54 C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 as our trustees needed a lighter but more regular hand on the oversight of the IHBC’s rapid growth and evolution. So as the luxury of employer support for trustees’ time being spent on charitable objectives waned, we had no choice but to move to include virtual boards. If you ever wonder why our chair is so adept at chairing online events, it is in part at least because he has had such a substantial training there, one that long pre-dates the pandemic. That said, our development of virtual learning experiences for members was much more dependent on the pandemic.We started with a wholly ‘virtual’ conference, in June 2020, organised at short notice after the mandated cancellation of our traditional, expensive and unavoidably carbon-heavy, in-person school, planned for Brighton. The most obvious upside for such virtual learning events was that they could boast unprecedented contributions by otherwise inaccessible sector heavyweights such as Carl Elefante, the global lead on architecture and climate change. In 2021 the school also ended up as a pandemicmandated virtual experience.Yet it could still offer low-cost, global access to global leadership such as that from international heritage economist consultant Donovan Rypkema – with personal sessions in the Heritage MarketPlace too – and architect Jan Gehl. The informal, learning-led virtual Heritage Marketplace, held within the 2021 day school programme, offered a new dimension of learning options to the virtual school experience. That was extended in 2022 to serve as a stand-alone school launch event, free to all IHBC members, while plans are for it to be refined radically for our 2023 Swansea school. In the 2021 school we also included a Thursday of virtual themed discussions, our first de facto podcast formats, locally led and taking the place of the traditional school tours, now pragmatically adapted to serve as a viable digital offering of learning, insight and discussion. Here content was led by the supportive, and ever-patient, south-east branch as the ‘host’ of our Brightonsubstitute virtual school in 2021. With our own lessons learned through those rapidly evolving development formats for digital learning, the IHBC@COP26 service could side-step the school model to offer a radically different service, detailed previously in these pages. As IHBC@COP26 we also explored radically different options in audience experiences and, naturally, target audiences. These included: • a single Zoom meeting • free, globally accessible learning and resources to users and delegates at all levels of conservation and climate interest and skills, from Marianne Suhr to an enthusiastic homeowner • a ‘living’ format, with learning options capable of being shaped by partners and participants • at 13 days, our biggest-ever single CPD programme. By offering the IHBC’s table to almost all, we could open the institute’s inclusive and holistic conservation agenda to everyone. Clearly such low-cost digital platforms and strategies open out huge opportunities. Income streams can be enriched when that is a priority, while at the same reducing costs for and across all users and currencies, including, and especially usefully for COP26, carbon costs. Early ambitions for a greener, low-carbon learning experience at Brighton that had seemed a pipe-dream in 2019, spurred on by technical individual uplifts demanded by the pandemic, became a reality in 2021. Our push to more digital learning platforms recognised the downsides in that learning experience, but it also understood that new systems of communication as the foundation of learning have always brought with them limitations as well as opportunities. From the development of writing, and of libraries, and the invention of the printing press, each stage in such communication helped more people access the learning of others, even as they added restrictions when compared to previous norms. When Plato started to put the in-person lessons of Socratic dialogue into written form, he lost the nuances of immediate personal interaction that so distinguished his master’s approach to education. Yet that change in mode is in principle no different to when the hands-on and in-person aspects of apprenticeship and vocational learning are communicated on paper, or indeed online: access is opened even as the experience changes. From writing out lessons, to collecting teachings in libraries, to printing the literature of education, and now to digitising them, the challenge is the same: to use what any new platform or medium offers, while also recognising its limitations.
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