 Hi everybody. Thank you very much for coming today. My name is Jim Groom. I work at Reclaim Hosting and I just, before I get started, we'll get into the presentation. I just want to say, I think yesterday was one of the best conference days I've ever had in shaping today, shaping up to be equally as amazing. How many was anyone in the karaoke bar at Fox's? I have to say, at about 11 o'clock, this is my conference experience, and we'll get into the presentation, about 11 o'clock at night, kind of regular, like, you know, 40, 30, 50 year old like me hanging out, and then like 30 or 40, 20 year olds come in to the main place and they are there to party. And like in the best possible sense of that term, they are cool, they are digging it. And then I have to wait an hour to do my karaoke song. I go before Tom Ferrelli, who does dirty, no, he doesn't do, he does hybrid health. Kills it, and the kids are like, YAH! So that goes up after that through in the pixies. I'm like, no one knows the pixies. No one has any of them. And the whole crowd is in it. And then, like that 21 year old comes up and does Rocky Shell, Hara, Time Warp. And the whole place just blew up. It was like a bomb. So like, that's OER 23 for me right now. So you know, that's how I feel. So this gets a little crazy, not my fault. I blame Inverness, I blame Mutant. So anyway, welcome. My presentation is really kind of an attempt to understand some things that have been transitioning for over a decade. But I think that transition is starting to materialize with different applications in Web 3 that are not just cryptocurrencies, right, but are actually maybe social networks like Mastodarm and others. So that's where I'm going. That's kind of like the 10 minute, I mean, a 10 second version of my talk, you got it, you can leave, go see something good. But this is the longer self-indulgent version, because I'm always self-indulgent in all my presentations. Okay. They're walking through a bar. You look higher online, right? This is from a course I taught at Mary Washington, which I'll return to in this presentation, because as everyone knows, I always talk about the S106. I've been living off of that for 12, 13 years. Maybe not everyone, I have to explain what it is. But who's saying this to whom? That's my question, because I assumed in my pre-fem ed tech days that it was Superman. And then the woman who made this is like, no, it's actually Wonder Woman talking to Superman. This is an assignment that a student did for a course we taught called DS106 that I think has a lot in common with some of the things that Dave was talking about this morning in his keynote. This idea of building and creating a community based on thinking through elements of recentering the relationship of power and understanding how we create and where we create and how we think. But I'll get into that in a bit, because this is not going to be an educational or pedagogical talk as much as it might be a little bit of a thinking of the technology. So Web 2.0, and I know few people in this link came up with it like me, was always referred to as the social web. Web 3.0 has been described as the crypto web. And I think some of the things, and John Newdell says this in particular, is I much rather normalize the term around the federated web. Thinking about what Web 3.0 means in terms of federation. I'll talk about that specifically in a second. I can't get these things figured out. This is me circa 2007, 2008. I was fully in to Web 2.0. As you can see, I drank the Kool-Aid. I wore the hat. Someone said this recently and they cringed when they said it. I was what they called the evangelist, with all the difficult religious overtones. In fact, my nickname was the preacher. I believed in it. And I believed in the idea that Web 2.0 was in some way revolutionary. Now what I believed and what's true may be difficult and problematic, and we can talk about that. But one of the things that came out early on was this idea of what is Web 2.0. And Web 2.0 was in many ways a marketing term created by O'Reilly to define and understand something new. How the web had been shifting from the mid to late 90s to this new kind of definition of what the web was in 2001, 2002, all the way up through I don't know 2010, 2011. But all of these points of very interesting kind of akamai, does anyone remember akamai? That's what we used to use to share files before peer-to-peer BitTorrent came along. Or Napster. Or syndication for blogs is something I want to talk about in a second. But I'm interested in this idea of part of what Web 2.0 was framed as very early on was peer-to-peer network. Was the idea that we were getting away from centralized networks. What do you think about when you think about Web 2.0 now? It's probably very different. That's part of my talk. This is a famous Web 2.0 meme map. This came out as part of a whole O'Reilly, this is what Web 2.0 is. You can go find this online, you can search Web 2.0 or O'Reilly, and you'll get a very interesting paper about Web 2.0 and how it works. One of the things I was super interested in is BitTorrent, this point, radical decentralization. Sound familiar? Blogs, participation, not publishing. I want to think about that a little bit. There's also this idea of tagging, not taxonomy. There's some interesting kind of frames here, Wikipedia, which I think in some ways the governance model was always difficult, but in some ways was one of the more consistent elements