This month, February 2020, is the third time I volunteer to curate the @femEdTech Twitter account. If you haven’t come across it before, I encourage you to:
When I curated the account the first time, in May 2018, I wrote about my week as a curator in this post, and I reflected on what’s involved, setting up a TAGSExplorer and other accounts that inspired me.
The TAGSExplorer View in May 2018
The TAGSExplorer View in February 2020
As you can see, things have changed a bit since my first time curating!
In March 2019, during my second stint at the Twitter deck of the FemEdTech network, I also wrote a post. This time, I reflected more on how people were contributing to what was then a much bigger and broader conversation. I shared examples of how we worked together to grow our network, to spread the word and to raise awareness of the challenges we are yet to overcome in order to achieve greater equality in Learning Technology.
At that time I had started including information about this in talks I gave, including for example:
And more of which I covered in a review at the end of last year, celebrating a #FemEdTech kind of year.
Which is why this time round, reflecting on my time as the account’s guest curator, I want to step away from the hashtag, from the online network and share with you how the network has changed my every work and life, how the work we do translates into the world outside of the Twittersphere.
Making momentum One of the things that you can only really guess at from the online conversation is how much making goes into building any kind of momentum, and I mean that literally. Just now, with the quilt project, you can watch the process of momentum becoming material. But before the quilt, there were badges and signs and letters and stickers, parcels sent across the country and sometimes across the world, to distribute tokens of belonging to this community. Cat memes, photos, blog posts, radio shows, podcasts, artwork, drawings… people create all kinds of things and over time it creates real momentum:
Meeting strangers The other thing that has really changed is to meet individuals who are also active in this network in person. Two years ago when I mentioned this topic, no one had even heard of it. Now, it’s been a while since I last went to an event at which I didn’t have a conversation about it, met fellow supporters, seen badges, stickers or exchanged hugs. Some of us even have the t-shirt ;).
It’s surprised me how powerful it is to have these meet ups. They act as a catalyst for activities and collaboration well beyond the day on which they take place. They also help to encourage those who give so much of their time and effort to the network, giving me an opportunity to say thank you to someone who has helped me or supported me or someone whom I have only ever ‘met’ on Twitter. It’s powerful to have a way to bring the conversation to promoting equality, it gives us permission to discuss common issues around HR policies, professional development, career progression and collecting data about these things and to share new developments.
Hashtag and humanity Being part of this effort, the work that the hashtag #FemEdTech has grown into, gives me hope that there are more and more people, some of whom I already know and some of whom I will never meet, who take an active role, who make a contribution – and for that I am grateful. I am grateful to those who recommend less visible colleagues for keynotes on the big stage, to those who work to make their events and conferences more welcoming to all, to everyone who helps to amplify the voices of those who are heard less often and those who champion causes like gender equality in their professional practical. It is definitely not an easy gig. But for every exasperated, eye rolling, impatient or indifferent listener, I also meet one who does care, who wants to know more, who might get involved.
It’s often an uncomfortable experience to stand on a stage or sit around a meeting table, telling your audience about injustice, discrimination, about the gender pay gap and inequality. Even if you are able to share positive trends or hopeful new initiatives, the message remains one of “always more to do”. No matter where you look, no matter what kind of inequality you fight for, there is always more to do. We may not all agree on what the most urgent priorities are in our individual, institutional or national contexts, but I hope that we share a sense of urgency, a drive to do better as professionals in Learning Technology, as human beings.
Now, an ‘I love me’ wall is something Jim Groom introduced me to, ‘basically a space dedicated to all the stuff you’ve done..’. And I’ve come to embrace that concept wholeheartedly in my work space at home. Home working has never looked so stimulating and that’s a major plus on days when the heating is broken, the cat has been sick on the carpet and the doorbell rings with yet another delivery for next door.
In that spirit, this is the ‘I love me wall’ of the past year, celebrating the stuff I’ve done, been part of, am proud of and am inspired by…
Photo by Sandra Huskinson (@FieryRed1)
One of the absolute highlights of my year was giving a keynote at the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference in January, which led to conversations and collaborations that last for the whole year including this excellent webinar Academic online identity and social media .
I really enjoyed working on this ‘keynote in three hashtags’… it was a great way to start the year, thinking about how social media often comes with a general sense of the superficial, showing just the best side of myself, trying not to avoid being vulnerable for social media can be a toxic space for many, particularly for women, for people of colour, for anyone whom the trolls choose to single out. The talk focuses on three questions:
How is social media changing professional practice?
