 So, let's get started. This is the title of the talk. And I'm grateful to the opportunity for having the chance to try to kind of gather together some of the things that I've learnt while working for Alt and before. For those who are not connected with the association and they're bound to be people in the room who aren't, I stopped being chief executive of Alt in May. And for the past couple of years, my credit card with its expiry date on the 7th of July, which I've used most days, has reminded me that by the 7th of this year, July this year, I'd have got a changed kind of work situation. And this is my 12th Alts conference. And it's the last one in which I have had any kind of production role and a minor one at that. So, this is a sort of reflection that is, I was asked to make it personal. And that's what I'm going to do. These are the points or the areas I'm intending to cover. You can read them. And I intended to include some credits and references at the end, but I ran out of time, but I'll put them on later. So what got me into it, the older I get, the more I realise that this hadn't expected to happen at all. The more I realise that you need to know about people's antecedents. So, I'll have to jump this very weird. I should, I'm going to do it. If I can, my dad left Berlin in 36 and came via that geographical route to London in 46. My mum left Uruguay in 45 arriving in London then. And you can see where I've lived and I finished up in Sheffield in 76. In 1976, I followed friends to Sheffield and I got drawn into the work of an organisation called the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, which had at that time a two sort of strands of work. One was against chemical and biological warfare and new means of social and political control. In relation to work hazards. And I got a dream job in 1979 at Grenville College in Sheffield and my role was to develop and run courses about occupational safety and health for trade union representatives. This will make you smile. Anybody here who works for or has worked for Sheffield Hallam University. So on the left is Bill Owen, after whom your bill, your own building is named, and who was chair of the Sheffield Education Committee and chair of the governing body at Sheffield City Polytechnic before it became Sheffield Hallam. And in the centre is Len Murray, who was the general secretary of the TUC in 1981. This is the opening of Sheffield Trade Union Studies Centre. And in the background is some 1981 learning technology, which some people in this room will never even have seen, but a roller board was what we had to work with. Some of my students is Maurice Birch, who was, at that time he was convener on the building of the flue gas desulfurisation plant at Drax Power Station, talking to Greg Douglas, who was an official in the construction and engineering union. This is Betty, I don't remember her second name, who was a noopy shop steward in the laundry at Northern General Hospital. Kay Bergin of Naogo, who now part of Unison, led a very long strike in Sheffield Council against the introduction of what were then called quaintly visual display units. And I always remember her as having done that, and they negotiated an agreement that limited the minimum size of screens that they were allowed to work on, diagonal size and built in breaks of 20 minutes for every hour of use of their device. Anyway, it didn't last very long. So, now the connection with learning technology. This is the mouth of the VA tunnel that goes under Pyrenees, under the Pyrenees highest mountain. It was the longest tunnel road tunnel in the world until 1964, five over five kilometers. And I biked to it and through it in 85 with my friend and colleague Andy for AirClough. He worked the TUC education service, and I worked in the Australian Studies Centre in Sheffield, and it was 160 miles to get to the tunnel from where we'd stayed the previous day, very up and down, and on that day we had a very long conversation on the kind of flat bits about technology and its use by union representatives for organizational purposes. And essentially that's when I kind of first started to think about these issues. I got drawn in by the TUC into developing training materials for trade union representatives in their use of technology. And a bit later on I was asked to represent the TUC in making and running an online course, pre-web, this is early 90s, for shop stewards in Denmark, Sweden and the UK about European integration. And I think anyone that's been involved in online distance learning will relate to this, which is a posting by a learner, and I'd like you to read it. And I thought, can you read it at the back? Because if you can't I'll read it out. You can read it. And I think it's not too extreme to say that this posting had a very, very sort of strong effect on how I thought that learning technologies I now know it to be called could have an influence, a beneficial one on teaching and learning. And this caused me to start banging on about it in a very energetic way, everywhere I could. There's a phrase that the squeaky wheel gets the most oil. And the upshot was that I got a job in the same institution, which by then was the largest FE college in Europe, or claimed that it was the largest FE college in Europe, as its learning technology development manager, with the added advantage that I reported directly to the principal, which is a completely unstandard way of operating, but it meant that I was able to get things done for a period of time. And the first thing that we got done was the creation of a course called Learning to Teach Online. This was post-web, but only just post-web, and it was a wholly online course about how to be an online tutor, and it was very successful, particularly due to the input of several people who in a perverse way later became very involved in the association, including Fred Pickering, the treasurer who those of the AGM would have seen yesterday, and Dick Moore, who is a trustee now of ours, and a woman called Julia Douglasby, who was closely involved in the creation of the Certified Membership Scheme that out now has. And very unusually we had, and we decided to do this, we had tutors delivering this course in Canada and in Australia as well as in the UK, so we had all three time zones covered, and this sort of meant that learners could get very, very good support wherever they were based, and we got a lot of international students as a result of it. The other thing that Leto had, and I think Jonathan Darby will relate to this and others in the room, was a very unusual copyright statement, which I put on it as a sort of whim. I had control, so I thought, and I had been an article in The Economist featuring David Wiley, who was then in his early 20s, who'd invented or come up with this thing called an open content license, which kind of appealed to me. So I put an open content license on the Leto course, which, and this open content license is a kind of, is the precursor of a Creative Commons license, many years before Creative Commons became an organisation and was created. And as a result of that, I kind of always known that you can make your content open and it doesn't cause people to steal