(with apologies and much love to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys for the title, from the amazing track ‘Surfer Girl’)

Held in Warwick on the 1-3 September, the Association of Learning Technology annual conference (ALT-C) brought together 400 plus academics, learning technologists, heads of e-Learning and other engaged practitioners across a programme of keynotes and predominantly practice-led presentations. With the theme ‘Riding Giants: How to innovate and educate ahead of the wave’ the conference posed more questions for me than answers. I was interested to know who or what the ‘giants’ actually were? And for what reason did we need to ride them? Equally, what was the wave we were trying to stay ahead of? Was it something that would wipe us out or carry us to somewhere we didn’t want to be? I know it is a bit glib to interrogate a conference theme in this way. They are designed to set a tone for the millions of words, ideas, tweets and powerpoint slides that would emerge from the programme and the social milieu that followed. But each time I threw myself into the debates and discussions, listened to presentations and talked to people over coffee or an excellent Thornbridge Jaipur IPA, I found myself unable to answer these questions to any great satisfaction.

The overwhelming and confounding sense I took away from the conference was one of polarisation, especially in terms of practice. My choice of the word polarisation is quite a considered one. Learning technology has suffered over the years to engage with the mainstream practices of higher education. MOOCs opened the windows and showed us what can happen with the investment, commitment and attention of the wider institution. The struggle that was clearly demonstrated throughout the conference was the conflicted views about what we as learning technologists, teachers using technology or institutions want to achieve or succeed in. Do we want to lead (be the giant)? Do we want to avoid the impacts of change (stay ahead of the wave)? Do we want to follow the technological trends that shape and impact the rest of society (giants) or do we want to carve out our niche in the institution and let the changes and challenges pass us by? (wave)

I have extracted some tweets that I made during the conference, in response to and sometimes times inspired by the speakers and presentations that go some way towards addressing/interrogating/ignoring some of these issues this have led to what I see as this polarisation of practice.

are we talking about preparing the institution for the technology of today in ten years’ time? We have to be more agile than that #altc

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 1, 2014

This tweet was in response to the keynote presentation of Jeff Hayward entitled ‘Designing University Education for 2025: balancing competing priorities’.

He argued that the modern university needed to prepare itself for a raft of changes that represented substantial changes that arise primarily from the technologies of today. There is a clear disconnect between the pace of technological change, the use of technologies by our learners and the pace in which institutions can change and adapt to both of those. I think we have been successful in winning the battles of large scale institutional systems as a means of embedding learning technology. The difference in the post-digital age is that now, these platforms and tools don’t have to be firewalled behemoths of yore. They are lean, agile, accessible and most of all, social. There isn’t a single institutional ‘out of the box’ solution that we can get the institution to invest in. There are micro platforms, single purpose aggregations of tools, agile new start-ups and the continued predominance of a digital backpack hosted and stored in the cloud.

As a sector, we need to move away from our systems mind set and into one that creates the conditions for agility, creativity and innovation. The effort should not be on shaping the systems to be ready for 2025, it should be shaping the institution to be able to adapt to whatever is thrown at it. If we went back to 2005 and asked the institution to prepare itself for 2015, what would we have told it? What has happened in the intervening years that we could have never predicted? Funnily enough, it’s the stuff we are still trying to ways to adapt to now. Social media! Participatory culture! Digital Citizenship!

some people are still arguing that tech gets in the way of learning. it’s not the tech, it’s the pedagogy that needs to change. #altc

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 1, 2014

This was a tweet in response to two quite distinct examples of polarisation. The first arose from a number of comments from the conference that argued strongly that technology gets in the way of learning. The interrogation of the efficacy or impact of the technology was presented in the context of how much negative impact it had on learning, with the lower the negative impact the better. This is a problematic assertion at the best of times. It positions technology as a value-added, rather than as an integrated component of teaching and learning. The assumption was that the technology needed to change to better align with the pedagogy. Better social media platforms. Less kit. What is wrong with good old pen and paper?

The second example arose from an underlying assumption that technology was there to enhance the way we teach now. Hence the debate about students using their smart phones in class, or the ubiquitous shots of a sea of laptops and illuminated apple logos facing the modern lecturer. The elephant in the room here is that all of this was predicated on the argument that the pedagogy we have is fit for purpose. My main takeaway from the whole conference was that debate we need to have is not around the stranger danger of the internet, or the relative merits of lecture capture systems or the administrative benefits of the next generation of VLE products. We need a good, old fashioned barney about pedagogy. We need to debate whether the way we teach now is suitable for the way we learn. Is it practical for the jobs our students are going to do when they graduate? A blind-faced acceptance of pedagogy now asserts that we will always do it as we have done. And ultimately,our teaching and learning practices and their respective pedagogical approaches will be constantly challenged by agile private providers, emerging new modes of higher education entrepreneurship and the ‘gold rush’ like stampede towards a MOOC led future.

