 welcome to you please make yourself comfortable and find a seat and if there's in the back could just give me a wave if you can hear me okay perfect thank you very much with all the rain this morning I think we're running slightly late but we are going to get underway in a moment and if you are just arriving please do sit down try and get yourself drier I'm sorry about the weather it's the one thing we can't fix but we will get underway and it is my great pleasure as Chief Executive of the Association to welcome you to Liverpool to Alts 24th annual conference okay we're going to be practicing this throughout the welcome so by the time Bonnie starts talking we're ready for it so I'll get to speak first because I get to introduce you to our co-chairs in a moment but I did want to set the scene a little bit because our annual conference is 18 months in the making and it means a lot to us that you are here that you are helping bringing learning technology beyond islands of innovation and I did want to reflect just very briefly on how we actually as a community put our values into practice when we come together here physically in Liverpool and online so one of the very exciting things about this conference that over half of our 470 delegates actually contribute so more than half of you are speakers and helping make this conference happen many more of you are volunteering in one way or another as reviewers or a session chairs and it's a real community effort so it is very exciting to have you all here and participate as you know as an association as in a community openness is one of our key values and while we can't make the conference completely open and free to attend we do use what we can to make it openly accessible in terms of the resources we produce and the knowledge that we share but your contributions being here and as members of ALT if you are really help keep this in independent association and this is our 24th year of providing an independent voice for learning technology across the UK and beyond and while it is a privilege for us to be here and it's certainly a privilege for me and my colleagues to welcome you here it is I think really important to underline the contribution it makes to keeping us an independent voice from across sectors with policymakers and with industry but most importantly we bring people together help set up relationships to foster collaboration not just here over three days but over the rest of our year and throughout other events and activities all across the UK and beyond now I'd like to all encourage you to make your voice heard at this conference if you are active on social media and I think the 15,000 tweets from last year suggest that you are please do use the hashtag ALT C and now we're going to have a second go at giving a very warm welcome to two people who've been waiting literally 18 months for this moment they've worked behind the scenes with their colleagues at this university and all across the country to make this conference happen to set up the largest parallel program that we've had in five years to attract more delegates than we've welcomed in three years and to bring this national conference to Liverpool for the very first time so please give it up for Helen O'Sullivan and Pete Alston thanks Marin and it is my absolute great pleasure to welcome you here to the University of Liverpool right in the heart of the knowledge quarter of the city and I do apologize for the weather it's been lovely the last couple of days but anyway can't do much about that I'm sure many of you be really familiar with the history and the ethos of the University of Liverpool we were founded in 1881 and we can truly claim to be the original Red Brick University a phrase that was coined about the distinctive building the Victoria building which is a terrible sense of geography I think it's that way but you'll see it every time you go out of the building our founding mission was for the advancement of learning and for the ennoblement of life and that's still our mission today and it underpins everything that we do and it highlights our belief in the transformative power of education and research and digital education and online learning is of strategic importance to the University of Liverpool we have around 10,000 students studying online and we've successfully graduated 9,000 students from all across the globe and this broad expertise in digital and online education is reflected in the 30 or so colleagues from the University of Liverpool that I'm proud to say are presenting this week so come on in everybody don't worry come in and find a seat so I hope you find time those of you that are new to the city and those of you that are returning I hope you find time to explore this great city and experience from the culture and heritage and for this conference what I'm particularly personally looking forward to is really learning more about how we can take individual innovation and creativity and turn it into policy and practice that really is for the benefit of all of our students. Morning everyone, I just want to carry on with the theme that Helen's just talking about this kind of the beyond islands of innovation and the kind of obviously the key theme for the conference is that we've sent lots of good practice when we've been here at the University of Liverpool and seen lots of people doing really good things in their own departments and we wanted to kind of see how can we take that further what are the challenges why don't those sorts of things kind of get scaled up into the institutional level and for us kind of looking at the conference program I think we've kind of hit a kind of a chord with everyone given the amount of presentations that we're going to have over the next three days so we're really looking into us Helen saying how can we scale it up how can we look at policy how can we look at practice and get these things kind of working more mainstream for the benefit of everyone rather than just the benefit of the few. Thank you. Well thank you very much Pee. In a moment we're going to start with our opening keynote but before then we do want to give a voice to a few organizations who've made this event possible and really put their money where their mouth is so please give it up for our three sponsors and give them a warm welcome. Right and what we're going to do because we're going to do that short and snappy and heartfelt we're going to get three quick pictures and we're going to give one big thank you to all of them together at the end and first up here is Dave from Cosector. Good morning and thank you very much for having us here we really enjoy coming