 OK, well, we'll make a start. Thank you for staying if you know you're going to enjoy this session. So Amplify-FE is a huge part of ALT, the Association for Learning Technology. It's sometimes, I wouldn't say overlooked but perhaps forgotten about that learning technology is something that is also very prevalent in learning in further education. We are very much higher education driven and so the Amplify-FE brings a real extra piece of sparkle to ALT in that we get to capture all of those activities and journeys that are happening and those communities that are happening and networks that are forming in the FE sector that a lot of our work has quite a lot of correlation to. So I'm going to introduce Maron, who needs no introduction whatsoever, you know who Maron is, and she will be telling you more about our community of practice sector report. Thanks very much, Billy, and good afternoon everybody. I am so thrilled to be here today to share with you the Amplify-FE communities of practice sector audit report of this year. This is a brand new piece of research that we're very excited to share for the first time today. It's launching here at ALT's annual conference. Whilst I'm here on the stage, I am very much supported by the whole Amplify-FE project team who've done so much work, especially my colleague Emma Proctor-Leg, who is the key author of this report and also Chloe and Lynn. And at the end, we'll get all everybody to give you a wave and come up on stage just so you can find out more. The Amplify-FE stand, which is just outright the main hall here, is open to you for the whole conference. So hopefully, if you're inspired by this session today, you'll have an opportunity to learn a whole lot more. Now Amplify-FE is a strategic long-term partnership between the Association and the UFI Voktec Trust. We did launch it in 2020, just in the throes of the pandemic, and today Amplify-FE connects over 2,500 professionals in further education and vocational education. And it is only possible because UFI and ALT with shared values and a joint vision work together to make this work possible. This piece of research that we are launching today is one of the things that our communities appreciate the most. Because it looks very real picture or it rather portrays a very real picture of how communities of practice are growing, are changing, are getting lost and disappearing all together and provides practitioners, policymakers and institutions with an opportunity to connect those very elusive dots. This is a pioneering piece of research that Emma is now in its third or fourth year of carrying out. And I've got the privilege today to introduce you our findings from this year. We're seeing very important changes and earlier today in some of the sessions we heard about the fragmentation of social media, the changes in our sector in the post-pandemic era. And this piece of research puts data behind those changes that are happening. Specifically this year we focused on looking at the digital landscape making a really great impact. The being less community sustainability on the open web and looking at how we as a kind of meta network can help people continue to connect and object or rather achieve one of our core objectives. Now in 2020 when we first launched this audit we didn't realise we were on a journey to kind of do a big landmark piece of research for the next few years. So the journey has continued and last year there were three reports and this year this is the first of our audit reports with the key findings that is coming out. And that data set is now not just showing us what's happening this year but also what's been happening since 2020 and how things are changing. And it's an absolutely interesting and fascinating glimpse into what's happening behind the kind of communities that many of us are always talking about and that we're active in but not really get a bird's eye view of. Because this is really hopefully going to give you some new insights into where the conversation is moving, how people are connecting but also what connections are lost. So our audit as I mentioned is now in its fourth year and it continues to grow. As you can see in the first year we started with a relatively ambitious number of communities of practice we audited but now we have grown extremely large over the last few years so that we are now many more multiples of those communities we first looked at and we added 86 new communities of practice, groups and forums to our audit this year and we removed 28. And for those of you who've been following along this piece of research you will see that each year some really big pieces of our community go missing altogether. They're simply closed down, websites disappear, groups and mailing lists disintegrate and things are changing very rapidly. Now the 322 communities of practice that we've audited this year as I said from the initial audit of 100, there's a huge increase here, has really expanded and it reflects I think also the interest in this piece of research as we have been able to add new data set, open data sets I hastened to add that helps more and more policy makers and institutions and individuals understand what's going on in this sector. And you can also get a sense of the number of communities that were removed so overall our number is growing but the number of communities that are defunct that no longer function is also increasing overall. And it's particularly true since the pandemic years. Now one of the things we're very mindful of is that the conversation is changing and where the conversation is taking place is changing. Now for sake of clarity we have continued to refer to the platform formally known as Twitter as Twitter because if we just started putting Xs in data analysis we