it. And this course was very successful, it was making lots and lots of money and we were public about that fact, but nobody ever nicked the materials. There wouldn't have been nicking them, we allowed them to, because the thing that we were doing well, which they couldn't really nick, was a kind of approach to managing it, to running it, to building the team, to getting the whole thing to hang together. And for that reason, I think that what this was proving was that be relaxed about openness. There were spin-offs and this is topical. In 2002, by that time I didn't work for the Sheffield College, I'd left, just left, I'd been made redundant in a sort of amicable way. The Sheffield College ran an English GCSE online course and if you've any familiarity with exam rates that have been published now, those are astonishingly good GCSE results and they're continued to this day to be achieving those kinds of pass rates and grade rates on their online GCSE course. I put a link there to the first faltering issue of my fortnightly mailing, which because I was out of work and intending to be an independent consultant for as long as that was the option. I produced fortnightly mailing and it was just Googling for these results that I landed yesterday on me reporting the results from 2002. Anyway, so that year I was working as an independent and this job came up with ALT as its executive secretary, a halftime post that I knew fitted my experience like a glove. And I'm not going to now go into kind of history of my working for ALT because it would be boring as hell and I'm also eight minutes behind the planned scheduled point at this point. So I'm going to sort of switch forward and really race through this. Meanwhile, I think it's important for you to see sort of other things that were going on. These are snapshots. I did a lot of mountain walking. The dog owner cared about his Alsatian's eyes at this hut in the Pyrenees and had him with snow goggles on the warden of the hut. I've done a load of Nordic skiing as much as I possibly can and I do want to just dwell on this because I'm at the front here. This is climbing Norway's highest mountain, Glitterheim. I'm at the front but I'm keeping very clear of the edge and I think that's a kind of bit of advice for managers really. Just stay clear of the edge. My kids became young men, unlike me and their mother, their kind of creatives of a particular kind. And during this period we had six administrations who varied very widely in how shall I say how good they've been. So now to some sort of technological stuff. Along this period, Moore's Law. This is Gordon Moore's original sketch from 65 showing how the price of transistors had fallen and how he predicted it would fall in the future. Moore's Law has been ticking away. And is the reason why we have the web in its current form. Just this quote from last month, this is from an article that Peter Norvig and Woody Mambo wrote in the Google search blog. Peter Norvig has spoken at a conference here in 2007 and I had a kind of vague association with him since that time. And I just think this is an astonishing, when you read this sentence, it's an absolutely astonishing kind of representation of Moore's Law in action. And not just, I mean you think the computing that got the Apollo to the moon, but this is the computing that got the whole Apollo program from end to end. So it's an even more astonishing statement. Now to some of the things I've learned. It's a disconnected list and when you're preparing at all like this, you always put too much effort into the front and then you get to this bit and you just have to kind of throw it together in a way which is a sense of which I've done. So first thing is the terms of engagement really do matter. And by that I mean the dignity of the doers. The issues like credit and attribution. And when pay is due. And rarely being unbending if you're running something. Roy P's diagram really stuck in my mind when I saw him give a talk representing it this is that learning is life wide and lifelong and that's the proportion of the time that learners spend in formal learning is absolutely tiny in comparison to the proportion that they spend in life wide and lifelong learning. There are some dreadful models of learning out there, which this is one, the kind of squirting it into the brain model to key points here learners, not teachers not content create the learning. In the next three minutes, I'm going to use bits of the next three minutes to dwell on just for you to have time to read these two fantastic statements one made at the 2007 out conference as it happens. There are such things as cornerstone ideas. And depending on what your work area is you need to find them. There's two from Herb Simon and Dylan William are examples but blooms no significant difference is another one Laura lards conversational framework, Missou's peer based learning. And you need to find them and sort of stick with them and don't assume that only the new is a cornerstone. You need to jump quite a long way to say, and it's really a connected point that there are such people as deep and leading thinkers who are worth seeking out and reading and all listening to. You shouldn't feel kind of ashamed about having that sense that. And I've listed. I put a couple there who personally I found to be incredibly influential, one who many of you will have heard of David Weinberger. But I guess many of you will never have heard of Richard Skem. Because his work in the 60s is pre Internet, although there is a website with some fantastic videos of his investigations of how children learn. And I think that's a terrible thing that people who've got their heads around things that absolutely matter for the design of learning just people to reinvent the same ideas. And we need to not have that happen. This is a flippant point coming up. And I'm going to stop as time has run out in a second, which is that people find brain images and neuroscience language more convincing. Than results that make no reference to the brain. So watch out for scientific papers with brain images. You're being being changed drawn away. So what I was then going to do was talk about what we need now to do. And I'm going to just give these 15 seconds each. This is a photo of somebody in a rare earth mine. Rare earths are central to the functioning of mobile phones. Be patient. The drive for world class competitiveness as a policy objective will dissipate. In fact, it already has been dropped from the business plan. If you look at the 2012 version, although it was there in 2011 writ large. I think we should push instead for world class collaborativeness. I just think that's a much more productive thing to be doing. And to have the confidence to bring our community's knowledge and experience to bear on the wider educational world. Do things at the right scale. I think points to using other people's services wherever possible because they're able to organize them at the right scale. There is this slide in the presentation, which is take too long to explain, but it's got enough notes to it in the bit that will be on the web for you to make sense of it. And I would be interested to get your feedback on it. Thank you.