to this event every year and seeing this conference get ever bigger and stronger and this year it's hard to deny it looks the best and biggest yet. At the Bloom team at Cosector University of London previously ULCC have been many things to many people over the years but we know one thing for certain we exist to help you deliver the best possible learning technology for your institution. We know we must continue to evolve so that we understand the ever changing ways in which we can help you deliver those compelling learning experiences for your students and painless administration for your staff and affordable cost for your budget holders. Learning technologies are at the very heart of every institution student experience. We want to talk to you to see how we can add to the great work that you already do. There are more ways we can help them perhaps you realize hosting administration development advice cloud single sign-on online assessment repositories reporting user experience and more you name it we can help you. As I said we've evolved over the last 49 years and will continue to do so for at least another 49. Whatever your technology whatever your needs please visit our stand say hello find out what we can do together and finally we're very proud to be sponsoring the learning technology awards again. Voting is open till lunchtime tomorrow I believe so please take a look at them vote for your favorites and come and talk to us thank you. Thanks very much Dave I'm up next and joining us for the very first time is Danny from open stacks. Hi everyone so I work for an organization called open stacks we are part of Rice University and we're based in Houston Texas so we provide free peer reviewed openly licensed textbooks for introductory college courses university courses so we've published about 29 textbooks so far since 2012 and it's really taken off in the US about 3.4 million students are using our books around the world so things have gone pretty well so far so we'd like to talk to you we do have an exhibit table in the exhibit hall so that's that's cool and you know free textbooks are great but what we're really excited about is what we're calling kind of an information revolution so we've made this foundational knowledge free and openly licensed so that allows faculty and students and everyone involved in education to do some really exciting things new pedagogical practices content localization all these things beyond the traditional textbook so again thank you we are in the exhibit hall we don't have a lot of materials because our boxes were are missing they're somewhere but I'd like to meet with all of you and talk to you about some of these really cool things that we're doing. Great thanks very much Danny our next sponsor is actually a positive internet company and as an association we've worked with them for over 10 years. Positive internet hosts all of Alt's websites including the conference platform so while you may not have heard of them in the education space they have enabled us in our community as an excellent hosting company definitely the best customer service I've ever used and they're not paying me to say that so I'm happy to give them a big shout out because none of the team can be here from the US today so thank you very much positive internet for supporting Alt's hosting for a decade and more and our last sponsor who I'm sure you will have heard of it's not just supporting the conference but I want to give them a special shout out because they support our webinars all through the year. Alt's is not just for September but all year round so this is Gillian from Blackboard as our final pitch. Hi good morning everybody my name is Gillian Fielding I'm a customer success advocate at Blackboard that's a tell champion to you and me. Some of you may know me from Salford University or from you Siser for my work on the digital capabilities survey. Anyway Blackboard are really pleased to be sponsoring the Alt conference again this year and I'm particularly pleased because it means I get to come here and all your great presentations. I want to show you this slide because I think this slide helps illustrate the fact that Blackboard is not just about a VLE we supply a broad range of different products and solutions. We're best known for learn our VLE package but did you know that we're also a Moodle Room partner not just supplying Moodle rooms but we're also the world's largest contributor to code into the Moodle community. Our latest product which was launched in April is Ally and that's an accessibility and inclusivity package. It does three things. First of all a lecturer will upload content to the VLE and it will automatically convert it into accessible formats so things like enhanced HTML, electronic Braille print version and MP3 so that students can listen to it or you know and that's really inclusive so students who haven't got any accessibility issues can listen to an MP3 format perhaps while they're on the bus or traveling in the car or walking the dog, whatever. We also do a range of other products as well, content, analytics and Safe Assign, our academic integrity tool and we also do IT services. We have 60 European based staff that are all from education background who provide strategic services and training such as implementation, academic adoption, e-teacher and new training course on digital capabilities or grade journey to help us get the marks out of the VLE and put them into the student information system. So there's just four things that I'd like to point out to you and maybe point you to at the conference. We've got Meg Juss from Edge Hill University who is talking about the user experience and VLE work that they did at Edge Hill. I think not surprising that Edge Hill got the test University of the Year in 2014. So Meg is speaking on Thursday. I'm speaking more about Ally on Thursday, the accessibility tool that I just mentioned and we've also got two people from our partner's Moodle who are speaking today, they're just here today by the way so I do catch them today. They're speaking about Moodle and accessibility and Moodle and mobility. So pop along to the stand for that session or to come along and get freebies or enter into the draw for an Echo Dot and meet any of my colleagues which I'm just going to ask you if you could just stand up so that people can see you. I didn't want them about that. There's my colleagues as well. So thank you very much. All together then for all of our sponsors, Danny, Dave and Gillian. Thank you very much. If you've just arrived, please take this time to find a seat because you're in the moment. But just so you know, there's