 here at Oldsea and I'm really really really very excited to welcome someone who is very special for chairing this particular session whom many of my colleagues from ALT and also some of our members I know have met at the wonderful at tech conference that our colleagues in Ireland from the Irish Learning Technology Association organize each year. Now when we took our President Martin Weller there this year we all came back with the clear mission to steal the very best bit of the at tech conference and we asked permission and they kindly let us borrow a very special Tom Farley for chairing the session. I hope I'm not gonna have to do any comparing for the next half an hour but give it up for Tom who's gonna come on stage now and show you how to Gosta. If this bombs it's Martin Weller's poor lack of judgment. Martin Weller I mean I was like all sort of fanboy you know and been in ed tech and you're living in Ireland and you quote this man and finally we're sitting down at the dinner there and a friend of mine says what did you talk about? That analytics is to be a leaded no air-blind dogs. It would be funny if it's not what it is actually true. That's exactly what we talked about so yes so Gosta. So I suppose the Japanese have Pachacka or Pechakucha which is obviously very organized. This being Irish, it's a little bit manic. I mean top of the conference is an international linguistic conference and a Spanish-speaking linguist who says to the Irish professor, tell me do you have an Irish award like many others? The Irish ones are for I don't even have a award which indicates such a degree of origins. So, an article I can tell you, this only works and I'll have to be honest, I'm very, very embarrassed. Because now, will English people get a home? We need to take this matter. Why does it say with my cat that Gosta was born? It came to the Rugby World Cup. So Gosta needs quick chit chat. So it's sort of five minutes of frenetic. We do a countdown to start, then you're going to finish it well. Are we going to stop? We're going to stop. Now, you walk away from a conference and you say what did I take away? That I learned about the latest technology. I mean, do we think about how we actually do our work and learning technology? Do we think about power relationships? Do we think about data analytics? No. What I want you to take away from this is how to count an urge. Oscar yoga. Hey, brother. I used to do therapy there. I used to do technology in a lot of YouTube videos. I just took a couple of steals. So we count down each Gosta when we count down one, two, three, four, five. So it's important that each and every one of you knows how to count. So I just said, there would be people here who do doctorates and they would have found them easier than the next two minutes. I want everybody to join in. Ahayn, the pronunciation. Ahayn. Ahayn. I feel a bit like some of Doher Deere. This is actually just Doher. It's straightforward. If you've seen a sound of music, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. That's very easy. Now tree. There's almost invention there. A haym, a doe, a tree. Now you think, oh, show up. This Irish language is easy. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Well, does anybody who's ever watched Father Chaddle know? It's not that easy. I'm just telling all of you folks there. My son there, my jetty's our son. My wife is here. And all of our staff dressed up. And these two Canadians were afraid of getting insult as we all are. I don't need to be rude. But all seriousness, they had a my lovely horse competition. Now. Now. Fall. Give that one a go. All right, boys. Where we are. A haym. A doe. A tree. A carrot. And again. A haym. A doe. A tree. A carrot. That's, I have to go. I'll go max and a billion dollar. Two week. Yeah. A two week. I'm on your roll now. You're big enough now. I'm going to get the sleeves off now. You ready? A tree. Dosa. I don't want to put it in the nail list. Now. You have a lot of tips here. I'm not going to be on no one though. But today is actually literally the fulcrum of dust. Right? Because I don't get everything you see here. Just a little bit. Right? I'm not going to be on no one. I'm going to get to the left and right. But sad enough. So. Laurie, you need to be aware of your fulcrum. This side here. Why that? Okay. On the right. The left. On the right. Okay. So what we're doing now is we're going to cut off. Cut off between one side and the other. Yeah. Just to get us all going. It's late in the day, isn't it? So on this. How nervous I've been. Now obviously they won't do it. But they have done it. Now. Our first count. Coming up here. Do you see what's going on? What are we doing? I can't remember all the problems though. We just had a call of each person there. You want to just move here and collect yourself and gather yourself here? Now you're all right. Don't give her a round of applause. She hasn't. No, no. She's very kindly going to give you a three minute warning. And a one minute warning. You want to learn another Irish word? Would you online? Oh, online. Roger. Hello, Peter. Okay. I'm a county in Waterford. Tony Moepe in Tralee. I'm in Costlow in Dublin. If you want to question it out. Now. The Irish word for stop is stop. Stop. And again. Stop. Stop. Okay. Now, when we hold rope, it means stop. I know you mean stop. Are we okay? Yeah. Don't be looking at me like that. Oh, it'd be easy, I mean. No. In fact, if anything, I've come here. I have to go down America. Now. We won't, we won't divide up the room left and right. We'll just do the hold. The hold is there. If you're ready to go. The clock will start when we shout out. At the last tone of Boston fades out. The clock will start. Are we ready? Hey. That's a real one. I'm suffering. It's like father storm here now. I'm glad. I'm glad. I love me. It's how we create in the night. Now. The whole idea, as I said, is participation. And when we start that one again. When I raise the flag, we start. Are we ready? At three. Nice. That's really unfair. I've got to follow that. And then I've got to go before these lovely people. So I think I'm kind of the warmer back, but I'll give it a go. Okay. And so I'm Debbie Bath. And I kind of mad on pink because you might have gathered. And I'm a senior academic developer here in Swansea. And now when Marin, lovely Marin asked me to do a gastric. I went, yeah, that would be great. Because I thought it had something to do with cakes. I don't know why. I kind of conjured up that image. I now know it's nothing. What's the way to do with cakes? So Marin said, all I've got to do, which is great, is just talk a bit about my involvement with Alt really. And what my favorite Alt 18, Alt C 18 moments have been so far, bearing in mind we're only in day two. So I'm sure there'd be wonderful stuff tomorrow, but this is all I've got so far. So here we go. And why I love Alt. Okay. That's a synopsis, really, of my summary of my involvement with Alt. I first started to get to know the lovely people in Alt in 2014. And then I did the octel course. Does anybody do the octel course? Yeah. Pay me later, Marin. And I had a role working in Wales at that time, where I was involved in the OER conferences. So talking about the OER 15 conference, where I've persuaded a certain somebody sitting in the front and a couple of other somebody to come and do the chairing for me. And ever since then, I've kind of haven't left, really. So that's kind of all the sorts of things that I've been involved in. The Open Education Special Interest Group, I lost to give a quick plug to, because I know Katherine Cronin is quite keen on mentioning that for this year. So if anybody wants to know anything about the OER SIG, then let me or Katherine know. I've also put down there that I'm a Seamult helpful. I don't know if you remember