 All right, well it is nearly 5pm and so whether you're joining us online or you're joining us here in this very warm room and you're very welcome. I must say that I'm especially excited to have this introduction, because this has been, I think, a moment that I've been looking forward to for the last few months and weeks. And I have spent a little bit of time scanning in all archive materials that I requested from a sort of not quite Indiana Jones like but still very mysterious storage place where all keeps all of its historical archives. And thanks to a bit of prompting more of it is now available online that ever before. But I wanted to give a big thank you to David because I think particularly Helen and I have worked with them over the years to bring all its voice to more people in the sector and to infuse it with the criticality and the perspective that is so important to our community. So I know David's here wearing a different hat and I know there are many followers of the apocalypse in the room. So I want to please ask you to put your hands together for a very special session here to celebrate all 30th anniversary. Welcome. Thank you very much Marin for that introduction, I can only say in my defense that if Marin asked you to do something. The only question is, when would you like it by So, I'm exquisitely conscious it's scorching hot day out there I understand there might be a bar on campus somewhere. I'm the only person the only thing standing between you and a cool glass of the beverage of your choice. I am conscious of that and I will try not to overrun or test your patience. I'm not going to be doing workshop stuff. I'm not going to make you do any stuff because it's been a long day and I'm just going to invite you to sit back and let me tell you a story. So, why do I say that it's because I mean, it's because we're humans it's what we do we tell stories we make sense of the world by imposing a narrative on things that happen to us. We make stories of all sorts we make stories of our lives we make stories of the lives of others we make stories of the wider events that we watch in policy, or politics, or even education technology. We like to think that there is a pattern we as humans we are exquisitely well developed to spot patterns including and especially when there are no patterns whatsoever. A prediction is a form of a story a prediction is a story that we don't know the end of yet but we can expect the end based on what's happened so far. It's like watching three acts of an action film you watch the first two acts, and you know in this third act there's going to be loads of explosions, and the heroes going to save the day. And everything is going to go back to normal and everything's going to be lovely that's what tends to happen in these things, so we can predict what's to come based on what's happened already. I came up with a typology of predictions which I'll refer to occasionally during this presentation. So at the top you can either have an expert prediction or a lay prediction, an expert prediction, if it was about education technology would be the kind of things I think the people in this room would make. You live and breathe education technology, you work with students you work with staff, you do that hard work you do the amazing work that you did during the pandemic to keep the whole show on the road where everything else felt like it was collapsing. You are the experts. If you make a prediction it is based on your understanding of the subject matter. It's also possible to make a lay prediction you know you can not be an expert you can look at some numbers some stats, and you can think, oh well I think probably this is going to happen based on these numbers you don't need to be an expert for that kind of thing you can just do it. The three types I've slightly mischievously characterised the first being the flying car prediction. We all know people like this and everything they stay starts with, wouldn't it be cool if. And that kind of prediction is just imagining a world that they'd like to live in and then thinking yeah let's do that then. It is nice to be with these people it's refreshing sometimes it's invigorating. It's sometimes intensely annoying because sometimes the thing they think is cool is not actually going to be cool at all it's not going to work and it's quite difficult to deal with them when that doesn't happen. The second kind of prediction is an extrapolation prediction you take something that's happening already. You expect that it's going to get better or faster or cheaper or some combination of the three. We've been quite good at this kind of prediction and technology in the past. We predicted that computers would get smaller and faster to the point that they would fit in your pocket, they would have more sensors, we predicted that people would get more and more used to network technology they did. We predicted that people would get much better at entering metadata when describing learning resources. These is the apocalyptic brand of prediction now this isn't. This isn't kind of back to the action movie thing. This is, I guess I'm cleaving closer to the apocalypse of St. John of Patmos, if anybody knows it, it's the, the weird end of the Bible. And the way it works he claims to have seen all of these things while sitting on a hill in the Middle East. And what message basically is is you were right, everybody else was wrong. There are some people that make predictions like this. There are some