no federal's plan today. So if there is an alarm at any point today, it is actually an emergency and please follow our staff's instructions and make your way out. But now I'll leave you in Pete's hand and I hope you have a good day with us. Thanks, Baron. Okay. I drew the shot. Well, I don't say I drew the shot, but I got the lucky job to introduce our first keynote speaker as we get things underway. So Bonnie Stewart is here with us today. Bonnie is an educator and social media researcher who's fascinated about what we do online. She's an instructor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. And she's also the founder and director of the Media Literacy Initiative Antagonist 2.0. And Bonnie's work explores the intersections of knowledge, technology and identity in her work. Now, one of the things I'd really like to point out is that we're really lucky to have Bonnie here, I think, because she was originally going to do this talk virtually, but we managed to convince her to come all this way to Canada to come and kind of give the keynote on the first day. So I know we're all warmed up now. We've already had three or four rounds of applause. So will you please join me in giving a real warm round of applause to Bonnie Stewart? Thank you. And thank you, Peter. She's got to get the slides to come up here. And we've got the little clicker. Good morning. How are you? I'm going to move over, I think, to this mic. It's a huge privilege for me to be here. I have brought you the gift of my Canadian September cold. So I apologize. And if I do start to have some kind of sneezing fit on stage or tissues begin to trail out behind me, I sincerely inform you that that is not Canadian bad manners. That's just me. I have followed ALT-C for years on the hashtag online and to actually have the opportunity to be here with an organization that does independent digital media work in higher ed is huge for me. So thank you. I have been working in digital and online education for about 20 years. And I was excited when I saw sort of the theme of the conference in terms of beyond islands of innovation, because I imagine for a lot of us in this room, there's an element of working on an island within our larger institutions that sometimes happens. And how many of you kind of look forward to this conference as a way to come together with people who are like you, who do the things that you do? Right. And that's important. But I'm also going to be that keynote person who troubles and gets us to think about some of the figures and language that we use when we talk about things like new normal. Because before I started working in digital education, I did my teacher training in the 90s. And I actually did a special ed background where one of the things that I learned and was trained to do, how many of you are familiar with this image, this figure? It's the bell curve, right? And so I learned as a training teacher to test to do to actually do Westler IQ tests, to look at each of these categories, and to box and mark sort of people's scores on given tests, according to if you fall outside of the norm in the center, and if you fall more than two standard deviations outside, you can be diagnosed with a learning disability. And this was useful to me. And I was excited to learn it. And I was actually very interested in the sense that my colleagues and I who were training together, we tested each other. And I discovered that possibly my lifelong visual spatial challenges had a very visible reason behind them in my own scores on these kinds of tests and that there were places where I did not fall inside the norm. Normal, when we use the word, can simply be the familiar, the thing that is known. And the idea of learning technologies in higher ed simply becoming part of the normal, the part of what we do, I think there's something really positive about that. But what I want to open up today is which parts of learning technologies, which aspects, what does that bring in the door with it? What figures has it arrived with? And is that sort of boxed standard deviation bell curve concept of normal part of what is dragging along because normal can also be a way of gatekeeping and be a way of saying this is what is inside and this is what is outside. This is what we do not validate. We do not legitimize. We do not accept. And so there are always power structures behind any idea of normal. My first teaching job was in a place called Joe Haven in what was then the Northwest Territories of Canada, what is now called Nunavut. It's an Inuit territory. How many of you here have heard of the Franklin Expedition? So Sir John Franklin sailed away from Empire and Queen in the 1840s to find the Northwest Passage. And he disappeared. And he disappeared and it's been known for a long time that he disappeared in the Central Arctic. You see that red dot? It's on an island called King William Island. And it's the town that I lived in. And just in the last two years, they've actually found Franklin ships, the Arabus and the terror, just around the area of that island, as had been part of the Inuit oral history for 150 some years. But it had taken that long for science, sort of to be able to perhaps hear the stories and look in the places where people were telling them those ships were. I taught in the first high school that had ever existed in that community marked by the red dot. All but one of my students were Inuit. My students ranged in age. I was 23 years old. My students were 16 through 29. Because many of them previously had had to fly down to the dot dot dot border to a city called Yellowknife to go to high school previous to that. In a residential school setting, which in Canada has a very significant colonial problematic history. And a lot of those students went to that high school and it would be like showing up in New York City when you've grown up in a small town and being completely removed from culture. And so people didn't necessarily stay. They went back to their community. And so when I came in, there was a great deal that I didn't know. And not just sort of how to manage a classroom because I didn't have a great deal of experience. I was sure that I had great tools to work with these students with. Right until I started working with the students. And so I slowly learned over the years that I spent in that high school in the early part of my career. I learned that I was white. And that was the first time that I had learned that because I grew up in a very small town in Prince Edward Island, Canada, where frankly, most of the people in that town were white. And so what that meant to be other in a community, but also