 Now, as you all know, it is ALT's 30th anniversary this year. We're celebrating our 30 year anniversary. And this is a very special session in honor of this anniversary called Making Friends and Influencing People, Research and Learning Technology, 1993 to 2023. And our speaker today, Michael Flavin, is our editor-in-chief of our Journal of Research and Learning Technology, and heads up a group of volunteers who tirelessly work to edit our journal and make sure that open access research, which we've been building up now for three decades, gets to you in the quickest and best possible format. I'm really delighted that Michael is joining us today, making such an effort to be here and share this wonderful piece of anniversary research with you. So please put your hand together for a very warm welcome for Michael Flavin. Thanks very much. I teach at King's College London. You've got my contact details there. I'll be delighted to hear from you. I'm also not going to subject you to death by PowerPoint over the next few minutes, which is a cruel and abysmal fate to inflict on any fellow human being. But I just want to give a narrative context to start with at the beginning. My first ALT conference was 2012 in Manchester. And I came to it as a newbie in the field, like a lot of people who end up practicing and writing and learning technology. I didn't start out in that field. So in 2012, I was early in a PhD and came along. And what impressed me then and still does was that combination of yes, academic perspective, but also practitioner expertise. Right from the first time I attended an ALT conference, I was talking to people who were on the cold face. So technologies that were on the horizon in academic discourse, there were people there who told me, well, it does this, but it's not so good at that. And I think it gives both the association and its journal quite a unique perspective that brings academic credibility, but also the credibility that comes from being hands-on in the job. So I think 2012, I had my first Technology Enhanced Learning paper published that year in the conference proceedings. And just to give a sense of my journey after that, I wrote more and more for academic journals on TEL, had my first book published in the field by Paul Grave Macmillan in 2017 and then joined the editorial team of research and learning technology. And a couple of years after that, then was invited to step up to the role of editor in chief. The reason I draw attention to that is a decade ago I was in the position of everyone in this room, you know, an interested practitioner, an interested researcher. And again, I think it's what organizationally we enable is movement and mobility, an expansion of your interest in your role. So regardless of where you kind of self-position as somebody who's interested in technology-enhanced learning, I think it's a great organization for enabling you to immerse yourself further and to achieve a great deal more in the field. A quick picture. That's from the very first edition of the journal 30 years ago this year. So I hate to shatter everyone's illusions but you'll notice we'd sold out to the corporate man right from the very first edition with a British telecom advert. I think what's quite interesting there in the hard copy is that even back 30 years ago some big infrastructural stakeholders in technology were beginning to think, you know, there might be something in this online learning. And I think if, I mean, we all know the field has grown exponentially. We all know how the pandemic was an accelerant for learning by this modality. But I think we can look at things, we can gain things from looking at our history. So a short-term project was undertaken this year. Excuse me, I'm just trying to move on to the next one of these with no effect whatsoever. Here we go. A small project that myself and the other members of the editorial team have undertaken and hopefully will be published by the end of this year was started to think about, well, people who write for research in learning technology, what do they write about? And the people who read research in learning technology, well, what are they reading? What are the articles they're looking at? And then we're looking at impact. One of the things I'm proudest of of the current editorial team is that we've overseen a rise in the citation rate for the journal. So we can see that what we produce gets used by other members of both the academic and practitioner community in subsequent publications. I think the more we can build on that and increase it still further, the greater and more enhanced our status is the field is. But this was a small research project, specifically just to sample really and answer some of these questions. So we looked at the three articles in the journal that have been most downloaded over a approximately two year period but published at any time. And then the three most downloaded that were also recent published themselves within the last two years. And then the most cited. So it's very much just taking a stratum of what the journal produces and saying, well, okay, what can we learn from this information that we have? We learned a great deal. Couple of key points is this. Relations of power and what technology enhanced learning does to those. If I think back to when I was an undergraduate student which admittedly was the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. One of the things I remember from that was if the library was closed, you couldn't have it. You know, if I was looking for a particular book or paper and I was a depressingly nerdy student who didn't go out and have it large. But if the library was closed, there was nothing I could do. That's a completely