 I'm John Wilson. I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally, we prefer to work with what we feel is ethical industries, obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms, easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilise. What we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas. By investing in broadband in these local areas, we can attract more talent, we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland. Good afternoon. Welcome to this final session of day one. I'm absolutely delighted to be chairing this session as well because we got some fantastic presentations, two sessions this afternoon. First one is Melissa Highton from the University of Edinburgh with quite an intriguing title anyway, Next Expect Locusts and dealing with relationship breakdowns. I'm very intrigued, as I said, to find out more about this presentation, so I'll hand over to Melissa. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you very much, Sheila. This is going to be, I think, quite an interesting session because the next presenters are also going to be quite challenging and I think that the idea is to get this, hopefully to get you thinking. You'll have seen from the blurb of the session that was in the booklet, it's an experimental and exploratory session. The idea is to get you thinking about your own ethical position with regard to strike action, business continuity, policy and practice. So that is basically what I'm going to be talking about. And I thought it would be of particular interest to people who are Seamalt holders or writing a Seamalt portfolio, particularly because I know that the policy section of the Seamalt is one of the areas that people find quite difficult to think about what the policies that shape the environment in which we work might be. So I hope you find it useful. I hope you will think, as I'm talking about your own context, I'm going to talk a bit about my context, but it would be great if you could think about yourself in relation to some of these issues. You might also call this session a provocation. I suppose I'm going to say some things that might be controversial. I've tried to think quite carefully about what to say and what not to say about University of Edinburgh. I am reading from a script. I have written it all out. Sorry if that looks like I'm reading from a script, but I have been quite careful about what I want to say. Discussions are ongoing at University of Edinburgh, but we do have a chance to reflect, and reflection is always good, and that's what this conference is for. So one of the other reasons why this session is experimental is that I'm trying to use it as a way to upgrade myself in my own Seamalt from Seamalt to Senior Seamalt, and I'm going to use this session as evidence of reflection, bringing, I hope, an additional chunk of reflection in an advanced area of leadership and looking at the wire impact in the sector. But if you want to read more about my work, I have already blogged about this. I do blog regularly, and that's the link to the blog. The name of the session Sheila mentioned is a slightly odd next expect locusts. It actually came from a conversation with Amber Thomas earlier this year when we wondered what on earth was going to hit us next. So earlier in the year we had a perfect storm of learning technology, industrial action, the beast from the east, GDPR, best efforts, breakdown in trust, public transport stand still in European data protection law. On top of the strikes came the snow, with the snow came the closures, with the closures came the childcare crisis, after the snow came the floods, after the floods came the power outages and the darkness, after the darkness came the student occupations. So next expect locusts seemed appropriate at the time because unknown forces seemed to be combining against us to test us. So at times of crisis, your business continuity plans and policies become key. Every university will have business continuity plans. It's important to know where learning technology fits with those. How do you keep learning and teaching going in the face of disruption? So think about what you might think would be acceptable for business continuity during snow closures. So of course we would try to get as much material as possible online. We would want to help students who couldn't travel into campus. Of course we would make extraordinary efforts to deliver the teaching using the VLE and virtual classrooms and video conferencing and working from home. And we might even bring up materials from previous years to fill the gaps. And of course our academic colleagues would want that because we're all in this together. But how do those same business continuity plans feel during a strike? The snows are an act of God. The strikes are political. Everyone is on the same side during the snow. And there are many sides during a strike. So in March we had both strikes and snows in the same week at Edinburgh. The first three days were strike action, the next three days were snow closures. For university management both of those are covered under business continuity plans. So you might think if you work in educational technology, that you work in a fairly neutral service. You might think that you're apolitical. You might think that learning technology is mostly harmless. Or you might think that learning technology is disruptive. You may even have presented sessions at conferences where you've explained about how disruptive learning technology can be. And if you're not in a union you might think that the strikes didn't really have anything particular to do with you. But at a time of strike what might have been thought of as a fairly neutral service becomes very political. There are expectations from both sides. And either way the choices you make will be political. The choice of action with regard to your services. And it may come down to your own political or ethical position. Management will expect you to use every tool you have to mitigate the impact of a strike. To