ALT-C 2024: Speculative Re-imaginings
The last ALT-C I attended was when it was hosted here in at The University of Edinburgh in the impressive McEwan Hall in 2019, just before the world changed. So it felt appropriate that the opening Keynote by Chris Friend (Keane University, USA) ‘Humane Education: Empathy in Policies, Places, and Platforms’ focused in on the way our use of technologies for education has changed and proposed five principles of Humane Technology:
- Disciplinarity: Understand how people in a discipline use technology to do the work of their discipline. Help students use technology effectively as members of their fields.
- Transparency: Disclose what any app/platform actually does, and explain its basic functionality in simple, accessible terms.
- Agnosticism: Make the app/platform/device/brand fade into the background and focus on the task/work at hand.
- Openness: Remove hurdles and barriers to access. Make content seamless and simple to obtain. Rely on free content whenever possible.
- Fidelity: Preserve original files and formatting to ease access and maintain quality. Keep text as text (not screenshots) and use the simplest url when providing links, removing trackers.
You can read the text of Chris’s full Keynote over on his blog: https://chrisfriend.us/humane-education/
Or watch ‘‘Humane Education: Empathy in Policies, Places, and Platforms’ in full on YouTube.
One of the Playful Opportunities and Barriers landscapes created by participants of the ‘Reviewing and re-imagining opportunities and barriers to fostering playful engagement in learning technology professional spaces’ workshop.
I was attending the conference this year to present the ISG Playful Engagement Strategy review project undertaken with intern Ayaan Ahmed from November 2023 – June 2024. The workshop was well received with participants really enjoying the combination of Ketso tree, and Cultural Probing methodology to tease out perceptions, ideas, and understandings.
The first workshop I attended also turned out to be my favourite of the conference. Matthew Moran, Head of Transformation at The Open University, engaged our future thinking with ‘Reimagining learning technology futures with speculative design: a hands-on workshop’. I really enjoyed the activities using science fiction prototyping, design fiction and speculation on experiential futures and will be keeping an eye on his work and future outputs.
Another highlight was catching Britt Dzioba (B.C. Campus) and her talk ‘Supporting Digital Literacy Development in Educators with Open Educational Resources: A Canadian Perspective’. BCcampus has designed and launched a brilliant digital literacy tool, the B.C. Digital Literacy Hub. The Hub is a public, open, online collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) designed for post-secondary instructors: “The goal of the hub is to help educators, including learning and teaching staff, improve their own digital literacy skills while learning how to integrate these skills easily into courses to support students. The design and curation of the site is informed by the B.C. Digital Literacy Framework and is intended to provide a simple, practical toolkit.”.
Tom Farrelly, Gearóid Ó Suilleabháin, Rajiv Jhangiani, and Darragh Coakley presented ‘Engaging the Future: Re-imagining Open Education Practices in the Technological Higher Education Sector’. Discussing the processes and outcomes of their recently published sectoral White paper ‘Open Education Practices (OEP) in Higher Education – Focusing on Responsiveness, Innovation & Inclusivity’. Their two broad recommendations proposing a) the development of a national OEP strategy, focusing on stakeholder capacity, supportive policies, equitable access, sustainability models, and international cooperation. And b) and outline of 12 items to enhance institutional capacity for supporting OEP, the comprehensive nature of these recommendations to act as a potential blueprint for the sector.
The second and third Keynotes were panel discussions. On Wednesday we had ‘Imagining the Future of Education and Technology’ a panel of four students responded to prompts regarding technology now, in the near future (4-5 years), and farther future (40 years). Blackboard Ultra was mentioned positively several times, focusing on the importance of clarity in these spaces to locate study guides, slides, and recorded lectures to go back to. Mention was made of using LinkedIn Learning to complement their studies, and there was a strong desire for interactive engaging lectures preferred over standard talk -> listen lectures. Hybrid learning spaces were discussed, with request for screens showing the online students as present with in-person students. Maker and Technology spaces where students are trusted and able to access creative technologies. A good amount of interest in using VR for exploration, design, and in further future possibilities for hybrid/blended learning.
Thursday’s Keynote ‘Inviting Improvement through Lived Experience’ was a panel of students and professionals sharing their lived experiences of navigating access and inclusion in education, sharing their views from their roles in inclusive learning spaces, social justice, and as a student studying today. There were several interesting points raised, but both the Wednesday and Thursday panels had very similar things to say on the uses and benefits of generative AI. Of course, the students admitted to asking AI to generate an essay for them, but found this didn’t achieve what they wanted, and gained much more from using it to engage critically using it as a facilitator to investigate ideas and thoughts. The generative AI providing benefit to both groups of students in providing back and forth prompts to assist with grasping concepts, with the desire coming from wanting to use it in a responsible way to deepen their learning. The lived experience panel also highlighted the many accessibilities of benefits from assisted captioning and visual description services that are now available.
I found attending ALT-C this year a real champagne experience, with new ideas and connections fizzing and bubbling up each day and feel incredibly lucky to have been able to attend this year. I packed up my bags on the last day feeling positive about where educational technology might takes us.
Do take time (if you can!) to watch the panel Keynotes.
Watch the panel Keynote ‘Imagining the Future of Education and Technology’ on YouTube
Watch the panel Keynote ‘Inviting Improvement through Lived Experience’ on YouTube
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