of Web 2.0 into Web 3 that was like, well, we've always been doing the peer-to-peer, open editing. Nothing really changed for us. As probably with most of my presentations, I cheated. I cheated in a good way though. I went online and I wrote a blog post because I've been doing that for 20, almost years. I have 3,752 blog posts, and in another year and a half I will hit 4,000 blog posts, which will be 200 blog posts every year for 20 years. I'm old, and there's a lot of bad writing, like a lot. It's a lot of it's crap, most of it, but there's a couple of gems that you write that much you might find. This presentation is the one of them. This blog post is kind of thinking through what I wanted to talk about, not only coming back to OER 23, but talking about what these two kind of clashing ideas of Web 2 and Web 3. You can see John Udell gives me a kind of kudos around, hey, Web 2.0, the social work versus the federated versus the crypto. I stole that already, but I'll steal more from him. It's coming. Does anyone or does everyone in this room know who John Udell is? Do we have? John Udell, an interesting cat. In 1999, he wrote this book, one of those O'Reilly books. This one has the sea lions, and this book is called Internet Groupware. Does anyone know what Internet Groupware is? Any idea? Internet Groupware was basically in 1999, the idea of what social networks would become five or six years before Facebook became a thing. He was theorizing through open standards what open or what social networks would be five or six years early. In some ways, this is kind of like ground zero for the publishing thinking around Web 2.0. This guy is now responding to me unasked on telling me how I should do this talk. This is the guy who wrote the book on Web 2.0. You're getting high end material here. Blogs, participation, not publishing. This is one of the points that came up. I'm super interested in the idea of when we think about Web 2.0 right now. You often think of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It's interesting because social web, Web 2.0 in 2005, 2006, when I started blogging, was not that. You only could get on to Facebook with a dot e to u here. It was super exclusive. You couldn't get it. YouTube didn't exist. Just started. There was no Flickr. It was probably Flickr and delicious. It was probably the two social networks that you would know still. The thing that kept the blogosphere together was this open protocol called RSS. What RSS very simply did is it took an XML file of all of your posts or any given post that came out new and it let people know through a feed reader, this is a new post. It came from here. That was the loose federation of early Web 2.0. The blogosphere, people still blog. You hear Alan Levine say that. That brings me back to this discussion I'm having on Mastodon. Very interestingly, we'll talk about that, about Web 2.0. He says here, of course, the RSS connected blog network, this is John Newdell, the guy who wrote the social network book, connected a blog network was beautifully federated and still provides a model for doing things that way. Web 2.0 wasn't one thing. It wasn't Twitter. It wasn't Facebook. Certainly not Instagram. It was an idea of a decentralized open protocol driven web that people could manage and control. Hopefully on their own. How many of you know of this technology called the Trackback? You do. Can I put you on this? No, I'm not going to put you on this. Because I don't. No, I'm good. So the Trackback is this kind of other technology that Riley talks about in Web 2.0 in 2004. He talks about this idea of Trackback was brought to you by a permalink. Does everyone know what a permalink is? A permalink is basically this. So here's mine. Oh, we are. Maybe someone will see themselves in the crowd in my blog post. It's amazing. The blog post is amazing. That's my URL, babatuesdays.com. And this is not an empty plug like Martin Weld does for his books. And then that's the slash. And then this is a permalink. Oh, I could touch the screen. That's weird. And that permalink takes that post off of my main web page and makes it its own page. That allows you to comment on that post specifically. But it also allows you to take that beautiful URL, put it in your blog, and link to me. And what will happen when you do that, like magic, is I will get a notification that this person is linking back to me. This person is tracking back. They're talking to me or about me. Sometimes that's good. Oftentimes it's not. You don't have to publish every permalink Trackback if you don't want to. But that was the way in which we federated the blogosphere. That was the way in which we talked to each other through these weird things called the blogs that weren't just about cats. The early blogosphere was in many ways a federated will. I told you I couldn't avoid it. DS106. I mean, I am biased. This was a course toward the University of Mary Washington in 2010, and then turned into an open online course in 2011, designed by people like Martha Burdus, Alan Levine, Tom Woodward, and myself. And the idea behind it was to take this magic called RSS and give every student their own site and through the magic of RSS and through the magic of tags and through the magic of syndication, every piece of work they did in their own space would syndicate what we called the mother blog. So you can see everything in one place. But the students still own their own work in their own space called their