other in a position of power. This was a community where education in the school system was only 20 years old. Most of the people in that community had been moved in by the government off the land approximately 20 years before and told their children had to go to school. And so I had to grapple very early in my career with what it meant to be a teacher and a purveyor of knowledge in a community where for the most part, there was no written text. If you went to the store, there were no magazines on sale. It was an oral history community. There was an incredible thousands of years depth of knowledge. There had been massive abuses of that knowledge and its continuity passed from generation to generation. And when I was asked to sit down and test some of my students to see if they had learning disabilities, how they fit within those norms and standard deviations, I couldn't really make sense of my results. Because how many of you have ever taken or given an IQ test? They're an extraordinarily and some people will disagree, but they're an extraordinarily culturally sensitive instrument. And some believe that no, no, their objective. My students, there was a question in one of the tests that required you to visually recognize the word Dahlia, D-A-H-L-I-A. It's a flower. But this community is north of the tree line. There are no Dahlias in this community. There is no relationship between what I was testing and the knowledge that these students had. And most of them tested outside of the norm. My concept of norms did not really allow me to help them. And I had to put those aside and begin to see what they could do in very different ways. I propose that maybe some of our concepts of normal right now in higher ed are not entirely useful to us either. And it might be valuable for us to consider putting them aside. Because normal is sometimes the wrong name used for average. How many of you get encouraged to make change in your environment? And then you try and you realize that maybe the people who have used that word don't necessarily want to make change themselves. Anybody? Anybody? At this point, and every country has its own challenges with this, but in higher ed, we face a time when many people are precarious in employment, when many of us do not have permanent contracts, and yet are asked to review, to peer review, to contribute to a system that assumes that your service is in some way recompensed or paid for. I've had the experience of publishing and not actually being able to access my own articles because my small institution cannot pay for them. I particularly like this tweet. It's the equivalent it says I'm opening an academic publishing themed restaurant. You bring the ingredients and get volunteers to cook and serve. Now pay me 10 grand. No problem. And so sometimes our normal, I propose, leaves us a little bit like a frog boiling in a pot. We have gotten used to a great deal of change that may not be serving the reasons we are in higher ed to begin with. And if our goal is to make change in people's practices, in knowledge creation, in empowerment, which is another word I'm a little wary of, but also think is important to talk about. We're not necessarily doing it right at this juncture. Sometimes our trajectories of change are expanding the inequalities in the middle rather than protecting or expanding the democratic norms that institutions have the capacity, a very singular capacity to protect. Now we get to the really cheery part. We are living in a time when the concept of institutions as protected societal social contracts is to an extent under threat. Just last month we went from in three days to as a world, almost having a nuclear war, to almost having a race war, to whatever the next spectacle was. And I don't know if you've been following Cambridge Analytica, but just a couple of days ago on September 1st, it was discovered that Cambridge Analytica worked in Kenya to effect the last election, and that election was actually overthrown. And there were a great many tweets coming out of this country about have we looked into the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and the outcome of the Brexit vote? I think that piece speaks for itself. The idea of leadership as ratings spectacle, as media spectacle, all of these things relate to the digital tools and platforms that we use for learning. And we're not immune to the threat to institutions. Our institutions as structures that are societal that are invested in have suffered significant for the most part disinvestment over the last number of decades. And this is an American publication. This is an American voice. But there are fears that we are moving in directions where the forces that shape higher ed, the normal that we've gotten used to is really and significantly under threat. Some of the stuff that we, you, the people in this room do are the things that actually break down those concepts of gatekeeping that that exist in higher ed, right? Sometimes we can use this is a sketch note, sorry, a sketch note that a participant in my digital pedagogy lab workshop did this past summer in Vancouver, when we looked at Howard Reingold's social media literacies article. And these literacies of attention and participation and collaboration, critical consumption, network awareness, these are things that an organization like alt values, right? These are things that to some extent, challenge, perhaps, the ways in which norms in higher ed operate to keep people out. And that can be great. But that idea of disruption, that word disruption may not be a model overall that can preserve our institutions, right? How many of you remember Napster? Napster was super exciting when it first came out. But that model of disruption threatens to unbundle the things that all exist under one roof. And once you unbundle them, it's not the unbundling that's necessarily a problem. This is something that I saw George Siemens say a few years back. It's how they get re-bundled that concerns me. How will once the pieces of what we do in higher ed get unbundled under a disruption model where there are a variety of promises being made around them. There might only be 10 universities in the future or whatever this year's promise is. How will those pieces get re-bundled and packaged up and sold back to us? And to whom will they be available? And for whom will they operate? And to me, when we talk about normal and new normal, these are all questions that we need to be considering. I kind of love these chairs. However, my colleague Amy made a very good point recently on Twitter when she noted that these chairs get sold as if they themselves are going to