How does social media support openness in education?
A completely different kind of conversation started a month later, when I took part in a panel discussion at the Royal Society in London on Human Transformation Remembering and Learning alongside Diana Laurillard and Diana made a point that really resonated with me: Diana reminded us of the enormous scale of the demand for education (at all levels) worldwide. Diana reflected on how many hundreds of thousands of teachers will be needed to provide education and training as more and more learners in the global South in particular gain access to education and come online.
Keynoting at the RIDE Conference. Image: Sarah Sherman
It was the interplay between learning and technology, how they effect each other to change our understanding and our practice, that is of particular interest. One of the areas of high priority I discussed is measuring learning, an interest in assessment and in a wide range of methods to quantify, track and chart all aspects of the learner experience. There is always a promise that with enough data and dashboards we can gain insights, leverage the power of learning analytics to understand more about how what we do impacts on progress, skills development and learning outcomes. It is up to us to develop our own capabilities in order to be able to understand fully how the more complex systems we use work, what determines when a ‘red flag’ goes up and how we should interpret and act on the information we gain in this manner. One of the last points I mad in this part of the talk picks up on a section of the 2018 Horizon Report, which describes rethinking the role of educators not as a solvable or even a difficult challenge, but a wicked one, as ‘complex to define, much less address’. This is why I think the work that my organisation does is so important, charting the changing role of professionals across sectors. This particular was a really valuable opportunity for me to explore this further with experts in distance education.
April had many highlights and a particularly special moment for me was to be joining #PressEdConf19 for a session that explored a conversational post format can be used to support reflective practice (read more here). The idea for the session came from an ongoing blog project in which Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) and I write a monthly series of blog posts to openly share our approach to leadership. You can catch up on earlier posts and podcasts on this blog.
It was a great experience to present at a Twitter only conference. I took part in quite a few virtual conferences this year, as a speaker and a participant and it is extremely useful to have those experiencing when you are have a role in organising events yourself.
May brought both online and in person interaction with the Creative Commons community as I was able to attend the CC Global Summit for the first time and it was a fantastic experience. I have long been involved in the Creative Commons community and various activities but this was my first visit to the event which is at the heart of it all and I was met with real warmth and welcoming acceptance. The creative and joyful atmosphere of the conference, from the handmade designs on the badges to the samba music playing throughout the museum conference venue conveyed a sense of celebration and joy at this meeting of so many in the Commons but also motivated to pull up your sleeves, get stuck in and do plenty of work (and there was A LOT to be done). Here I wrote about my experience in 10 tweets.
Photo: Clint Lalonde
In June I had the pleasure of participating in the ETUG conference in Kamloops, Canada. It was a real privilege for me to be there, to have been invited to contribute a keynote ‘You are more than a data point. Weaving a tapestry of hope and humanity’ to ETUG’s 25th Anniversary Conference, and also to have the honour of taking part in National Indigenous Peoples Day. I learnt a lot from my time in Kamloops and I wrote a couple of posts reflecting on the experience and the keynote I contributed:
“I felt very much at home at the ETUG conference because just like the ALT community it is all about collaboration, reflection and sharing of best practice. After 25 years of working together (celebrated with a great donut birthday cake) this community has come to hold dear very much the same values as I do, recognising the power of sharing practice and research and working together to make change happen for students and staff alike.
And you could tell that this event was very much organised with heart. Little touches everywhere made participants and speakers feel welcome from the start and created a space in which the moving narrative from Elder Mike on National Indigenous Peoples Day found an equally receptive audience as the newest members of the community sharing research findings or #femedtech conversations about equality and women in #edtech.”
This talk was one of the most satisfying pieces of work I did this year and it brought together some different elements of my thinking that I subsequently published as a rewritten article in Educause Review.
#altc staff team portrait
As you may know, we are a virtual team and everyone works from home (even during a heatwave). This way, we can better work with Members throughout the UK. Being a virtual team has many upsides but one downside is that I don’t get to see my colleagues very often. When we do get together, as we did in July, we sometimes create a team portrait (alternatives to photos as we are mostly a bit camera shy) and this is one of my all time favourites. I enjoy planning our team days and I put a lot of effort into the preparations, just like I would for an event. Writing about the Annual Conference Martin Weller called our approach ‘meticulously informal’ and that captures not just the way we run events but also the way we work together precisely.