irrelevant criterion now. You know, at some stage later today or this evening or tomorrow morning, I'll be accessing materials from my institutional library. I'll be accessing journal articles. The idea of somehow the library, the librarian as gatekeeper, has completely gone. Even if I physically visit my university library and chance relay in a very lovely building, I won't actually interact with anyone's member of staff. I mean, I'll self-check out any titles I take. And I think if we look at online learning, it certainly I think causes us to reflect on relations of power in learning and teaching and the curriculum. Because our access to learning does not get mediated necessarily through a teaching and support faculty now. It's certainly capable of people and the OER movement, Open Educational Resources movement, shows this as well. So certainly I think that's something that's changed. Also about learning design. And when I first experienced learning technology, it was teaching for the open university, for whom I started working in 2003. And just around that time, and at that time I remember still I was working, three Saturday morning, every other Saturday morning, through the academic year, still a lot of face-to-face tuition. But we were starting to introduce a thing called a VLE, a system called First Class, which may bring a nostalgic tear to the eye and some of the more established practitioners in the field. But I think we made so many mistakes individually, collectively as a community, in that we tended to copy and paste from material from face to face. An entire lecture, a set of PowerPoint slides, and just plonk them online. They're not necessarily useless, but I think we have to recognize the deterministic effect of the medium itself. And so another field, I think, that's been really interesting in the past generation is that of not how do we relocate the materials we already had to the online space, but how do we design for the online space? What skillset, what prior reading do we need? And I think in this community, we've certainly built up an impressive body of knowledge in that space. Couple of key words that have come out of looking at this sample of nine articles. There's an interest in efficacy. This works better than this, comparative studies. This, we tested this, and the group who use this technology performed slightly better than the group who didn't. These are very valid concerns for learning and teaching. Certainly skills, right from that first ever addition, there was an editorial at the beginning that was basically saying if people have to go away and learn a whole skillset before they can use the technology, chances are they won't. Now this has become a truism to us in the 21st century, but it wasn't that way in 2013. And I think a lot of early technologies, it was like the first desktop computer you bought, which came with an instruction manual that looked like it had been written by Tolstoy in one of his more verbose phases of his career. And like everybody else, I picked that up and threw it away and never saw it again. So I think we have to think in terms then of again, this interest in more, you know, we almost won't plug and play technologies. Our students certainly do. Definitely learning design and how we can not only design technologies per se, but the entire learning and teaching interface using technology enhanced learning and core usage. What do people do with technologies? What do people use? How much money do our institutions commit to costly academic databases when I know for a fact my students Google it? Now I personally am a great fan of web of science and related disciplines, but if just faculty are using that, we're missing out somewhere. And I think again, what our community produces in terms of scholarship is particularly interesting in that space. Now, I think this 30 year mark is generational and there's a movement. We lose an outstanding CEO. We look forward to working alongside another. But I think really not only the span of 30 years itself but changes at the top level of the organization. It is a real opportunity to reflect and then to think forward. So looking at the sample we looked at, where do we think we can go in the next iteration, the next phase of our community development? Now maybe this one comes to me because I come from a more conventional academic background, but I think the space for more theory driven work in technology enhanced learning. Now that might just seem like kind of academic flag waving, look, you know, right from theory. But theory is a lens. And when we apply a different lens to a phenomena and instance of practice, we produce different insights. And I think there are so many theories that can be adapted for online learning. When I first entered this community, it was using disruptive innovation theory as my analytical lens. Which wasn't a tell theory or even an educational theory, but it had come out of the Harvard Business School. I think my last three published papers in tell have all used Foucault as the theoretical lens, whose writings are incredibly wide ranging. So I think there are a plethora of theoretical perspectives available to us. They're not limited to technology. They're not limited to education. But I think we can work with them in productive ways to generate insights that will progress the next stage of our development. Certainly ethics. Now this is big at the moment. And if you go onto our homepage of our journal, as I hope you do, you'll see we encourage ethics. But I think we're really only beginning to work through ethics in relation to technology enhanced learning. And there's a lot of space for us to explore. If we think about our own interactions with