 Okay. Thank you all. It's a very long and stimulating day, so thank you all for being here on behalf of Francis and myself and welcome. And I'm afraid I'm still a bit shook by this presentation. Very courageous and really thought-provoking. Francis and I were thinking of the phrase the personal is political when we were preparing our own session and I was thinking of the converse of that, the political is personal for you and very powerful. And maybe we need a theme of that for all conferences in the future because I think these conversations are really important. So Francis and I engaged in a series of reflection and discussion over the last few months. And as Sheila mentioned, we blogged a little bit about that. And in coming up to ALT's 25th anniversary conference, we thought about what's happened over the course of the last 24 conferences and could we look at the themes and what kinds of things emerged and how those were concurrent and perhaps coincident with our own personal histories as we say learning in brackets and technology. So we have woven in not just our experiences as learners, as teachers, as researchers, but also as mothers, as feminists, as community activists, all kinds of things because we feel it's a really important piece of who we are in learning technology and in education. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. We also are going to give you an opportunity to do a little bit of reflection and speaking with each other. So that's why we invited people to come down a little more close to the front. And welcome to all the people, the people who are participating virtually as well. We will make sure that we include you in those activities. All of the links that we'll be referring to over the course of the presentation are in a Google Doc, which is bit.ly. So our presentation is there. The abstract to this session is there. Our blog posts and blog posts by other people who will mention later in the session. So that's how you can follow along, whether you're here in the room or following virtually. Thanks to Trezi because the title for this slide in our presentation was Context. And that is because we live in serious times. We can't ignore the wider context of this conference, of higher education, of our work and of our lives and the lives of all who work in higher education students and staff and others. So what we chose to do and what's impossible not to do is when we looked at the history of the alt conference themes and what had arisen, we've done that through the lens of who we are and our identities and our experience. And that's very much a feminist approach. So not ignoring context. So in the abstract for the conference, we kind of talked about the green and the purple circle. So we said we're going to look at alt conference themes through the lens of our own histories and standpoints. But we also wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect and have that kind of conversation also. So to start out really briefly, a more deeper reflection will come later in the session. We'll just ask you to take one minute just now, if you would, and maybe share with someone, ideally not someone that you walked in the room with, but maybe just say something about yourself, who you are, whether it's your work, your job, your location, and maybe your first experience of ed tech or learning technology. So just for a minute. And if you're online and doing this, please use the alt C hashtag. Okay. I want that a little closer. People are talking. That's good. Okay. I might ask for your attention back again. There'll be more opportunities for speaking. As I said, we're not asking you to share that. We simply want to invite your reflection as a foundation for what's going to be happening over the next 25 minutes or so. So I'll hand over to Francis now. Very good at talking to each other. That's a good sign for later. So this is what we promised in our abstract, in our session description and what we've worked on for the past few months. And it's mainly been detective work to generate the resources. It's definitely work in progress. And it's an ongoing analysis of the themes and trends of the first 24 years of alt C. And as Catherine pointed out, our reflexivity is important. And we want it to leave space for the reflection and perspectives of others. So we hope we achieve that. We've reflected on our own histories. And we're recognizing that our personal histories are integral part, as Catherine already said. So we're going to share a short summary of that work, some of which we've blogged about already. But our main task today is to invite you to this discussion. So our documentary resources, as you'll see if you look later at the document, are incomplete and organic. But at any conference like this conference, even delegates get only a partial view of a conference. And over the last 25 years of alt, not surprisingly given that long period, we've had lost websites and limited access. And it's made for some very partial views of some years. And we're still finding new sources in our work in progress. And if you've got any little conference proceedings tucked away at home or CD-ROMs or whatever, please get in contact with us. But what we've found is that even glimpse from afar, some things look different and some things can actually become clearer. So there are clearly connections and overlaps between these themes, but they are identifiable as distinct threads of conversations and work over the last 25 years. And they're themes that are important to us. So if you'd done the work, you might choose different themes. And we've explored two of these themes so far, and that's what we'll be presenting this afternoon. So the theme that I'm looking at is active learning. And I'm going to give you a brief reflection on my working-like link to active learning. And there's more in the blog post that I've already written if you want to look at it later. And then I'll look at active learning in alt's history. So working as a program analyst in the 1970s sparked my interesting learning by doing. It seemed sort of more relevant than some of the stuff I'd done at university. And it raised my awareness of workplace sexism, especially in IT. And I understood this better when reading Marie Hicks' book this year. And I can really recommend it as a read because, you know, it's an American researcher who did archival historic research to look at why Britain's discarded women technologists in the post-war period. It's absolutely fascinating. But unfortunately, sexism and racism are still prevalent in tech industries and elsewhere, but it's interesting that they are prevalent in tech industries. So in primary schools, active learning can be achieved through play, garden clubs, and other authentic activities. And when I was teaching in schools