In early August, when the weather was hot and most people were on their summer holiday, I went to our monthly online Members Assembly meeting. Most of these meetings are virtual and the reason why I took a screenshot was that I found it so inspiring that despite the heat, holidays and probably a heavy workload, the room was full of volunteers, engaging, taking action. That’s the secret sauce of building sustainable communities of practice: share power, have a purpose, provide consistent, robust structures and put the time in. Even in August, during a heatwave.
Picture by Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology on Flickr
This community portrait taken at the ALT Annual Conference is the first of it’s kind for us. The moment of that photo means a lot to me. It captures a few hundred participants. I keep it on my desktop to remind me each day that we serve ten times as many Members. It helps illustrate the scale of the core community I represent, it makes something that is largely a virtual network more tangible. Over the past ten years I have probably met more than half of our Members in person or connected with them directly online. Each voice matters. My job is to listen and to make them heard.
This is a photo I took of the Extinction Rebellion Protest in Westminster on a day I had a meeting with senior Edtech policy officials. We sat inside the building discussing essentially how to make change happen whilst outside, on improvised barricades, thousands were singing songs of fear and hope.
From left to right: Christian Friedrich, Maren Deepwell, Lorna Campbell, Laura Czerniewicz, Martin Hawksey, Christina Rupprecht (at the cat wall, Wikimedia Deutschland offices), Source: Tweet
Working in partnership with Wikimedia Germany I was involved in organising an event in late November, an evening of discussion and debate on education, open participation and democracy and critical reflections. It was a very special collaboration and part of our work for the OER20 coming up in April next year.
There is one more big item to add to the ‘wall’ for this year, and that’s ALT’s Impact Report 2017-20 which was published yesterday. Because, of course, the whole ‘wall’ is green… the tapestry through which bright threads of my year are woven spells #altc.
It is a huge privilege to be a CEO and it most definitely is hard work as well. Being in a leadership position brings into focus all elements of who I am and that is reflected in the way I think and work. Borrowing from my ETUG talk to close my reflections on 2019:
…”That brings us back to my own story, my own perspective and professional journey as a Learning Technologist, an Anthropologist, an Artist, Star Trek fan, a carer and a woman. Some of you may be familiar with the OER Conferences that we organise and with the wonderful work of Kate Bowles who gave one of the keynotes at OER19 this year entitled ‘A quilt of stars: time, work and open pedagogy’. Kate and many other speakers and participants created a strong narrative of hope, a thread of open practice that stitches us together, a tapestry, a patchwork, a weaving together. In her blog post about the conference, Kate described her reflections as “a scrap of practice that makes sense through the labour of others who take time to read it, think about it, share it, ask questions of it, extend it” and I feel her words eloquently highlight all the invisible work, the unbilled effort, that is so often crucial to making change happen, from grassroots activism to academic practice.
And this message of hope and kindness very much inspired my year. It reminds me that … we are all more than the data we create and our professional practice is more than can be tracked in time spent, papers marked or support tickets answered. Our practice becomes fully realised when we adopt a more mature and reflective, a more critical perspective that is informed by our stories and recognises the importance of the labour of others. Communities such as ALT are key to us collaborating and communicating in order to create a future for Learning Technology that is more open and equitable for all, to weave that tapestry of hope and humanity.”
If you don’t think gender inequality (in Learning Technology) is an issue that concerns you, this post is especially for you. Welcome!
For those readers who are already interested in this topic, welcome back. It’s been a #femEdTech kind of year 🙂
Maren Deepwell, Laura Czerniewicz, Helen Beetham
For the last few years I have been actively involved as a volunteer in community efforts to promote gender equality in Learning Technology but this year my day job as CEO of the Association for Learning Technology took on a decidedly more #femEdTech flavour.
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that gender inequality is certainly not the only issue we are facing in Learning Technology and that there are other forms of inequality and discrimination that we need to continue to address and challenge.
But nonetheless it remains an issue from the gender pay gap to the gender data gap, representation at conferences and on executive boards, in policy making, on social media and so forth.
As I am in a position of relative privilege I can often exert influence over who I work with, who gets invited and who has a voice in what I do. But as soon as I leave my sphere of influence I am back to being the token female speaker on the agenda, the only woman around the table, the woman who gets trolled. Sigh. Sometimes cry. Often shout!
In this post, I am going to share the key pieces of my work on equality in Learning Technology from 2019. I hope they will be useful to you to explore, share, reuse:
My year started at with a talk that brought together the threads of community, openness and equality: Community, Openness, Equality: a keynote in three hashtags #SocMedHE18 (talk, video): Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference, 9 January 2019.