last year, but we had to do a little I Will Promise. And last year, I Will Promise to do my Seamult, but I didn't actually do it. So there you go. Hey, right, I'm going to run now. Five moments, collaborative learning. Snapchat on the go. Anybody use Snapchat? Two, three, four. Right, we had a bit of an on-the-go session on the train before we even got here, which was quite good. So I've never used Snapchat before, but it's been started already. Some more fab moments that we've done. Virtually connecting. I took part in that. That was really cool. Really enjoyed that. First time I've been a guest on Virtually Connecting. Two minutes, okay. Some more fab moments. This is the lovely Suzanne. Juggling. You get juggling at all. Who'd have thought? I can't juggle, by the way. If she was here, she would be juggling, but I can't do that, so you don't get that. But that's also on YouTube. So if anybody missed that, that's all about our Bring Your Own Device for Learning course that we did. There we go. We're on to the why I love alt now. Community. You guys, you make it what it is, really. I get such a sense of warmth and energy. So many opportunities to learn. You're always learning something new. I've just got such a buzz out of coming to this conference. It's the highlight of my year, really. You get to feel part of something. I think my professional values, I like to think I'm an open practitioner. I like to share as much as I can. And above all, we have loads of fun, don't we? And we have some really nice cakes. Anybody have the cakes just now? I hope there's going to be more cakes tomorrow, Maren. Can you promise more cakes, possibly? Yeah. One minute left. There we go. I did a little scribble. I didn't have time to finish it, so there's some bits and pieces that I haven't got on there. But I hope that gives you a bit of a flavour. A flavour. See what I did there? Gaster, flavour, cakes. See? There you go. But yeah, I think it's great. And I'll be back next year. I'm under time. You have ruined my mom. I think we've got a strategic start. I have my number two list here. This man, we age and to see her. Coming over, my colleagues from Australian Technology Association, and if you come over to EdTech next year, you can experience more. There is the madness I've built it. So coming over for it, I've got a wizard and Paul Don. I'll be nice to Lord, but Paul is fair game for anything. I'm so close to holding it up here. Are you ready to go? Yep. Yep. Will you be on time? No. Good. Now, we start it off, I've made it a little easier. We're going to start it off here with the hay, the doe, tree, car, and then we all show the cooie, and then we guss it. We'll just do a drawing of it. Are we ready? Starting with the left. Don't think you've still got the idea here. Gustav, not Gustav. A bit of Gustav. Will you try again? Okay, Tom. Thanks for that very warm introduction. Delighted to be here on behalf of my colleagues, Catherine Roon and Alison Egan, who fortunately couldn't make it. To talk about, okay, the title comes from Paul. It's really difficult. Little Lord Acorns, how they grow, looking at fruitful collaborations among professional bodies that hopefully are yielding bountiful engagements. So who are we with the Irish Learning Technology Association? In essence, an independent voluntary community of professionals committed to the development and exchange of knowledge Intel in education. We run a number of initiatives in terms of our annual conference, generally about 300 people is on every year in May. Hopefully you can make it. Jen Burke Award. A couple of years ago, we were delighted to collaborate with some colleagues nationally in producing the first NMC technology outlook for higher education in Ireland. We have an open access journal in technology enhanced learning, which Tom is one of the main leaders on and will be talking about tomorrow. And we're also delighted that a couple of our Irish colleagues, in particular, one project, which is a special edition of the Tel Journal, which was focused on VLEs, that's up for awards tonight, along with another DCU project. If you want to find out anything more about ILTA, have a look at our website and follow us on Twitter. So why are we here today? As professional bodies that outside in perspective is sometimes quite hard to get. And one of the ways we've always been thinking about what are we doing? Are we doing all right? Are we going in the right direction? And collaborating with other professional bodies, looking at what our colleagues are doing nationally and internationally, is always a good way of achieving that. With this in mind, we've been developing our collaborative networks with our colleagues internationally over the last few years. We signed an MOU with a couple of years ago. We've escalated. We have our colleagues across the water in the US in terms of the OLC. And we've been looking at how we're developing these networks. And I'm going to hand over to my colleague Paul, who's going to talk about some of the common issues and how we've been addressing them. Thanks, Laura. So when we looked over the global garden fence, we identified the following four, I suppose, issues or commonalities, I suppose, at a higher level for professional bodies. So around collaboration, dissemination, governance and leadership. So we've all kind of interacted around these issues. And I suppose identifying the issues is fairly good. It's good, it's good. But I suppose operationalizing or sort of addressing them in a collaborative fashion is another day's work. So the ways that we've done things recently, so for example, we've worked on, well, how do we do it? We got involved, essentially. And so we got involved with projects like the blended learning essentials, recruitment of choosers, for example, in terms of continuing professional development. We've got a partnership with Alt around Seamalt. We've engaged with the IELOL professional development strategy from the OLC. And there's an EU equivalent called Empower. We're always mindful of promoting each other's activities. So we do a lot of crowdsourcing for projects. Obviously, we do a lot of conference participation. So we have under the MOU that Alt comes to us and we go to their conferences as well. And we'd love to see some of you over. Well, increasingly there are a lot of Alt members who are coming over to us for a conference. And importantly, around consultancy, around governance, for example, around steering groups that we might have in our respective organizations. So for example, we've got representative on the strategic plan or the strategic group for research and learning technologies. So a lot of this stuff is very reciprocal and very useful for all of us. Okay, so where are we now then? Obviously, all of the professional bodies are geographically dispersed, but we were lucky last year for last year's EdTech conference where we managed to get most of the heads of the bodies together, which was absolutely fantastic at the EdTech conference in Ireland. So from left to right, we've got Don Parrish on the left from Ask Alight, Martin Weller down here, who was ubiquitous anyway. We've got Meg Benke, who was talking about the old C, myself, and then Marin. What do we do next? We're looking around leadership program webinar series to put together so that we can kind of do some comparative analysis globally in terms of how people are addressing the e-leadership, I suppose, narrative, looking at quality assurance standards for blended learning through looking at, I suppose, we're finding it difficult, certainly in Ireland, to get those standards through, so we're looking forward to collaborating with others. And for us, oppressing Lee, we're going through a change in ill to governance. Five, four, three. And it's been great to see you all. Welcome