 and the session is being recorded. Okay, welcome everybody to today's CPD webinar session with the lovely Theresa McKinnon. I'm looking forward to this, this should be great. I'm Debbie Baff and I'm the membership and professional development manager for ALT. Just a quick reminder of the access panel there for you. I know I've just gone through this, but if you click on the bottom right-hand corner, you can access the access panel and the chat function. So there will be some chat today and Theresa also has some various links for us to click on and have a look at as well. And you can also raise your hand to ask a question. I'm sure you guys know that because we've all been doing this for a long time now, but it was just in case anybody needed a reminder because all the buttons tend to shuffle themselves. Okey-dokey. Right, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna stop sharing this and pass over to Theresa who's going to introduce herself and start sharing her screen. Thanks very much Debbie, thank you. And it's great to have you here. It's a small but perfectly formed group. And as I say, I'm looking forward to learning from you all. But I'm gonna start off just by sharing my screen with just a little bit of a session really to try and make sense of the last 20 years of my professional life. But also what I've tried to do having revisited how I've gone about the last 20 years and the things that I've done sort of post internet is to examine something that I thought would actually end up as a timeline. In other words, just a sort of a collection of I did this at this phase and I did this here. And I took a sort of auto-ethnographic approach to reviewing my journey in teaching and learning. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting or helpful to analyze that and see whether there were certain phases that I went through and whether there's actually some commonality between what I've experienced as I've moved from, if you like, analog teaching to digital teaching. And in terms of the experiences that you're having either as a practitioner or in supporting the learning technology of practitioners and to see whether there are things there for that we can share and learn from that. So I'm gonna start off just by sharing my screen and showing you the first, my starting point, if you like. So let's just grab that. Right. So what I've done is use a Jamboard here. So you should now be seeing my starting point. So what I did is I looked back over the various things that I've done over the last 20 years as a practitioner in language education, in higher education and was to identify certain key moments. And many of those I've reflected and placed on a Padlet Board that I'll share with you in a moment. But my starting point here is really to give you an idea of just how far away I was then from where I am now. And that was a bit of a surprise to me really, I have to admit. So this was my point of the ball. This was my starting point. I had been given a role within my school. No, it wasn't, it was a language center at the time. We've been restructured, so many things have changed. But my role within business language education and teaching was to try and support the digital practice of our learning, our language teachers, our language tutors. So my starting point really was quite scary for me. And I've been very much reminded of it. Debbie and I have just been through the last sort of 20 minutes or so from hell when I discovered that my laptop wouldn't connect to the wifi and we hadn't got long to go before the session started. So that was a really timely reminder for me of just how much I've been through from that point because 20 years ago, the internet was not a terribly stable place. 20 years ago when I was talking about moving from analog to digital and using web resources particularly, there were still all sorts of problems with URLs, still all sorts of issues that meant that you could prepare and plan a lesson but not be able to deliver it when you actually came around for whatever reason, the website was down, the internet wasn't available, whatever it was, or it didn't work the same from your planning as when you went into a classroom. Those sort of things really pushed the blood pressure up of any practitioner and I'm sure you've all had experiences along those lines. So one of the first things I wanted to do was to investigate because I'd come from a secondary language teaching background, investigate what the internet was all about in a sort of scholarly way. I wanted to find out more so that I didn't feel quite so lost online. So scholarship became a sort of principle at the big, in my starting point, wanting to find out more about the impact of internet on teaching and how we could use it in a way that wasn't just about the shiny, shiny but was about high quality learning experiences and there were huge challenges. Fortunately at the time at Warwick, there was a postgraduate certificate running called the Weller Certificate. I had done a PGCE for training before I started teaching, analog teaching in the days when I had one computer in my classroom that wasn't connected to the internet, of course. But now I wanted to investigate what it would be like and what e-learning could do to support my learners and my practitioners. The beauty of actually being part of this e-learning pilot project was that it started from a point that assumed that you hadn't actually been on an online course and I hadn't. So back in 2004, I joined Jay Dempster's e-learning pilot project and started to experience learning online. It