people possibly even in this room that think, you know what this worldwide web has just been a bit of a fad really eventually we'll get beyond it we'll get back to mainframes, we'll get back to real computers. And there are some people who think, you know, MOOCs are a bit silly they're probably not going to be a thing I know I was one of them and we'll get back to taking online learning seriously as a subject to pedagogy inquiry rather than mass broadcasting. There's lots of stuff like that. So this is my typology, I think of prediction this is the kind of things we can do. So we've got the expert delay and we've got the flying car, the extrapolation and the apocalyptic. So this now has stopped working of course that we get back on there. My slides are broken. I feel like Andrew Ning. And if anybody gets that reference thank you. Does that say slide show. Yes that's what I want slideshow resume slideshow one day we'll learn how to use PowerPoint. Maybe right okay that's a story. It's quite nice in it starts at a place it goes up goes right down that's a sad bit. It goes back up again ends up largely where it starts. This is a wave it's actually a sine wave but that's not really though like important. We can string them together. And then think, okay these sine waves keep happening there is a series there is a pattern this is an extension of the extrapolation idea of prediction that stuff happens it keeps happening it continues to happen. There's lots of examples of this. So we have at the top there the contractive waves from economics this is the idea that there are these epochs. And incidentally the last epoch is generally reckoned to have ended in the early 90s and much the same way time as Eric Hobswam's 20th century if people are familiar with that. It was just before the time alt started. So I was a star of a new thing, and it was a start of an, a new age and a new idea. I'm not sure if anybody recognizes the bottom wave. Can people shout out if they do. Yeah. Yeah. You meant to tell me what it is not just say yeah. It's a partner hype cycle, which is not a cycle, but they say it's a cycle I've not seen anybody use that. I mean I've been out of ed tech a bit in the last like 10 to 15 years I think it's people seem to stop referring to it. You don't see presentation. Based on anymore has anybody seen one of these in the wild recently. And what have you been doing with them. All right. Okay. So, okay so for people listening at home there is a group of people called something geeks with it. So you can see it and they play with these things. I think they've kind of died out. I mean, mainly because they're really really stupid assumes every single innovation, every single technology stimulus goes through the same phases, and then eventually dies out they don't think about the swamp of the diminishing the turns, or the cliffs of obsolescence in their material, everything's going to work. That's the dream they sell. I mean, another word for this kind of thing is fashion, you know, things get cool and then they stop being cool and they start being ironically cool, and then they kind of go away a bit and come back we're apparently in the 70s revival, which I think will be demonstrated by the music choices later this evening. So, I mean, there are fashions in education technology there are cool things everybody talks about, and then suddenly couple years later, everyone's pretending it never happened we will get to a few of these later. So, I asked what we laughably call an AI at the moment to let me know about the last 30 years of ed tech and the next 30. This is the area. I like it because it's named after a funding council it's built into the opera browser, and it was just literally the one I had lying about. So, this is looking specifically as the United at the United Kingdom over the past 30 years and the next 30 years. The immediate thing we can see is four of them are the same. And also, one of them is blockchain. Ignoring that latter the fact we have for the same and all of the rest of them are quite kind of recognizable. There is a class of things that we expect to see in predictions of the future of education technology there is stuff that always turns up Internet of Things virtual reality and augmented reality it will have its day one day soon if there are any true believers in the house. So, there is a kind of thing that we see it all seems hauntingly familiar, and the idea of AI is, or the kind of LLMs that we like to call AI at the moment, because they're not intelligent, and anybody who is trying to tell you otherwise is lying and if you believe it is true, I have got a bridge that I'd like to sell you. If you want to talk to me later on the bridge. I mean, beat me in the bar. An AI type tool like this should be good at this kind of thing but it just seems to realize the kinds of things that we say anyway it looks right because it's the kind of predictions we make. A confirmation bias is what I see here and it is haunting because AI is a haunting is the ghost in the machine it's a repetition of everything that's ever been said on the Internet, and it all comes back in a slightly different order. So, if extrapolation and big data tools are not really cutting it for our predictions. The alternative is you guys, we talk to experts, and in looking for an alternative to a large language model I stumbled across the blog of Martin Weller. So back in 2025, 2025, that's not even happened yet, back in 20, back at the 25th anniversary of