 Welcome to Nottingham, where we're on the third day of the ALT conference here at East Midlands Conference Centre. My name's Alistair Clark. I'm somebody who works in various guises in adult learning, and I'm here joined by a colleague. Hi, I'm Susan Easton. I'm from NIAS, which is National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, and I'm very pleased to be here at ALT, which I've enjoyed very much. We've been chatting about some of the issues that have been important to us while we've been here over the three days, and actually there's quite a lot to take away, and we've actually focused down on a few of the points that we wanted to share with you. It's no secret that there have been an awful lot of people here at the conference from the higher education sector, but it's been really good that other sectors of education have also been represented. I think Susan probably agree that it's one of the great benefits of the ALT conference that you get a chance to learn what other people are doing in other sectors, steal the good ideas and ignore the stuff that doesn't seem to be relevant, and I think that's certainly what I've been doing going around the sessions. It was particularly nice that the first day was defined as having a further education and adult community learning theme to it. It did mean that people who could only get away from work for one day to the conference and who worked in that sector were able to come along and experience all of the papers and the presentations that were relevant in that area. I saw some great stuff there. It's a really interesting use of Facebook and it's talked about an awful lot, but the experience at Bridgend College I thought was quite impressive. They really thought through the issues of how they would use Facebook in a class. I've still not embraced it in any of my teaching, but I'm very, very interested in hearing people make that work. However, I guess the highlight of that first day for me was the consultation session, which was linked to the Feltank group, which has been set up by Skills Minister Matthew Hancock. He's set up this consultation group to consider how technology really can be used to offer a step change. In fact, a disruptive change was the phrase used in the specification for the group in the way that the post-16 education sector works. I'm attracted by the notion of disruption, if it's a positive disruption, if it makes people rethink the way that learning is experienced. There's been a lot of talk over the conference about focusing on the learners. We had a keynote speech right at the beginning from President of the National Union of Students, which set a really good tone there. A recurring theme in the Feltank discussion was around the inclusion of learners, students as co-creators of learning environments. I think these are easy words to use, but to be honest, the practicality is the challenge. We did hear some great examples, but we also heard people being quite challenging, students being quite challenging, saying that their experience of co-creation was sometimes quite tokenistic. I guess the bit that I done picked from that, and I went straight away to my blog and kind of made a public statement about it, is that I'm still convinced there are lots of teachers in the post-16 sector who are nervous about the use of technology. They're increasingly using it themselves, but still quite nervous about placing the initiative in the hands of their students. They'll sometimes set a particular task or particular activity within a technology, but when it comes to actually building on the creativity and the imagination of their students to choose which technology to use for their learning or which technology to use for their creation, I think they stand back from that quite often because they feel depowered by not having A, the technical knowledge and B, maybe the pedagogical understanding of what the implications are. I think technology in the hands of the learners and decision making about technology in the hands of the learners, but clearly with the skills of the teacher being there to focus that. I really hope that Feltag takes on board that because we've had some great CPD, but I don't think that's necessarily been covered properly, so I think that's the next stage of CPD. A couple of other things that I think have been important, and then I will give you a chance to speak soon, I promise, don't worry. I didn't use it at all. Interesting discussions about digital literacies yesterday, and I enjoyed going through the first part of the theories, and then I have to admit that I've begun to get a little bit lost with some of the complexities of the rather deeper theory that was being used. Because I think we in the adult community learning world are essentially very practical about digital literacies, how they should be defined and how they should be used, taught. But the key message for me really is that ever changing landscape, the fact that there is not a key set of digital literacies which stay forever in a day. And I think the recognition that the buttonology, the pressing the buttons in the right order is less and less important and the understanding of the implications of digital identity, the way that you pay for every resource that you use on the net, even though it may actually appear to be free at point of use, i.e. through the data that you're providing to the provider of the resource or indeed the adverts that you're receiving as a result. So digital literacies I thought was really interesting, but I guess what floated my boat here was the whole area of open education. We have had a really powerful relaunch of Ault's open education special interest group and there's been a lot of work in this field in the last probably six years in the UK with some quite high profile funded projects which have now come to an end. But the momentum