blog. Revolutionary, right? Syndication. Actually, federation. This little piece is Martha Burdus is doing. It's magic. Each of these links out to an assignment. The assignments were created by the students. Not only did they do the assignments, but they submitted the assignments. So this is an assignment I want to do. Here's my submission. Now, you'll see you could vote on them. But the other cool thing, and I'll look at this one here, you not only have the assignment, but through RSS and tags, every person in the course who did that assignment that someone else proposed, you can see it. So there's a long list of other people who did this assignment. So you can go and get inspiration. All federation. Here, on the other side is a tag where people would share the tutorials they did to create that assignment. This is a page with a permalink using syndication to create an open educational resource that's federated. Yes, one of six. Okay. Now, but Web 2.0 became increasingly centralized. We know this, right? We're dealing with this right now. There was a $40 billion deal. I want to get too deep into it. I only made a few million off of it, but Web 2.0 became increasingly centralized. And I have the joy to actually meet face to face with John Newdell in the Muir Woods in San Francisco in February. And it was awesome. And he's awesome because he's like one of the early Web 2.0 pioneers. And he made no money off of it. He's the one who did the hypothesis LTI integration that Kate talked about yesterday. I mean, this guy is awesome. He is my mentor. He's my hero. And he said this, Twitter has evolved into brands talking to brands. How much, how true is that? That's where we've become. And this idea of Web 3.0 being the federated web versus the crypto web is interesting to me. Here's the foundations I found on the Web 3 foundation definition. Users on their own data, not corporations. Does that sound familiar? Lauren to you at all? Users owning their own data? That's what Reclaim has been trying to frame through our work at UMW and then as a company for 18 years. And then there's a really awesome movement in Europe. It started in Finland called My Data. How many of you know My Data? It's about reclaiming your personal data through things like GDPR, but through things like asking big networks, big social networks, big tech networks to make possible the ability to export or control who sees your data, when and why. This idea of global digital transactions are secure, becoming more and more important. This is also where the blockchain often comes in and cryptocurrency. I heard you should buy Dogecoin now. So no, I think that kind of killed the Web 3 moment in some ways was it was driven almost entirely by speculation financially. And that's gonna obviously affect a group of educators' impression of Web 3. And it should. But I think if we think of this last piece as important, I think there's something for us to think about as we move forward with some of our infrastructure for what we're doing. This idea of online exchanges of information and value being decentralized. And this actually is a big point. Because when we heard from Colorado yesterday, that was an amazing program. They were getting millions of dollars for these open educational resources that would be created by a vast community across the state. One of the big questions I think is where does it live? How do we gain access? How do we ensure ongoing access? The whole open infrastructure part of our discussion of open is often an afterthought and often offloaded to creepy companies like we say away. Open web protocols. I talked about RSS. RSS was the big one. That was the open web protocol that made the blogosphere's federation possible. There's a new kid in town. I don't want to hear it. There's a new kid in town. I'm sorry. I lost my voice. So don't blame me. I'm on a way to hell. That was awesome. I talked about it before you came in. I'm gonna buy you a watch. Activity pub is in many ways the open source protocol that's driving open applications like Mastodon. And that's why I'm interested in Mastodon. And that's why people like John Udell, Dave Weiner, and early web pioneers, maybe they're just like me and they're trying to relive their glory days. Fair enough. You might want to run the other way. But these people on there who I've watched for decades talking about this as another instance is super interesting and exciting to me. But I'm also afraid that maybe we're going to relive the same path. We went down with web 2.0 and I'm not having been through this rodeo once before. I know how quick and easy that is to go. But here I am on Mastodon reading Sheila McNeill talking about Catherine Cronin. I see the tag. This is my own instance of Mastodon. I'm running it. Yet I can integrate with a vast community of people out there. And I'm not at the behest in the quest of a platform like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. And that still means a lot to me, right? That still means a lot to me that I can own and control my space on one. I still believe in it. Now I'm going to end here. And this is a recent post by John Udell who's basically been doing this for me. Old happy lifting. Thank you, John. It was a long night last night. I blame Tom. You did a good job. He wrote a post recently called, of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse. And, you know, Eamon did a good job of talking about chat GBT as Dave did this morning. Like, you