 Hynny, mae'n gwybod i Sheila i gyd yn gweithio ein ffordd. Yn y ffordd, mae yw'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yn ymlaen, mae ymlaen i'r cyfrannu'n cyfrannu'n gyfrannu. Prydym wedi'r cyfrannu sy'n cyfrannu a gofyn, yn ymlaen i'r cyfrannu. Felly, sy'n cael ei cyfrannu yno, dwi'n cael ei ddwyledig, mae'n cael ymlaen i'r cyfrannu ymlaen ymlaen o fewn gwahanol. 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 taking a leadership role in the heads of the learning forum, so for those of you in the UK that are involved in the strategic direction and implementation of learning technologies, you will realise how important that group is to all of us. But before moving to Warwick, Amber's had quite a long and varied career that I think has touched on practically all sectors of the education system here in the UK through her work in Bechtar, through her work with colleges and more recently with her work at JISC 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 I also get 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 of, in the early days of learning analytics, I think Amber came up with the phrases about pimpact and analytics 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 in 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 innovation 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 and marked myself out zero to three on all of these but that's for another blog post. I put it in a spreadsheet and did a star system and everything. But here we go. So I'm 42 years old, it's the magic number and 1993 I was nowhere near educational technology. I was finishing my A levels and discovering beer and boys. 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 I then 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 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 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 Bechtar 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 the 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 and 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 ALTC was in 2001 which very memorable that was in Edinburgh and it was I was at ALTC in Edinburgh when it was 9-11 so ALTC 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 ALTCs and I'm not entirely sure which years I went to hence the question marks but my big contribution probably to ALTC 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 ALTC 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 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 ALTC members list about what it actually means to be a learning technologist we ask 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 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 maybe that imposter syndrome that feeling of being on the edge is a characteristic of needing to travel between those domains and 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 for my entire 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 wella 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 from the outside that new technologies will be brought into education there'll be new suppliers to the market that change will come from private sector new business models coming in 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 online consumption the 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 six to 12 week courses entirely online modelled obviously on on existing MOOC platforms such as coserra and edex 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 Peagogy 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 three and a half million pounds 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 has 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 the outside of our sector that it was a new entrant to the market it was these new people teaching stale old UK HE a thing or two about digital social learning but we did it so that's kind of ouchy to 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 and 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 are initiatives like curriculum online national curriculum ICT expertise assistive technology computer games in education all kinds of state funded initiatives and in Effie we had Phil and the information learning technology I'll teach champions and the Phil practitioners program and the national learning network materials and worked alongside them and vectors community and adult learning team and in universities I helped to develop the open access research repository network and worked on the UK open educational resources program particularly with the Durham 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 quick poll hadn't warned you at the back so I'm going to ask you about your experience via me too so some of you will see it already you see the questions on the me too interested to know in the room and online how many have been involved with the ICT 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 great brilliant now the first one's really interesting because that's a higher proportion of people who've been involved with those initiatives than our 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 nearly 60% thank you so these were state funded sector wide change programmes in the history of ed tech 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 product setting and nurturing standards and improving supply there's a lot of collective endeavor so not strictly ed tech but look at interlibrary loans open access repositories look at the janet network itself and open standards i ns 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 endeavor 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 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 and government 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 okay this is the best I could find but I challenged someone to do one of these but 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 five that looks pretty much like my top five as well actually content management systems, VLEs, electronic assessment, blended learning and so on and in the bottom five 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 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 is still emerging and that's okay and meanwhile we're pretty busy with our VLEs and our E-assessment I sometimes hear people saying at Old Sea 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 isn't it 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 at an idea to get it accepted so we do need to go around 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 their 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 we're based on campus I work near our centre for teacher training and obviously they're just given a single textbook on classroom behaviour management and they pass a test and they're done yeah they never need to discuss classroom behaviour management again no no it's a topic that they continue to develop their practice in so we're 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 two 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 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 wearing my anti-brugs it 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 no you will do this using the tool or someone says and this tool will make sure that 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 at the end of the day digital is people it's made of our labour digital education particularly is made of academic labour so it's really not just about the technology but there's no