revolutionize your classroom. Now, can you do more flexible, broken down things in a classroom? If you have movable chairs rather than a lecture hall with desks, potentially there are certainly participatory ways that you can connect people together if you can move them around a room. Absolutely. But the chairs are not actually going to do it themselves. And interestingly, the week after Amy did this, she had a week long workshop herself where she had these chairs in her room. So those of us on Twitter were actively teasing her that her week must be going very revolutionarily. She reported back that it had. I'm a big fan of Seymour Paper, it's work. Disruption in the sense of just bringing tools into a room, and I think most of the people in this room would know that does not equal learning. Just bringing computers into a classroom where nothing else is changed. The idea that that would change learning is absurd. So widening participation has to be about more than chairs and technology. And then we get to the idea of open. Open is a funny word because I think in each country, in sort of the field of ed tech or learning technologies, it has a slightly different meaning. How many of you would consider yourselves here to be somewhat open practitioners? Okay. What does that mean? Do you work with other people? Is it about open to other people? Is that part of it? Is it about open source? Open access? Some combination of all of the above? Using open here really as a shorthand for outside of the gatekeeping of traditional institutional practice. So anything that involves openly sharing, participating, communicating in ways that are not necessarily bound by the structures of traditional higher ed is sort of the term of open that I'm framing here. And I think open is important. I think it may be the piece when we look at this normal that we need to consider. But it may not be solution or problem in and of itself. I do think that it is the trajectory that keeps higher ed from being monopolized by old forms of gatekeeping and institutions from being undermined by new forms. I think we live in a very interesting intersection right at the middle of that X, where we've got a trajectory of learning technologies that can go in a variety of directions. We've got the trajectory of open practice and somewhere in between there is the change that we will see or reap in 10 years. And to me, the open piece is the one that we have the most control over shaping and directing. And it is the one where we need to think about what figures and ideas we are bringing along with us on this trajectory of open practice as we go forward. Don't think Martin is here yet. I think he's coming this afternoon, but Martin Weller said, Openness helps shape the identity of higher education and its relationship to society. And it's that piece about relationship to society that I'd like to keep coming back to, because it's the piece that brought me into education that certainly brought me forward in education after my first two years, working with a community of Inuit students of all ages who totally did not fit inside of the norm of what I had been taught to expect. And from whom I learned a great deal. But wait, does open mean we do anything? Open as less emphasis on gatekeeping. Open as with fewer barriers. And open as continuing to learn to get beyond our silos. Do you folks have silos in Britain, these kind of large, I think of them as very much a sort of Canadian prairies farmland thing. Often, it is actually the people in this room, who have the best opportunity to connect academics beyond those silos and to make those connections. And one of the thing about silos is that they're about knowledge as a thing. How many of you have a device with you? Great. On that device, this is kind of a maxim at this point, but you have access to literally more information, whether you have any way of taking it in, than was available to me in my university library when I started at my tiny little college in 1989. It's just there. But what do we do with it? What I love about this quote is the point that actually, it's from 1975. Abundance isn't even digital. We've just been making stuff and printing stuff and sharing stuff and getting ideas out there at such a scale that has then ramped up to such another level with the digital that we are never going to master all of the things. If you wanted to be a renaissance man or woman who could do all of the things in your time, you picked the wrong time. Because we live in a time when people need to be able to navigate knowledge abundance. And we need to educate towards the handling of data rather than the accumulation of data. But our silos sometimes still encourage us to focus on the accumulation of data. And so one of the jobs of working in the open with learning technologies is sometimes to begin to make those silos accessible and available and connected to other forms of knowledge so that people can navigate and thread a path through the things that they need to know, not necessarily all that is known. And one of the structures of abundance is networks. How many of you have a family? Networks like abundance are not actually digital. They don't originate with the digital. Networks are one of the oldest forms of human social organization. Networks are the ways in which we have clusters of relationships where we're the little dots. And the lines between dot and dot is the relationship potentially between two people. And if you've only had the relationship of shaking hands one time, then that one experience is the line. And if that person is someone you've known your whole life, that other node, that line may be made up of a lifetime of memories and history. And you know, right, if you think about a family, how many of you grew up with a sibling? Do you as one dot in a cluster and your sibling as another dot have identical relationships with say, your mother? Usually not. I'm sure that your mother loved you best. Totally true. But we don't. Right. And we know when information comes from one node, that it may be more trustworthy or differently trustworthy from from another node. So if your mother says, you look lovely, honey, you might be like, Oh, well, she would say that even if I was wearing a garbage bag, you know, whereas if your brother says, Oh, you look lovely. You might wonder, like, am I am I dying? What's going on here? Obviously, there is a giant roll of toilet paper hanging out of the back of my pants or something. Because that's the only way in which that context might get you a compliment. So we understand that who information comes from shapes how we are to receive it. And that