old, whenever that was. You were there already. You literally lives in the future. He is a human keynote. All of the stories are true. He assigned an educational trend to every year from 1994 to initially 2017. He then published a book based on his blog post which is a really good idea people should do that in 2018 but he he kept writing more chapters. So these were here. His perceptions. A couple of things that stood out to me. E learning standards in 2001 that's something we used to talk a lot about at all is standards and interoperability. I struggle to find any sessions this year on standards and interoperability is still a huge problem. It's still something that we need to deal with it still constrains the kind of massive purchases it manages make that you can't buy this thing because it doesn't talk to that thing and if you're going to make it talk to that thing you need to buy this thing to make it do it. We did have this idea once of open standards it seems to have not be something we talk about currently web 2.0 huge peak you will see this again and again and all the data that I show you, we will see 2.0 social media blogs. That was a huge thing we round about the middle of the noughties of the late noughties we had this idea that social media is going to be an educational revolution that it is a nice place for students to be they can learn they can make connections all over the world. I think history relates it did not turn out quite like that there was a lot of optimism a lot of hope in that part of the movement which was something I really enjoyed and it got us into interesting places like the world of connectivism like the world of books, stuff like DS 106 all stuff like that it really got us into some interesting places but those kind of approaches were of the time they're not possible now I wouldn't stand here and recommend that a student needs to be on Twitter, but people do this people did actually do that at the time they said we should get our students on Twitter. I mean there's not even a Twitter anymore it's named after a letter of some sort. The coolest letter in fact, just let that one stand where it is really. We talked about the MOOCs already the personal learning environment is all is a really useful concept it's not something we've heard a lot about recently, but it was a huge deal at all at the time. So, I think Martin would say that he was only looking backwards he's not making predictions. He wasn't actually basing it on data, he was basing it on gut feelings it was not really a methodology behind it apart from this is what I reckon, which is fair enough Martin's been around EdTech for a long while, what he reckons I suspect is what an expert can do for a couple of seconds. So for that reason, this kind of stuff is worthwhile. Looking at trends in the past. There's still a reproach that looks at trends for the near future and relies on expert was what was called the NMC horizon project now taken over by edgy cause this is the slide I originally showed in 2015 when I first did a version of this presentation I've updated it. But after that day you'll spot they change their methodology they no longer make these explicitly predictions as of 2020 and they seem to have moved more into ideas of course design of types of courses of the way courses fit together. This is something that's always been a huge scene adult. It's never really made it into the NMC predictions. Either way, and I know because I used to be involved with a closed off wiki environment where people talk about stuff that they're predicting. I think I was on the 2018 one and I tried to persuade them not to include blockchain. They didn't, but they included it next year, which you can take or leave really. The kind of patterns we see here again all of this kind of blue stuff. Around 2006 2008 the web 2.0. The idea of the read write web which is another term we've not heard for a while. Lots of stuff on mobiles and tablets, following straight enough after that. They were really into the idea of gesture based computing in 2010. I've no idea what happened to that. And then round about 2012 we start seeing the idea of learner analytics kind of creep into this stuff. It's a fascinating days that I will publish a version of this at some point. But what you're really here for I think is to know what people were talking about alt during all these years. I've used the same categories and I have made a chart. Thank you. A podcast listener in the house lovely. There used to be a thing on the wonky podcast I work for wonky if that actually wasn't made clear at start. And that was a whole thing basically so. This is not just any old chart. No, it's an interactive chart as I hope to show you. Let's sweep this through. So this is based on every single title of every single session I could find. I could only get back as far as 2003. I have one day of 2002, and I'm also missing 1998 and 1996. If anyone has any information on what was presented at those conferences. I would be really glad to include them in here. Out. We still have them in the archive. Yeah, as soon as we get there. I'll add them to this. We can go right the way back. So this isn't actually 30 years. It is 20 years. If you'd like a conference ticket refund. That's Marin. And she'll say no. But the reason I show you this. Yeah, yeah, she no longer has the authority. So what I'm going to look at social social there. We can see again that same pattern. There was a big peak. 2006, 2008. And we've always. Talked