keep learning and teaching going. And academic colleagues or those on strike will expect you not to. So you have to pick a side. Do you want to be seen as a management tool or a friend to academics? Are you them or us? And what impact does the decision that you make to keep working during a strike have on the longer term relationship that you have with those colleagues? Those academic colleagues who see you and your services as a management tool? So the better name for the session I think is dealing with relationship breakdown because I think that what happens during the strikes this year has implications for us all. And that's kind of why I've brought this as a reflective session to the conference to see if we can think about some reflection as a community or as a professional group. When you're writing a C-Mult portfolio, you're asked to think about a reflective framework or how you would reflect on incidents that happen. And I quite like to use critical incidents as a framework for reflection. So if you're writing a C-Mult portfolio or a SILIP portfolio or your HEA portfolio, do look up the theory around reflecting around critical incidents. So a critical incident is something that has a significant impact on the way that you think about something, something that raised questions made you stop and think something that happened in your practice. And to do critical reflection, I think you have to situate yourself against some kind of framework and see yourself in relation to something that happened and see the wider picture. So in early 2018, there was an unprecedented period of industrial action at many UK universities, particularly the Russell group, but obviously at other institutions as well. And really never before in the 25 years of old have so many colleagues protested for so long against their employers. And never before has there been so much technology available to those employers to mitigate the impact of the strike. So in a strike, there are workers, there are management, there are academic colleagues, there are support staff, there are union members, there are non-union members, there are students, there are parents and there is social media. So personally, I'm a learning technologist, I'm a union member, I'm also senior management, I'm assistant principal in the university and I'm a business service owner for all of our teaching technology systems. I think it's actually quite rare for managers to still be in the union. People often expect that senior management will give up their union membership when they become management. And actually in some countries it seems very odd and they actually have different management unions. And I'm actually a strong believer that if you're in a union you should remain a member of the union even when you become senior management. And the reason for that is I believe that you get better decision making when there's diversity around the board table. And union members are part of that diversity of thinking. So having some managers in the room who are union members means you get better management which is more inclusive and considerate of a range of staff views. And the hope with this is that you get better informed thinking and you should get fewer staff management standoffs. And because of this I always ensure that whenever we're doing a policy consultation the campus unions are part of that consultation from the start. And I'm quite lucky in that sometimes people ask me for advice or wisdom and my advice currently is to anyone who works in a role similar to mine try to avoid being in an institution-wide consultation about an opt out lecture recording policy at a time of national industrial action. That would be my takeaway message. So learning technology veerlies and lecture recording are all very much on the union policy agenda and they will be used as part of negotiations alongside other issues. So you need to think about why this is important. The relationship between professional learning technologists and academic colleagues is finally balanced. Learning technologies offer technology solutions to teaching problems and encourage innovations in pedagogy and learning. We bring technology into classroom spaces on campus and online and we ask colleagues to embrace it. We assure academic colleagues that the technology is there to help and not replace them. We ask for trust and understanding and communication. We ask them to give it a go. We know that academic buy-in is key to all of our success. But as part of the business, our IT services are key in ensuring business continuity, supporting students beyond contact hours and mitigating the impact of disruption to time and place. So what happens when things go wrong? How resilient is the relationship between ed tech and educators and where should learning technologists' loyalties lie? If we work with technology for teaching and learning, then all of our technology comes into contention during a strike. So I'd like you to think back to March this year. Some learning technologists were on strike because they are members of the UCU. The UCU is not exclusive to lecturers. Learning technologists, some of your colleagues, were in dispute with their employers, your employers. Do you remember why they were in dispute? Where were you? Were you with the management? Were you on the picket? Were you hiding? Were you taking action short of a strike? What did you think at the time? You work in a highly unionized sector. So think about what's your attitude to unions. So the particular incident at Edinburgh, we had the snow and we had the strikes. And at Edinburgh we were also smack in the middle of an institution-wide consultation on an opt-out lecture recording policy. The strikes hit our evaluation focus groups with so many colleagues out, meetings had to be cancelled. And the questions we had originally prepared took on a whole new meaning. So people's concerns about IP, retention and performance review changed dramatically when they were in dispute. And the responses to our consultation