really still needs to keep going and Ault is now supporting the Open Education Conference. OER 13 was very successful back in April and took place here in Nottingham and OER 14 will be in Newcastle next April. These series of open education conferences have developed quite an international status so it's really good that Ault has become a key supporter of these events. But it's a bit HE dominated. Did I say that? It's really important that we get the voice of further education and adult community learning in this space. The potential of using freely available, shareable and repurposeable content to the benefit of people who have so far had least access to education is really, really important. So I'll be banging that drum over the next year. And I'd like to hear about maths. OK. Obviously over the last couple of days I've been participating in a lot of sessions however I was here primarily to talk about the technology aspects of the Maths for us initiative. The Maths for us initiative was ran last year and is still continuing. It's initiatives that's managed by now is on behalf of Biz in order to try to address through different means the fact that one in four adults in England have maths levels or maths skills about the average of an 11-year-old. So that's obviously quite important then to try to address. So anyway the Maths initiative, the Maths for us initiative, gathered together 20 partners from all kinds of backgrounds, one of whom was old, to try to address this. And from that work there was all kinds of activities like the recruitment of 8,000 maths champions, various tools and resources, but quite a strong feature of the Maths for us initiative was the technology strand which had various outputs. Now I was here yesterday to talk about one of those which is Maths Everywhere app. The rationale for this really is that adults who have poor maths skills have gone through the school system, they haven't increased their maths skills to a level that's fit for everyday living. And to do more of the same would not be successful and so what we're trying to do with the Maths for us or the Maths Everywhere app is to put maths in the context of everyday living. It was a really successful launch of the app, very very well received. It has three different types of thing in it. One is tools, one is learning and one is assessment. Assessment is probably too strong a word but it's basically about self-trialling. You can challenge others, you can go against time and so on. It integrates the use of digital badges. The tools which are available are practical tools to help you to be able to calculate everyday situations. For example, what's your dat score? What code should your dat score be if you want to get to whatever it is you're getting done? That's 180 I think. There's ones about calculating the amount and the cost of petrol to go from different distances, from different journeys. There's one about calculating the amount of money it would cost to build a wall to do any kind of construction. Great things about the Maths app are, first of all, it does really set maths in everyday context. Secondly, it's free. It's free for anyone to access, anyone to use. Third, it's multi-platform so it can be used on any device, web or mobile. Fourth, not only is it free but also the code is open source so what we're hoping is that developers will be able to take that code and do with it as they please. Develop that in a different direction, expand it, it's completely open source code and that will be published at the end of October. Other things about the app is it links to another great product from the technology strand which is the App Index. The App Index was developed by Alt with some support from Martin Hoxe. Basically, the idea of the App Index is that although we know there are lots and lots and lots of apps out there, it's very difficult for tutors and for the general public to be able to find ones that are used. So the App Index gathers them together, invites reviews saying how they can be used and you might say well if there's this App Index with all of these different apps gathered into it, what was the purpose of developing the mass everywhere app? The purpose was, as I say, it was one that was tailored me to suit the needs of adults. Secondly, it maps against the adult numeracy curriculum directly and third, it has the opportunity to become sustainable through its development in different areas. So we actually have scoped out what was available before we commissioned the App for us index, before we commissioned the mass everywhere app. And I should add actually, it was developed by Bolton College, by two great people, Paul McKean and Catherine Langstrath, who did sensational work along with their developers who are a commercial development company and never worked in education before and together I think they have developed a fantastic product. Well I'm really quite inspired because I know some people actually who are very shy about the fact that their mass is not up to standard. When's this available? There is a beta version available at the moment, try saying that fast, but the full version on all platforms will be available from the first of August where it's going out on a limited trial, first of October, and then going out to wider publicity and wider use for anyone by the end of October at the latest. And is there a URL that we can give people? Well all of the products from the Maserahs initiative are on the Maserahs website and that's the best place to link directly to that and to the other product. So it's www.mass-us.org That sounds great, really good. OK, well it's been great to link the conference with those of you who are at home or at work or somewhere else. We hope that this has given you a little bit of a flavour of the way the conference has been for us, Susan and myself, so I'll say goodbye. And goodbye for me.