was a very basic VLE but we were all encouraged to blog our journey. And it was very much an experience that helped me understand what it would be like to use the internet and to use online tools as a learner. And I don't think I really realized at the time just how crucial that was as a starting point because it really made me focus on how does it feel to be in this environment. I had fabulous tutors on this. I had great tutors when I did my PGCE or IK as well but on the Weller PGCE, we had great support. And it was a very emotional experience, partly because I was trying to work full-time and study full-time, but also because of the importance of the tutors understanding the emotional context of what I was doing. And I reckon that was particularly important to me because during that period of my life, my father died. During that period of time, there was a lot of change around me. So a lot of things happened that made life quite difficult, but it was a really useful starting point for me. So that was where I started out. And what I then started to do, and I will just flick on into the second phase here and then we'll just recap over these two phases, was try and find other professional opportunities that as a result of doing the Weller PGCE that I went on to do a masters in postgraduate teaching and learning and blogging stayed part of my experience. So I still went back to blogger and I used Next Steps. I set up Next Steps as my blog. And I found when I actually dug back into these very early posts that I was hardly writing anything at all. I was just using it to capture stuff that had caught my eyes, stuff I wanted to investigate. And that was particularly about finding networks, finding other people who could help. And I think on that slide, as you can see, I've got my first ever response to a blog post. So this was back in 2010. A Mark Childs who actually had worked at Warwick, I think he was working at Warwick at that time, responded to a post that I'd put up. And then I started to feel a connection. And you can see there from the Tags Explorer image at the bottom, I know Sarah and possibly others of you are very familiar to it with the Tags Explorer. You can see how that network started to connect and draw me in and I started to find other people. Social media was an important part of that. But that was how I started to understand what connected practice could do for me. And that was pretty crucial. So let me just stop the sharing a second and come back into the room. So just do a quick check of the chat. Right, so what I want to do is to, because in this session, I'm gonna ask you to interact with me. I'm gonna ask you to follow that experiential path. And I'm sure many of you have already been engaged in interacting online, but let's just show you a few places that I'm gonna provide. And if you can just keep these open, there's additional tabs in your browser. The first one of these will look a bit daunting because it's just a blank page and who likes blank pages? So it's a blank page that I've set up as totally open for you to add any thoughts that you have as they occur to you. So whilst we're together here, it could be a picture of where you are now. It could be a thought, a reminder perhaps of something that's been mentioned that resonates with you. It could be that you've started from somewhere totally different and you might want to share that with us. So essentially what we're doing here is just providing an open space for you to share. Now, here's another link I'm gonna ask you to keep open. There's a tab, I apologize for this, you're gonna have lots of tabs open. But we all come to this room and this space from different places. I've told you a little bit about how I got here, but I wanna hear about how you got here. And what I want to do is to try and understand better the commonalities or the challenges and the barriers. What I've set up here is just a spreadsheet. And on it, there's a Google spreadsheet. And again, it should be open for everybody to edit, yeah. And as you can see, I have listed some of the tools, not all of them, because it would have been too daunting, but some of the tools that I found useful over the past 20 years in order to build my online presence. I've just put one word purpose, but feel free to use your own words to express them. And I've given a link or an example. So anyone can add to this. There are filters on here. So if you want to filter it, you can do. And I know for example, if I look at the things that Deb goes to express her online presence, I know there are tools that she uses that I don't use. And I'd love to know what they are and, you know, curate them on this list. Because I think although other people you meet on the journey, or this is my conclusion so far, reflecting back on my own journey, they give you ideas. Scoopit, for example, was something that came from my early days following of Steve Wheeler. Yes, voice thread, that's a wonderful one. There are lots of tools out there that I saw used and thought, oh, that might be useful, I'll try that out. I've left a column as well for comments. Now I haven't filled comments in, but I think it's really useful to have your thoughts and comments on tools. And all of this is anonymous, so you don't need to feel anxious about what you say. Put in what you think and let's put these together. Discord is something I've only just met recently. Great to see that starting to get populated. Thank you. I'm really grateful to you for participating because this is what it's all about really today. We are connected educators and it's