actually had been fairly slow before the strikes. But once the strikes were on their way, they came thick and fast, particularly about the purposes and how recordings could be used. We had had the union rep as part of our policy task groups, but once the strikes happened, they weren't there. And I wasn't there. And our policy officer wasn't there. The whole thing stopped. And in the absence of a clear policy, various statements were being sent around. And in a spectacular example of short-term thinking, someone else in the senior management announced that we would use recordings from last year to mitigate the impact of the strike. And basically the whole thing blew up. So anyone who had been convinced that lecture recording was a good thing, but was now on strike, had their worst fears confirmed. The university would use recordings from last year without your permission. And there was actually a mad scramble to find the policy position from the previous year. And the new proposed policy, which explicitly rules out the use of recordings during industrial action, was of course still draft and so not live on the books. Any trust that we had developed by consultation and engagement and any hopes that we had about academic and union buy-in to the policy looked scuppert and we feared that academic staff would never trust management or IT or learning technology ever again. So everyone has to pick a side and there's a number of relationships that get strained. We need to reflect on the interplay of technology and learning and learning technology and business continuity and the relationships between management and academic staff. And even though the leadership of most universities are senior academics, everyone refers to the university and colleagues are suspicious of anything that seems to be happening at the top. And I've been in many conversations over the years with colleagues who worry that if they record all their lectures or share all their materials as OER, the university won't need to employ them. We always reassure them that technology will not replace them. But when they withdraw their labour, the first time the relationship is actually tested, their fears were well-founded. We can just use recorded lectures. Is the need jerk go-to response of university management when threatened by an academic walk out? We made assumptions about how that technology would be used and the first opportunity the assumption was blown out when the opportunity arose short term isn't triumphed. We don't know yet what impact that will have and the time and effort that it will take to get colleagues trusting learning technology again. If you thought you had a tough job before, I think it's going to be worse now. And another relationship that I think is a risk is the relationship between strikers and non-strikers inside the union and outside it. I just want to say a bit about what happens when you're on strike. When people are on strike, they withdraw their labour. They're in dispute with their employer. They make a salary sacrifice. And they have to declare the days that they're on strike. They don't get paid for those days. So a loan strike hits hard at people's income. And the point of a union is collective bargaining. This is Beatrice Webb who invented collective bargaining. She's one of the founders of the LSE. Collective bargaining is the process through which the union can negotiate with the employers on your behalf because they represent many members of the union and many is greater than one. Unions are mostly democratic. We vote on issues and we vote on strikes. If the collective bargaining is successful, everyone's terms and conditions improve whether or not you went on strike. If we get a sector or local pay rise, everyone gets it. The reason it's important to know about how unions work and what other institutions do during a strike is that everyone, what happens at one university quickly spreads to the other. So other people hear about it. Where there are strikes about paying conditions going on, any suggestion that we can make digital materials or recordings or whatever will directly impact the security. It will be couched in terms of security of tenure for staff, particularly those on precarious contracts. So when we know that the position that some institutions have taken is that we can just record it, you can be sure that colleagues in your institutions also knew this was happening at some other institutions. So the relationship between strikers and non-strikers in the union and out. If you're a member of a union and your union calls you to go out on strike, you get called out and it's all out. If you don't strike, you're called a scab. If you're in the union and you don't come out on strike, you are actively working against those who do. The first thing that management will do is try to undermine the strike by announcing that it doesn't have full support of the members. So relationships can become very strained in groups where some union members strike and others do not. Collective action requires cooperation. What's the point of being in a union if you're not prepared to strike? There's also relationships between managers and learning technologists and learning technology managers. So you should think about the advice and discussions which happened in your workplace with regard to business continuity during the strike. Did managers give the impression that you could or should not strike? If you're a manager, what conversation did you have with your staff? Is your manager in the union where you asked to cover for them? There are different kinds of impacts that withdrawal of labour can have and sometimes support staff withdrawing their labour can seem invisible. I have a suspicion that if a large IT system goes down and no one's there to pick it up, the impact actually would be obvious. How many of our university systems have just one person as a single point of failure and what happens is that person allowed to strike? Should service teams cover for colleagues during a strike? When