is the structure that networks lend to abundance, because if you're rolling around in the abundance of social networks, right, how many of you have a Facebook account? Twitter? Right. And you see something that comes from someone whose name you know, maybe it comes from Marin. Okay, and she's a trusted source, because you know that she's connected to alt, and maybe she usually shares good articles. So you think, Oh, I should read that. Whereas if you see something that comes from your poor auntie Norma, who's constantly circulating those, did you hear this terrible scandalous fake news story? You might not be as inclined to click that, hopefully, hopefully these are the literacies we are learning as time goes on. Because you recognize that that node is not as credible for that type of information. And so that's how networks and participatory structures and open communication can help us navigate abundance. And open can also help us break down some of our boundaries and binaries. I just did a talk Friday night before I left Canada about Andy Warhol at my local public library, and how he sort of foreshadowed some of digital culture and some of the things that we're living with today. And one of the strongest things that he kind of left us as a legacy was Andy Warhol lived, he started off as a commercial artist, but he actually really, really wanted to succeed in the high art, the formal world. And so he constantly sort of was looking for approval from the high art world, but all of his work essentially broke down the legitimacy structures of that high art world, because he would present things like a soup can and say, it's art. Right. And so he collapsed the prestige economies, essentially, of the New York art world, and mass media, and put them together in a way that is quite similar to the way that open academics, and folks who work in open education, sometimes collapse the prestige economies of academia, the silos, the stuff that counts, right, a prestige economy in academia is, where have you published? What associations do you belong to? What status on the hiring ladder? Are you where did you go to school? What are the things that are circulating recognizable items that are attached to your name? And those really do carry a fair amount of truck. Years ago, in 2013, I did my PhD thesis on academic Twitter, and how academics who use Twitter a great deal read each other, how we make sense of somebody's influence in that space. And I had the privilege of having about eight people, including Audrey Waters, who keynoted here I think in 2014, and a number of other people who were sort of affiliated with academia in some way, and had any variety of like huge accounts like Audrey's or very small accounts. And I gave those exemplar bios, their Twitter bios to my participants. And I said, tell me about these, tell me how you would read these people. And the interesting thing about that was that, even though all of my participants were academics and very able to read how prestigious a given institution was within the states or different countries, because I had people all over the world, the only institutional affiliation that actually stuck out that people cared about at all on Twitter was Oxford. So Dave White, who I think is showing up later as well, he had volunteered to be one of my exemplar identities, and his Twitter bio said Oxford on it. And every single participant who looked at it said, I don't even want to care, this shouldn't matter on Twitter. But it had enough brand recognition that it carried. But for the most part, in academic Twitter, it actually doesn't matter as much where you've published. It doesn't matter as much what your status is as professor or reader or senior lecturer or instructional designer. It's not what your circulating status signals are. It's what you do and how you interact and how you contribute. And so there is a collapse there of binaries and boundaries, similar to what Warhol did. But we have to confront if we're going to engage in that space. And so it can be very intimidating. Have any of you ever tried to support a senior admin who's a dean or a vice chancellor and has quite a bit of status in academia into starting to use something like Twitter? I my experience of this is that there has sometimes been real, almost like sticker shock around what do you mean nobody cares that that's my title. I'm accustomed to trailing that prestige with me wherever I go, but now I only have three followers and I have to be interesting. It's quite intimidating. It really is. And so these are weird spaces that we work in. And we work on corporate platforms. How many of you've seen the new Twitter terms of service? They just came out two days ago. The bottom part of this comment says Twitter may have spotted a revenue stream. Now pretty much everything that you put out on Twitter, starting October 2nd, they can sell. So that's problematic. Chris Giliert, who works in the States, he's pointed out despite their participatory rhetoric, right? And I'm all for the participatory rhetoric. I love love the participatory love the open sharing. But social platforms operate as closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic ones. These are tensions and contradictions at the core of our normal. These are problems. When you have a space like Twitter where I've been working for 10 years, I literally did my PhD in and on Twitter. And just the terms of service are randomly changed quite regularly. And the platform itself changes quite regularly right in the middle of my PhD research. It's like showing up it's like showing up in your kitchen one morning in the fridge is moved. You know, and you're like, Well, where did that go? I, I don't know. So when we are considering what open means for higher education and how to confront what open means, it means all of these things. It means that we both challenge the traditional gatekeeping, right of academic prestige economies, and at the same time exist on corporate platforms that we don't necessarily control. But I think it's important to begin looking at open as something that needs to enable adaptive change. Okay, and what, what could that do for higher education? How many of you are familiar with the idea of adaptive change? It's just a mental framework. It's basically, it counters the idea of technical change. And so technical change, technical problems are easy to identify. Right. They lend themselves to cut and dried solutions. They can be solved by an expert. It's great to be able to bring in an expert and say, Oh, great. We're going to have a solution to this. Technical problems are often contained. And there are people