really important that we share that connectivity. Right, I'm going to do probably my most brave thing because this isn't something that I'm terribly obey with. So let me just share my screen again and collect some thoughts. Anything I ask you to do today will be anonymous, so please feel free to say what you really feel. As I've recently retired, it's a wonderful freedom to have. So around the first two phases which were finding my starting point, which was all about really the impact of the internet on my practice, and then finding your thing, finding your place if you like within that, finding things that would work for you professionally. So here's the first question I'm going to put out to you and I'd really appreciate it if you can pop into Mentimeter and use that code in order to just note down for us. Since the first day and I can remember it quite clearly because my husband bought us a router and I was terrified about connecting the computer to the internet and I think it was probably that fear that made me play close attention to what I was doing. So how has the arrival of the internet and the affordances of the internet changed? I was going to put your practice but actually I'm interested in any practice you've observed maybe if you're working as a learning technologist alongside academics. What have you seen? And of course we've had this horrible pandemic which has really focused minds on the use of the internet. What have you observed? How has the internet changed people's practice? So any thoughts, positive or negative that you want to record there, pop those in and we will update that we just, in fact, there's a link I need to share with you in the chat as well, isn't there? So that might give you a quicker access. Let me just grab that and pop it in the chat for you. Sentences, words, exactly how you prefer. Not worried at all, you know? Bullet points are fine. And if you're doing things on that Google Doc as well, feel free, you know, if you want to write a poem if something occurs to you, yay, Debbie started us off. Lovely, where did your journey start from? I'm going to have a read through these because that's really, really helpful. Great, okay, a move from FE to HE. So you've also done that shift that I went through from secondary into HE. It is a strange feeling. It's like you're going back to the beginning, I've experienced the same. Yes, right, wonderful. You've got your dream job, how marvelous. My experience has been that dream jobs also contain nightmares, but that's part of life. But how useful to have that, thank you. Good to have that, those thoughts. Wonderful, I'm starting to see things come through on that shared doc. And now we're starting to see things as well on the, let me just share my screen again. On the mentee poll, let's share that and then we can have a discussion around that and please feel free to use the chat. I'm sorry, you're going to lose the tabs and such is life. Right, let's share that and see where we are now for the internet changing practice. Yes, certainly that was my first feeling was the internet is going to help with international collaboration. With international collaboration and obviously working in languages, it was hugely helpful and really important to get involved in that diversity. What a fabulous word. We have to be really careful, don't we, that we don't end up just collaborating with the people we've always collaborated with. And yes, you might see that sentiment reflected in the things that I talk about in the second section. Finding things, yeah, we're so well would be without, you know, Google it, global collaboration and that's really where the work on virtual exchange comes from, open learning and I really want to explore that with you because I think we have different takes on these things, don't we? So it's good to, ah, that's serendipity, that wonderful word. Yes, the people you kind of bump into that you didn't really know were there. Oh, I love that, yes, created curiosity. Wonderful. I found personally, now this experience was, it's very, that resonates with me. I very much found that by engaging with the internet, once I've got my head around it and there were lots and lots of journeys there, that was a big journey in its own that there was a tendency very quickly from colleagues to define me as a digital champion or a digital evangelist and that brought headaches as well as advantages. It meant that people engaged with me on conversations when they were looking to get online and looked to me for ideas, which was really wonderful. Oh yes, and yes indeed, real relationships. But it also meant that for some people who didn't really want to engage with the internet and with any new tools, it was very easy for them just to dismiss me as a digital evangelist. So it brought positives and negatives way out of the box. Yeah, who needs boxes? Fabulous, right, I'm gonna stop my sharing and come back in, I'll leave that open obviously so that you can continue. And let me just check back in the chat. I'm really starting to see things coming together, yeah. So thank you, we're starting to build a whole set of resources here and thoughts and feelings. As I said, they are anonymous to you, so they're not, you know, you don't have to be anxious about what you put in there. But it was really important for me to find sort of a support network. And actually, you know, the things that you've already shared with me touch on this fact that in fact, we have to, when we get into these professional opportunities they may not be local to us and they certainly weren't local to me. So