IT staff are on strike, but academic colleagues are not? How understanding will academic colleagues be if we're not there to fix the thing that they're using or using to work from home? Would academic colleagues stand with us if we refuse to use learning technology to mitigate the strike? For those of you who are interested in social justice, many people tell me that they are interested in this. It's worth thinking about what the unions are for. Unions may be the place in which minority voices are being heard. If you care about social justice, it's worth paying attention to the reasons for the strike and looking to see who is striking. If it's about conditions or paying conditions or pensions or equal pay or low pay, it may well be disproportionately women who are on strike and those who are hardest hit if the strike is not successful. It's worth taking a moment to find out because it may be a cause that you want to support. So, in our reflective portfolios, we're prompted to think about what we would do differently if it happens again. So I've talked about strikes since now. At least one of them, the industrial action, I think is going to happen again and we need to think about our relationship with the core business of learning and teaching. There's some immediate work needed around lecture recording. You need to keep up to date with what the national policy around is coming from the unions. So last year, the UCU's stance is quite different from what it is now. Following the strikes, there's actually a national position which makes it very difficult for a local union to agree and opt out policy however well-written or nuanced it is. That leaves several institutions actually with no policy in place. So no protection for staff IP, no clear statement about appropriate use of recordings and no protection against the recordings or no reassurance that the recordings will not be used if another strike takes place. You should also be thinking about what you do now to sustain a trusting relationship with academic colleagues. Think about the conversations that you have with academic staff about your services. I was encouraged by staff to refer to academic colleagues rather than the academics and I would encourage you to try to avoid lazy stereotypes like digital natives and digital immigrants and Luddites and caves. The more conversations that you have with colleagues the more conversations you have with your teams about how our roles relate to the strike action. The more likely it is that the relationship will survive. Think about how you feel about retention policies and management requests to give access to last year's materials. Think about the fact that the strikes have historically been most effective when they hit exams and marking. Think about how investment in computer-aided assessment will change the nature of exams and marking. What policies do you want to have about the use of those tools for business continuity? So I hope we can have discussions in this community about how we reassure colleagues and how we position ourselves and see ourselves as others. See us because thinking about the role of technology during a strike is very important to our relationship with academic colleagues and with the academy. In the past, with examples like print workers at warping, the new technology was in the hands of the management. They used new technology to replace the old ways of working to cut costs and to modernize. So are we the new technology? The lecturers are the old technology. What happens when the new technology is in the union? If learning technologists and IT staff strike it can have quite a large impact because it means that the new technology is unionized. I do think that actually we will see the emergence of tech worker unions. There isn't really any at the moment, but I think that people will unionize in tech industries not necessarily because of pay and conditions. Tech industry is notoriously well paid, but I think because of ethics and I think that workers will often want to hold their company or their employers to account to check that they're living up to the ethical standards of the workforce. So I would argue that if we're going to make the most impact we need the new technology to be in the union. Learning technologists are in the UCU. We're also in the management. And from there we can protect the rights and the users and we can make better management policy. If you don't want to join a union you should at least be talking to them because that leads to better policy making. There's a tendency in universities to have one group of staff write policies and then it's basically done and it's run past the union as an afterthought. My suggestion is that you try to get a union representative into your policy task group and onto your project steering boards. If you're working with technology if you're working with any technology that changes the way people work you need to have the union around the table from the beginning. If you ever find yourself talking about academic staff buy-in try to get a broad range of views around the table. Having the union invited from the start to be part of that group tasked with scoping and producing and consulting on a policy ensures that you get an early indication of what might be contentious and you'll be more likely to be able to write an inclusive policy as a result. You should be in no doubt that we work in an environment in which university policies union policies and government policies shape what we do and we need to be paying attention. Thank you very much. I thought provoking presentation. We've got a couple of minutes if there's any maybe comments. I think there's or questions would anybody like to ask anything or just a general reflection? There's a huge yes at the back here. We've got a mic coming back and then I'll come to you, Mary. Thank you so much for that, isn't it? Yes. That was so interesting. I was interested, I would, but also when you mentioned a tech workers union and I'm a learning technologist and