to EdTech next year. This is a savage, savage reference. Thanks, Sam. Sam, you have to leave me. I have my clothes in line, so I was in EdTech next year. We're not sure we'll have lifesavers, but we'll definitely have Tom. That's it. Thank you very much. I'm absolutely going to go wherever it is there. Anyway, the time is at first, and I've just contacted a colleague, a friend there, just asked her if it's okay to work. The therapy had worked, and on her brain force, Dustin, she was told in seven minutes and found out it was five minutes on the day, so that wasn't an easy thing to do. Well, harsh, but fair. Now, Klinks, Milande, is now joining us over here now, so we'll just let them get themselves ready. Now, this time, I think, we won't be on the left and right, but we will be on the left and right, but it's a bit of sort of lateral movement, so as we count, we'll all start off to the left, to the right, because it's sort of the whole mass of migraves. You know, there's a little bit of a hand, so it's your arm. So as soon as we're warm, we'll get started. I'm watching here, and we're not getting the balls. Don't step behind. Okay, that's enough. We just hope to wear you out. Okay. Oh, yeah. We all start off to your left. We're ready? I've titled my guest, when I grew up, I wanted to be a learning technologist. Said no child ever. Five minutes is too short for an intro on who I am, but suffice to say, I wore a whole bunch of different hats back in British Columbia where I work. I'm the manager of EdTech for regional education called BC Campus. I'm also associate faculty at Royal Roads University in the School of Education and Technology, and I'm a community steward for an organization of BC similar to Alt called Etug, the educational technology user group. In addition to this being the 25th anniversary of Alt, it is also next year the 25th anniversary of Etug, and next year is also my personal 25th anniversary as an educational technologist, learning technologist. Although to be honest, for the first 10 years of my career, I didn't actually know that I was an educational technologist. It's a career that I fell into and I suspect I'm not the only one in the room that fell into it. At any rate, when I was a kid growing up in Northern Canada, like most kids, my childhood dreams, this is from Martin, where I would have become a professional ice hockey player, but once I realized that you actually have to have some skills to become a professional hockey player, I altered my dream to something that I thought was a little bit more achievable. I wanted to be a professional Nessie hunter. I even had a backup plan, should Nessie hunting fall through, see in Canada we have this similar mythical creature called the Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan, so I thought, well, I couldn't make the big show in Scotland hunting Nessie, I could try my luck in the local leagues at Lake Okanagan, but at no time did I dream of becoming a learning technologist. But 25 years later, here I am and here's a few things I've noticed in our field. So here's three things. First off, education technology has become simpler and more complex. Sorry for any mathematicians who have actually modeled a mathematical word there in simplex, but let me explain. On the simple side, in 2007 when I used Skype for the first time to bring a guest speaker into a class for an instructor, it took me six weeks to coordinate this. And the biggest hurdle I had was convincing our IT department that this new thing called Skype wasn't some kind of secret back door into our network for Eastern European hackers. Skype traffic in and out of our network, I don't know about that. Today, a digitally literate instructor can bring a guest into their classroom in about five minutes. On the more complex side, I built a learning technologist of 1994 who had to worry things about things like the student data retention policy of the overhead projector sitting in the corner of the room. Which brings me to observation number two. Learning technology has become more critical. I think this is an area that we can continue to go in, but we've made some great strides in, especially in the past five to ten years thanks in no small part to a lot of people who are at this conference who I really admire the critical work that they're doing. Early in my career, I was often cast in the role of being a evangelist. And some of you may have had that in your title at one time. It was quite vogue to be an evangelist. Today we're much less evangelists and much more critical of not only technology but often the unseen processes and unspoken processes that drive technology adoption and education. And I'm happy to be at a conference actually that has an entire stream dedicated to critical perspectives in learning technology. Finally, observation number three, a learning technologist is not an instructional designer. Perhaps it's the Canadian to me that phrases this as a not because sometimes when you ask a Canadian who they are, the answer you get is not American. But I don't mean this pejoratively and I don't mean to pit these roles against each other because both are valuable and important roles in maintaining high standards of teaching and learning excellence in our institutions. But I really do think that these are two separate roles. They're a country and need to be informed by each other's practice, but distinct fields requiring different skills and attributes. And I often feel that the profession that we call a learning technologist or educational technologist is often undervalued in our institutions and they tend to get tacked on to an equally important but really for me a separate role and that is instructional designer. It's this third point that's actually brought me to ALT this year because I think ALT has a really good model and the CMALT program raised the profile of learning technologists and it's something that I'm hoping that I can possibly bring back to Canada and one of the reasons why I'm here is to learn much more about CMALT. Okay, there you go. In the end, not the career I dreamed of as a kid, no professional hockey careers for me, but I can honestly say that now I've arrived at there's not another career that I would rather be doing. Thank you. So I should sort of say that I've done a very brief throwing out ideas, so I would encourage people if anybody has read something or something to have a chat with them afterwards like that. So I just had to check with Donna but I just thought that it's a beautiful name. It's Donna's line call. That's not bad. That's not bad. I was just saying to Paul that we have EdTech next year, it's like been a TED talk I've never had these fancy things I've done so I think that's added to the whole the whole thing. So I'll just sort of say by the way, you've been a great great participant. We'll just sort of up the ante now a little bit more. So what we do now, because I think at this stage you can do a lot of sitting all day that's good for the old bands. So we'll start off in the standing position for the we'll go down to the hay and then you have to fully sit down so it's a hay and a dog free. Arms up pretty good. We all stand up. Come on. It's late today. This is actually good for your health. I'm actually going to stop debate from both now and this. And also what I have here with Scuy but learning technology anyone who's watching on the stream if you want to get one of your friends to photograph you taking part in these sort of warm-up exercises are we all ready? A hay, a dog, a tree, a car, a tree, a car. Is this thing... I'm not a learning technologist. I'm an anthropologist. My name is Donna and I have opinions about things and I'm not going to apologize for that. So in the work that I get to do in this sector which is weird for me because I am not of