Thoughts on GEM Conference 2026

The wartime home of Colossus, one of a number of historical machines regularly given the title World's First Computer^[1] was a fitting venue for 2026's GEM Conference with its theme Learning is Digital? This post collects some of my thoughts following that conference.

A badge I acquired in Liz Fraser-Betts' workshop session Human Super Strengths: Enhancing your Human Career Skills (The one AI can't replace)^[6]
This image is licenced under is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Highlights

For me, the main highlights of any GEM conference involve opportunities to catch up with old friends, see some familiar and friendly faces in 3D for a change, and meet new people with interests and aims that intersect with my own. As a freelancer, these people are the closest things I have to colleagues, and getting to hang out with them for a few days in the real world is refreshing. Whilst the daytime activities only allow for relatively short interactions, the Thursday night social allows deeper (and less formal) conversation in a relaxed atmosphere. The GEM quiz has become a traditional part of this, and it was lovely to be asked to write a codebreaking round (which I think went down well despite concerns from some that it would be too difficult!). Another aspect of a GEM conference which is sure to be a highlight for me is the organised trips: I'll talk about the one I attended under its own heading later.

The programme of talks from invited speakers^[2] was interesting and varied. Standout sessions in this category include Greg Jenner in conversation with Saira MacNicol; Eve Poole's fantastic talk about the need to consider the human impulses that keep society functional, and how to programme these into AI in order to reduce its potential for harm; and Oonagh Murphy's update on her work with Arts Council England to develop responsible AI policies.

I tend to enjoy the member presentations as an overview of what people working at the coalface of heritage education are thinking about and experiencing. It was particularly interesting to hear about people utilising a variety of digital technologies to extend access to objects and collections beyond the bounds of their physical sites. Of great relevance to my own work was Vicki Ciaputa and Steven Illingworth's review of their project engaging trainee (history) teachers with Chetham's library in Manchester: in a recent research project exploring enriching mathematics lessons with history-of-maths themes my research partner and I recommend that trainee maths teachers should be exposed to relevant content, and findings from my MA project in 2022 suggest that university-museum relationships can form solid foundations for popular, useful and long-lasting history+mathematics engagement programmes. I hope to bend Vicki's and Steven's ears about this at some point!

For similar reasons, I was intrigued by Lauren Aspery's presentation about Bringing GCSE History to Life Online from Newcastle University Library, which I have visited as part of a different conference: in 2023 we tiled part of the floor with large foam versions of the newly-discovered aperiodic 'hat' tile as part of a public maths engagement activity. I'm particularly interested in working with libraries to encourage and enable more people to explore mathematics through them^[3].

Something which definitely deserves an honourable mention is Adam Goldwater's provocation on reframing object-based learning in the age of AI, and his call for endorsement for, commentary on, and contributions to refining and developing his The Real Thing proposition, framework and draft manifesto.

Emergent Themes

I'm always fascinated by the unintended subthemes that seem to emerge as conferences play out. This year, perhaps a little predictably, there was a large focus on AI, and a key theme on that front was: 

• Using AI ethically is difficult (but might not be impossible).
• AI can support the development of digital resources, but shouldn't be the digital resource.

AI is topical and important, but I wondered if it didn't perhaps drown out some of the other important discussions to be had, including the (very brief) mention that 'digital' is a word that everyone has a slightly different working definition for. Some ideas that did repeatedly make it through the wall of AI were:

• Our digital journey began (in earnest) with Covid-19.
• Digital technologies can bring objects and collections to audiences who might not be able to visit the physical sites.
• Digital activities and resources aren't automatically accessible and inclusive.
• 'Digital' is a means, not an end.

Trips

My choice to take part in the visit to Milton Keynes Museum was largely rooted in the fact that it was the one that's least convenient for me to visit routinely^[4]. Although I've visited before, it was interesting to do so with sector colleagues.

The Milton Keynes Museum suffers a little from being overshadowed by Bletchley Park, which has a more overtly nationally relevant story and is far easier to access via public transport, but I think everyone in our group would agree that MK Museum is a hidden gem of a museum that deserves more attention. It's both larger (in terms of content and land area) and smaller (in terms of the paid staff body) than many people might expect, but it's heavily supported by local volunteers and has plenty of content that, whilst specific to Milton Keynes, is also highly relevant outside the area.