know, Mastodon had a moment and then open AI came and chat GBT came and then everything was like, that's it. And you can see the whole text there go like squirrel, right? Everybody was there. Like, you know, there's no social network. That's fine. I mean, that's part of what our job is to figure that out and to play with it. I'm not against it. I just find it all weird. So I'm kind of staying away from it for now. But he has this blog post, which I highly recommend you read. It's called, of course, the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse. But what I liked about it is this quote. And you're not supposed to read quotes. That's good. But I will. If you occupy a privileged position in the attention economy, as Megan McCartle does now, and as I once did in a more limited way, then no, you won't see Mastodon as a viable replacement for Twitter. If I was still a quasi-famous columnist, this is what I like about Johnny Depp. I probably wouldn't either. But I'm no longer employed in the attention economy. I just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight me and who might feel similarly about my words and pictures and ideas. There are thousands of such people in the world, not millions. We want to congregate in different online spaces for different reasons. Now we can, and I couldn't be happier. When people say it can't work, consider why and who benefits from it not working. And I think that's a really nice place to kind of end. I don't pretend to be an expert at Web3. I'm starting to experiment with the technologies. We're running some of that stuff on our own cloud to see what's possible. It is exciting that, unlike early blogs, this stuff can not only be possible, but scale in ways that never could on a Bluehost account, which I'm excited about. But I'm also excited because of this idea that John represents here is, oh, we are 23. And I started this presentation intentionally talking about the mood, the space, the people, my excitement, because that's why I got into this space. That's why I got into the social Web. That's why I believed in writing and publishing and sharing as a conversation and as participation, not as me being a brand. I'm not interested in that. That doesn't get me excited. And so I'm getting somewhat excited about what's possible. In the next step, is this idea of hope punk? That I'm going to get it wrong. She said act depressed when you say your name, though. I'm trying. But as she said, hope punk for life. Maybe there is some hope in reclaiming these spaces and rethinking about what it means to federate and to kind of, I don't know, truly believe that we can own some of our space online and that we can get out of the centralized networks that have kind of in some ways defined us as brands, whether we like it or not. And with that, I'm going to stop. Hopefully I've used, yeah, 20 minutes. Perfect. Any questions? I thought that was great, too. Thank you. I've got many, many, many questions for my head. I mean, the federations, I mean, make something that Dave's talked earlier about abundance again, there's a, when you showed the assignment bank and all the assignments there, there's a navigating abundance task that comes with the federation, which is interesting. You know, how do we stop this stuff? If Web 3.0 has characteristics of Web 3.0, how do we stop the dystopian cycle from repeating itself? And that led me to a small experience that I do mentioned running your own instance of mastodon. You are kind enough to share that instance with a few of us. And somebody posted, not on our instance, but it's the lessons and purses of federations and we posted something racist on that. And I hit the report this and I got an email back from you going, I've sorted it out and you've got moderation. But that, that, that was a moment when like, you know, the Wizard of Oz metaphor, the curtain was drawn back and you suddenly saw in running a mastodon instance, the ghost work of moderation. And if you want to be a part of that mastodon instance, you have to take a share of that work as well as, so there's, there's community building work you have to do with these spaces as well as just hanging out with your people, which is how it should be. So I think there is something in the way some of these new federated tools work that is building off of where we've been with Web 2.0 and the kinds of, kinds of labor that have come in, in the background with Twitter and Facebook, that there is this moderation labor that comes with them and comes with these big centralized networks that, that Web 3.0 is now starting to expose in that federated model. And that for me is maybe the place and the space where we can stop the dystopian cycle repeating because it's more than just having fun and hanging out with friends. You need to take responsibility for it now as well. Yeah, I love that actually. No, and that's one of the things we had that experience together. It's like it was a new world to not only figure out how federation works with these social networks, but then it opened you up to questions of how do you understand what's real? Like what is the URL, like URL training around where is this coming from? But then how you now have to employ a community to control what can happen to any network. But I think maybe that's the difference between Masterdom and Twitter is that you have that ability. And like, luckily I can, I'm talking, this is another DS106 being made by the great, I'm like