the sector but anthropologists work outside of everywhere they are so that's fine. I have been tasked occasionally with going in and having people talk about what they do when they go online to do teaching and learning things. And early on I was doing this thing that some of you may be familiar with mapping practice using visitors and residents and we were arguing against natives and immigrants because we didn't want people to pigeon-hole themselves in really, really, really not useful ways. And so what ended up happening of course was that people started to pigeon-hole in the different way that we had given them because we were still talking about identity and what I wanted to do was have them talk about practice. So this triangle represents the opportunity that they have to talk about what they do regardless of who they are. And I think that one of the things that ends up coming up over and over again is when people talk about what they do they end up talking about the people among whom they do these things. So we start off with practice and all of a sudden we're talking about people. We're talking about the places that they go because there are certain people there. They talk about the places that they don't want to go to because there are certain people there. They're talking about networks. They're talking about the networks that they have. They're talking about the networks that they want to have. They're talking about the networks that they avoid because they're toxic and they don't serve them. People don't get enough of an opportunity to talk about these sorts of things. And I think it's wrong. I think that there's too much emphasis on what are you going to do, where are you going to do it, and not enough about with whom are you going to do it, and why are you going to do that. So, the other thing that ends up happening when we have people map their practices is that they talk a lot about visibility. We talk about people who are stars on social media. We talk about the people that we see all the time. They shine so brightly. I see them everywhere. Surely I know who that person is because I can see them all the time. And you might know some things, but you don't know everything. You know the things that they show you. That doesn't mean you know them. You can interpret the things that they show you, and they can make deliberate choices about the things that they show you, but that's not the same thing as knowing. So, when I think about people and their practices, and I think about the ways that we want to encourage people to do things, I think that too often we get bogged down in, but who can see me? And look at that person over there, and aren't they amazing? I want people to think about the intimacy of their practices. I want people to think with people who care for them. One of the things that my mother and I do together, when we have an opportunity to walk, is we walk at dusk and we peer in people's windows because we want to be opinionated about the color that they painted the wall and the sofa that they chose. And you do it at dusk because they haven't gone the blinds down yet, and you can see into. So, one of the exercises that I have started doing with my colleague Laurie Phipps is based on the idea of a window, that you open a window into your practice and you invite people to look in the window and talk to you about what they see about your practice, not just the stuff that's visible, but the stuff they know about because they know you and because you trust them to tell them things about what it means. I feel like a window is an inadequate metaphor, the sort of thing that I'm trying to encourage people to do here. I'm trying to encourage people to leverage their intimate networks of people who care about them, not random workshops of people who you just met, who can Google you and think that they know you if you're visible. I want for people to talk with the people who you want to invite into your home. Who are the people who are already in your network? How can you open a door to the people that you want to hear from about your practice and what it means, what it means to you, and what it means to them? How do we create those moments of intimate reflection, places of care that don't come from some abstracted notion of visibility and importance? But from home. Three, two, one. Start. I don't know what it says, but it's very exciting that the only two people who've gone over time were my fellow compatriots and colleagues. It's like sort of that all the way into the setting. Other compatriots have rules and going on to laws. We have Asher. Shouldn't really do that. As he said, we have a finer understanding of the grayer condition of the human psyche. So, we have Leo Heberman coming up for last but not least. Good round of applause for himself. So then, Larry had me tweeted in showing himself going up and down or... I've already tweeted you do. Ah, that's it. Raymond Costlow, Tony Murphy, you're watching in. You should be doing this. Now, I've got you to do a bit of physical exercise. Now, we're going to do a bit of mental exercise. You've been absolutely excellent at a handle, three-car, two-two. But how do you find to be doing two-two-car, three-doe, hey? Have you enjoyed one? Oh, this could end badly, Mark. This could end very badly. But you know what? I have great faith in this group. You've been absolutely excellent, better than the useless lot of life normally do with every day. Now, honestly, you really have to know, I was honestly so nervous that this wouldn't work. I said, I wouldn't this work. You have been absolutely brilliant. So we're just here to draw you on, because we're going to put Leo up. Three-doe, hey, you ready? Three-car, three-doe, hey. Well, you don't need to hear this at the time. They're really good. I taught that this would be great. That's very useless. Anyway. So, are we ready? And a big, really loudest, and a huge ghost at this time. Are we ready? Three. Thank you very much. Some of you, no doubt, in this room will recognize what this image is of. Slightly blaring, and not the best quality. Sorry about that. But I will now explain it for those who don't know. In recognition of this auspicious occasion of 25 years of old sea, I wanted to talk a bit about my personal experience of old and the role that it's played for me. And so I first became involved in old, around 10 years ago, as many in this room might say, only 10 years ago, when I started attending the M25 Learning Technology Group. Technically, actually, at that time, the M25 Learning Technology Group was not yet actually an old sig. That was soon to follow. It was on the horizon, precisely because the community attending M25 were very much aligned in spirit and overlapping, also in practice, with the wider old community. And really, I have to say, joining that group was a surprisingly transformative experience to have when attending an event named after a motorway. The M25 had the name when it was originally set up in the early 90s to be a group in which learning technologists and their ilk and their variants could meet up and talk about what they've been doing. Because normally, in this type of role, you're working in smallish teams within institutions. Sometimes you need to learn some new stuff. Or even just for your own sanity, really, you need to get out and talk to other people. And so the meetings of the M25 are generally a presentation and Q&A format, sometimes through other kinds of more experimental formats as well, or with special guests. And after attending and participating in this group for a few years, I managed to replace someone who'd stepped down from the organizing group, or as alt call us, the officers. Sometimes we like to call us the admirals. So the M25 group, I like to think, exemplifies the alt spirit. It's an alt