digital education without technology and a 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 risky student experience just isn't something that institutions find easy to stomach but talking for this talking about this makes for a 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 altsy called evidence bases and business cases and I said then it's fashionable to roll your eyes about 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 in 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 the particular kinds of projects that get a lot of air time 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 I'd love to someone to do a 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 up with quite different models and conclusions to those that come from that the 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 30 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 I think we should be very 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 or manufacturing discipline does matter evidence matters we can't all be researchers and evaluators though and that's where 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 when 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 so I don't allow a large 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 they're 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 flip 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 pinney puts it there is a silent majority versus the deafening minority and it could be hard to hear the mainstream voices emerging be the one to ask the stupid question this is definitely something that I've learned I remember asking at a I think it was a CETIS special interest group they were showing the learning activity management system lambs 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 patronizing and the answer from the presenter was yeah it's like a lesson planner so I think say say the things be the one to ask the stupid question and especially at this conference in this community you're here you've earned the right to put your hand up and say what 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 out with a few years ago and Laurie Fitz has embellished it and here's what 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 we don't want their gifts think back to when you handed in that project report you'd worked on so hard and senior 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 recognize the dead birds power 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 recognize your power we design tools to support workflows and we're part of those workflows and in many ways digital education is made of labor academic labor and our labor some academics don't like to think that the organization 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 and some of you will have been at Melissa Highton's talk yesterday around lecture capture at 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 learned 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 with institution within institutions is being recognized and we need to recognize 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 brought 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 that's 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 but 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 in past the question yeah we've got a question there we'll take that first then we'll maybe get some 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 add well thanks to me that is a very terrifying question well what 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 would be fascinating and I suspect that the actual computing bit would probably be about 20 30 percent a lot of it would be about how decisions are made how people teach and that kind of issue but that's that's a brilliant idea there's a project for us off yeah any more questions from okay I think we've got a few online so I'm going to let Amber choose the question she wants to answer because I think that's only only fear so a couple of points have been asked about the imposter syndrome saying it's very common what can we do to change this um I have 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 um but also to 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 absolutely can I just ask at this point can anyone who has imposter syndrome just stand up okay stand up okay now standing just now now you might have noticed that on on my lanyard um 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 okay none of us are imposters and that's true anyway anyone else want any questions coming from the the audience how that you're not imposters you can ask you can ask a question oh here we are thanks Amber what an inspiring talk I've been looking forward to this to a long time um you have so much experience and you've shared a lot about the different perspectives that you've had in your role what what do you think um 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 um 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 plain 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 more of the practical level and there's clearly been some really good work um on the 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 can have digested that and take ownership of it um and it going back to Tresi'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 allow people to learn those things themselves I'm just going to take one of the questions here and just embellish it with as you're 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 I know certainly my career is developed you know 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 how do you think we can continue to share our knowledge whilst our business managers are trying to make us to compete rather than share and collaborate and I think the wonderful thing about all those projects that we're 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 invert exactly as much but maybe yeah I suppose there might be as 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 at 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 they 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's coming there and I think you've touched on it oh sorry sorry I'm just saying there's another question coming through there um so how can we be both grounded in what institutions need solving the problems for today and at the same time explore explore new ideas and new technologies that's the perennial challenge for us all yeah 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 learned 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 yeah you could you could do that but maybe it's not going to get traction however hard you work I think it's it's a continuous process isn't it yeah okay now I'm going to um this is quite a tricky one that Amber 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 yeah I think we've probably all been there a firefighter never has to explain their job could you succinctly discover any technology I think that might be a general challenge to us all and Susan a hundred and forty characters hopefully but there are a few destinations coming through so I usually say to the stranger I usually say uh 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 it was a fascinating talk I really love the way that you framed that in your timeline I know lots of people are now creating their own timelines 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 utilize 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