a member of UCU but before I came to the university I looked up tech workers unions to see if that was a thing and it wasn't, as you said. I'm wondering how if you know anything about the landscape of whether that is something that is on the horizon and if it isn't, how easy is to solve? No, I think that's a great question because actually I did sort of the same search myself because although yes if we work in higher education but if the unions around higher education but actually if we identify as tech workers which often we do and that issue about who owns the technology and whether it is unionized and whether it's the new technology that's unionized I think it's quite important so yes, I was doing some searching and I would encourage people to search for information about tech unions I think we would be looking at some of the things that are happening in California and certainly in the US and we might also be looking at relationships with the reasons that there might be tech unions emerging might be linked in some way to Trump or something like that going on I encourage you to search to find information for yourself Thanks Elizabeth for really brain talk I think because there's a lot of issues that you mentioned that we don't often hear about particularly not on this kind of platform and I was wondering you mentioned the impact that the strikes had on the consultation process do you feel there was an upside on actually being in the consultation in terms of it actually opening up any avenues to have dialogue because I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how any of us can maybe learn from some of what you've talked about trying to open up a dialogue about some of these difficult breakdowns so maybe not an easy question I'm sorry but yeah just hoping for some inspiration Yeah I think it just was bad timing for us actually the planning of when we were doing institution-wide consultation we had been a little bit delayed before Christmas and we launched in February and then there was about a month of consultation it had run for about two weeks before the strikes actually hit so it was just bad timing for us but I think what was notable is that the policy we were consulting on because it had been written in a very inclusive way I think it's a good policy I'm happy to share it with people I would recommend writing policy in this way I think it's a well-written opt-out policy it says quite specifically about whether the recordings can be used during industrial action and that was because the union were at the table when we were writing it then of course when the strike happens we're consulting on a policy that says your lectures would never be used during strike action but of course that wasn't live we were still consulting on it so when a position was taken that we would use last year's stuff that stuff had not been recorded under that policy so it was just very bad timing but I think so yes in terms of liking if you like a challenge then yes these are the kind of things that do cause so I think one of the conversations that happened that perhaps might not have is a very senior level university discussion in which someone said oh really why don't we just use these lecture recordings and I said have you noticed that we're consulting on a institution-wide policy around this at the moment and is there any connection between that announcement and the likelihood of getting opt-out in this institution and so there was some thinking had to happen around that topic Catherine Cronin and it's going to be a bit of interactivity in this but I think they've really captured the essence of the conference so they're going to make a personal, feminist and critical retrospective of learning and technology so I'm really looking forward to this session again and I know Catherine and Francis and others have been blogging about this topic as well so over to you. Thank you so much we just need one moment to change gears here and get our presentation up thanks okay thank you all it's a very long and stimulating day so thank you all for being here on behalf of Francis and myself and welcome and I'm afraid I'm still a bit shook by this presentation very courageous and really thought-provoking Francis and I were thinking of the phrase personal is political when we were preparing our own session and I was thinking of the converse of that the political is personal for you and very powerful and maybe we need a theme of that for alt conferences in the future because I think these conversations are really important so Francis and I engaged in a series of reflection and discussion over the last few months and as Sheila mentioned we've logged a little bit about that and in coming up to alt's 25th anniversary conference we thought about what's happened over the course of the last 24 conferences and could we look at the themes and what kinds of things emerged and how those were concurrent and perhaps coincident with our own personal histories and as we say learning in brackets and technology so we have woven in not just our experiences as learners, as teachers, as researchers but also as mothers, as feminists as community activists all kinds of things because we feel it's a really important piece of who we are in learning technology and education so we'll talk a little bit more about that we also are going to give you an opportunity to do a little bit of reflection and speaking with each other so that's why we invited people to come down a little more close to the front and welcome to the people the people who are participating virtually as well we will make sure that we include you in those activities all of the links that we'll be referring to over the course of the presentation are in a Google Doc which is bit.ly slash alt C hyffin bell hyffin cronon so our presentation is there the abstract to this session is there our blog posts and blog posts by other people who will mention later in the session so that's how you can follow along whether you're here in the room or following virtually thanks