and microcosm by the community, for the community, or as one could say, in the M25 and indeed in alt, the community is the curriculum. What makes this possible is that our community is blessed by willingness or an openness, if you like, to discuss our practices and our obstacles and to share our work in progress that sometimes doesn't quite look like a solution just yet. Ah, yes, solutions. Remember solutions? Industry was awash with them a few years back. IT companies were so advanced then, I know I was working in them at the time, they knew your solution already before they even knew what your problem was. And I think now the language has somewhat evolved over time, but solutionism certainly persists, and it still pays to be wary of the kind of solutions that can purchase with a license fee. In fact, what I think is great about the alt community is that over the years, we've got better at talking about problems that we recognize are difficult, wicked and intractable, that no solution, especially off the shelf, is gonna provide a quick fix to. So how does the alt community do that? I love this alt image about being greater than the sum of our parts. The alt community through its conferences, its special interest groups, its mailing list, and really importantly also, through its open access journal, Research and Learning Technology, which I have a peer review overdue for right now, opens up spaces for sharing and increasing our understanding of these problems. Human problems about coping with change, about supporting colleagues and students, about limited resources and context where the need for our assistance is great. These spaces and the conversations that are able to be contained within them are a lifeline to those of us working in this field, and through participating in them, personally I've gained knowledge, support, a professional network to turn to when needed, but also colleagues and friends who are a vital part of making this work worth doing. So yes, don't bring me solutions, bring me problems. Thank you, Alts. Thank you, Alts. Thank you all for giving me a little press for time, so I'll just take a few seconds. First of all, thank you very much to Peter and Larry for helping me keep this madness on track for our participants, I should say, who let us not eat, he came up here, and I'm sure they didn't know what to expect. Most of all, I mean, just Alts because everybody gets involved, so for myself, thank you, good to meet them all, thank you very much to Martin and Martin for taking this bait, and thanks for that. Cheers. Now, this was the first GASTA we'll see, and I hope not the last one. We're going to go straight into Alts' annual general meeting, so if you're a member or you're an interested participant, we really invite you to stay. Otherwise, we look forward to welcoming you back at the Midland Hotel at 6.30 this evening to start our GALA, thank you very much again for participating in our first GASTA, and we'll see you this evening or now at the AGM. All right, fantastic. We're going to get straight on the way with the AGM, and I'm going to hand over to Alts' president, Martin Weller, to open the proceedings. So please, before Martin gets us underway, make sure you sign in. This is an important part of our annual governance. Signing-in sheets are going round. Also, voting cards are going round. If you are a member, there will be instructions on the screen on how to vote at each resolution, and you should have a card to vote with. My colleagues here from the staff team will help you vote if you're not sure how or you're not sure if you're eligible. We have a list to check. So thank you very much for joining us at the AGM this afternoon. Also, just before we get underway, we're looking for two people to volunteer to be tellers at the AGM and count votes. I have one volunteer. Thank you very much, James. Any other volunteers? Elizabeth, perfect, thank you very much. So Elizabeth and James will be the tellers. During the voting, please could you get out of the front No, I'm okay here. We're okay, we'll go for the next round. Okay, okay, hi everyone. So thanks for coming to the AGM. I can't promise it's going to be quite as fun as interacting with Mr. Graston, but you've got to do this. So thank you all for coming. So I'm also going to stand up, thanks. And welcome to people from other organisations. So, Kim, and he's from ETAG and Canada. Tom and the Ilter Valley from Ireland. Tamden chose to join us from the European Association for Technology and Arts and Learning and Kath Bennett from the Association of Appointment and Learning and Rights. So she and I are just going to give some brief highlights of the past year, do you want to go first, Cheryl? Yeah, sorry, I'll just, yeah, well, it's been a really action packed year for us over the last last year. And you can see some highlights there. We've had a lovely Brian, again, doing some graphics for it. Whereas I suppose there were a lot of highlights in terms of our journal, in terms of the OER conference. And in terms of this conference as well, 25th year, there's been a lot of work by all the people in the committee and, yeah, it's just been almost too much this year and we are a bit short of time. So Martin, is there anything else you want to highlight? Just, I've gone wrong already. I'm going to ask for an apologies. And proxy votes, so do you have those? Yeah, six proxy votes. So just on my highlights there, I think to say, I think Mark's kind of, they're in a transition period for all of us, which Maher and the trustee are very skillfully negotiated. They particularly are moving to be a distributed organization. It's kind of very important for all to, the structure we have now kind of points towards longer term stability, I think. So I think it's important for any modern organization to always reflect on its practices and all to kind of accept. I also have to say, as the OER guy, I kind of, the OER conference, the one in Bristol this year and every year is kind of a real highlight for me. It's becoming a real international fixture and I think that's really moved on over the past few years. Okay, so on to the business. So, approved of the minutes of the last annual general meeting held in Liverpool on 6th September, 2017. There's an accurate record of the meeting. We'll need a proposer and a seconder. Peter, and I need a seconder. James. So those are approved as an accurate record of the meeting. Thank you. We don't have any matters arising. Are there any matters arising in what's to face? No matters arising. Thank you. We zipped through that, good. So thank you. We're back on time. We're back on time, that's the way to do it. So moving on to the annual report and accounts, I'm very pleased to hand over to Daniel for this part. Thank you. So welcome to this meeting. Thank you for attending. My name's Daniel Clark. I'm the honorary treasurer of OLD. And it's my privilege to present to you the annual report and accounts. This is a really important part of our governance and our commitment to openness that we are transparent with you about the resources that we get, the membership fees and so on, and how we're using them. So it is important that these are made available to you. And when I was looking at them and reviewing them, I was thinking, I've just finished three years as treasurer of OLD. And as Martin said in that time, we've seen some really big changes in how OLD runs and operates. So we've moved to being an independent organization, a charitable incorporated organization, which means the trustees are not personally liable, which is a huge relief to all of us. We've moved away from our partnership with Brooks to become a virtual organization and directly employing people. And we deliberately kept a lot of that invisible to you, our members, because it shouldn't