wouldn't very easily be able to tell what's going on there. So we do mean Twitter platform X and vice versa so hopefully the data continues to make sense. I don't think they thought this through. But one of the new examples of communities of practice identified via threads is Edu Threads UK, a newly created communities of practice. And this I think exemplifies how much the number of platforms we have to look at each year is changing. So it's not just the overall number of communities that is changing and increasing but also where we have to go and find them. While Twitter does remain the most popular platform with a total of 157 handles that we review. We are seeing more platforms being used like Teams and Zoom and WhatsApp and LinkedIn groups and as aforementioned Threads and Instagram. Now we're going to give you a little bit of a sense of what's happening on these different platforms but I am mindful that you'll probably want to go and have a look at that report and do a deeper dive yourself. But there's been a lot of changes on Twitter in particular the policies around content but also the change on the branding that we already mentioned. And we've seen more groups than ever experience a decline in the follower and the number of groups leave the platform altogether. Examples include DigiLearn Sector and the Beara EdTech belonging to the Beara Educational Technology Group both leaving Twitter. The UK EdChat, a traditional Twitter chat group now cross-posed their weekly chat on Threads 2. And the UK Fee Chat and I know we have quite a few fans of that in the room at the moment are moving to a monthly format from September and will be cross-posting their chats on LinkedIn via the Amplify Fee LinkedIn group. And I think this is a really good example five years ago or even three years ago UK Fee Chat on Twitter was such an established institution within communities of practice and now it is much more threatened by what's been happening across the platform. Let's also look at mailing lists and email. So there's been a growth in mailing lists and Giskmail which continue to be popular options with communities of practice. This year we looked at a total of 94 who use this methods of communication and there was still an increase in the use of mailing lists from 35 to 34 who are using Giskmail to run their mailing lists. I think this is a really interesting one like given that ALT itself has a very old established member list that continues to be one of our most popular membership activities. It is sometimes the good old mailing list that saves the day when Twitter platforms do weird things. But the examples of one that for example increased subscribers includes AI and tertiary education community, the assistive technology network, the future teacher talks UK and the old anti-racism and learning technology special interest group. Now one more deeper dive and this one is into Facebook communities. We look at 63 different communities that have a presence on Facebook and that's a significant increase from 47 from last year. Approximately three quarters of these are pages rather than groups and this year one of the new communities of practice added as well and we have loads of new ones that we've looked at 14 that are still using Facebook as well. The largest group is the Microsoft innovative educator program. Now I think we do want to make a point here when we talked earlier in the introduction about the open web and the sustainability of communities of practice in the open web. It is a real challenge for us that more and more closed groups are just operating or behind closed doors so you can't really see who's in the group or how active they are. And as a new member if you do find them you don't always know if you would be welcome or what might happen in these groups and the group chats. So that is one of the things that we've been watching quite carefully how many communities of practice are moving from quite an open format to closed ones. I want to just pause here and give a big shout out to Brian Mothers who's in the audience for us today so Brian I can spot you up there. Brian continues to work with our community and helps by visual thinkery and conversations to celebrate some of the heroes, the unsung heroes in our sector. And we are huge fans of Brian's as you will be able to see the conference venue is decked out in life size, Brian Mothers creations. But we are huge fans particularly at Amplify V because we really want to make sure that there is that beating heart of the community that really comes across and celebrates the FE superheroes. So a big thank you to Brian who makes that possible for us. Despite the best efforts of social media platforms to make it difficult and fragment the conversation, the conversation that we are supporting with the hashtag Amplify V is growing. And I think that is a huge testament to the Amplify V team and all the engagement that is happening across the different platforms now including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or platform X and LinkedIn. And this year we've seen nearly 30,000 tweets with this hashtag. And when we first started Amplify V, I remember this moment so distinctly when we tried to choose a hashtag that would really resonate that people would use. Our job was to come up with a hashtag that would be here for decades to come, not for one conference. And when we sat down and we tried to come up with a name, I'm really glad we stuck with Amplify V because I think still now it tells you what it does within the hashtag. It amplifies the voices that are in further and vocational education and every time we take into another tens of thousands on this hashtag, I think we're doing a little bit of a better job. And it is now used in a whole different variety of