the idea about the idea of social about the idea of. Social learning about the idea of social interactions among students between students and staff, all the rest of it. But that was the big peak. There were 150 papers in 2008 that actually had something to do with Web 2 or social media or something like that. It's. Tailed down since the other big peak I spotted was in 2021. I think social media became in 2021. Suddenly a lot more important. Again, I think the time that we couldn't communicate. We fell back on that tool. And I think a lot of this. Stuff that happened over the pandemic was people falling back on. Tools. I mean, my. First response being an old disk. Project manager. Was. Okay, I'll have to Skype anyone. And then I mean what happened to Skype. That was no longer a thing. I've not. Kept up with that area of tools whatsoever. Let's look at another one briefly. I can't see what I've got here. So. On there. Analytics. There was a big peak. Again, starting round about 2012. Going up to 2016. 2018. And then. Tailing down slightly. Analytics are here now. That's a. Thing. And the kind of presentations I've seen this year. The folks on analytics have been. Very much focused on this is what we do. Rather than this is what we could do. Or there was one more. I wanted to show. Let me see if I can find it. Which one was it now. Content. There we are. So. Always been a theme at all. There was a big peak between 2008 and 2012. And then a big kind of drop off. After 2012. That was because an organization. Named. Jisk decided to fund a load of. Projects based around content. During that. Period. A big part of the. History of all. Presentations is. The history of Jisk. Projects. Every project needed to have a dissemination plan. Every project needed to have a dissemination plan. Every project needed to have a dissemination plan. Every project says we'll present a paper at all. So the big peaks during that year. Those years, the big peak in the, the number of presentations. Is linked directly to the funding. That. Was available in some ways. These are not real trends. These are trends that were caused by. Program managers like myself. Like. Many map. Former colleagues. So that I think is interesting to note. Let's get rid of this. I have some more charts to show you later if you like charts. So don't worry about that. I need to mention the data quality. It is incredibly variable. A lot of this is literally. Hand. Typed off. PDFs. The data quality is incredibly variable. A lot of this is literally. Hand. Typed off. PDFs. A lot of it is screen scraped. The quality of the data is appalling. Frankly. I have done my best. I will continue to do my best. But it's not great. I want to thank. A former association for learning technology. Learning technologies of the year. From 2008. Whom I had. I had the incredible foresight to get married to. Who. Help me to do this coding. Some sessions are impossible. Meaningfully tag. Lots of people like to do alt sessions that are a pun. Based on the acronym of a project. That is just no longer a thing anymore. And the pun and the project are lost to the mist of time. And. There is some earlier data that we can get to. So this is 3,313 conference sessions. This is a lot of conversations. I will go quickly. These are all the conference themes. The conference themes themselves are interesting. I could spend a lot more time on them. But these also have an impact on what was discussion. Discussed. People like to write about the themes. So. To shift forward. To shift right back was right to the start. 1994. The first old sea conference. Now to what to understand this, you need to understand where alt came from. It was an outgrowth of the computers in teaching initiative, which was funded by Hefke. The computers in teaching initiative became the. LTSN subject centers, which became the LTSN. Network more generally, which became the higher education academy, which became advanced H.E. So these were. All at various times. Funded by Hefke, the higher education funding council for England. The aim of the first all was to bring together all of the people in these in this computers and teaching initiative and together chatting about stuff. It was not really meant to be a research conference. It was bringing people together a talk about. And they even put this in capitals. Winning solutions from corporate strategies. A courseware design. It was a what's worked thing. It's like, okay, we're all struggling with this stuff. It's what we do. I think all is still a lot like that. A lot of people come to alt. Not because they want to find out what is the next best. Big thing in. Learning technology. But because they're struggling with stuff. Everybody else is struggling with stuff. And they all want to get together. And I think that's what we do. They're struggling with stuff. Everybody else is struggling with stuff. And they all want to get together. And they want to sell it all out. Then the nature of presentations has changed numerous times over the years. This is a graph I made ages ago. You can. This is a graph of all of the funding for teaching quality enhancement that has been spent by the government over the years. The year has passed since that. This is a graph of what's in 2018. I would have updated it. But I mean, what's the point? It's not really worth it. This is it. So all the way through that. Period. A large part of the vaults life, the kind of things we talked about it here. Dictated by what was being funded. makers