generally like technical solutions, because they can see what they need to do. Adaptive problems. And I would say that higher ed right now is beset by adaptive problems. We have lots of technical problems. But we're often trying to solve our adaptive problems with technical solutions. Adaptive problems are hard to get people to even agree what the problem is. Adaptive problems require shifts in values and beliefs. And people with the problem have to do the work of solving it. And most of us who work in this field, who've been tasked with change, but do not are not very often given the power institutionally to make that change, right, who work on platforms that we do not necessarily fully control, who live sort of straddling prestige economies. We live in a time of adaptive change. And that, to me, is part of what open means for higher education is learning to find ways to grapple with this. It's hard to confront things. It's hard to consider what open really means for higher ed. Now that we live in a world of digital media, we are increasingly confronted as human beings regularly and often, right? And in a world where things seem to be news wise on a sensationalized cycle, we are often confronted even more regularly than we may have been before. I'd like to propose that we need a model, a figure to consider as we go forward in this water that we have to work together to be open. And yet, we haven't necessarily got models to look to from previous generations. Sometimes it's about perspective. Someone posted these two photos recently on my Facebook. They found these as installations in the park of a children's hospital. And she showed the first photo. And then she showed the second photo. And it was as simple as things change, change things. It depends on where you stand. Right? How we look at the times that we live in and the challenges that we confront depend a great deal on where we stand. And to use this, I'm actually going to look for a model from a previous generation. How many of you are familiar with Donna Haraway and the cyborg? Okay, a couple? Great. The word cyborg has sort of shown up in our science fiction fantasies as a monster, a machine, human combo. And Haraway was playing with that idea. In 1985, she initially wrote out this theory, this concept, this figure. The cyborg for her is a figure to guide how we go forward. And I find that this figure is still extraordinarily prescient. That we have not quite managed to bring into being what it can do or what it can offer us as a thinking tool. Haraway is a biologist out of California. She was politically kind of working at the intersection of trying to deal with that idea of normal and the norm and objectivity that I opened with. And she posited a feminist objectivity that was very different philosophically from the rational objectivity of what she called the God's eye view or the God trick. The seeing from nowhere. If you think about that idea that you can see the world from a non-embodied point of view, there's something interesting that I think social networks, digital social networks may have made a little bit more visible to us in terms of challenging that norm of objectivity. And the question is, if you think about connecting with the people near you. So what I'm going to do is just, I often do a full exercise in this, but I think I'm just going to do a super quick version right now. I'm going to tell you that my favorite color is red. And I'd like you to imagine a red string that connects me to you, me to you, me to everyone in the room. Can you see it? Can you imagine it? That is broadcast model communications, right? That's often how we teach. That's how TV was when I was a kid. All those things. Now, what I'd like to do is do one-to-one communications. I would like you each to turn to somebody next to you and just shake hands and tell them your favorite color, please. I'm almost done. Okay. So now, I'd like you to envision the color that connects you to your partner and their color that connects them to you as a little dyad of color. Can you see it? Okay. I'd like you to do one more thing. I'd like you to take their color. I'd like you to turn to someone else and pass it along. Okay. Hand on their color. This person's favorite color is X. Okay. I'm going to pull you back only because I'm very cognizant of time. If we were to continue to share those colors, there might be a few that would go viral. Maybe someone in the room is famous enough that everyone wants to know their favorite color. Or maybe there's a secret, terrible favorite color that no one's supposed to have. So that one goes around too. Other people's communications may be their first friend they never passed it on. And it's like when you post a Facebook update and nobody likes it. Right? And some communications get dropped. But what you're starting to do there by passing on the thread is actually passing on, you're building a many to many networked communications thing. Now, picture the room. Imagine even with just two handshakes each. What does our room start to look like? It's pretty colorful, right? Imagine, can you see it from the top? Imagine there was someone sitting on the ceiling. They would see every connection. But do you know what you would see? You can envision the rest from the top, but your handshakes will always be those people's faces, those hands. Right? You cannot see something that you've been involved in and down and dirty with from the top. You always see from the space of your own body. And so Haraway talks about this as situated knowledges. So I would like to propose this idea of the view from a body. I'd like to bring us as we think about open and new normals that we consider embodied work and embodied perspectives as important. The differences in our experiences of the world based on our bodies and our human walking around. That these shape the ways that we can know each other and the work that we can do. And in a world where we are constantly confronted by difference and where there's a lot of false equivalency, that we accept that anger and defensiveness, that sometimes we're seeing a lot of our signs that we are learning and that discomfort is not the same as hurt and harm. And so for those of us who walk around in certain types of bodies that have certain types of privileges, that may feel very uncomfortable when we feel like we may be hanging on to them with our cold dead hands, that that discomfort is not necessarily the same as hurt and harm. And that we be willing to enter into new conversations around openness and being open to other people. The cyborg is subversive. The cyborg is the illegitimate child as are