and further education, it raised my awareness of gendered experience that contrasted with my single-sex secondary school in ways that I hadn't experienced. So I learned something from being a teacher that hadn't learned from being a student at school. And as a mother, I certainly learned that learning starts at home in families through play and through learning life skills like eating. A little boy I know is doing that currently. So in further and higher education, there are obvious examples of active learning on vocational courses, but I do believe it can be achieved in many learning activities. So not just there. And active learning even happens at Old Sea. I think this was 2008 at Leeds, but I'm not absolutely certain. And I'm sure you'll recognize a few faces there. I also learned from doing research, which I think demands persistence, accountability and criticality. And it leads to learning by writing and blogging about your research, conversations that follow. And social media has offered great opportunities for networked learning in research settings, but we do have to think about the platforms that are in flux. For example, what we learned about Facebook and other revelations this year. So trawling through these archives, just say a little bit about my own connection with Alts. I had little or no contact with Alts in the 1990s. My subject discipline was information systems. So I was reading science and technology studies. I was critiquing technological determinism and learning how to research. I was also studying to improve my pedagogy. I was really interested in that. So look at books like Shones, Reflective Practitioner, Diana Lawlard's book, The Active Learning Journal that I think Helen Beatham might have worked on. And getting the IT forum mailing list. There's a US mailing list. I fell into what we were then calling e-learning when I shared my teaching materials online by accident, but that's another story. I attended most Alts conferences in the 2000s, and this is a third Altsy I've attended in this decade, but we found some interesting sources to help plug the gaps in our attendance and recollections. So the first Altsy in 1994 was entitled Enabling Active Learning. And honestly, I didn't really know that when I decided to look at Active Learning. I was already interested in that. But we don't really know any details of the discussion there. We've managed to find summaries of titles and authors for the first three conferences. What we found the strongest voice in the mid-1990s came from the editor of Alt J, who was one of the founders of Alt. In his early editorials, he acknowledged that what he called traditional education in higher education needed to change, and that applying to education technology was a change in itself, but the challenge was in understanding the relationship between those two changes. Sounds a bit familiar, really, doesn't it? He also argued for more than stories of practice at Alt. And this long article was from a constructivist perspective, and it doesn't read badly for an article that's 23 years old, so you can find it in the excellent Alt J Research and Learning Technology archives. And it was held by the Alt J editors and an inspiration to authors and presenters. It's had more impact more widely. It's our journal's most cited article with about a thousand citations, but as far as we can see, only three of those are within our journal, so it's had quite a wide impact, but maybe not as much impact within our community. When we trawled through the Journal and Conference archives, we found there was very little that you could call formally active learning that was labelled as active learning, but there were many examples of learning that was active. So maybe, looking down this right-hand side, how to get real, how to get a rich environment for active learning, maybe our members were getting real in their own ways. So this, the next article was entitled Enabling Active Learning, but we don't know the details of the discussion there. And there again, he was complaining, or not complaining, but commenting after the conference that what he'd wanted was not for just people to look at the two changes, but to look at the relationship between them. He seems to suggest he didn't find that was happening. Okay. This is very, very speedy, but we just wanted to give you an idea of some of the highlights of what we found in our research, and there are more detail in the documents we linked to. In terms of open learning, anyone who's done research in the area of open learning or open education will know that the very definitions of those terms have changed considerably, particularly over the last 40 to 50 years. So research in the late 1970s and early 1980s would have defined open learning as flexibility of space, student choice, integrated curriculum, changing the relationships between learners and teachers, fostering student agency and ownership for learning, those kinds of things. So, and this is also evident in the research in ALT, in ALT-C, which I'll talk about in just one moment. But in terms of my own lens for looking at that, I blabbed about this, but really briefly, I have what is kind of called, I think, a portfolio career. Maybe a lot of people in the room have this as well. Not a straight trajectory. And so in the 80s, I qualified as an engineer and practiced engineering in IT. In the early 90s, I went back to study for an MA in women's studies and really learned a sociological approach to study and knowledge, and also got to learn and experience critical and feminist pedagogy. And I did my dissertation in the area of gender and technology. And later in the 90s, I deepened my understanding of qualitative research in a three-year study of gender and technology. And it wasn't until the 2000s that I really started getting involved in e-learning as it was then and laterally in open education. And that was initially as a practitioner and then in the last few years as a researcher. So that's the lens that I bring to the troll that I did in the area of open learning. So here's a nice example of open learning from my history. So this was literally cut and paste. Anyone who was doing education in those years will know that's how we did those things. And this was one of several community education courses that I developed for women because through all those different career choices that I made, one of the threads that's been extant in my life since growing up in Bronx to living in Ireland and Scotland and the States is community activity and community activism. So much of that work has been working with women and kind of financially and socially disadvantaged areas. And a lot of that was bringing IT and working in the areas of IT. So even in those days we were trying to make sure that Ada Lovelace was in the