thought were interesting. I think those days have gone. I think the kind of things that are presented at all now are quite different in nature. A lot of those projects were useful. They were kind of theoretical. They might not have actually really gone anywhere in many cases, but what they did do is they brought together a community. And the alt community, I think, is the last expression of that community when it comes to learning technology. People think about and talk about this stuff, sharing ideas that has cemented the community. And whereas it's difficult to argue that that was the best outcomes for all of that funding, it adds up to a lot of funding. If you add everything together, incidentally, we're talking close to a billion pounds, I believe, into this stuff. So it sounds to reason that we would be quite good at it at this point. It's interesting that we're not better, but it sounds to reason that we're pretty good. So how does this end? This is the picture of a flying car. You could buy it in 1949. Nobody wanted it. People don't want flying cars. People don't want this revolution in higher education that everybody is talking about. People have problems. People want to find solutions. The solutions might not be big or flashy. In fact, a lot of the time they are a Google Sheet, I understand. But these little scrappy tools, this quasi-commercial, not really a part of the IT system, when it really hit, when the pandemic was in full flight, those were the things that we reached for. We reached for Zoom. We reached for Google Docs. We reached for stuff that we knew just worked. So who designs our future? There has been a tendency in this community more widely to have a lot of sessions, a lot of conversations about this is things that we can now do with technology. It's interesting. It's nice to play with new forms of technology. It's quite nice to ask chat, GPT, stupid questions, and to get stupid answers from it. It's quite nice to look at the latest, greatest expensive content and think, wouldn't it be lovely to do that? That's not the stuff that has historically come out of ALT. We don't invent the big stuff. We invent stuff that works. There's a case to be made that ALT is responsible for the way learning technology is used in universities and colleges. At the moment, there is a case to be made that the UK has had an impact globally a lot wider than it would suggest. There is a case to be made that JISC, which has a similar lifetime, a similar lifespan to ALT, was really our equivalent of ARPA. It invented a lot of stuff. A lot of it didn't work. Some of it got taken on and become part of something massive. All I wanted to close with in terms of who designs our future, the answer is you guys. It's not the vendors. It's not the policymakers. It's not the hype that we see online. It's you guys solving the problems that you have in front of you with the people that you work with. If you're in a series of innovation, this is lead user theory writ large. It's Von Herpel. That's who needs to design the future. The question I would like to leave you with is, is that something you'd like to do? Thank you. Thank you so much. I know we are slightly over time, but I just want to give a moment for any points of clarification before we do, and to give you a piece of moment to catch your breath, I have two excellent pieces of news for all of you with us in this room. The Gardiner venue is fully air conditioned. The bar opens in 57 minutes. There is nothing standing between you and a cool a bit of entertainment at the end of this evening, but if you're up for two or three questions, if you give it a go, I'll answer questions as long as people have them. We'll try and repeat them for the online audience, so if you start with, this is more of a statement than a question and go on for five minutes, please keep in mind there are people listening. If you're going to do that, if you could leave the room, that'd be great. So do we have any particular questions or comments? I can see a troublemaker over there. Should we start with Martin and then go over to Fanny? Yeah. Okay, at the conference theme, a conference furniture is stuff like he has had to do Seamult. He has a meeting of a SIG. He has a meet and greet session, you know, it's just like stuff that happens. There's not been that many presentations about Sotha's at all that I know about. Really, the question is, what is the different, what do you see as a sort of observer of the sector as the difference between the levels of innovation and sort of student satisfaction then and now where we've got, so we've got no funding and we had shed loads of funding. What's the difference? In response to that, I want to speak very briefly on the idea of small projects. I did not like big projects. I don't think we got a lot of value out of big projects. Small projects that would sustain somebody's time long enough to kind of follow up the hunch and to see if something worked or not. I think we got a lot of value out of that. Problem the sector faces at the moment is that, I mean, nobody has any time to do anything. Everybody's at 125% of their contracted hours doing all the stuff they need to do and all the extra stuff that they have to do because if they don't do it, nobody else will do it and the whole thing will fall apart. That's not sustainable. I mean, the whole sector is massively underfunded. It needs an injection of recurrent funding. It also needs an injection of capital as well. A lot of the assets