to Trezy because the title for this slide in our in our presentation was Context and that is because we live in serious times we can't ignore the wider context of this conference of higher education of our work and of our lives and the lives of all who work in higher education students and staff and others so what we chose to do and what's impossible not to do is when we looked at the history of the alt conference themes and what had arisen we've done that through the lens of who we are and our identities and our experience and that's very much a feminist approach so not ignoring context so in the abstract for the conference we kind of talked about the green and the purple circle so we said we're going to look at alt conference themes through the lens of our own histories and standpoints but we also wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect and have that kind of conversation also so to start out really briefly a more deeper reflection will come later in the session we'll just ask you to take one minute just now if you would and maybe share with someone ideally not someone that you walked in the room with but maybe just say something about yourself who you are, whether it's your work, your job, your location and maybe your first experience of ed tech or learning technology so just for a minute and if you're online and doing this please use the alt C hashtag okay to walk that a little closer that's good okay I might ask for your attention back again there'll be more opportunities for speaking as I said we're not asking you to share that we simply want to invite your reflection as a foundation for what's going to be happening over the next 25 minutes or so so I'll hand over to Francis now very good at talking to each other that's a good sign for later so this is what we promised in our abstract in our session description and what we've worked on for the past few months and it's mainly been detective work to generate the resources it's definitely work in progress and it's an ongoing analysis of the themes and trends of the first 24 years of alt C and as Catherine pointed out our reflexivity is important and we want it to leave space for the reflection and perspectives of others so we hope we achieve that we've reflected on our own histories and we're recognising that our personal histories are an integral part as Catherine already said so we're going to share a short summary of that work some of which we've blogged about already but our main task today is to invite you to this discussion so our documentary resources as you'll see if you look later at the document are incomplete and organic but at any conference like this conference even delegates get only a partial view of a conference and over the last 25 years of alt not surprisingly given that long period we've had lost websites and limited access and it's made for some very partial views of some years and we're still finding new sources in our work in progress and if you've got any little conference proceedings tucked away at home or CD-ROMs or whatever please get in contact with us but what we've found is that even glimps from afar some things look different and some things can actually become clearer so there are clearly connections and overlaps between these themes but they are identifiable as distinct threads of conversations and work over the last 25 years and they're themes that are important to us so if you've done the work you might choose different themes and we've explored two of these themes so far and that's what we'll be presenting this afternoon so the theme that I'm looking at is active learning and I'm going to give you a brief reflection on my working-like link to active learning and there's more in the blog post that I've already written if you want to look at it later and then I'll look at active learning in alt's history so working as a programmer analyst in the 1970s sparked my interesting learning by doing it seemed sort of more relevant than some of the stuff I'd done at university and it raised my awareness of workplace sexism especially in IT and I understood this better when reading Marie Hicks book this year and I can really recommend it as a read because she, you know, she's an American researcher who did archival historic research to look at why Britain's discarded women technologists in the post-war period it's absolutely fascinating but unfortunately sexism and racism are still prevalent in tech industries and elsewhere but it's interesting that they are prevalent in tech industries so in primary schools active learning can be achieved through play, garden clubs and other authentic activities and when I was teaching in schools and further education it raised my awareness of gendered experience that contrasted with my single-sex secondary school in ways that I hadn't experienced so I learned something from being a teacher that I hadn't learned from being a student at school and as a mother I certainly learned that learning starts at home in families through play and through learning life skills like eating a little boy I know is doing that currently so in further and higher education there are obvious examples of active learning on vocational courses but I do believe it can be achieved in many learning activities so not just there and active learning even happens at old sea I think this was 2008 at Leeds but I'm not absolutely certain and I'm sure you'll recognise a few faces there I also learned from doing research which I think demands persistence accountability and criticality and it leads to learning by writing and blogging about your research conversations that follow and social media has offered great opportunities for network learning in research settings but we do have to think about the platforms that are in flux for example what we learned about Facebook and other revelations this year so trawling through these archives just say a little bit about my own connection with Alts I had little or no contact with Alts in the 1990s my subject discipline was information