I had to go out looking. And sometimes that meant that I really had to make sure that I understood who I was connecting with and what their expertise was in the area. And you know, that is just a journey. So from that point, I started then to think about how I was presenting myself and to make sure that the connections I made, largely through social media use, and this was thanks to people I bumped into on Twitter out there. So people like Sarah and people like Sue as well. And I think you would recognize my PLN. I share that with you as well. Lots and lots of, well, actually at the time there weren't that many, but there are now. I started to bump into people online. Steve Wheeler was one of the first who helped me build my confidence in that domain. Let me just share with you the second mentee question which I hope has come out to you. But if it hasn't, just let me know and I will make sure that I've pressed whatever button I need to press in mentee. So let me just check back in the chat and see if everybody's been able to access that. Let me know if you can't see it. So what I wanted to do then was to create some sort of image that would communicate what my professional focus was to other people. And exactly that's where I started, my blog, the Next Steps blog, which really was actually, my focus was never to be writing for anybody else. It was very much to be keeping a note of what I was doing for myself. And pulling together as well, this idea of who I was and what professionally I was about a bit moji. Yes, a bit moji and a gif. Yes, we need some examples. I know who put that in. Or I think I know who put that in. So please do tell us, how did you or how do you or how are you thinking of presenting yourself in the open in order to attract the right sort of audience and the connections of people? Oh, I love that. Big fan of screencasting. I'd like to show the companionship of the voice. When I was when I did my PGCE, when I trained to teach, the importance of voice became very obvious. You know, I mean, they talk about teacher stairs, why can do a teacher's there? That's, you know, the teacher look that just says, whoa. I think any of us who are practitioners have that. But you also have to cultivate your voice. And, you know, your voice online is slightly more complex to communicate. And certainly when I started out, voice over the internet was a bit of a dark art. So, you know, we weren't in the days. I wonder if anybody's added it so far to the tool collection. We went in the days of Flipgrid. Oh, we can see. Yes, we're excellent. Somebody's put moving five in. Thank you for that. That's brilliant. I wanted to put that into and I forgot. So, yeah, we were starting really to see people's people thinking about how they could. It was before the YouTube generation, really. It was that was only just starting to take hold. But sharing video and voice because of the issues of the size and the delivery were really problematic. And that was particularly problematic for me from a language perspective. To jump in and grab a mic, if you want to, because what I'm a bit concerned about is whether everybody's managed to get that second question on the mentee. Yes. Yeah, that's I think voice is important. But it's it's not just a case of voice in terms of looking at all the way you communicate as a whole. Actually, physically, your voice, you know, how do you sound when you record things? How do you pitch to your audience? Do you envisage in your head a certain person that you're talking to and what they are and how they are and what they would respond to? So it's voicing up in a whole collection of ways. Great. I can see we're really starting to pull lots and lots of ideas together. And that's that's really what we're here to do today. Might not be what you thought you'd do, but it's what we're here to do. So those were my first two phases, if you like, it was about, first of all, you know, understanding my starting point, understanding what I wanted to get from the next phase, if you like, of using the Internet for my teaching. And secondly, finding my focus and my focus really was voice over the Internet at first. It was simply that. How do I get people listening and speaking to each other? Obviously, with a language learning aim in mind. And in terms of principles from that phase, as I looked back and obviously that that phase within my development was very much including presenting at conferences and getting out and talking to my communities. And there I started with the communities that I felt would understand me best. So language teaching communities, like the Association for University Language Centers, where I talked to them about, now I'm not a Germanist, so excuse my pronunciation here, but I talked to them about my Bildungsreise, a reflection on my journey and the journey that I wanted to go through to support the use of voice tools in language education. And it was a battle I fought long and hard and really was very challenging. So it's kind of at this point that I want to think about the importance of collegiality. So this was a phase where I wanted to share the vision that I had, because if you're going to find your voice, you have to know what you want to talk about and what you want to communicate. In my cases, you've probably seen, if you follow me on Twitter, it was to use the Ammonite as a visual presentation. And I wonder whether any of you have also visually presented yourself, looking back at that sharing space document that we've got, Deb's given us a really clear idea of what she did. And there's a blog up there