owned by the sector are aging. They will need replacing. This is stuff like campus here. This is something like stuff like, I mean, big technologies. If I was asked, I would say I would like the sector funding settlement before, a long way before any projects, but I think projects are valuable. Number of institutions will support people internally. I think that is fantastic, but I know the bulk of what has been presented at the conference so far and will be presented tomorrow has been written by enthusiasts sitting at their kitchen table at the weekend because that's what they want to do and in some ways that is humbling, that is touching. It is an incredible commitment this community makes, but in some ways it should not have to be like this. It should not be that we're doing this stuff in our own time. We had a question, I think, from Seb as well. Do you have a question? You had your hand up. Okay. So I should say that between 2002 and 2012 I was in Marin's role, and there were two observations I wanted to make. One was I've only been here today, but that feeling that the people presenting are kind of doing stuff that's really close to their heart rather than a kind of dissemination effort because they've had a funded project is very powerful. I really noticed that. I've not been at the art conference for 10 years. The other thing I wanted to say was that in the period I was working for out, we rather, in a very mannered way, messed about each year coming up with a jazzy conference title and deciding on themes. I do think that the working out what were the key things going on from paper titles is a bit confounded by the fact that the centre was giving shape to what was seen as an appropriate thing to put a proposal in about. I think that's a kind of a complicating factor that is worth bearing in mind. You're absolutely right on that latter one. I should explain briefly that I would like to have done an assessment of the kinds of people that present at Alt C, their job titles. I would love to have given a presentation on the split by gender. I think that would have been absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately, I would also have liked to have done some deep text analysis on conference abstracts, which I think is something that could get us closer to what people were actually talking about. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, the data doesn't exist. I couldn't plot it. I couldn't do anything with it because it's just not there. We have lost such a lot of the institutional memory of Alt and the idea of you shredding those conferences and proceedings. I am livid. Yes, but in terms of the conference scenes, you did see that every year people would do a little pun that was based on the theme. I actually did it for this session because that's what you do at Alt. It became an Alt thing. I coded it just by as a conference attendee was just reading the title and saying, well, what's that going to be about then? You spot the key words, the key phrases. If you spot learning design, you know exactly what that's going to be about. That's always been the case. I know it will be the case broadly what you're going to get. That's the level of coding that I've done. I would love to have done more. Any final questions before we wrap up? Okay. One more. Yes, absolutely. Thank you, David. My question is, does it matter? And I'll contextualize that. I'm a big fan of Alan Kaye who invented the laptop and various other things that we take for granted today. When he talked about innovating, he says that the present dominates and new isn't new. It's new. And to actually do meaningful things to innovate, you have to remove the present and the past and make your own future and then go. It's very valuable work, but should we be removing it from our minds and just thinking about the future? That's a really, really good question. I think the idea of us looking to the past of education technology is important because as I hinted at the start of the presentation, there are some cycles, there are some stuff that keeps coming back and back and back. Is there stuff we can learn currently from the last time people got really excited about artificial intelligence in the late 70s? Quite possibly. Is there stuff we could learn about teaching at school at scale with the early MOOCs experiments? I think there probably is. The problem is not that if we look at the past, we can't innovate. It's more along the lines if we can't look at the past, we are continually going to be coming up with the same stuff and solving the same problems. As you know, large amounts of education, technology and indeed large amounts of the internet are held together largely with the code equivalent of duct tape and string. People have made a fix that is good enough. People have come up with a schema or a standard that did the job at the time and then people have just built on that until we've reached the limitations of that early decision. We always need to be aware of what else is in the playground before we start to play, I think. Thank you. Very warm thanks from us, David. Thank you for the research. We hope this is a piece of work to be continued as we add to the data of our history, but please put your hands together one more time. Thank you. I should say I will be publishing all of the data. I will write up the presentation of the blog post somewhere probably in the next couple of days. If you're interested in this stuff, it'll be out there if you play with it.