systems so I was reading science and technology studies I was critiquing technological determinism and learning how to research I was also studying to improve my pedagogy I was really interested in that so look at books like Shones Reflective Practitioner Diana Lawlard's book The Active Learning Journal that I think Helen Beatham might have worked on and getting the IT forum mailing list it was a US mailing list I fall into what we were then calling e-learning when I shared my teaching materials online by accident but that's another story I attended most Alts conferences in the 2000s and this is a third Altsy I've attended in this decade but we found some interesting sources to help plug the gaps in our attendance and recollections so the first Altsy in 1994 was entitled Enabling Active Learning and honestly I didn't really know that when I decided to look at Active Learning I was already interested in that but we don't really know any details of the discussion there we've managed to find summaries of titles and authors for the first three conferences what we found the strongest voice in the mid 1990s came from the editor of Alt J who was one of the founders of Alt in his early editorials he acknowledged that what he called traditional education in higher education needed to change and that applying education technology was a change in itself but the challenge was in understanding the relationship between those two changes sounds a bit familiar really doesn't it? he also argued for more than stories of practice at Altsy and this long article was from a constructivist perspective and it doesn't read badly for an article that's 23 years old so you can find it in the excellent Altsy research and learning technology archives and it was heard by the Altsy editors and an inspiration to authors and presenters it's had more impact more widely it's our journal's most cited article with about a thousand citations but as far as we can see only three of those are within our journal so it's had quite a wide impact but maybe not as much impact within our community when we trawed through the journal and conference archives we found there was very little that you could call formally active learning that was labelled as active learning but there were many examples of learning that was active so maybe looking down this right hand side how to get real how to get a rich environment for active learning maybe members were getting real in their own ways so this, in the next Altsy was entitled enabling active learning but we don't know the details of the discussion there and there again he was complaining or not complaining but commenting after the conference that what he'd wanted was not for just people to look at the two changes but to look at the relationship between them he seems to suggest he didn't find that was happening okay this is very very speedy but we just wanted to give you an idea of some of the highlights of what we found in our research and there are more detail in the documents we linked to in terms of open learning anyone who's done research in the area of open learning or open education will know that the very definitions of those terms have changed considerably particularly over the last 40 to 50 years so research in the late 1970s and early 1980s would have defined open learning as flexibility of space, student choice, integrated curriculum changing the relationships between learners and teachers fostering student agency and ownership for learning those kinds of things and this is also evident in the research in Altsy which I'll talk about in just one moment but in terms of my own lens for looking at that I blabled about this but really briefly I have what is kind of called I think a portfolio career maybe a lot of people in the room have this as well not a straight trajectory and so in the 80s I qualified as an engineer and practiced engineering in IT in the early 90s I went back to study for an MA in women's studies and really learned a sociological approach to study and knowledge and also got to learn and experience critical and feminist pedagogy and I did my dissertation in the area of gender and technology and later in the 90s I deepened my understanding of qualitative research in a three year study of gender and technology and it wasn't until the 2000s that I really started getting involved in e-learning as it was then and laterally in open education so that was initially as a practitioner and then in the last few years as a researcher so that's the lens that I bring to the troll that I did in the area of open learning so here's a nice example of open learning from my history so this was literally cut and paste anyone who was doing education in those years will know that's how we did those things and this was one of several community education courses that I developed for women because through all those different career choices that I made one of the threads that's been extant in my life since growing up in Bronx to living in Ireland Scotland and the States is community activity and community activism so much of that work has been working with women in kind of financially and socially disadvantaged areas and a lot of that was bringing in IT and working in the areas of IT so even in those days we were trying to make sure that Ada Lovelace was in the introduction to computing curriculum and the Jackard Loom which some of us have been talking about on Twitter recently but looking through the archives for those years with my personal lens was really interesting so this is all C now and not all J so this is a timeline from 1994 to 2017 in those early years in any search for open open was not described defined as open education or open learning as today it was that older definition so things that came up with things like open and active learning open collaboration, open questions and even the values underlying openness openness and trust was talked about quite a bit and then if you look at the blue stripe there the first explicit mention of openness was our wonderful friend