Promoting equality in a distributed organisation, joint keynote with Martin Hawksey for International Women’s Day, University of the Highlands and Islands, 8 March 2019; this particular talk and the work we presented from the ALT Annual Survey provided a basis for other talks later this year, particular in relation to exploring a gender perspective of the professionalisation in Learning Technology, job roles and changes to this over the past 5 years:
“… the only rule is to make use of your voice, to continue to engage and question, not to become indifferent or disengaged no matter how difficult that can seem at times. …It is, for me, a powerful reminder that we each have agency, and that taking part, contributing something that helps others understand our way of seeing the world, our perspective on open, our world view (as a women, as a feminist, as a contributor in my case) is a meaningful and important act.”
UnCommon Women meet up at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2019
And this certainly isn’t limited to the work we do here in the UK, or even the #femEdTech network, as there are many other communities and projects with similar aims.
The #femEdTech network is made up of activists all of whom ‘represent’ the network in their own contexts. But we, and who that ‘we’ is changes quite often, get regular requests to write about what we do and I volunteered to write this particular post: Building a Network for Curation – the #femedtech movement, blog post for WCET, 22 August 2019; the post gives a short summary of what the network is, what activities members engage in and examples of the types of things we have done in the past.
And there was a lot of talk of #femEdTech also with Terry on the podcast: Gettin’ Air with Terry Greene, 23 August 2019; which I really enjoyed. You can listen to the episode here.
I also want to reflect briefly on how to challenge the status quo and keep going… .
Male only conference, event, panel? No! I no longer accept invitations to male only events or panels and I always ask to see the list of speakers/full agenda. Many organisers I respond to to ask about other female speakers seemingly have not thought about this. Full stop. In many cases the conversation leads to changes to the agenda to be more balanced and I have plenty of lists of speakers I can refer them to if they are looking for speakers on particular topics. This is an old problem, but I figure that I can be one less person to accept it and if more and more people join in then ‘manels’ will soon be a thing of the past.
Women’s issue? No! As you can see from the list above, this year I started to include something about gender equality in pretty much every talk I have given, regardless of context or audience. I reject the idea that gender equality as an issue should be confined to women’s networks or International Women’s Days etc. It’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s fundamental to the work we do in any sector. Eye rolling, sighing and other ‘oh, here she goes again’ reactions are common. Regardless of how many graphs I show or stats I include to provide a dispassionate, well-referenced and balanced argument, the uncomfortable truth is that gender equality requires change and disruption for every single one of us.
Vote = equality? No! I often come across the perception that gender inequality is no longer a thing. That at least in the UK the fact that women have the vote means that the problem has been sorted. Be content already. This is precisely why I include something to address this misconception in every talk. I’d also recommend reading up on the research (Invisible Women – exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado-Perez is a good place to start).
Allies – thank you! I am fortunately not high profile enough on social media to attract a lot of trolling, but keeping up this work year in, year out is hard enough given what I do have to contend with. Luckily I have allies, both men and women and those who identify differently, whom I am grateful for. Every time I hear their voices, see their actions, notice their efforts, I am glad that they are there. Some of them are very visible and others work behind the scenes, but all of them make a difference and they inspire me to do what I can to make change, too. Some moments of this year, like this VConnecting session at the ETUG 25th Anniversary Conference, have stayed with me:
So, gender inequality in Learning Technology, we are coming to get you… from collecting data about pay, promotions and professional practice to calling out harassment, discrimination and ignorance on the web and in the physical world.
Creating strategies is a big part of my work. Some are small and fit a particular purpose, others span an entire organisation and many years. It’s the second kind that I am currently working on as ALT is half way through setting out a new strategy for 2020-2025.
Our process involves many people, with their own views, ideas and voices and it’s all the richer for it. ALT’s Chair, Sheila, and I, blog about our progress regularly and if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to engage and make your voice heard.
For me, this new strategy will be a living, breathing, practical framework for pretty much everything I work on for the next five years, just as the last one has been. So every ounce of effort, every speck of gold dust that I can help channel into it now, is going to make a big difference further down the line.
A lot of my thinking as ALT’s chief executive develops alongside and through the wider consultation process with our Board of Trustees, staff, Members and the wider network. But there are some things I think through on an individual basis.