contexts doing its job to connect networks. It's the kind of meta hashtag that we're all following. Now this and tomorrow the creator of tags, Martin Hawksy, will be with us and you can get a little bit of the special magic that makes these visualisation possible or rather made them possible until the Twitter API stopped working. But this is the conversation at Amplify V. This is what the conversation looked like over the last year. Every single dot and every single line exemplifies a conversation between one person and other people and you can see it's so dense. This is an animation you can on the Amplify V website have a look at this yourself, how it moves and gets this wobbly, wobbly, wonderful ball of connectivity. But this is what it looks like when practitioners across the sector share a conversation in 30,000 messages in a year. And I think when we're here, particularly all together in one big building, it's easy to see how communities of practice can work. But it's not all that easy is it when you're the only learning technologist in your college or training provider, when you're working from home, when you work part time, when you often feel like you're the only person fighting the fight and you're the only person who has particular problems that you need to have help with solving. So it is very reassuring and I think a big testament to the work that we are doing that our network continues to grow. And some of the networks that we're now connecting with again follow the hashtags and our wonderful community map that we also have at the Amplify of Eastland continues to grow in all different directions. And we chose the metaphor of the map because it is really charting a landscape that continues to evolve. It's not a map that you do once and then you're like, oh no, no, I'm going. Now the point of this work that we're doing, the point of the audit, the genius of it is that it continues to take snapshots as this landscape is evolving. Now I'm not going to read out every single hashtag but I would urge you, if you haven't come across them, to make some time to click through these on whichever social media you follow and have a look. I do want to give a special shout out to the LTHE chat because we had a big anniversary chat last Wednesday where I was getting quite sentimental feeling all friendly on Twitter for the first time in a long time and I hope that this week will bring a little bit of that humanity and connection back to a platform which can often feel a little bit desolate nowadays. But now on to our key findings. So first of all we want to start with talking about the digital landscape. The most important factor for our audit this year is how much all the changes in technologies and networks, our use of technology have made an impact on the ability of practitioners to share practice and to learn together. Never since the pandemic and since we started doing this audit has it made such a big impact on the ability of people to connect. And I think for us as learning technologists and working across the sector this is a big point to take note of because while we do work in partnership with industry it's not always an equal partnership and the power imbalance that exists between a lot of the networks we depend on and the work that we do is very significant. So I think there are some really interesting nuanced findings that are coming out in the audit and the hard work that Emma has done to actually put numbers behind things that all of us would instinctively feel like, oh that sounds true, makes a real difference and will help us as we prepare for this new term that starts this week. Now one of the other key findings that I want to talk about is less community sustainability on the open web. The open web is becoming a lot less friendly and a lot less easy to navigate for many people in further education and vocational education and many communities of practice have correspondingly decided to downsize their social media presence on the open web and they are retreating into world gardens of something like Microsoft Teams or Zooms, private group on LinkedIn, Facebook or even WhatsApp. But these close groups, while some of them can be absolutely wonderful and really wonderful spaces for practice to be shared, make it much harder for new members who are not already in the club to find them and to decide whether they're right for them to join. And I think this connects really well with last year's special report where we looked at inclusion and diversity as one of the key focus points around communities of practice. Close groups are much harder for newcomers to break into. And we're also seeing continuously that so many communities just disappear. And when we started Amplify V, Alt and UFI sat down and we said, you know, one of the key issues our sector has is that we suffer from chronic short-term funding and lack of strategic long-term investment in communities of practice. Projects come and go, funding initiatives come and go and we keep dropping and changing who is sharing what, where and when. And if you do invest a lot of time, it's very likely to just be gone in a year because the funding has dried up. That is why Amplify V was set up. That is why we do the work that we do. And the fact that we are seeing in the data that there's less open web sharing happening, fewer communities of practice that we can see that are happening openly is I think underlining the need for this urgently to continue. And that brings me to the last key finding, which is that we are doing what we were set up to do, Amplify V, connect the dots. Since we launched in 2020, one of our core aims is to make those connections. We're not there to replace other networks or communities. We're not there to take them over. It's not competition. It's