all things that come from computers of militarism and capitalism and a little bit of state socialism. But they are often unfaithful to their origins. To me the cyborg as a figure allows us to work with our realities of being in the open, in learning technologies in this time. The cyborg is not worried about purity or innocence. The cyborg makes ties of affinity rather than identity, rather than you're the same as me. And our cyborg is not just born from the militarism and capitalism that started the development of the computer, but from our academic work and our academic prestige economies and from the big data and big surveillance of the spaces we work in. Because I struggle with how do we do truly open educational things in spaces bound by all these challenges. And sometimes I feel like I don't know how to make change and go forward based in all of these problems. All of my faves are problematic. And yet the figure of the cyborg gives me a model of kind of hope and possibility for doing something not faithful to norms as the bell curve. What would the cyborg do? The cyborg would continue to go out there and do the work that you folks are doing in the open, in digital spaces, with faculty, with students. My own project is a media literacy project based in that. Because nothing goes back in the Pandora's box of what we have kind of let loose on the world by 2017. We're not going to suddenly decide in higher ed that we're not using digital technologies anymore because they have challenges. We're not going to decide that our academic hierarchies don't matter. So we need to work with that and find a way to go forward to do something good. And I offer you as a norm rather than the bell curve, the cyborg, to think about as you think about the work that you do this week. Thank you. I'm for a few questions. So Helen will organize questions, but if you have a question, if you raise your hand, we're going to try and come up to you. And if you could also let us know who you are and where you're from as you pose your question, so Bonnie knows who she's talking to. Right. I'm sure there's loads of questions. We've probably got time for two. So who wants to kick us off? Come on. You know you want to. It's a heavy talk. One there. Thank you very much. Yeah. Alastair Clark, work with an organization called Stirring Learning. Thank you very much for your presentation. My only question is why only HE? Many of us work in other areas of education and doesn't everything that you've said also apply to other institutions or is there something specific about HE that I've missed? Yes and no. Yes, it applies. Absolutely. I also work in what I think you call here further ed and to some extent in K to 12 and I think in education broadly the one piece that I would say the no to that there is something specific about higher ed at least in my experience of it is the very particular prestige economy differ as you change sectors. And so my experience of the value placed on certain types of publications and the challenges particularly of the academic publishing system and its intersection with the lack of hiring that's happening. That part is sometimes kind of specific to higher ed particularly at least in my context. But I think it applies to all education in terms of the cyborg piece. Hi Bon. Helen Beatham. Thank you for that great keynote. It was lovely to hear from you live. I wondered when you mentioned Donna Harroway if you might be going to think about another offering that feminism brings to the open space which is the idea of the gift economy and of counterposing that to the exchange economy. So in feminism that would mean that we share our ideas first and worry about their value in the cultures of academic prestige second. And my own experience is that actually to do that to share first requires quite extraordinary resources as well as commitment that most people who are actually engaged in the kind of open sharing we might want to see. In practice have tenure or have other kinds of academic resource have project funding have ways of being open that are in practice being supported. And I wonder whether you have anything to say about whether we can move towards a space where actually we are equally resourced to share and to be open and to give gifts rather than only a few people being in that position. Thank you Helen. I think it's really important to recognize that each sort of national context operates a little bit differently. And I will say that in my own case when for instance in my PhD research of the people who participated I had one person based in Ireland people in South Africa, Mexico, Australia no one who was actually in the UK space so I'm not going to speak for the UK space right now but of those 14 participants seven were graduate students or early career researchers and then a couple were instructional technologists rather than faculty members. And for the most part it was particularly those who actually were early career researchers who were particularly benefited by the open sharing piece who were not necessarily resourced in conventional ways I myself was similar during that period so I work at a very small institution I'm precarious, I'm not tenured and all of my work has always been in the open often without the resources that I would love to have to bring to it but I've been able to leverage so I started doing keynotes when I was a PhD student solely because my work was on Twitter I think it was largely because that topic was kind of interesting to people and curious and a bit of a novelty so I had that great privilege of starting to work in that prestige area while I very much did not have resources or academic prestige to bring to it and it's been sort of a leveraging of the two together but we need to also make sure that as institutions we recognize and learn to become literate in the ways that people are doing important knowledge work in the open and begin perhaps to consider adapting some of our prestige economy pieces to that so definitely applying resources to allow people to do the work in the open but also note what they're already actually doing and sometimes the resources come with top-down direction that may not take people in the same paths as they would if they were able to make the choices for themselves Thank you, thank you so much Bonnie it's such a pleasure to have you here and thank you for kicking off our conference with such a thought provoking and fantastic talk I've got a little present to say thank you and I'm sure you'd all like to join me in really giving Bonnie a big thank you Thank you so much so we have a break now 15 minutes, yep and it's really important