 Hello and welcome to this pre-recorded talk on emerging community leadership for digital learning in the performing arts conservatoire sector. I'm Evan Dickerson, I'm a learning technologist with over 27 years of higher education experience in both hands-on and management roles in both small specialist universities such as the Guildhall School and larger universities including Queen Mary University, St George's etc. I joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as their sole learning technologist in July 2021. So a little bit of information about what distinguishes a performing arts conservatoire from a more generalist university and really as we can see from both of these sources here, Conservatise UK and UCAS distinguish conservatise by means of their delivery of approach of teaching and learning. So we can think of conservatise as including dance, acting, instrumental and vocal performance and you know the emphasis is on the skill, developing the skill rather than the more academic history, criticism, understanding of the theoretical underpinning, though of course conservatise by nature of their discipline have to teach some of that as well. And as UCAS say in a conservatoire education individual development is paramount so rather than taking a large body of students teaching them as a group, although necessarily that happens in some areas, you know in individual development of skills in singing or performance of any kind, drama, whether it's behind the scenes in terms of the various roles in production arts etc that we cover at the Guildhall that is all part of you know what is what is covered. We can think of learning technologists then if we focus on our particular role as having several different peer networks and these are represented by some of the some of the images on the screen here. So you can think of it in terms of people at different areas of their or different phases of their career whether they're early career learning technologists such as that network that exists on LinkedIn or at the other end of the spectrum there's the Heads of eLearning forum. You know there are other types of network as well you know. So we've got GistComail acts as a kind of very loose network like that often connecting people around a particular interest or theme, particularly use of technology and there are groups and communities that exist around particular technologies. So Instructure have the UK canvas users group for example there's the Moodle Moodle there's the Penopto annual users conference there in London there are some geographic groups as well like in London there's the Moodle users group Greater London Muggle and of course ALT have a number of different groups whether they're geographic or focused around a special interest. When I presented that tail end of last year was the copyright and online learning special interest group which was very interesting to see copyright issues and talk about them from a learning technologist's point of view and there are also other groups and networks like the learning network which is perhaps more aimed at the commercial aspect of learning technology rather than the university sector. So what about a peer network for the conservatory sector then? Well I looked around when I joined the Guildhall school there wasn't one so it's a bit like a tumbleweed experience well to say there wasn't one wasn't strictly true there were a few things that GistComail list here that was very you know sparsely used in that kind of thing so it seemed there was a space even amongst all of the groups that were already and if we think about how learning technologists often employ leadership traits what do we do? We are proactive, we build teams, we are collaborative in a very nature of our role and we enhance the visibility of the people we work with and you know quite often we meet for a purpose as well so all of these things have been loved have identified and I think leadership in the learning technology space I would say to use this final quote from their paper needs to be nimble should be dynamic it's quite often fluid and responsive to need and adaptability is crucial. So therefore December last year I decided I would try and form a at that stage what was a peer network group rather than a leadership forum of any kind to share practice between institutions we had an impartial chair a colleague of mine who I've known from a previous work role Julian Bream agreed to come along and be a chair of that so that you know somebody impartial was running it on the day and everybody who took part felt that they could share their views openly. So garnered participation by invitation people I knew elsewhere around the conservatory sector that I tried to you know find out who was where linked in just male list etc put posts up invited invitations and sign up via event right. So we focused on three main questions this was really just to kind of what you find out what the landscape in the technology sector was like and in the conservatory space so what works what hasn't worked in terms of technologies sharing some of the major challenges of the past two years and what do we think the future of learning technology looks like in the conservatory space so those were three questions that we really focused on debating online this is a screenshot of you know the meeting itself Julian there in the center at the top chairing the thing with the questions you know behind him and you know some of the some of the members you can see there so we had some good representation Guildhall Central School of Speech and Drama Royal College of Music you know Oxford University other places like that so you know we had a good set of representation I'd say so some outputs from that internally on the left you can see I did a write up for our internal you know intranet and I also incorporated a lot of the the quotations and things like that that came out of the session into a forthcoming chapter I'm writing have written for a publication in a CEDA special journal to be published in the autumn and that was peer reviewed and one of the peer reviewers said that it was really good to have representation from the conservatory sector which is underrepresented in the literature both of learning technology and you know educational development as a whole so if I was to summarize where I think an initiative like this could lead it is by having you know regular meetings diarised that people knew when and where they were happening varied participation modes have some on site have some online maybe hybrid sessions as well discuss topics of value to others that are suggested by and led by the community have it has the potential to be a forum for kick starting further collaboration between institutions I think and it can have value if people evidence that internally for themselves and show that attending things like this makes a different with the decision making that they do internally but you know I think with things like this if you build it there will come eventually but one of the key takeaways I think is start small learn to walk with it build it gradually get people to buy in and then eventually you can run with it thank you