 So, very, very welcome to everybody who is joining this pre-conference session for Alts Annual Conference, which is taking place in Manchester from the 68th of September. Before we jump into our discussion, I just wanted to give you all a quick briefing on the platform we're using for the session, so you should be able to find an access panel at the bottom right hand corner of your screen. This should give you the option to chat with other participants and we've enabled mics and cameras for everyone in the room, so please feel free to interact however you're most comfortable. I'd be really grateful if those in the room could maybe post an emoji or a message in the chat just so that we can check the sound is working. Also on your access panel, you should be able to, thank you very much everyone, great to see those coming in, you should be able to adjust the settings, so particularly if you're not using this a lot and you're getting a lot of pings or audio notifications, this is where you can switch them off. Okay, that is all the housekeeping and we are here for our FM EdTech Get Together and I'm not really convening this, I think we all are and everybody in the room is welcome to participate and I was going to share with you what I thought we had to kind of be able to kick us off is to just share a couple of the things that have been happening across our network for the past year and more and then open it up to everyone who wants to share anything on any of those points or share other information about how they've been getting on, anything they've been up to, work you'd like to share, it could also be more personal updates, so you're most welcome, please feel free to jump in at any point in time and we are recording this session at the moment, but we haven't quite decided yet whether we'll make the recording live, so feel free to express a preference around that in the chat as well. So I'm going to just start with just giving a big shout out to our open space and Lorna I'm not sure if you'd like to say a few words around that as well because you're doing a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes but do please visit our open space if you haven't yet done so. Yeah sure, no problem, let me just, oh my camera didn't seem to want to go on there, I'm sick. Hello. To the open space in there. Hi Lorna. Yeah so the FEM Edit Tech open space was a website that we set up for one of the OER conferences, OER 19 was it? I can't remember, last few years have been very strange, we did originally set it up to coincide with an OER conference, an open education resources conference and we invited people to submit, oh yes we are 19 in Galway, thank you Francis, to submit any kind of writing around the theme of openness but we'd always intended that the open space would continue to live on beyond the conference and be a space for all members of the FEM Edit Tech community to post thoughts, reflective writing, to host all the projects that the FEM Edit Tech network's been involved in such as links to the quilt, the journal special issue, so the website is still there, anyone is able to post writing to it, you can choose to post writing anonymously if you choose, we felt that was very important that we wanted to be able to empower members of the community to share their authentic voices anonymously if they felt more comfortable and safer doing that so you are more than welcome to post anonymously, the posts are moderated just to ensure that there's nothing offensive that gets posted, Francis and I and some other members of the network do very, very lightweight moderating, it's really just approving anonymous posts and I also just have to give a little shout out to Alan Levine, the FEM Edit Tech open space is based on one of his plot templates and that's what allows us to be able to host writing and particularly anonymous writing so he's done a huge amount to support FEM Edit Tech over the years so enormous thanks to Alan, so yeah please do check out the open space, it's great to see new writing is still being posted there, it's always really inspiring to see what comes in and I particularly enjoyed seeing Deb Arnold's recent little reflection on curating the FEM Edit Tech Twitter feed as well so please do go in there, have a look at the writing that's already there and you're very welcome to contribute. Thank you Lorna, before we move on I wanted to dive into the special issue very briefly, I just wanted to pause to give us, give anyone else the opportunity to jump in so please unmute or post in the chat if you would like to contribute. Lorna, you mentioned the feminist perspectives on learning, media and technology special issue, I know many of us really enjoyed reading that when that came out first, it's obviously still on the side as well, is there anything in particular you wanted to highlight in relation to that or I don't know if anyone else in the audience wants to add any information around that? Yeah I'm going to pass that one over to Francis as Catherine here but Francis certainly is, I wasn't hugely involved in that particular project but Francis absolutely was so maybe Francis can say a little bit about that. Okay fantastic thanks Lorna, hi Francis, I can't hear you yet sorry. Right you can hear me now can you? Yes yes you can, my microphone keeps turning itself off. Okay, no problem. It was I mean it was amazing during lockdown because it just coincided with a bit of a pause in curation for various reasons but actually I think the open space came into its own during lockdown. We, to do this special issue, I think I'm in the middle of February, I had the call for papers ready by the middle of March and then Catherine pointed out to us that what we were heading into with Covid and was this the right time for feminists to be piling work on other feminists and so we immediately asked the specialist and it was all ready to go and into that space with lots of other things and people shared their ideas and so on so it was fantastic but to get a special issue it did resume later that year. We got 60 abstracts but of course it was really difficult for people to do them because you know to complete the papers I think we accepted 24 of those and not all of the ones we accepted got into you know people weren't always able to do the work because of the situation that they were in but we did finally get a special issue which was out March, April, this year and it's amazing and if you follow that link that Marin has shared you'll