A perennial highlight for me is the telephone exhibition in which most of the phones are connected to each other by an old analogue telephone exchange that clacks away in the corner, but our group was also excited by the opportunity to buy some traditional sweets from a mock Post Office (the frontage for which was from a real Post Office previously in nearby Ridgmont); an innovative presentation of Roman coinage excavated in the local area; and the famous concrete cows. The cafe, replete with its locally-renowned home-made cakes, is also worthy of mention.

The other options for this section of the conference involved staying at Bletchley Park for a site tour, wandering a few hundred metres to the National Museum of Computing, or heading over to Central Milton Keynes to visit the MK Gallery. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who went on any of those visits^[5].

Things Left Unsaid

There were a number of things that fit under the banner of 'digital' that I expected to hear about but, surprisingly, were largely absent from proceedings. It made me wonder if I should have submitted a talk about one of them. The next few paragraphs could be considered elevator pitches for talks that never happened, I guess!

High-quality, but one-shot

An enormous amount of excellent and engaging digital content is produced by museums and galleries, but often by communications teams for the purposes of firing it out of a social media cannon and then forgetting about it. Yes, these can be found by someone scrolling through an account's history, but there's discussion to be had about how this short, sharp content might be given a second life with minimal adaptation and a little curation as an addition to rich topic, exhibition, and object-related materials served via, for example, a museum's website. This discussion intersects with those about inclusion and accessibility via features like alt-text.

A similar thing can be said of some longer-form material which is often released once and then left to sink to the murky depths of a website or playlist. Bletchley Park's own podcast is an example of this: a well-written, excellently-produced series involving historical research in progress, interviews with veterans, archive audio material, and period material read by actors. Although each episode has enormous potential for someone interested in a broad variety of topics, that potential is unlikely to be realised as its episodes are not associated with key metadata that would facilitate anything but accidental discovery outside of the podcast playlist.

The importance of metadata

It's not just Bletchley Park that is wasting excellent content on poor metadata practices. A basic example of metadata is the 'tags' that may be applied to blog posts in order to indicate unambiguously to users (and search engines) that a particular piece of content is relevant to a specific topic. Using GEM's own well-provisioned Resources collection as an example, resources are tagged, but the tagging structure has clearly grown organically over time rather than being designed, and this has introduced issues which hinder rather than simplify discovery: click the "all tags" drop-down menu in the filter box on the page linked to above, and notice the redundancy, repetition, inconsistent spelling, and repetition that splits what should be single collections into multiple sets: decolonisation" vs. "decolonization"; "disabilities" vs. "disability"; and "museum freelance" vs. "freelance" vs. "freelancers" vs. "freelancing".

Longevity of resources and activities

The above considerations affect the longevity of digital resources in that letting them drift down, without appropriate metadata, to join the goo in the unvisited underbelly of a website, playlist, or social media feed means that they functionally cease to exist, but there are other things that affect longevity.

In 1996 a technology emerged that allowed interactive activities to be presented on previously static web pages. It was given its most famous name - Flash - when it was taken over by Macromedia in 1996, and really kicked off in the early noughties, with Adobe acquiring the software in 2005. It was the Next Big Thing in internet technology, and in the heritage sector it wasn't unknown for museums to spend thousands on a developer who could create a bespoke Flash-driven interactive resource for their website. In december 2020 Adobe retired the technology, and in early 2021 the major web browsers removed the code required to play Flash content: an entire generation of digital resources was rendered obsolete over a matter of months.

Meanwhile, a .txt file created in 1994 will run without issue on most personal computers purchased in 2026. Technologies evolve, change, are phased out and replaced; sometimes organisations pivotal to the continued existence of a piece of software or an internet service go bust. It's not always clear what software and services are essential to the digital resources that we create, and what the options are if part of that disappears. This is all very important to consider if we're deciding whether to fork out the often considerable amounts of cash required to create bespoke digital resources. This idea did come up briefly in one of the workshops I participated in, but it was something that came to my mind during many of the talks and member presentations.

Sometimes there's a free option

This is probably the thing I was most surprised not to see as a theme at the conference, especially with regards to the member presentations. We saw some great examples of innovative digital resources and activities, but they were mostly from organisations who had a big budget (or external funding) for a specific activity, such as the British Museum's brand new Bayeux Tapestry online experience. As far as I could tell, every single one of them involved buying in experienced coders to create a bespoke activity. Lucie Tuck-Brown and Rae Seymour did make a point of saying that the environment that was created for the Bayeux Tapestry project was developed in such a way that it can be reused to develop similar experiences in-house that connect to other objects, but this still requires a large initial outlay at a time when many heritage sector organisations are struggling financially.