For example, when I applied for my job in 2012, part of the interview process involved giving a presentation about my vision for ALT. I still have that slide deck…
Since then, ever few years when we start to write a new strategy, I sit down, and I prepare another presentation pretending to be applying for my job all over again. It’s a useful tool I find. It helps me to step outside of what I think I already know about the organisation and try to see it with fresh eyes. It prompts me to ignore all practicalities and focus on vision instead. As a new ceo you never quite know what you are going to inherit. How many skeletons in the closet.. how much willingness to change.. what kind of internal agendas that dictate what can and cannot happen. You have an excuse to clean house, to start from a blank slate. A new strategy has a similar power… it can help reset the board. It gives you the freedom to start afresh. It’s an exciting moment.
As we began working on the strategy, one of my colleagues asked me whether a strategy is all about the future. That’s a very useful question. I suppose, in a practical sense, much of the strategy itself will focus on what’s ahead. But in many ways I don’t think creating a strategy is all about the future because you also want to understand, learn from and build on where you have already been. Making meaningful progress and change depends on not ignoring what you already know, problems you have already identified. In many ways it’s the opposite of what Sir Humphries does in Yes, Minister in order to manage his Ministers. Dusting off the same old idea and repackaging it in brand new marketing is a successful way of avoiding change whilst always hailing the next big thing. It doesn’t challenge the status quo.
Change is good to think about in the context of strategies. The more radical your vision, the more work it takes to bring everyone with you. The more things change, the more effort it takes to communicate that change and make everyone notice. Here’s where working closely with the tech sector is not always an easy thing because the narratives of change in technology tend to be about shininess, all about seamless transitions and problem solving. Often I come across sexy must have solutions to problems I didn’t know existed. That’s the kind of change that’s easy to buy in to, literally. Change that takes years to plan and longer to bed in and real effort to implement for years and at scale is far less sexy and so much more meaningful for an organisation like mine. That’s why looking at the landscape, listening to what’s at the heart of the community, taking time to step back and really look at where we’ve come from is so valuable.
I like to dabble in doing some development work. I can’t do the really tech heavy bits, but I like doing design, documentation and bug testing. Sometimes I get too ambitious about how many things can be improved or changed in one iteration, and getting others to test the workflow is a good way of identifying those things and improving the design in response. Strategies are quite similar for me. I start from a point of where I can see we will be in 5 years time and then work backwards until my ideas converge with everyone else’s. Sticking with my tech metaphor, the strategy becomes like a user interface for where we are headed.
The last time we created a strategy the process taught me much about the value of listening and collaborating, of what can be achieved when you work together, share power and responsibility. It was an rewarding experience for me on a personal basis as well as greatly beneficial for the organisation. It also taught me the value of setting aside time to dream about the future.
Today for International Women’s Day Martin Hawksey and I joined an inspiring day organised by the University of the Highlands and Islands Women’s Network. We contributed a joint keynote on promoting equality in a distributed organisation.
— University of the Highlands and Islands (@ThinkUHI) March 8, 2019
The keynote focused on sharing our perspectives on promoting equality on three levels: promoting equality as a challenge for Learning Technology professionals, promoting equality as key value in our organisational culture and promoting equality as a personal commitment.
You can access the full slides deck, including crowd-sourced slides from the generous #femedtech community https://go.alt.ac.uk/IWD19altc and all slides are openly licenced.
Martin’s part of the talk focused on a new analysis of survey data from ALT’s Annual Survey, that highlighted some very interesting differences in how male and female professionals views differ and he’s written a blog post that includes all the graphs and links to the full data set.
For my part, I want to add some reflections of my own on key parts of what we spoke about:
First, building on the perspective that Martin explored through the survey results, I shared parts of my professional development portfolio which has been accredited through ALT, making me a Senior CMALT Holder:
We heard much today about how important professional recognition and career progression is to fighting structural and organisational inequalities and in this context I felt there was an added significance to recognising different forms of promoting equality as not only a valid, but essential role of leaders at all levels, not ‘just’ specialist staff. One of the speakers today, Dr Susan Engstrand, reflected on how even small matters like keeping meetings running to time and chairing in a manner that encourages participation from everyone can make a significant difference and promote a positive culture change. It was inspiring to hear so many different voices, students included, from such a diverse university population as the communities that the University of the Highlands and Islands serves and the closing slides of our keynote added more voices from the #femedtech network to today’s discourse:
Especially as this year International Women’s Day happens during Open Education Week, it’s been a pleasure to receive contribution for this crowd-sourced slide deck, enabling volunteers within the network to help share ideas, perspectives, inspiration and practical resources. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed – and more contributions are always welcome.