reusable learning objects and lastly OER, open content, MOOCs, the octel course I see little smiles in the room a lot of you were probably involved in many of these presentations, open data although those were the topics in open education the green structures that a lot of the tools and spaces that people were using for open educational practices were talked about quite throughout those conferences as well blogs, wikis, social media and social networks 2009 was a significant year it seems that was the famous or infamous Villilius judge seminar hey who's James Crane yes he is here and a keynote by Terry Anderson really about web 2.0 and defining open scholarship and so on but really from 2012 a couple of interesting trends one is 2012 which is Lorna Campbell reminded me this morning was the end of the UK OER program was the first time there was explicitly a theme of open at this conference but also really evidence of critical approaches so now we're talking about that quite explicitly but it's been evident in the program for the last few years so as Francis said we have different perspectives from looking back so what we'd like to do is do a really quick think-pair share okay so you may have had some thoughts listening to what we're talking about about your own experiences inside and outside education perhaps bringing in the strand of the political as well and we'd like you to think about your own experiences, skills and values perhaps as educators perhaps as learning technologists or more broadly and write down three anywhere I'm going to give people that you have that you feel are most important to bring to your current work in facing the challenges that we face currently in learning and technology so what are three aspects of yourself that you think are most important to bring to your work right now given the challenges that we face okay I'm just going to say 90 seconds for that just alone just a thoughtful exercise alone and then we'll take 90 seconds to share with each other for those who are participating virtually you can do this alone or if you wish to share you can do that on Twitter or elsewhere using the tag alt C or personal alt C okay now for the pair part of this activity so again I'd like you if you would to just pair up with one other person and just to read your list you don't have to explain just read your list to one another and listen to one another's list and then see if together you can decide on one thing that you'd like to share in our Google Doc I'll put the link up in a minute so again 90 seconds just to share your three things with one another thank you perfect we're very low maintenance okay I'm really sorry about that I mean it would be great if we had an hour to do this session but it's possible that you may have found something really striking that one or other of you mentioned during that and you might want to share that it's possible that you may intersect in one of those that you both said one of the things may be roughly the same so we're just going to ask you as a pair to access this document it's a Google Doc and add one thing to the doc based on your discussion and we'll bring it up on the screen and we'll have a look at it and then we'll just pull the threads together and try and finish on time and you can include your name or not include your name as you wish yep so you can be anonymous on that list yes or add your name whatever you wish okay we we tried to break Google last week with Martin Martin Hoxie was helping us it is open for sharing yes it's just case sensitive yeah okay can you shut that off pull the screen out of that way my goodness we'll have to look up at this last if you can bring the link back up on the screen yes indeed that's big.ly and then case sensitive alt-c-bell-cronin thanks for that Grishale are we on the bus two minutes on the way okay for those who possibly don't have access on their device there's an awful lot of collaboration communication community and sharing and then other values appearing empathy equity fairness coming from a marginalized background ethical awareness compassion inclusivity okay okay I would like to keep this going but I know that we're in the last session so please feel free to continue to add here any further comments as well also if there was something you feel really strongly about and you're sharing that wasn't the one thing you chose you can go ahead and add that now as well we just didn't want to have too many contributions crashing the document I we just invite you to think about the fact that what one thing that we certainly found was the surface aspects of being a learning technologists are necessary but not sufficient to do the work that we do today and that we felt that the thing that was most important in looking back that looking back view that Francis talked about with the lens was bringing our whole selves into the work that we do and we think that's increasingly important for all of us so a kind of a values based approach as Melissa mentioned several times which is difficult it's challenging but possibly more spaces in this conference to be able to talk about the challenges of doing work in that way and we invite you to engage in those discussions with us here at the conference and also online beyond in our abstract we just go back to work we used a quote by Audrey Waters and we just wanted to call her to mind again today we felt this framed so much of of our perspective as we looked at this and that is all visions of the future of education, teaching, work, learning are ideological and they are also political and to the extent that we deny that we're not doing the best work that we can do so I don't know if Frances wants to add anything but we would really love to hear more from you and thank you very much well we just want to thank you and everyone else who's contributed and we put a list of what we know about of the blog contributions in the documents and if anybody does make a post or finds one please just add it to the document yourself okay thank you so much