 I'm Jonathan Derby. I was the first president of ALT. In fact, the idea for an association for learning technology was mine. It came to me in 1992. At that time I was directing the Computers in Teaching initiative, which was a precursor of the Higher Education Academy subject centre network. It consisted of 24 subject centres, like the academies, each of which was seeking to support the innovative and effective use of technology in teaching in a particular subject. CTI Centre for Geography, Chemistry, English and so on. At one of our regular gatherings of CTI centre directors and staff, I put the idea to them that we might work together to set up an association for learning technology. The reason for this was that the Computer and Teaching initiative was funded by government as a short term initiative, three years. We had just come to a point coming towards the end of that three years and we had a review and were being extended for another two years. I was starting to feel how unsatisfactory it was that here was a community of people actively involved in learning technology, both the centres themselves and the people they worked with out in universities. And yet our existence, our very existence was at the whim of the funders and we could be gone the moment the funding ran out. I felt there was a real need to create something that would be both enduring and more importantly owned by the practitioners themselves. And in that way also create a forum, a place for the hard-won knowledge and expertise of those actively involved in this area to be exchanged. I have to say the proposal, the suggestion for an association was not well met by the Director of the Confucian Teaching Initiative. They thought it would be confusing, it would duplicate what they were doing and there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm for it, but a few of them thought it was a good idea. So I moulded it over a bit more. Then a short time later I had a couple of people approached me, Graham Chesters from Hull and Gabriel Jacobs from the University of Wales at Swansea. They were editors of a journal that was in search of a home, it wasn't doing terribly well, it was on technology and education. And they said, look if you're going to set up an association, how about taking over this journal and making it the journal of the association, which seemed like a very good idea to me. But I was still worried because it's a lot of work getting something like set up and we weren't at all sure how we were going to manage it. Because clearly it couldn't be done at the cost of the work we were paid to do in the Confucian Teaching Initiative. And then a short time later I was at a function organised by BT in BT Tower in London and I happened to mention to someone from BT our interest in setting up an association. But the sticking point was what would really help it get off the ground and running quickly would be if we could employ someone to work on behalf of the association. But unless we had money in the bank to underwrite such a post for a couple of years it wouldn't be possible to do and I thought no more about it. And then a couple of weeks later I had a phone call saying, you know what you were saying about an association for learning technology would £50,000 help. And I said yes it would at that time, that was enough to cover salary for two years. And so at that point we rolled into action, we got advertising for points someone. I wrote to everybody I knew in our education who had an interest in or was involved in it and it was about 200 people inviting them to become founder members. And more than half of those who I wrote to responded and said yes they would like to and promptly joined. And then as those of you who saw Wendy Hall's presentation yesterday will recall it was launched at Cal 93, the Cal Conference in 1993. And from that point it went from strength to strength. We're particularly celebrating at this conference, the first conference which took place in September 1994, 20 years ago. Sorry that was 19 years ago wasn't it, but this is like our 20th conference. And at that conference we had just a little short of 300 people coming which was quite remarkable for a new association and a new world. And some of the objectives of the association were achieved very quickly. The establishment of a community that recognised itself and the creation of effective ways of exchanging ideas and knowledge between members of the association was something we were able to do really quite quickly. The other thing we were really keen to do though was to start to influence policy. At that time quite a lot of money from government was being put into learning technology initiatives, not only the caboose and teaching initiative that I was responsible for, but there was also the teaching learning technology programme. And that was trying to significantly improve the effectiveness of higher education by creating computer based tools for teaching large population first year subjects, so maths, psychology, chemistry, economics etc. And so this was if you like an attempt to lower the cost of higher education through use of technology, but nobody actually involved thought this was at all realistic as a target and yet the justification for getting the money out of government to fund this had been just that. So decisions were being taken at a senior level based on unrealistic expectations and very limited understanding of the technology and just what it was or was not suitable for. So we were keen that the association should start to influence policy, should be consulted by those at the senior level and that I think took another 10 years to occur, it was a long time before we really got to that point. So here we are in 2013, looking back over 20 years a lot has happened, but in some ways the questions remain the same, what are the best ways to use technology to meet the big problems and issues that we face in higher education. And there's a session coming up shortly at 5-12 where I and a number of other past presidents will be reflecting on the changes of the last 20 years and what the future holds for learning technology. So I hope you'll be able to join that session.