As an extension of the monthly series of blog posts about leading a virtual organisation this keynote built on a recent post and podcast, focused on Martin’s and my own experiences. And so I felt it was appropriate and important that the talk followed a similar conversational format, giving our audience the opportunity to join into reflecting on our different points of view, contrasting experiences and also the similarities. It reminded me powerfully that meaningful progress can only be made if we don’t have the conversation about equality ‘just’ amongst women, or indeed any discourse about inequality of any other kind. It’s not a ‘women’s problem’ or an issue that only concerns those of us who identify as female. It’s an issue for everyone to be concerned with. In some contexts, we may make an economic argument, that mixed teams are more effective. In others there are legal, social and political realities to be confronted. But on a daily basis, there is also the difference we can each make, affecting change on a small scale, within our personal sphere of influence, as part of our families, our communities, our institutions, our networks. Thank you to everyone at the UHI International Women’s Day event for so many examples of enthusiastic, passionate and compassionate people doing just that. Every day.
We about to embark on the third and final year of ALT’s Strategy 2017-2020. Together we have made strong, strategic progress putting our shared values into practice and meet our aims for Members and for public benefit, too.
We reported to Members and stakeholders from across sectors in ALT’s Annual Report and at the AGM in September about the changes to our organisational and governance structures. The transition to an independent, distributed organisation, has allowed us to make huge leaps in terms of meeting our strategic goals.
Since September, much has happened and so we are are now sharing more of what we have been up to in the year that saw ALT celebrate its 25th anniversary:
Open research
A key area for growth has been the Open Access research published in ALT’s journal. The full back archive reaching back to 1993 is an invaluable resource for Members at a time when reliable research is increasingly important for efficient use of Learning Technology and informed decision making.
Member organisations from industry including Blackboard and Moodle as well as individual experts such as DCU’s Head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit, Mark Glynn, have led a series of webinars on GDPR organised by ALT’s Chief Innovation, Technology and Community Officer, Martin Hawksey. Much of this work has been shared with other sector bodies such as ELESIG Scotland and also fed into ALT’s recent response to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics inquiry into data and technology ethics.
Enhancing professional recognition
We have also completed the pilots for Associate and Senior CMALT. These two new accreditation pathways for Learning Technology professionals will launch later this month. Led by Operations Manager, Susan Greig, working closely with Certified Members and Lead Assessors, both pathways will be supported by a growing body of community-sourced resources and a baseline of example portfolios that set a robust standard for professionals at different stages of their career and across a broader range of roles than before. We invite you warmly to sign up for the launch webinars for Associate and Senior CMALT to find out more.
Postcards celebrating ALT@25 remixed by ALT Members
ALT Assembly
ALT’s Membership has now grown to over 3,500 Members and as a result many of our activities are now scaling up to support the larger community. Alongside increasing our operational capacity, the Board of Trustees led Members in the effort to update ALT’s constitution, bringing it in line with best practice set out by the Charity Commission and also to ensure that in our governance our community is at the heart of everything we do. That is why as part of the updated governance structure the new ALT Assembly committee has been established. The ALT Assembly is the overarching committee advising the Board of Trustees, supported by Tom Palmer, ALT’s Membership Manager, it will be bringing together former operational committees, publication and events related groups and boards as well as Members and Special Interest Groups. We hope that the Assembly will help improve communication for Members actively involved in ALT as well as the impact of the work we do together.
ALT marks one year operating as an independent organisation
In our report above we have focused on the work our Members do and with that in mind it seems only fitting to add a final update on developments that have seen us increase our organisational capacity to support Members across the UK. Today’s date, 1 February, marks the first anniversary since ALT began to operate as an independent, virtual organisation and employer. Whilst major restructuring and transition have been ongoing for most of the last 18 months, disruption to services for Members have been minimal. In keeping with ALT’s commitment to openness, Members have been regularly updated throughout the process and ALT’s senior staff have shared the journey informally in a monthly series of blog posts on open leadership. Having successfully weathered the transition, we now look forward to the benefits the more agile and distributed organisation structure will bring.
Thinking about the year ahead, with the results from ALT’s Annual Survey due to be published soon and a packed calendar of activities already planned, we look forward to increasing the impact of what we do as the leading professional body for Learning Technology in the UK. Members will convene the Assembly (both face to face and online) in the next month to work together and this new development inspires and reminds us that each contribution to the work we do makes a real difference to our growing Membership.
Together, and on behalf of the Trustees and staff, we thank you for helping us making many small steps into one giant leap forward over this past year.