see that we've got a special issue with a link to everything at Learning Media and Technology but also we've put one of the papers with an open access link so that's a page really worth bookmarking because you're obviously not going to read all those papers in one go but keep coming back to them. You don't just have to rely on having institutional access and read all but one of them in open access so it's an amazing achievement from the editors and particularly the authors in very difficult circumstances so that's all I've got to say. Thank you Frances and yeah if you haven't read it yet please do have a look and explore that special issue and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about what's happening with this research going forward. The next item I wanted to share was a little bit about a shout out to all the wonderful curators who've been working on the Twitter account curation and been getting involved in Femetech in other ways over the past few months. We have had a different volunteer curator every month since February and as I do a little bit of the admin behind the scenes I have the pleasure of meeting everyone and having some engagement with them as they go along their curation period so I know quite a few people in the room have been curators and we are so deeply grateful that so many people do express an interest in helping us curate our presence on Twitter. We've been also improving the way we provide information about getting involved so if you head to the link that I've posted in the chat you can certainly have a look and find out what's involved what the code of conduct is for curators and also how to sign up and it's really lovely I think to see different voices on the Twitter account and also different emphasis for each month. This month's September curator is Catherine Cronin and I could see Catherine just arriving in the room as well so welcome Catherine. We're just having a quick look at some of the highlights of what's been happening across the community over the past year so I'm really looking forward to having you join us on the FEMEc Tech Twitter decks for this month and really looking forward to everyone else. If you haven't already and you're keen to volunteer please do that. Okay so we've been going through some of the highlights, the open space, the journal and also how to get involved and the Twitter curation and the last item that I wanted to highlight is coming up rather than something we've done in the past and I know that Francis, Catherine and Lorna are all involved in making this particular project happen so if I can hand over the mic to all three of you and we will have a chat about what's happening next week. I think we should let Francis kick this one off I'm not actually sure how I can do this with my laptop perched on a pile of gardening books but I can assure you that next to me I have all four of the quilts on this on a footstool next to me and if it could think of a way to get you to see them might just post a picture to Twitter later on but the quilts are amazing I lived with them and so the sort of joy of them dulled to some extent in 2020 but I've come to love them again now that everything's finished and we've got so I'm just going to post you a link to a Flickr album which I hope works which has got pictures of the quilts and only recently I managed to create in 2020 I did a picture of the four quilts all clipped together so all clipped together in two by two format they can be in one by four format four by one format or two by two form and it was a very quality but after several hours this week Terry my husband and I managed to do the thing spending them from our Juliet balcony for our bedroom and clipping them together again and taking a better quality picture so that is within that album that I linked you to so hopefully if you had a square in that quilt or you're just interested you can go and zoom in on that picture or you can go to the quilts website and I'll just put that in now there with me probably type it wrong now and look at the digital quilt and in that digital quilt you'll see images of the whole of each of the quilts the backs of the quilts but also also this is the from the genius that is Anne-Marie Scott I hasten to add a little eye for all the quilt squares that have got a story attached with them so you could kill a good half an hour or 40 minutes reading the stories and you know it's just the most amazing thing the digital quilt is fantastic but I believe you me that actually seeing the quilts in person is a different experience and at that point I'll go over to Catherine to see what she says because she has seen the quilts. Frances my heart leapt when you just said that because that's exactly the experience I have been close to you and everyone through the process I really related to a lot of the tweets this week about people who had never sewn before because that was me you know the recovering engineer who hardly ever held needle except to fix a hem or something but you encouraged me and the network encouraged me and I did my little square but actually to visit you earlier this summer and to touch and hold the quilts is just was just so moving so it's just it's enormously gratifying to think that you'll do the labor of bringing the quilts from Macklesfield to Manchester and then Lauren and I will help and anyone else who's at Altsie next week can help as well and we'll make sure that as many people as possible can see them and be close to them and contribute possibly. There'll be a little opportunity for people to contribute to the quilt in Manchester as well. Yeah we've got secret plans and clever tricks haven't we to contribute in a very small way and you don't even I mean if you can sew a bussen on you could contribute if you could do a couple of stitches you could contribute and I even had an idea Marin and this is putting you on the spot I don't know if you're having those lanyards this week or anything woven that's got Altsie 22 on it do you is there anything like that or are we all digital now? No there'll definitely be lanyards there will be material and I believe that they are white this year with green on so it does I think it has out on it rather than Altsie 22 well I've dug out one of those from some other conference probably oh probably OER 19 and I don't know if you can see this I've got a Femme EdTech badge on it and some little badges that says EdTech will not save you but it's this one says association for learning