 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahame-Spinoza and this is a brief recording to explain the status of unified the platform to link teachers and researchers. In June 2018, we created Unified with a small group of 11 very dedicated teachers and researchers within educational neuroscience, mind-brain and education science that met at an early conference in London. The basic concept of the platform is to unify. Teachers interested in sharing their individual students in classrooms or schools as research labs for people conducting studies within the learning sciences that have to do with the teaching learning dynamic. For those of you interested in looking at the platform itself, please go to Unifiededu.org and if you'd like to read a bit more about the history and where this came from and the basic core concept and need that's been identified, please go to the mind-brain and education journal and 2019 issue in which we explain the background and the initial design of the platform. The Unified web-based platform was designed pretty much in a very simple way to broker relationships between teachers and researchers. People create their profiles. They insert keywords related to their areas of interest and the system links them based on shared keywords. The basic design of the platform has been tweaked back and forth to a stage where we now feel comfortable launching it out to the public. But we decided to meet to talk about the real home or the next steps for the unified platform. And so a small subgroup of unified members met with Luciano Sid, who leads the Special Interest Group for AERA on Brain Neuroscience and Education, and Stefan Vogel and Dieter Scholle from the early SIG Group 22 also related to Neuroscience and Education. The objective of this January 2022 meeting was to put a finger in the pulse of continual need, which remains high in trying to bridge the divide between classrooms and laboratories, as well as discuss the best ways of putting this platform out into the public in a way that would reach and serve the needs of both educators as well as other learning scientists. So Michael Hobbes began by introducing and giving a background on the unified platform and then Jessica, Michael and I talked a little bit about where we are as far as the platform is concerned right now. The ongoing maintenance and the finances that have been invested so far into the program. We celebrate this. I celebrate this as one of the first South-North cooperation says all of the initial seed money came from Latin America. The main discussion then turned to the utility of the platform and it was very exciting to hear from the ARA and early members about the great needs. They saw this platform actually responding to. Different people shared their insights as to what teachers are really looking for and these types of relationships and what researchers are really looking for. And this naturally led to a deeper discussion of the role of Unify. Should this small working group, which began as a structure basically to broker others' relationships, somehow have an ethical responsibility to judge the information that was coming through there. That is, is there a role for the unified platform in also educating and helping teachers and neuroscientists co-construct research that benefits the learning sciences. So these larger discussions sort of opened up a lot of different avenues for development of the platform, but they were not decided upon. They were just simply framed as being key ideas that could be used to move the platform to its next stage of development. There were some very concrete suggestions from the members from early about how unified may very well be the missing link between formal university lab structures and the reality of true classrooms. We also discussed many of the other organizations that are out there that are doing very similar efforts to try to link different types of learning scientists, ranging from educators to neuroscientists to people in the educational psychology field. And specifically, Imbus and G. Solan were discussed at length about ways that their audiences, that their membership would benefit from the services of Unified. So we left the meeting with two main questions on the table, which we'd love to involve you in. The first is whether or not Unified should take on a greater role in terms of guidance. Should it offer basic research skills to teachers and basic teaching practices to neuroscientists? Or is it simply meant to link people and be nothing more than, you know, basically a speed dating structure to get teachers who are interested in more information about the brain and how it learns and other scientists who are looking into these issues into their classrooms? Or do we have what many were pushing as perhaps a responsibility? To fill in a gap of helping guide better knowledge construction through better instruction of research practices, which fundamentally got to the question of whether or not both groups, teachers and neuroscientists had the skill sets of the other or a sufficient level of those skill sets to be able to co construct research together. And then the second question on the table was related to the platform itself. What would be its best home? Right now, it is not linked to any specific university or organization, but might there be a better home for the platform that would be more visible to people who would really benefit from it? So we close the meeting by talking about additional people who should be brought into the conversation, you among some. And so we hope that we have the opportunity in the near future to continue this conversation, to talk about ways that Unified might facilitate some of the current objectives that you already have for your organization. Thanks a lot and looking forward to talking to you soon.