that we work in many of the things amber talked about yesterday as well so i think we have to come back to that context and criticality are key all right shall we do one more maybe i'm quite surprised no one wants to ask any questions but they're all typing so yeah we haven't checked twitter yet there's probably a lot in this i um i like this comment around at some point learning technology will just be learning and i come across that all the time and i agree entirely but on the other hand i also think it sidesteps a lot of people's very unconvinced approach when they're like well but if it's just learning then we could just do what we did before and we don't have to go on that whole journey and i still meet a surprising number of people who somehow hope technology will go away they'll be absolutely fine not to do anything and they can just ignore it and wherever we are on the spectrum of adoption there there's a surprising number of these people and there's a surprising number of organisations who are ill-equipped or don't have the infrastructure or the capacity and we are here because we know that it is a big deal because we know it's important to our professional practice but i don't think our work is done in that respect at all not in this country and not anywhere else in the world and if learning technology just becomes learning i really hope that it it truly comes into its own not that we forget that we've all been working for decades to establish all the ways in which it can be learning just for people to then forget that there's actually a whole journey to be made so for the time being i think and also just to not talk myself out of a job i'm going to say that i hope learning technology is going to be relevant and very needed and in the heart of what we do for a long time to come and i think that's the perfect point to end this keynote again can i just ask you all to thank marin again for a wonderful thing and of course marin will be here for the rest of the conference as well if you want to answer any questions but i think we can all go for a well-deserved cup of tea or coffee thank you i'm john wilson i'm the CEO at Agenta we're a technology company that focuses on education