the one takeaway for me at #altc is the absolute necessity to debate/argue/interrogate a new pedagogy in HE http://t.co/Gb5G61lJRB

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 3, 2014

@alejandroa @A_L_T the problem of looking cool & hip & relevant whilst driving around in 1990 Nissan that is missing three of its four doors

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 3, 2014

This was a really interesting interjection from Alejandro Armellini, Professor of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at the University of Northampton (twitter handle @alejandroa). Asking the question of what problem does a MOOC solve, he cut straight to the chase about the issue of pedagogy, both in MOOCs and within institutions. MOOCs challenged the notion that we actually believed the mantra of pedagogy before technology. A number of questions and tweets acknowledged the fact that MOOC pedagogies were not generally innovative, and the innovation all came from the platform. The challenges for us to live the mantra we often espouse. The challenge is to slowly and surely blur the line between technology and pedagogy until it doesn’t exist. I have used the line before that modern learners don’t see a real or online world, they just see the world. We don’t talk about our telephone friends and our real friends. So why do we talk about on-line friends as being different and in some cases, assigned a value that is lesser than that of real friends?

My comment, a somewhat blunt analogy, refers to the fact that people engaged in MOOCs were seen as pioneers, innovators, cutting edge and radicals, when in the main, they were pushing the pedagogical equivalent of a Leyland P76. Unwieldy, dated, built in the seventies and as solid as a brick outhouse (and just as hard to steer). My case is that the current pedagogy of MOOCs (and by virtue, the current pedagogical approach for many online courses) is not fit for purpose. I recently wrote a blog post exploring this very issue which identified the six disconnects that demand a debate about a new higher education pedagogy.

@kerrg the disconnect is that academics are working with technology in their research and not necessarily in their teaching? #why #altc

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 2, 2014

This was an interesting one for me – the disconnect between academic research practice with technology and academic teaching practice with technology. I think it was an interesting question to pose. I don’t have an answer as to why acceptance of technology is higher in our research practice than it is in our teaching practice. In my experience, there is also a demand on those consuming and using our research outputs to be more digitally literate and engaged than the learners we shepherd into our classrooms and lecture theatres. We seemed to have merged our learning technology field with research technology. They definitely representing additional draws on our resources, especially practices such as blog support, research impact and open access increasingly fall under the learning technology remit.

@dkernohan life is scary and dark and unpredictable. social media just replicates the life we choose to live. #justsaying #altc

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 1, 2014

Life is a messy, chaotic, complex and troubling, both online and off, & we learn through those as well as the positive connected ones #altc

— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) September 2, 2014

My final observation from the conference came in the form of a couple of interchanges about the nature of social media. David Kernohan (always an interesting and provocative speaker) challenged the future of the corporate social media platforms with higher education, noting a number of issues around corporate ethics and intentions, lack of community ownership and a wider misunderstanding about their uses (citing a case at Warwick). This presentation made me ponder the existence or promise of existence of a social media nirvana. Is there a perfect platform, community owned, popular, relevant, not used by our parents that can solve all of our interaction, engagement, creative and educational problems? The answer surely must be a bleedingly obvious ‘no’. Is there a platform where you will be safe all the time, reinforced positively, engaged pro actively and never challenged, aside from the pleasant tasting engagement with a feedback sandwich? The answer for me is that there shouldn’t be. Life is all the things listed in the tweet and more. We experience life in discontinuous, chaotic and complex ways and we learn through these experiences, conflicts, communions and collaborations (or to choose to make the same mistake over and over). The social media we use is a replication of these highs and lows. Have a look at your Facebook timelines. They tell the story of the ways you engage inside and outside the web. Higher educations engagement with social media needs to embrace the elements of living and learning that social media clearly and often bluntly represent. It isn’t always about aligning every duck so that the students experiences of education is seamless and safe.

As I noted at the top, I find modern conferences leave me with more questions than answers. A neat encapsulation of life, really! This one certainly challenged me to keep asking these questions of us as practitioners, of academics, of learners and of a society that demands more and new skills and accountability from the academy. This post just scrapes the surface of the debates we need to have. But what is important is that we need to inject a sense of criticality into our engagements. Broadcast and backslapping only serve the ego and not the collective good. Social media is a tool for interactivity not broadcasting, even though the platforms make it easy to make it seem that your are interacting (like! favourite! retweet!). 2000 tweets during an hour brings you a trending topic but almost no discussion or debate between the audience, the interested observers or the speaker. #justsaying 😉

For all the presentations from the conference, including the delightful Catherine Cronin and the provocative and creative Audrey Watters, you can watch them all again at the ALT-C YouTube Channel (YouTube BTW started in 2005, something we should be ready for in 2015…but is our wireless network?!)