so blonde from that club, of course, in 2011. But like we had, I created that DS106 instance of Masterdom not only to play with the technology, see how it works, but also to provide as Alan Levine was asking for a space for people who wanted a community outside of other spaces. And luckily DS106, as small and modest as it is, did provide that. And people like you and other people who I know were willing to jump in. Like Darcy Norman, he started being a moderator right away. And it was just like, that's great. And it's not crazy. And I trust everybody. But like, isn't that interesting? Like it's almost like we've taken the community from who are the 5000 people I'm talking to, to who are the 30 people who I kind of know pretty well, and who I know, I'll get some share, I can still access the other thousands and millions or whatever. But that community is really localized. And it's localized in some ways like the keynote yesterday talked about, right, localizing open online and like the idea of like that people don't have to leave the islands to do that education. Yet they still have access to the best elements of the web. I mean, there's something really powerful that the way they federated that program. And I think federation almost as a metaphor, might be even more interesting than as a protocol, though both are super interesting. Can I cut you off? I still can't believe I missed the karaoke last night. It's all on Twitter. Right, so my name is Dean Whitcomb. I work at the University of South Wales. I've actually worked at the institution for just over 20 years, actually. Used to be the University of Llamorgan, we moved from another University of South Wales, we became the University of South Wales. And Louise, Richard and Charles are my colleagues. We're a very small team. They're currently either on leave or running the simulations this week with staff across the organization. First question, has anyone come across Hydra in most of learning at all? Okay, this is the point we normally talk about Hydra and Marvel, and then we go into all that kind of stuff. And yes, we have delivered Hypersenarios in the past fully geared into Marvel memorabilia. So yeah, but I can get on to that later on. So my background, my hobbies, I love, I'm a cyclist. I love video games, video game modding. I love modified video games. I love coffee. I try not to drink too much from days like today, otherwise that 20 minute presentation becomes a five minute presentation. So I'm really trying to keep my cool here. So for many, many years, I followed a very traditional academic path. I was told to do well in my degree, get a PhD, do the normal thing, become an academic. And I really enjoyed my time doing that. And then I took a role, which was in many people's eyes, an interim role in the university. It was a role, it was the actual first technical demonstrator role in the university. And it was a very practical based role kind of bridged the gap between frontline teaching and laboratory based work. So you did a bit about that ultimately bridging that gap. But when I applied for that role, there was 5% of the role one day every two weeks, dedicated to something called Hydra. And I genuinely had no idea what it was in the university, even though I've worked there for years and years and years. Even the people I spoke to before the interview didn't really know what it was in the university. Ultimately, I went into work on my first day, I met with my former colleagues in sport and health. And I then made my way down the campus to the Hydra Suite. And then I found a series of rooms, pod rooms, control room and a plenary room, all in darkness, all interconnected in some way. But nobody in the four years of it being installed turned on. So nobody knew what it was. And all I knew was that it was actually installed for police service training. That was the idea. So there was an agreement with the local police service. And they created this immersive learning environment for training. That was in 2007. I joined in 2011. It was never switched on. So I spent some time turning the lights on, pressing some buttons, trying out what things did. And actually, at that time, there was zero hours of simulated activity in the organization. And again, I was truly only dedicating one day every two weeks to this area. Fast forward 12 years. And we now have two state of the art, Hydra and the Clown Suite. And within these normal suite, within a normal relatively normal suite, we have a plethora of technologies which the university provides, ultimately. And what we find is that the immersive nature of what we provide for our students is very different to what would be performed within a police training environment, for example. So a lot of police forces services wouldn't have access to a lot of these other applications in these areas. But as of this year, we now conduct more than 2,000 hours of simulated activity across the organization. I'll give you some more context in a second. This is Professor Jonathan Prego. And Jonathan is the reason why we have the Hydra software, a Hydra license within the organization. And he would be, I guess, regarded as an international expert in critical incident decision making. The system was originally installed at the London Metropolitan Police Service following the tragic events of the Hillsborough disaster I've seen a long time ago. And Jonathan was simply asked to help create an immersive learning environment where high