as well. So these are parts of your voice, aren't they? These are the visual identities that you use to help people realise what you're about and decide whether they're going to engage with you. And that's a really important sort of phase, but it's also quite a demanding phase. And I found the collegiality very important in that particular phase. It has been throughout. This is why I didn't go for the timeline approach on this, because collegiality is always important. But it started just like my Ammonite. It started with a very small central group of people who were supporting me through the Weller Project, for example, and through my Warwick eLearning Award and things like this. So it started with people who were local to me. And then gradually as I became more open as I was using more open tools, that expanded. So just like the Ammonite, the circle got bigger and involved more people and moved further away from the centre. And that was really what I was trying to convey when I used the Ammonite avatar. It took me to all sorts of different places because once I decided that actually it was quite useful to get involved and to be more open, then I needed to do lots more exploring. I spent a lot of time in a lot of different spaces. So Second Life, RISO, a lot of the connectivist MOOCs that were going on. I know Sarah, that will resonate with you. Doing things that just basically involved hashtags with communities that I didn't know and people I didn't know that took me out of my little bubble and into new bubbles and helped me connect and understand what I wanted to do which of those elements would be helpful in my professional development. So I'm going to pause just there. Let me just come back into the room. Oh, I'm talking about RISO. RISO, is it possible for people to have their mics in case they want to share with us? I think they should have it already. Great, okay. But if not, give me a shout and I'll make it happen. I think, Sarah, if you don't mind, would you mind? Or I mean, often people find themselves in offices where it's not easy to switch a mic on but if you are willing to, just switch your mic on and tell us a little bit about your experiences of these connected education environments that became available really quite quickly in the last 20 years or so and took on a sort of life of their own. Yeah, sure. So I think for me, it was Dave Cormier's RISO 14 which is the one I think that I met you, Theresa and I met so many other wonderful people who are my friends now, including Simon Enter who I was talking to at the weekend. And it just, I think it just opened the world up. Suddenly with these connected, this MOOCs, you get this idea of freedom, don't you? And the idea that you can play, but it's serious play. It's playing with educated to a passionate about learning. And I believe there was one moment or one thing but I think just this sort of connected learning experience changed my life. Certainly changed my PhD because I started doing my PhD on all of these experiences. And you're gonna have to excuse me because my cat has just jumped up onto my table and is sitting on top of my microphone. They have a way, don't they? They just have a way, they just know. Participatory cats. Well, that's what the internet's all about, isn't it? There's generally has to be cats involved at some point. Thank you for that. That's really good participation. And Claire, I wanted to mention as well. Yeah, it is hard, isn't it? To think, how do I go about promoting or pushing myself forward? Especially we need to quite know what's gonna come out of it. Having opportunities to connect really helpful. I think if I could offer any one thing, it would be just give yourself space and time to do a little bit at a time and decide. I can remember points during these sort of 20 years when I have been online way too much. And when really I should have got away from the screen and taken some exercise or done something different. So actually the ability to physically go to conferences where you spend time sitting on a train, you spend time is sitting in a plane or whatever it is, that gives you that space, that headspace to think things through and to read. And I do worry a little bit that under the current situation, it's harder for people to do that. So building in some opportunities where you can look back and think, and in fact, I think blogging helps that because you capture stuff that then makes you try to make sense of what's happening. Right, okay, excellent. Is there anybody else who'd like to chime in at this point or we will, oh, I can see Simon's in the room as well. Simon did mention he'd be coming along. So yes, I'm moving now Simon onto the phase that involves a little bit more about virtual exchange and the journey that we've been on together since then. But before Simon and I met and we met actually on a blog over a blog post, Steve Wheeler's blog again, his ears must be burning this morning. I had spent quite a lot of time thinking about how online digital practice was going to affect my teaching, including a realization that was quite a crucial realization to me that I had always been as a practitioner, very much pro experiential learning and interaction and discovering that in fact, when I was moving these sorts of experiences into a VLE, I was getting more behaviorist. And that was quite a shock. And I really had to sort of pull myself up at that point and think, how do I change so that my teaching style actually isn't adversely affected by what I do online. And that took time for me, that was a journey. So Simon, if you're