I had expected at least one person to point out that if you're in an organisation that can cope with a result that might not have the logo in exactly the right place, or where the branding-specified font might not be available, it is possible to create engaging and effective digital resources for free and with a relatively shallow learning curve. I recommend looking up H5P as a starter-for-ten on this front (it's the tool I used to create these explorations of some of Florence Nightingale's statistical diagrams, and this interactive crossword).

Digital networking

I expected some commentary and discussion on the changing face of digital tools relating to networking. As recently as 2022's GEM Conference in Derby I can recall following and interacting with thoughts posted on twitter by others in attendance; and using the platform to communicate with them for social arrangements too. In 2026, vast numbers of heritage education staff have left the toxic cesspool that twitter (now X) has become, but rather than moving elsewhere this interactive digital layer to the conferences seems to have entirely evaporated. There were a few posts about sessions and talks on LinkedIn, but little discussion, and no open social conversation.

Digital professional engagement has changed elsewhere too: even the GEM jiscmail discussion list (aimed at GEM members though, I wish to make clear, neither provided nor moderated by GEM) which used to be so full of regular, vibrant discussion on a variety of sector topics, is now largely dormant. I've stopped posting almost entirely, partly because engagement has dried up, but also because posting about my work as a freelancer attracts regular wrist-slaps from the moderator on the basis of "self promotion" that weren't forthcoming when I was making similar posts about my work as an employee of an organisation. I have also been chastised for responding to the group rather than directly to individuals, which, if others have had similar messages, might well be behind the almost complete disappearance of discussion from this discussion list.

One place where group discussion appears to be thriving is in the GEM Freelance Forum Whatsapp group. This is provided and moderated by GEM directly, is available to anyone who is a member of GEM in the Freelancer/Supplier category, and is populated by a bunch of supportive and friendly individuals. I regularly wonder whether this could be extended to the broader GEM community (and have ideas about how it could work based on other Whatsapp communities I'm a member of), but realise that this would be extra work to set up and then moderate for the already busy (and small) GEM team!

The future

As always, I enjoyed this 2026's GEM conference and I'm already looking forward to heading to Newcastle for 2027's. I wait with bated breath for the announcement of its theme, and the idea that the current format will continue is plenty of encouragement to grab a ticket when booking opens.

However, I would be forgetting my own heritage as a teacher were I to leave without an even better if!

The maths conferences I go to all involve some creative aspect to them that adds colour and opportunities for reflection to the time between presentations: encouragement for delegates to bring along their own artistic creations, and somewhere to exhibit them; maths-themed cakes; a competition in which the best submitted competition wins a prize; an evening activity whereby delegates bring along musical instruments (which includes voices) and jam together; space and time for delegates to show off activities, resources and puzzles that they have produced in an informal environment.

I'm not saying that all (or indeed any) of these should necessarily be added to future GEM conferences, but it does slightly amuse me that of the conferences I attend regularly, the cultural, creative, and heritage sector ones are those that conform most closely to the traditional conference format, whilst the maths ones build in all sorts of opportunities for those in attendance to depart from the curriculum and get creative together!

Footnotes

1. This all depends on how you define "computer", with contenders ranging from the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism through to 1948's Manchester Baby. If you're interested in learning more about Colossus I recommend Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, compiled by B. Jack Copeland, which explains things largely in the words of people who were there (with many of those words actually written at the time). [back]
2. The invited speakers' talks are all labelled "keynotes", which always seems a bit odd to me, as most of them, whilst interesting and informative, did not contain anything which I would consider a key note. Surely, if everything's a 'keynote', then nothing is? [back]
3. If you're wondering why I'm so interested in this, the title of my book might be a big giveaway. [back]
4. I've got lifetime Friends membership at Bletchley Park and can cycle there in half an hour (or a 20 minute walk followed by a 6 minute train ride); the National Museum of Computing is next door to BP; and MK Gallery is a short walk from home. Milton Keynes Museum is the only one that involves some level of effort to get to! [back]
5. If you had some thoughts on the trip you went on and you'd like to share them, I'd be happy to add some short passages to this post. [back]
6. We had to choose a badge from the five available (curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion and communication). I chose "creative", largely because people like to tell me that mathematics is not creative, and they're wrong. [back]