interrupt the way we sort of deliver on our strategy. But over time, this should make us a much more sort of agile organization and we're able to cope with what the future throws at us. Now, becoming an independent organization and employing people directly does bring a little bit of extra risk. And it makes it that much more important that we are financially stable and that we are, say, careful with our resources. So I'm glad to say in the current year, the year ended last January, we did record a small surplus of 24,000 pounds. So that's a good result, clearly being careful on that side. What we've actually done is decided to transfer a bit of that money to increase a reserve that we hold. So we have, the reserve is now standing at 160,000 pounds in our accounts. Now, that reserve doesn't have any legal effect. What it is, it's a sort of rainy day fund. It's a marker to us as trustees, to you as members, that the money is set aside for emergencies. It's been calculated as six months of operating expenditure of alt. So the idea is that if there was a absolute catastrophe, every bit of income dried up, alt could run for six months, which would at least bar some breathing space. Now, that's not something we expect to happen. This is just us trying to be prudent. It is in line with best practice in the charity sector. So that's something that you'll see going through the accounts is a slight increase in that reserve. The other thing I'd like to draw your attention to and I hope will be of assurance to you as our members and stakeholders is that we have had, as usual, an independent audit of our accounts. So auditors who are not connected with us who are professionals have come in, reviewed our accounts, reviewed our financial record keeping, signed off their audit report, which is quite lengthy. But what it amounts to is that they look at whether there is anything in the accounts that they could consider to be misleading or mis-stated, and basically they're saying they are happy that the accounts are true and fair-stated. So hopefully that's something that sort of provides assurance to you that what we're presenting here is correct. And the only thing I wanted to mention, just sort of reflect on really, is that if you look through the accounts, sometimes there's an impression that alt is, it feels like a very sort of large organization with a lot of reach and sort of big staff and offices everywhere and stuff like that. You look at these and our total turnover is 485,000 a year, which in the scheme of things is not vast. And the fact that on that level of resource, so much is accomplished really, is testament to the amount of time and energy and effort that people put in. And I think that again, that's just something worth reflecting on as we look through these. So that was everything I had to say about sort of presenting the accounts to you, but I'm very happy to take any questions if there are any. Apologies to Bella who requested that I present the accounts through the medium of interpreted dance. But having considered that carefully, I thought perhaps it might go a bit wrong, so sorry Bella. Next year maybe. Okay, so I'm gonna propose a resolution that the annual important accounts be adopted. I need a proposer and a seconder for that. I may propose a seconder, Nick, okay. If you are entitled to vote, you should have a voting card. And I think Daniel will now ask for first for votes for, then against and then abstentions and will also count proxy votes. So please keep your hand in the air until you've actually voted and be counted. So the resolution is that the annual important accounts be adopted. Those in favor? Keep your hands up please. Are we having a recount? 43. Six proxy votes for. Those against and abstentions. Thank you. Thank you Daniel. I just wanna say. I was, every year I'm very thankful that we have Daniel as a trustee because this stuff is beyond me. So it's something I can really trust in doing. So thank you very much Daniel. The next part of this is to just approve the appointment of the auditors for the next year's accounts. So I need a proposer and a seconder to appoint David Cadwalador and co-accountants for the next year's. Proposer, James and Elizabeth. I think we vote on this again. We don't have to vote. They're approved. So that brings us on to award of honorary life membership. I chaired the panel for this. I wanna say that the person who's about to get it, I think we do a kind of Oscar thing, don't be worried, don't reveal who it is. So the person who's the winner, it was a unanimous decision to give this person a life membership. They've been a stalwart member of the art community throughout their career and contributed a lot to the UK sector in particular. I'm gonna let Sheila say a few words because she is better placed. I think I've been really lucky in my career that I've worked with and continue to work with a number of very inspiring women, many of whom are in the room today. And I think I'm really excited about this award because the recipient of this honorary award, it's the highest honor that we give and it's a recognition of a very significant contribution to the organization by an individual. And I think this year's individual, she's played a role in ALT, I think probably since its outset. She's been a trustee, she's been a vice chair, a chair. She's also hosted a conference. And even when she stepped back from her role in governance, she still was a really active part of the community. And she's done many, many things, including setting up the ALT Scotland group. I think in everything she does, she brings grace, intelligence, criticality and her scholarly practice. And most of all, and most important for me, her sense of fun and laughter. And I can honestly say, I don't think I've ever laughed as much in my life as when I've been working with this person. Even at times when our laughter was tinged, maybe with a bit of hysteria. But I feel so privileged to have worked alongside her for the past five years. And I'm still in denial that this person's taken early retirement. I'm still hoping that she's just gonna walk back in from holiday next week. But at this point, I would just like to say it just gives me a huge pleasure to present this year's honorary life membership to Linda Kreener. Thank you everyone for this. This is, I'm quite overwhelmed really and feel very, very honored to receive this. Thank you to all the Alt Trustees and also to all fellow members for this award. I do think something that's given to you by your peers is one of the most meaningful awards that you can receive in your career. And I'm really grateful to get this. Now Alt has certainly been very dear to my heart throughout my career. I actually started my career in learning technology in January 1993. So it was the first, it's the same year as Alt was established. So it's been there all along. And I have to say that any involvement in time that I've given to Alt, I've had back tenfold. In terms of professional networks, deepening understanding of the field and most importantly, making friends. Friendship and fun, I think we've had a lot of that and there's been a lot of that in this year's conference as well. So it's been a privilege to be involved in Alt and to have played a small part in its development over the years. I'm very pleased as well that Alt Scotland is now a thriving part of the Alt family and that membership is growing year on year. So thanks again to everyone. I hope to keep in touch. And here's to the next 25 years. Thank you. Thanks, Linda. So we've made some changes to constitution this year for Alt, which Sheila and Mara are going to fund you through now. Sheila, would you like to say a few words maybe just in general and I can maybe help talk through the technicalities? Absolutely. So as Daniel and Martin