there, do feel free to chime in, but what I'm gonna show you next is the third phase of my journey. So let me just share my screen again and jump us in virtually to the Jamboard that is the point at which really, or the phase at which really I realized that in fact, this had become more of, more than just what I had to do for my job. Because when I started out, it was very much driven by my job and very much driven by the work that I needed to do in order to support other practitioners. And although that remains there, or I've retired, there was more to it than that. It made me really focus on which aspects of my pedagogy, I particularly wanted to develop. Assessment very quickly became part of that and understanding of assessment. Having by then spent over 20 years in teaching, I thought I knew everything I needed to know about assessment. Yeah, I invigilated hundreds and marked thousands of exam papers, but as I really got back into basics because of this focus on digital learning, I realized I needed to understand what the principles were of assessment. And this was a huge challenge. So fortunately for me, there was a PG cert available within my institution on assessment and I found that really helpful. Although it was nothing to do with digital practice and assessment, it was purely to do with the principles of assessment and the differences between assessment for learning and assessment of learning. It led me into a really deep dive around the literature of assessment. It also led me into, or at least this aspect, the internationalization aspect, led me into thinking more deeply about how the use of online tools affected the nature of interaction and communication. So I got involved in the Urocall Special Interest Group, Computer Mediated Communication Special Interest Group and I chaired that for a few years. And that gave me a wonderful opportunity to hear from people who were researching in very detailed ways the use of online tools for communication and their effects. So that was really helpful. But by far the most life-changing aspect of this phase really was a decision to challenge the institutional basis of what I did. So ever since I started teaching, I've created resources which I've shared with other practitioners. That was just part of the way I always worked. So if I made worksheets and things like that, there'd be a little file that I'd put out and say, if you can use this, feel free to modify it, change it, go ahead and do it. I'd always done that. But what I realized with the internet when that came along was the biggest challenge and opportunity that came around was that I could now share my now digital PowerPoints, for example, with a wider group of people and make them available online. And at first I was really, really nervous about doing that. But I opened a slide share account and after the first few months of just putting up my usual PowerPoints that I was using in class, I realized that they were getting hundreds and hundreds of downloads. And I thought, wow, there really are people out there who want resources, who are interested in resources. None of these resources were created with any thought of them being the best resource on X. They were very much created as a practical response to teaching this particular class this year and what I needed to cover. And there are still, when I look back on my slide share accounts as some of my first uploads, there are some I look at in horror and think I really must adjust that. I've made a mistake there and I should change that. So then in no way put up there as shining examples of perfection, but they were just a way of, if you like, producing an online accessible folder for people. But then around that, I also started to realize that there were issues around my understanding or lack of understanding of intellectual property. And that again led to another sort of scholarly investigation, if you like. So I started to look at how we manage our intellectual property online. I started to discover that language teachers in the UK were selling resources online. And I felt that was very sad. I felt it was a shame that, A, that teachers needed the money in order to share or as a motivator for sharing, but B, then actually in many cases, they were sharing things that in fact weren't their intellectual property and they weren't theirs to sell. So I started to look at open licensing and again with some fabulous connections that really were acquired serendipitously. The wonderful Sarah Passfield-Neofitu who I met who actually was based at the time in Monash a Japanese teacher of Japanese. We investigated together copyright and sustainability and we investigated produsage. And if you're not aware of produsage, I've written a paper on it. There's plenty there for you to look at. I'm sticking away from my scholarly outputs at the moment. But it was very much about how do you go about being more open whilst protecting the things that you have created and making sure that they're connected to your professional identity. So the answer for me on that was definitely using CC, Creative Commons licensing. Most things I share Creative Commons BY so that attribution has to be given so that if somebody adapts or downloads one of my PowerPoints and then adapts it for their context, that's fine. But they just need to say in there, this is where I originally found it. They put a link to my online profile. And my engagement in those discussions got me more and more involved in the Open Education Special Interest Group. This was actually the moment when I first came across deadbath, another