Last week I was busy helping out and learning things at the Association for Learning Technology conference in Manchester. I’ve been the president of ALT for around four years, leading on the ALT awards and various other stuff with support from the excellent ALT team. There has been a colossal amount of change during my time as president, much of it kicked-off by Covid and all the pros and cons of Digital Education becoming strategically and operationally mainstream. Our new CEO, Susan Martin arrives at a time of great potential as we think about the future of ALT and explore how best we can support a rapidly changing community.

No hard sells

This year at the conference I managed to get to a lot of sessions and was pleased to find that nobody was attempting to sell the use of a specific tech ‘for education’. (Even the vendors at the conference trod carefully in this regard and took more of a ‘this can help to improve a practice’ line than a ‘this will solve education’ approach.)

Ten years ago (maybe less) the most popular conference sessions were often framed as “Using [Insert the latest tech here] for education”. We were in solution looking for a problem mode and quite often got it wrong, especially with anything supposedly social or community focused. 

Flexibility more important than ‘innovation’

In this year’s student panel keynote, when asked what the most positive aspect of technology was within their studies the answer was not AI or XR, it was ‘flexibility’. The agency to choose how and when to engage. One response during the panel could be summaried as ‘please don’t innovate, just work on making things better’. It seems that the term ‘innovation’ in the context of EdTech has come to mean “playing with that new thing in ways which don’t really help’’. 

Making the education we offer more flexible to access and engage with is more about process and culture change than about ‘using the latest tech’. In higher education we have a bad habit of adding a layer of ‘innovation’ on top of a fixed model of operation. It seems our students can spot that from a great distance and are not impressed. They were, however, very positive about a bunch of other digital related stuff and precise in identifying where the use of technology supported meaningful learning and where it could be corrosive.

Weariness

Perhaps we are all now wary-by-default of the revolutionary/radical/disruptive narrative around digital technology. For example, there was an ambivalence around AI this year, it has already become an auto-satirizing theme. This is not to say that it can’t be useful in some very general and very specific ways, it was more of a weariness born of ridiculous promises that it appears nobody believes. The most disruptive aspect of this hype cycle being the way that it regularly distracts from the hard work of quietly, and unglamourously, trying to make things a bit better.

Instead of luxuriating in hype, the sessions I attended discussed things such as improving the clarity of assessment processes for students, developing more relevant inductions, surviving in a sector where crisis is the new normal and understanding the lived experience of disabled students. All of which involved extensive use of, or reference to, digital technology.

AMEBWHIT

So perhaps it’s not the Association for Learning Technology but the Association for Making Education Better Which Happens to Involve Technology. AMEBWHIT is not the most usable acronym but it’s a more accurate description of the work of the ALT community. My hope is that in the coming years we can find positive ways of communicating the reality behind my infeasible acronym and grow the community by inviting in (and being useful for) a new generation of individuals and roles. The tech innovation cycle will take care of itself. In the meantime we can focus our innovation energy on setting the direction for ALT in an era where Digital Education is omnipresent.