have both alluded to, it's been the last couple of years there's been quite a lot of changes to the organization, particularly around our new strategy which we launched last year. And this year, by becoming a virtual organization and moving away from books. At the same time as doing that, we have felt that actually we needed to maybe make some changes to our governance structures to support the organization better. And obviously we've changed our charitable status as well. So what we want to do is take you through some of the proposed changes. And the reason we're doing this is really for the stability of the organization and thinking towards the next 25 years. And also, as it says in the slide there, it's really bringing us in line with best practice for the charity commission as well. So we really feel this is timely and necessary for the future development of the organization and association. Anything you'd like to add at that point, Mara? No, I think we can probably jump right in and just go through the key points. As Sheila was saying, there are a number of changes to be proposed and the first one is regarding how we appoint roles of the president, the chair, and the vice chair in ALT. So as many of you will be familiar currently and for the past, this has been an annually rotating role. And I think we've identified that while we've been extremely fortunate as a professional body to have very able and engaged trustees that make the life of staff like myself really easy and straightforward, it is a huge challenge to find really well informed, good quality trustees on an annual basis to take the most responsible role in our organization. And it also means that we as staff provide much greater continuity. And as we all think that the membership should have the greatest perspective on what we do as a sort of from a strategic perspective, I really welcome this proposal to extend the term of these most important trustee roles, the most active, the most responsible for the governance to the charity commission as well, to bring them in line with the same terms of service that all the other trustees have. It is quite unusual to have the chair of an organization rotate annually. And over the last six years as CEO of ALT, I've been very fortunate to have six wonderful chairs to work with, but we do only work together for 12 months before the next one arrives. So this makes great practical sense and does minimize our risk. And similarly, as we are quite a streamlined, small organization and we want to use the resources as best we can, we've also proposed that the maximum number of trustees overall goes from 13 to 10, which will still give us enough breadth to have the governance that we really need, but doesn't mean that we have to unnecessarily have larger committees that we really need to. So I think those are the specific changes to the boards and the roles. And we're moving on now to explain regarding that how trustees are elected and appointed. So as you are familiar as members, at the moment, all trustees are elected openly. Anyone who is a member can express an interest in roles, but we don't advertise as other charities do specific job descriptions for, let's say, being a treasurer. And in Daniel, we actually have the first treasurer who has an accountancy background and is fully qualified to advise us financially. So we want to catch up with what other charities, like the Wikimedia Foundation, for example, are doing, and we want to make the recruitment of the trustees more transparent so it's very clear what you volunteer to do because it is a role of great responsibility. So instead of appointing all trustees in the same manner, we propose that half of all trustees will still be elected openly and members can express an interest and they will be the same as they are now, but that they are specific roles, including the chair, the treasurer, and the vice chair, who will recruit with job descriptions and that instead of having open elections, which can sometimes lead to those who are most popular or well-known voices being elected, we will give the existing board the final say in their appointment. Again, this is probably quite commonplace in most charities, but a big step for us and a big change. So I'm just going to pause there because I think, Sheila, we might want to pause for questions briefly in case anybody has questions on these two points. Absolutely. So if you do have questions, please raise your hand or let us know. Okay, there don't seem to be any questions right now, so should we move on? Exactly. I think there's two more changes that we've had a lot of feedback on from membership in the last years the organisation has grown and one of the areas it's grown specifically over the last few years is member groups. When I joined ALT 10 years ago, ALT Scotland was kind of the member group and the M25 group wasn't yet an ALT group, but now we have member groups all across the UK and our governance hasn't really caught up with that. Our governance doesn't provide a direct avenue for those member groups from Northern Ireland, from Wales, from all parts of the UK and different parts of the country to have a voice directly in the governance. So the idea is that we'll make an overarching committee which is really going to be a new forum for member groups to talk to each other and with each other and have more direct opportunity to collaborate alongside the conference committees, alongside the journal editors, the blog editors and all other groups involved in the governance of ALT and that the assembly will be chaired by the president. Now, as you can imagine, I actually tried to make a slide for you of what our current structure looks like and I ended up having 109 arrows and I gave up, if I'm honest with you, because I thought no one will believe that this is how ALT is currently organised and how many different indirect reporting lines and direct responsibilities there are. So this is why we're proposing this constitutional change today but there'll be a transition period until the constitution comes fully into effect which is at the next AGM, so in 12 months and we want to work with all of our existing member groups to get it right, to make this transition and here you can see what we currently think is going to be a blueprint for the new ALT assembly so that the existing groups will still operate just as they do now, special interest groups, member groups, steering groups for the journal, conference committees and there might be other groups like C-mold lead assessors which are not a formal group right now but that we will work together as a community to get that right because there's many people, three and a half thousand or thereabouts involved in ALT and we want to make sure as many of them have a voice. So just to maybe conclude and my Sheila might have more things to add, here is how we propose to put this into practice. The trustees are putting it to the vote today to ask you to approve these new changes to the constitutions that will come into effect in 12 months time at the next AGM and that's why we have a secondary resolution for the three trustees where previously there would have been the rotation of roles to retain their positions for 12 months to give us some stability until we have the new election processes and the ALT assembly in place and that we will work together as a community to put the ALT assembly into place over the next 12 months so that our governance as Sheila said will hopefully be more stable in terms of accountability and management day to day but will also I think importantly give a greater voice to our membership all across the country and also internationally. So I hope Sheila that's covered some of the technical parts that you want to add to the thing. Not really, I think you've covered it very well and