From engaging on the periphery to coming to play a part: Reflecting on becoming a Trustee of ALT for Trustees’ Week 2025
By Keith Smyth,Interim-Chair of ALT’s Board of Trustees
This week, 3-7 November 2025, marks this year’s annual Trustees’ Week which acknowledges the work of the close to one million trustees who support and help govern charities across the UK. As part of Trustees’ Week, I’ve been invited by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) to reflect on being a trustee for this important charity and membership organisation.
As this post will be going out on ALT’s blog, I will say no more than that ALT is the leading professional body for learning technology in the UK, supporting a collaborative community for individuals and organisations, with our overall charitable objective being “to advance education through increasing, exploring and disseminating knowledge in the field of Learning Technology for the benefit of the general public”. You can read more on the About ALT section of our website.
So, where to start? Perhaps at the start.
I first become aware of ALT back in the 1990’s, as a mid-twenties PhD student beginning to research what was then being referred to as ‘networked learning’. I attended ALT’s annual conference at the University of Bristol in 1999, presenting a poster on the design of my PhD project. I can’t say it wasn’t a little intimidating; however, I learned a great deal about what ALT was striving to do – as 1999 was in the early years of ALT – and the people I met were supportive and welcoming. Often the decisive factor in going any further as someone new to a community.
As I progressed through my PhD studies, and into working in the education sector, I became a member of ALT, then slowly moved into being something of a member-volunteer. In my experience, progressing from being a member to a volunteering member of a charity is a common pathway, and one that can often also lead to being a trustee. As a volunteering member, I undertook reviewing submissions for ALT’s conferences, then helped facilitate ALT’s open and open-to-all online courses in technology-enhanced learning (ocTEL) in 2013 and 2014. Other highlights, through increased participation in the ALT community, included being invited to co-chair the ALT Annual Conference in 2019 – on the theme of Data, Dialogue and Doing – a nice, round, twenty years since I first attended an ALT conference!
It was the same year, 2019, in which I applied for and was very fortunate to then be appointed as a Trustee of ALT in the role of Vice Chair. Now, I readily admit that there are quicker routes to becoming a trustee, but for myself personally it was about the timing, about feeling that I had done a decent stint in the wider ALT community, and had developed my own experience to a point where I had enough confidence to come forward and apply for Vice Chair.
For those familiar with work in the field of ‘Communities of Practice’, the above can be understood in terms of the phenomena of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in which those of us who are the new or novice members of a community can gradually mover further inwards as we develop our knowledge, experience, relationships and place within that community. It was a phenomena I lived, and I was helped, supported and encouraged by friends and colleagues who were themselves Members and Trustees.
Becoming a Trustee in the position of Vice Chair for ALT was also very much enabled and made less daunting by having already been a trustee of two education and social inclusion focused charities, and having had a chance to understand what being a trustee is and involves.
So, coming in a little over the words I have been given, what would I say about being a Trustee of ALT? There are many things, but first and foremost it is about the opportunity to reciprocate, and give time, experience and hopefully useful input into a charitable organisation that I directly benefited from in terms of my own learning and development. It would be too easy to use the overused ‘giving back’, but that is what it is. It is also about committing to the shared outlook, ethos and mission of the charity itself, which for me is ALT, but for you may be something else…or may be something else in the future, if you are considering being a Trustee.
You should.
Ultimately, being a trustee it is about people helping people, or about people helping to mobilise other people to make some meaningful change in the world. As I reflected on in a recent post about this year’s ALT conference 2025, there’s little more important.
Reference
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.