technology but I could cut out that little bit that says Alts and stitch that on to the squares that we're going to put in so yeah I might be raiding some lanyards. Catherine did you want to say anything else about what we might do? No Frances I think you've done a beautiful job there I mean I you know what's known is that the quilts will be there what's unknown is that Frances has a few ideas up her sleeve and keeps floating them to Lorna and myself this week and we keep saying whatever you want Frances will be your acolytes will help. There's a quilt bolted up. Oh look at that it's amazing just to see that that's stunning I think it's going to be quite an emotional experience seeing them for those of us who haven't seen them yet because oh and Mags is here and she won't be at them alts so look what we've got there Mags and if you look very carefully. Yeah she's that's my mom there isn't it yeah yeah yeah I told Frances that I had used a swatch from my my late mother's stash so that was a very emotional thing for me to see that Frances with her genius for free quilting which I can't do had stitched mom's name into it so my sisters were very moved as well it's wonderful thank you. Well it was very enjoyable Mags I was so touched by the story about the fabric the red fabric lying on the sewing machine when you got the inherited the sewing machine. Oh so many things in that swatch because my that swatch was in honor of Cynthia Solomon and girls Cynthia Solomon is still teaching computer science to teenagers just let me let me put that out there in her in her mid 80s same age as my mother was so it the whole cycle of this and also I just say one more thing before I mute or cry whichever comes first I'm in the process I'm in the last three weeks of preparing my dissertation for submission so I just can't get on it you know I just can't you know get on a horse and ride over next week which is what I'd really love to do to touch the quilt but I'll see it some way I have a plan. Yeah yeah yeah we can plan something I'm sure Mags. Yeah I'm a tech quilt on tour. Yeah definitely and what was so lovely was that Mags and I had this conversation about her square at the time I was sitting there quilting all the quilts because it's not obvious to you if you're not a quilter but what makes a lot of quilts is the quilting you put on after they've been sandwiched together and more or less completed. Now some of the squares didn't need any embellishment at all I wouldn't have dared to touch Anne-Marie's silk square that was also beautifully intricate but some of them were really were really enhanced by having parts of them quilted and you know I that was the most scary thing for me because I was terrified of I'd never quilted anybody else's work and so in the end I thought you know there's four quilts to do there's no point in messing about I've just got to get on with it and so I just hope that nobody is disappointed in what they see but I think a lot of you will be amazed at how it enhanced some of the squares just having a little bit of quilting there and I've got one more thing to tell you I've been in touch with the People's History Museum in Manchester because I thought I don't know what's going to happen to the quilts and that's something we can talk about next week or today but it would be lovely to have them displayed in a public setting by professionals that where they were all fastened together so I contact to the People's History Museum and they do have opportunities to do this but if they decided they wanted to do it for our quilt then it would probably be three or four years down the line but it would be nice at some stage for that to happen but they gave me advice and they were happy they liked the idea oh I should show you that actually that the the way that the quilts fastened together is with backpack clips so the edge on the edges we've got the male and the female in the appropriate places and any of the two quilts can fasten together and the reason that also matters is it is absolutely certain that I will never be at the centre of a project like this again but I'm very happy to help anybody else who wanted to do one and I would be happy to create the sort of standards and specification for that to happen but if another group wanted to make their own quilt it comes to about 116 centimetres square and has the equivalent of well I have to tell you that later but the I would be happy to support you with that which would mean that you know say there was a four Femme Ed Tech quilts and group X quilt that they did together as a group any two of those could clip together at any future occasion and I would be happy to support any group that wanted to do it as long as I don't have to be the person doing it all so so there are opportunities for the future I think that's all I need to say oh somebody yeah somebody else asked if you could add more squares to the quilt well we will be adding one two or three squares to the quilt next week with stuff that people at the conference do but there are other blank squares available for that to happen in the future and I'm completely open about how that might happen okay that's enough for me thank you Francis and thank you for sharing that I'm so looking forward to seeing it in person just like everybody else who's able to come and join and see it in person and we'd like to just open up the discussion for anybody else who wants to share something and see if there's any other updates you'd like to share before we press stop on the recording and then maybe we can have a informal conversation as well but is there anybody else who wants to share how things have been going or wants to highlight a project or something that's been happening across the community so for those of you who've just joined us we did have a look earlier at our open space which is open to all the Lorna was mentioning how new writings are still being added and we also celebrated the amazing launch of the feminist perspectives on learning media and technology and that launched earlier this year and I'll see if you shared a update on people getting involved particularly in the Twitter curation okay so I think I'm going to press stop on the recording and then hopefully those of you who'd like to stay to have a bit more of an informal conversation can do so but for everyone who needs to head off and thank you so much for joining us and if you can join us next week in Manchester then we very much look forward to seeing you again