collaboration. We're working together. And that is one of the most important parts, I think, of the work that we do, is that we provide a meta narrative and a long-term perspective. And that is where Alt and UFI as a partnership are so powerful because our funding initiatives and our vision aren't limited to one year or two years or three years, but we are in this for the long term. We want to support our members in FE. And as Billy said in the introduction, this is such an important part of Alt's mission all across sectors. Now, I am fast running out of time, so please do scan our QR code and download our sector audit report. There are lots of these postcards around the Amplify V stand, and you can meet Emma, Chloe and Lyn and get much more information that I can give you in a very short presentation. We are very aware that, you know, research only goes so far if you can't make use of the findings. So we're here to help you make use of the work that we do. Individual practitioners can use our findings to find support and build personal learning networks. We can help you find communities of practice on many different platforms and help you find those people to connect with. If you are representing a provider, we can help you engage with communities of practice that your staff and you yourself can make use of, but also disseminate the work that you do and find the expertise that you need. And we hope that the data from the audit, which is all openly available, can help inform strategy and policy providing an up-to-date overview of practice, as well as the gaps in provision. Now, we are nearly out of time, and I am going to ask Chloe to come up and just give you a couple of extra heads up about things that are going on in our diaries. So Chloe, if you want to just come up, Chloe runs our community engagement strand, so I don't want to take away from the wonderful work that you do. Thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, yes. OK. So we are growing. I am one of the newest member of the team as of about a year ago. I started working on the Amplifier Feed community space, which is giving a platform for practitioners to come and contribute by way of meeting spotlights, podcasts, blogs and webinars. So there's loads of fantastic things going on. And there's two different elements to that. One is being able to come and contribute, and then the other is also to engage and support practitioners in doing that. But one of the things I really want to point out that is on this slide in front of you is the third one there, in that we work across the whole of the further education and training sector, and we really do see FE as being a wide branch. So by that we mean ITPs, we mean colleges, we mean prison educators, we mean charity, community learning. I don't know if I've missed anyone out there, but anyone and everyone really working in FE, we are definitely there. And that includes folks also working in HE2. I like that. Yes, if you're from HE, you're also welcome. Absolutely. Don't stay no to anybody. Thank you, Chloe. Thank you. That's brilliant. Cool. Okay. So I'm also going to just ask you to have a date for your diary, Amplifier Feed, Revolutionary Thinking and Education is happening September 29th. All of our webinars are free to attend and open to all. So all sectors are welcome. And please do look out for us in a very special event also coming up this autumn, the week of VokTech, which all is very proud to have a part in where we'll be launching our Amplifier Feed Insights report and case studies. And Lynn, if you don't mind getting up and maybe having a quick wave, one of our lead researcher Lynn Taylorson is also in the audience and can tell us a little bit more about that. So Lynn, if you just want to say hello quickly. Thanks so much, Marion. Hi everybody. Yeah. So we've heard about the podcasts and the webinars and the community research. So I've been leading the third strand of Amplifier Feed, which is insights research. And what we've been doing is exploring how we can reduce or hopefully remove the digital divide for vocational learners that are most at risk of being disadvantaged. So we've spoken to so many projects, DFE projects, ETF projects, independent projects in apprenticeships and mainstream ethics in the adult and community learning all across the FE spectrum. And as well as having our insights report, which we've been getting some feedback on today, we've also got some case studies. So speaking to some real experts, I hope if I say Peter Kilcoyne and teacher Mattych, people will know what I mean. So wonderful communities like AP Connect, but also some brilliant tools such as an apprenticeship tool in Northern Ireland, which encourages learners to build a bridge, but not just build a bridge, but actually form a team to cost it and source materials and test it all together so that real collaborative working. So you can find those online, but also if you wander to our stand, which is just in the corner across here, you can, oh yeah, drop by, drop by, it looks exactly like that. The bonuses were right next to tea and coffee and nibbles, so even more reason to come. We've actually got some good old-fashioned paper copies, Marilyn, that people can take away as well. We're old school sometimes. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I just want to encourage you more to reach out. This is a fantastic piece of work. And as I ask you to maybe put your hands together in thanks, I want to give a big shout out to the key author of the report, Emma Proctor-Leg. So congratulations on a wonderful piece of research and thank you very much. Billy, there's no time for questions, so I think it's time for tea and coffee for everybody, a half an hour break. Thank you very much everybody.