life-changing moment, life-enhancing moment. I was in Cardiff for Alts Open Education. I think it was OER15. And I was persuaded to get involved in the Open Education Special Interest Group. That really did change my life. That made me realize how important it was that we as educators get involved in the political impacts of what happens in terms of who gets access to learning. And possibly some people might say, yes, but your Twitter is full of the political. I think it was at this point that I started to really realize Frère's understanding of how education is inherently political. There was no way I could avoid or maintain that sort of tricky connection between education and who has access to it. And I didn't want to skirt around it. So it was at this point when I really got involved with people who felt the same as me, who shared the values that I share around education for all and the importance of learning for all. And Alts has an Open Education Special Interest Group, which you will find very easily on the Alts website. And you can see our mission statement there is all about inclusivity and making sure that learning is accessible to all. And from there, really, I got involved in open education practice. So finally, my fourth theme, and this very much comes into the category of stuff that would not, stuff that if it hadn't happened, would not have been possible to learn as much as I have learned and I very much continue learning. And that was finding a space for reflection. And again, if I thought about this along a timeline, there was a type of reflection going on right at the beginning, but it was very shallow and not terribly open. And as my confidence has grown, I started to share more and engage more and I found this reflection, I actually set up a new blog, a separate blog, which again, really, I set up with myself in mind, not writing for a particular audience. And those of you who've seen, perhaps, as Basisi fits very much about reflecting on political issues as well as education. But it gave me a little space that I could go to where I could cross-link things that I could see happening in society with my thoughts and feelings about learning and education. And then particularly arose and sort of bubbled out of the connected practice that I pursued through virtual exchange. So if you don't know anything about virtual exchange, I will give you a link at the end that gives you opportunities to take deeper dive, but virtual exchange essentially is a way of connecting through technology, individuals with each other, sometimes just to share information, very basic sort of sharing information, but at deeper levels to actually co-create together the sort of things that happened, as Sarah mentioned, in RISO as well. And that happens still in lots of other places that you'll see hashtags for. Please, within that document that you have, the sharing space, if you're part of one of those open communities that does this, there we are, we've got Rosamatic Learning, wonderful. This document now is turning into a fabulous way, oh, I love that, I get the cat as well, a fabulous way of sharing what we know in order to help us help grow. I shall return to this document and I will look at things. There are decisions I have definitely made throughout my journey over the last 20 odd years that I would not have been able to make effectively had it not been for having time and space for reflection. And I think that if you want educators who are thoughtful and effective, you need to give them time to find headspace. And what happens then is they start to realize, and certainly I did, and I would love to see the experience of others on this, that there are connections and that we as practitioners are at our most powerful when we connect our professional lives and our passions together. When we bring them together, the things that we really value with the things that we have to do to earn a living, then we can be really, really powerful. Then we have an authenticity, then we have a message. So my steps along the way included things like building a community of practice and starting to recognize the individuals who had contributed to that. Starting to look at open recognition. Let me just share with you a page here from my OpenBadge passport. I very much went down this line because I started to realize that the journey I had gone on, I needed to be able to curate and remind myself, not just through blog posts, but through little visual identifiers. So these sorts of networks started to become available to me thanks to the collection of OpenBadges. So using OpenBadge passport to curate those helps me to communicate what I do and what I'm about. So that is just one of the networks. And I'm going to just pop this link into the chat because I'm aware that there may well be those of you. And I'll come back to the chat to see if I've missed anything who are interested in, if you like, the academic aspects of what I've talked about. And that very much has been my route to publication. I started out very, very shakily and followed my passions and my academic interest to get to a point where I wanted to capture these and Sarah mentioned similarity there in terms of pursuing a PhD. And that was never a journey that I decided that I wanted to go on because it was very much, I was coming to a point in my career where I was about to retire anyway. And actually I felt, I just love doing what I'm doing. So I've continued along those lines. And thank you Claire, that's very kind of you. I really hope that you can take from this that actually even though it's scary, there