introduction to computing curriculum and the Jackard Loom which some of us have been talking about on Twitter recently. But looking through the alt archives for those years with my personal lens was really interesting. So this is alt C now and not alt J. So this is a timeline from 1994 to 2017. In those early years, in any search for open, open was not described, defined as open education or open learning as today. It was that older definition. So things that came up were things like open and active learning, open collaboration, open questions and even the values underlying openness, openness and trust was talked about quite a bit. And then if you look at the blue stripe there, the first explicit mention of openness was our wonderful friend reusable learning objects. And laterally OER, open content, MOOCs, the octel course. I see little smiles in the room. A lot of you were probably involved in many of these presentations, open data. And although those were the topics in open education, the green structures that a lot of the tools and spaces that people were using for open educational practices were talked about quite throughout those conferences as well. Blogs, Wikis, social media and social networks. 2009 was a significant year. It seems that was the famous or infamous Velia's Jedge seminar. Who's, James Craig? Yes, he is here. And a keynote by Terry Anderson, really about Web 2.0 and defining open scholarship and so on. But really from 2012, a couple of interesting trends. One is 2012, which as Lorna Campbell reminded me this morning was the end of the UK OER program. It was the first time there was explicitly a theme of open at this conference. But also really evidence of critical approaches. So now we're talking about that quite explicitly, but it's been evident in the program for the last few years. So as Frances said, we have different perspectives from looking back. So what we'd like to do is do a really quick think, pair, share. So you may have had some thoughts listening to what we're talking about about your own experiences inside and outside education. Perhaps bringing in the strand of the political as well. And we'd like you to think about your own experiences, skills and values. Perhaps as educators, perhaps as learning technologists or more broadly. And write down three anywhere, I accuse people that you have, that you feel are most important to bring to your current work in facing the challenges that we face currently in learning and technology. So what are three aspects of yourself that you think are most important to bring to your work right now given the challenges that we face? Okay, I'm just going to say 90 seconds for that, just alone. Just a thoughtful exercise alone. And then we'll take 90 seconds to share with each other. For those who are participating virtually, you can do this alone or if you wish to share, you can do that on Twitter or elsewhere using the tag alt C or personal alt C. Okay. Now for the pair part of this activity. So again, I'd like you, if you would, to just pair up with one other person. And just to read your list, you don't have to explain, just read your list to one another and listen to one another's list. And then see if together you can decide on one thing that you'd like to share in our Google Doc. I'll put the link up in a minute. So again, 90 seconds just to share your three things with one another. Thank you. Perfect. We're very low maintenance. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, I'm really sorry about that. I mean, it would be great if we had an hour to do this session. But it's possible that you may have found something really striking that one or other of you mentioned during that. And you might want to share that. It's possible that you may intersect in one of those, that you both said one of the things that may be roughly the same. So we're just going to ask you, as a pair, to access this document. It's a Google Doc. And add one thing to the doc based on your discussion. And we'll bring it up on the screen and we'll have a look at it. And then we'll just pull the threads together and try and finish on time. And you can include your name or not include your name as you wish. Yeah. So you can be anonymous on that list, yes, or add your name, whatever you wish. OK. We tried to break Google last week with Martin. Martin Hoxie was helping us. It is open for sharing. Yes, it's just case sensitive, yeah. OK. Can you shut that off? Pull the screen out for that one. My goodness. Yes, indeed. That's bit.ly. And then case sensitive, Hoxie-bell-cronin. Thanks. Shall I be on the bus? Two minutes, one minute. OK. So for those who possibly don't have access on their device, there's an awful lot of collaboration, communication, community and sharing. And then other values appearing, empathy, equity, fairness, coming from a marginalized background, ethical awareness, compassion, inclusivity. OK. OK. I would like to keep this going but I know that we're in the last session. We are free to continue to add here any further comments as well. Also, if there was something you feel really strongly about and you're sharing that wasn't the one thing you chose, you can go ahead and add that now as well. We just didn't want to have too many contributions crashing the document. We just invite you to think about the fact that one thing that we certainly found was the surface aspects of being a learning technologist are necessary but not sufficient to do the work that we do today and that we felt that the thing that was most important in looking back, that looking back view that Francis talked about with the lens was bringing our whole selves into the work that we do. And we think that's increasingly important for all of us. So a kind of a values-based approach, as Melissa mentioned several times, which is difficult, it's challenging, but possibly more spaces in this conference to be able to talk about the challenges of doing work in that way. And we invite you to engage in those discussions with us here at the conference and also online beyond. In our abstract, we just go back to our, we used a quote by Audrey Waters and we just wanted to call her to mind again today. We felt this framed so much of our perspective as we looked at this and that is all visions of the future of education, teaching, work, learning are ideological and they are also political and to the extent that we deny that we're not doing the best work that we can do. So I don't know if Francis wants to add anything but we would really love to hear more from you and thank you very much. Well we just want to thank you and everyone else who's contributed and we put a list of what we know about the blog contributions in the document and if anybody does make a post or finds one, please just add it to the document yourself. Thank you so much.