just I suppose just to say that this is not a power grab by Martin and I we are going to retire, this is just a temporary. President for life. Yeah, I'm not so sure about him. Yeah, but yeah, again just to reiterate that this is really, we see this as almost the final part of a jigsaw that's been coming together over the last couple of years around the future of the organization. So, yeah, that's all I would really add to that. Yeah, has anyone got any questions though because I know there's quite a lot of information to take in but obviously Marin has explained it beautifully and succinctly for everyone. Yeah. We have a proposer, thank you Sarah, the seconder and then we need to vote. So have we got our tellers? So vote for, I can't read it from here. The constitution is attached and this resolution be adopted as the constitution and CEO in substitution for the exclusion of the existing constitution as of 4th September, 2019. So four, 43 and we had the six proxy votes in against, zero and abstentions, thank you. So that's passed. So just to explain to you the legal advice was very clear that we had to have a secondary motion in order to make this possible for us to have the constitution adopted which you've just passed, which is that the following trustees retain their roles with Susheela, Nicola and Daniel. We're going to act as chair, vice chair and treasurer respectively and that will then be in accordance with the new institution for the next 12 months. So we're going to need to do the same and vote on that as well. A proposer, Gordon James, seconder, Stephen and tell us again, we'll vote on these. You don't get to sit down much, do you? So voting for these trustees keep their roles against, zero, abstentions, Daniel was there. Thank you, so that's recorded. Thank you, that's quite a big moment. Thank you everyone. We'll move on to chairs of all, which is number of the chair, our first chairs award over to you. So it's another first for the conference. So I know we're having another first tonight in terms of awards with the research awards as part of our learning technologies award. But this is an award that we have talked about for a while about maybe having another award for someone who doesn't maybe fit into the learning technologists award or maybe hasn't quite got the, had long enough to get a lifetime and honorary membership award, but someone who's making a significant contribution to our community nonetheless. And actually, we were kind of spurred into action by this, by yourselves, by our community. And I think the application that we received actually made my decision very, very easy about this. And I think the person who's getting this is normally behind the scenes of many things particularly at the conference. And he makes sure that everything goes smoothly and that he meets our strategic objectives particularly around openness. And not only does he provide almost single-handedly the live streaming for conferences, he's also developed a new platform for an open source submission platform for the conference. And he shares that with the community as well. It's probably giving this away if you haven't guessed who it is already. But I think the work that this person does in terms of openness and particularly things like the Tags Explorer, it's not just the work he does for Alt. It's not just his job, which he does like all our Alt staff members incredibly well and goes above and beyond what anyone would expect of him all the time. But he shares back wider to the community. And I think in particular, the work that he did in Tags Explorer allowed so many communities a view on their interactions that there was never possible before. And that continues to be used and he continues to develop that. And I think he's just such a great model, a role model for our community about being, you know, that person. Donna was talking about opening a window into your practice. I think this person has opened all the doors and all the windows and he's let so many people in and let people then open their own doors into their practice as well. So I'm again, really, really delighted to award Martin Hoxie with the inaugural chairs award. It's a long walk from back there. Thank you very much. Now I have a job I can't explain to my parents and now an award I can't explain to my parents. This is going well. It would have been easier if you just gave me a chair. Anyway, I've been very fortunate to work with a number of old members in my career, including Linda Craner, who was one of the first people I worked with a higher education institution. So it's, I think, very fitting that Linda's been awarded today as well. My first old conference was actually 2009 at this very venue. And it was a great opportunity to see so many people I'd heard about and read about face-to-face and the passion, the care and thought that I saw from a wide range of presentations has really informed my practice to this day. So it's really old members that have created me so it's your fault. Thanks, Martin. So it's now my role to say thank you to members and trustees who are coming today to the service and may have some presents. Good, I'll be able to give presents out. So first of all, thanks to members. German editor Amanda Jeffries is Amanda here. Hey, come down, Amanda. Three percent have been at nearly 20-olds over the last several years. And yes, can I just reiterate what Martin said? It's always been a very friendly, caring and compassionate place to meet and share practice. And it's been a privilege to make it part of my professional life. So thank you very much. And I'm sure there are lots of other people who will be able to carry on the good work that we're doing. So thank you. Also, so thank you to the blog editor, Santanu Versant. Hello. Oh, good, hi. Thank you for your work. Trustees who are coming into the term, Neil Morris, trustee and chair of the editorial board. I think Neil's not here, is he? Neil did some sterling work, particularly stirring the journalism of tricky period. Our very own James Clay, trustee and former chair of the F.E. Committee. And my favorite proposer, so we'll have a gift for you. My first alt was 2003 in Sheffield, and I hated it. I'm glad things have changed. But what I would say is when I joined the trustees, as I was elected, but I was also chair of the F.E. Committee, I think over the last six years, we have seen F.E. become much more engaged and interacting with alt, and I'm really pleased to see that change. So I feel like I've had a bit of an impact. But here's on to good and better things. And finally, Shirley Evans, trustee and honours secretary, but I think Shirley's not here, so she might be watching. Thank you, Shirley. Which brings us on to the last thing, which is also another first, is that right? It's just so many firsts. So this year, we're having a Seamalt Ceremony. So the closing highlight of the year is ADM. All members who have achieved or renewed the Seamalt Accreditation in the past or once are going to be invited on to stage the first annual Seamalt Ceremony. So if you're one of those people, please come up. Do you want me to read anything? Okay, so I'm going to... Okay, so we have Lorna Campbell, Richard Beggs, Vicki Dale, Richard Clarkson, Adam Elce, Sarah Knight, Karl Luke, Chrissie Naranzee, Ania Patel, Agatha Stadza, Amy Sampson, Chris Sheridan, Lynn Taylorson, Jilly Vox, Richard Walker, Gemma Whitten. Oh no, and it goes over the page. Wow, no, it's the same page as so. Well, and if I've missed anybody out, please come down. Congratulations to you all. Well, I'm just thrilled to have been part of the process and supported my reflective practice, and it's a great honour to be the first senior certified member. Thank you. Okay, and with that, we officially close the ADM. Thank you, everyone, and see you next year.