are aspects of openness that really help us and that can be very useful in terms of sustaining us. The bottom line for me really, for all of this has been the importance of people. I remember back in my PGCE days being taught about social learning theory and thinking, yeah, but I'm not a very sociable person. I don't think I'm a social learner. Have I discovered just how social I am as a learner over the last 20 years? It's actually been the internet that has allowed me to discover that because just as Sarah says, I have met real friends, people I can rely on, people who have helped me on my journey, people who've inspired me. I'm not saying there aren't also downsides to that because there are, but I've fortunately not really experienced anything too horrendous. There are always people out there who will try to provoke, but I try and keep away from the provocations and ignore it, but that's just my strategy. I'd love to hear from you. We have just five minutes left. I'm going to just review the various things that I've shared with people, just like in real life, exactly Debbie. And I think that the expression that stays with me is an expression that came from Steve Wheeler again in the early days. He said, everything I've learned about Twitter, I learned from kindergarten. It's so true, the play nicely, it's so important. Life is challenging enough and we all go through huge challenges, but actually having a passion and finding a network of people who can help support that, but also finding that network of people who are willing to just share a joke now and again and support you in that way helps as well to have a real life outside of an online life because there are times when it really definitely is important to switch off and to get away and do something different, something physical. But you will find people you can trust and networks you can trust and for the old has been one of those for me, but also a more informal network that's come through groups like BYOD, DS10, always get the number on DS10, something that's for Sarah or no, all these fabulous hashtags that you'll find on Twitter where you'll really find educators. And yeah, be really selective when it comes to engaging with certain aspects of social media because some can be negative. Right, I'm just gonna pop into the chat. DS106, thank you Simon, I was getting the number wrong. There was a race then between the two of you to get it in the LTHG chat, yes. How could we not mention LTHG chat? If you're not aware of it, Google it. Someone was saying earlier, yeah, the most useful thing about the internet is how quick it is to connect you. I was gonna create a reading list for today, but I haven't, and the reason I haven't is because what I would suggest you read depends on what your interests are. And so I'm focusing just on sharing my orchid ID because then if there are things there in the things that I've written, you will be able to grab the Biblio from the end of those, Simon, lovely. Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. Wow, this has been a lovely opportunity. Please do grab the mic and open it if you want to say something now. I'm done in terms of sharing my journey but I'm going to pop a Padlet link into the chat. And on there you'll find the things that I couldn't put in the Jamboard. So examples of the many networks and activities that I have found useful. So they are websites and a collection of resources. What I would do is encourage you to keep on being who you are because clearly there's a lot of people who can benefit from you being who you are by doing it bravely. And thank you, Simon, that's very sweet but by being brave enough to do that openly. And please do connect and continue to connect and share. Thank you so much for coming along and using your lunchtime today to connect. It's wonderful to have you all on board. Thank you so much. Yeah, if we can find a way. I think there's a CPD badge, isn't there? It's an old CPD badge that can come out for participants. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking an interest. It's great to have you here, Arun. Thank you. Thanks, Theresa. Thanks so much. Yes, there will be an open digital badge for taking part in this. And I'm hoping to get those out pretty soon. But yeah, that's been... I mean, obviously, Theresa and I have known each other for a few years now, but it's always a pleasure. And that was really, really just... You're just always such a giver. You really are. It's brilliant. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed that. And thank you, everybody, for your contributions and participation in that. There's some great resources and links and things that have been shared. So we will send around the recording of this, so you'll be able to play it back. And obviously, we've got the links, excuse me, that Theresa shared as well. So yeah, just to say thank you ever so much. That was really, really good. I'm just going to stop the recording. Thanks very much, Debs. And I have to say, the giving is not just... You know, it isn't totally intrinsically motivated, if you know what I mean. It's very much... You know, the giving means reciprocity happens. It does. You know, you give a little bit of a look back. It is, yeah. When you share... People share back with you, don't they? You know, it's really... And that's just coming back to what they were saying about being in kindergarten, isn't it? When you share your toys, other people share them back with you. It's really, really true, really great. I'm just going to stop the recording and then we're just about done.