technology, they are recorded, they are traceable. There's this extraordinary corpus of information that's built up about us all the time. We could see with something like the Cambridge Analytica scandal how that could be used to harvest information which could then be sold onto political interests to try and influence the democratic process. That's an extraordinary socio-political change that can be affected through the use of technology. Like, let's be clear about this. Some academics are the most turgid writers imaginable. But if any of you have come across Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, again, it's a huge tome, but it's incredibly readable. And I think the insights it produces about the data we produce, how that gets used and by whom and for what purpose. There's a whole splay, I think, of ethical considerations in technology enhanced learning that we're still at the early stages of thinking about. And as we move forward into the next generation, I think there's certainly space for us to continue to explore ethics, to take quite a broad perspective on what comprises ethics and to see how we can bring that practitioner and academic expertise to the subject area. And finally, EDI, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Tomorrow, there's a much larger research project on the journal taking place at the moment headed by Dr. Julie Vos. There's a presentation on that tomorrow to which I'll be making a very small contribution. Julie's done outstanding work. But the little bit that I did was looking at authorship over 30 years. B-minus could do better, I think. And we're an international journal. Yeah, if you look at the weight of scholarship, it wouldn't be necessarily obvious to you if you looked at first authorship of papers. This is not an RLT problem. This is a global sectoral problem. You will find that sites of academic production in North America, in the UK, in Europe, they tend to have greater impact. They tend to have greater readership. And I think there are things we can't just sit back and think, well, that's the way it is. Many journals do. I think the next stage of our strategic repositioning will say, well, what can we do to advance equality, diversity and inclusion in what we publish as a journal? Partly because it is fair and ethical, but I think we should look at it pragmatically as well. The more parts of the world we can draw into this conversation, the more inclusive we can be, the greater we enrich the scholarship that we produce and the audiences that it can reach. So that's a space, I think, that in the next generation I would really like us to see us move into. Couple of other thoughts. That's my, I'm on Twitter these, I tend to be a little inactive on it these days for reasons that Aaron was outlining in the last section. It's become a strange little space of late. I'm much more active on LinkedIn. I quite like its antiseptic nature, actually. I've still yet to see it descend into angry villages with pitchforks in the way that other online sites can do. So please do network with me there. Do take a look at the journal itself. I kind of turn up to, rock up to these conferences assuming everyone's engaging with it all the time. But our audience is global and it may be that our most, our own community, our most local one, we could actually be getting greater impact with. It's something I tend to take for granted that because it's this community's publication, it's something we all engage with, but not necessarily. And just think of it, it's an open source publication. I'd like to you to think of it as an open door publication. You may be someone who's got an interest in academic publishing, but hasn't taken that step yet. Well, I didn't have any publications in technology enhanced learning until 2012 and that was at this conference's proceedings. And I mean, I've now written two books for Paul Grave McMillan in the space and I continue to be active in academic publishing in this space. So look, it's an open source and it's an open door. And if you're thinking about how do I develop my own work, can I become somebody who produces knowledge as well as working with knowledge? Absolutely. I'm not the only member of the editorial team here for conference, so please just come and talk to us. And if we can facilitate and progress your ambitions, you're enriching our journal because you're people who are working with learning technology and you have a great deal of knowledge that has the credibility of being gained at that ground level too. Quick look at the actual journals, the articles that we produced for our sample. And again, what I'd like to draw attention to here is just that sense of diversity. You look at the top one, it's virtual reality. If the very first edition of the journal in 1993 had a virtual reality paper, open educational resources, we can keep moving into diversity. We see here mobile learning. We look at the one underneath that, which is looking at adolescent learners in West Africa. I think like a lot of academic journals, we're produced by higher education and we can perhaps be a little myopic in focusing wholeheartedly on higher education. But as the previous session showed us, FE is a very fertile space. School learning is a hugely fertile space for technology, particularly in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. Many of us are parents. I mean, we saw both the impact and the limitations of computer mediated school learning. There's a lot to be said about that that I think hasn't been said yet. And it would be great if this community could lead or be active in that discussion. Certainly social media too. So look, I'm giving a sense of diversity and I've tried to also locate it and link it to a personal narrative of how I went from somebody at the periphery of this community of practice to somebody who's in a move towards the center over a period of time, partly to indicate that that same journey is available to other people. Let me just show you where it can take you. I mean, look, that's my publications in simply 2022 and 2023, which from a standing start when I first came here in 2012, that's available to everyone. I'm only drawing attention to one of those publications. If you look at the penultimate one, one small step, you will, of course, know that my debut novel was published last year because you can't be thinking about technology enhanced learning all the time, ladies and gentlemen. There is much more to life than that. And I'm delighted to announce that I've recently signed a contract to publish a second novel called The Voice Hero, which the publisher wants to get out for Christmas. So we can take your cash off you, which is absolutely fine. I don't see any of it. I should really stress that or it doesn't feel that way when I see my royalty checks it go somewhere. I don't know. And if we have a conversation in the next two days that a tall-turn spiky, caustic or adversarial, I guarantee I will make you a two-dimensional villain in the next one and you'll meet a grizzly end about a third of the way through. That's not a threat, it's just a promise. So look, to conclude, we're a community. It's a community-built and community-driven organization. We are a community-built and community-driven academic journal. We started in hard copy in 1993 with the best wishes message from British Telecom. We're in a very different place now. We do attract global scholars. We do attract global readers. We attract a lot of citations. We're an impactful journal in the field, but none of that is possible without yourselves. The people who do the work in technology, the people who crucially at events like this share that work in technology, which then feeds forward to further research, scholarship, publications, back to conferences and other opportunities to get together. So we build this virtuous cycle of enhancement. We've got an upward trend in terms of our impact, our citations, our participation. Let's take the strategic steps now that enable us to evidence another generation of that enhancement when us have long gone, but we pass the torch to the next generation of people learning, researching, working with technology. Thanks very much for listening. Thank you so much, Michael. And I have to say, what a fascinating look back. We do have a couple of minutes before we're switching over to our next presentation in case there are any immediate questions. Now please do, as before, go to vbox.up, put in the meeting ID and put any questions in there that you have. And please let us know if you want to pick up anything, yeah? Do you want to just read it out because people online? The question is, is there a formal mentoring program or support available through ALT to those who haven't published research before? The answer is no, but there should be. I had a conversation at last year's conference precisely with someone who said, look, I've got all the expertise, I've got all the experience, but I don't have a background in writing for journals. So I did some individual mentoring with that person to try and develop them. If you look at the resource effectiveness of that, I can't see that working in the medium to long term. I think it's useful almost as a pilot study to say, well, what kind of mentoring and development does work and does result in someone getting published? So I think we'll probably persist with that one-to-one mentoring now, but I think the next strategic iteration of the journal has to include some more formal opportunities. How do we do that? We can have online get-togethers, but I think we have to think about the efficacy of those. We can almost set up a program that you come as a workshop with an idea, then if you want to persist with it, we meet a couple of months later to look at how we can structure and develop that. So we don't have that, we should have that, we need to have that, and our petition for us having that at the next strategic cycle of the journal. Thank you for that question, so I think it's really important. Thanks, Michael. We were just saying, we have one of our other editors in the room as well, so I thought we'd just bring your on stage briefly, and if you want to come to the lectern, or here's your mic, then please. Yeah, so hi, everyone. I was just going to plug a mentoring scheme that one of the special interest group, LSEG, all the LSEG is a special interest group, and we did a mentoring or scholars program, as it was called last year, where people could indicate initiatives aims like this, so I think Denise Sweeney's going to talk about this conference, so we are going to relaunch that mentoring scheme program, so I just thought I'll plug that as well, because that might be relevant to whoever was asking the question. Thanks, Mike. So that's not Mike. I'll hold it then. Thank you. If there's any other questions, please do put them now, because in a moment we're going to switch over to our second presentation. But again, a reminder, tomorrow there's the second session with Julie Vos as well. With a much bigger data set to work from, it's really impressive scholarship hats off to Julie for that. Fantastic, so hopefully please look out in the program for that tomorrow, as the research continues, but for now please put your hands together for Michael one more time, and then we're going to have a few minutes between this and the next presentation. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you. Thank you.