ranking officers could deal with real life situations, but not be afraid to make mistakes, not be penalized for mistakes, encouraging that safe learning environment. And for many years, majority of suites across the UK existed within police headquarters. And only at this time in the UK, there are only six universities with this technology. We're still the only one in Wales. And essentially Jonathan's remit is, or his ethos, is that any save life organization is welcome to utilize the high technologies that he provides. The wonderful thing is, if you don't pay the Hydra, it's actually what I say, we paid one pound for a license every year back in 2011. So this technology is available to universities, save life organizations across the UK, and it is still not the profit. As a university, we are not able to sell Hydra. So before I apply for this conference, in the 20 years of being in HG, I never really thought about open education really, but I suppose it's through my openness and willingness to help academics on their journey, creating these experiences for their students. There's actually got this 12 years down the line and in this situation. But actually, it all started with that original visit to the Hending Police College in London. Talking about Marvel and Hydra, this is the building where the Hydra team were housed and actually looked very kind of Hydra-esque. But I remember, I knew nothing about Hydra, I walked into this building, I met a team of people and they introduced themselves, they told me what they did and what experiences they had. I spent three days on site with them and I actually left with the US V-Stick with nine months worth of simulated immersive learning material for frontline police officers used in that organization. No cost. I just walked back to the university and I had this US V-Stick. So of course, all the people I was working with at the time were delighted that all of a sudden I brought to them nine months worth of training material for policing. So I spent two years introducing a lot of this content into the programs at the university and it worked really, really well. What really helped with the integration was that a lot of these people were senior police officers, retired as senior police officers and it actually designed and ran very high-level Hydra incidents in their respective forces. But following that period in my kind of openness, I suppose, I decided to just branch out and actually speak to other people who may be interested in such an environment. So I never forget, I walked down one corridor one day and I saw social work on one of the doors, knocked on the door. I met a woman called Judith Bowler and I said, look, we've got this immersive learning suite and I understand social workers use it in and around across the country. Would you be willing to have a look and see what you think? So that happened and Judith came along, we created something for the first time with social work students. But also this was probably the steepest learning curve for me in all the years I've worked within the HG sector. Health and Social Care came to me and said as a group, we would love to create an immersive experience for our students, which truly shows what it's like to deal with a vulnerable person at home. So this is Graeme, this is my wife Zoe's grandfather and Graeme kindly volunteered. I had to take a post-rexing for the day after that, he always says he kindly volunteered. But Graeme in this particular scenario, his name is Bill and Bill had a big gash on his leg, he had tab dressing, he was being looked after by health visitors. But it was the first time where I realised there was a kind of false environment really around how much work goes into these immersive simulations. When I left with a US beast, I didn't realise how difficult it was to create these things. So right there and then, not only was I writing scripts, but I was also learning how to use a camera for the first time, editing media footage, writing storyboards, changing events within this particular scenario. And then of course there was a delivery after that. But actually that still runs today at the same exercise. It needs to be slightly updated and we do that periodically anyway, but that core material of Graeme and as that patient is still running today and very proud of that. So in 2015 we had two state-of-the-art suites installed and now I work with a small team of people. I suppose you would define our team as a, my career I guess has been different to theirs and they would be regarded as hybrid technologists. I'm not sure what I am really after 20 years. I like that, to be honest. You're amongst friends. But here we are and we're all this, if I drop ass. I'll take that. But if I was to summarise what we do, bear in mind that in 2019 we did nothing. I have now worked with some wonderful people, some wonderful subject theories across the organisation and the majority of what we do are hydro simulations and I can discuss that with you in a second. But I've also used the learning environment to do all this other stuff. And it's, this is where I normally go off-piece and I start talking about all this other stuff that we do. But things I'm really proud of, for example our outreach activities. So I'll talk about that one only. When I first started in policing we used to bring colleges, local apartment colleges onto campus. We used to talk at them, tell them what police sciences was like, what it's like to be a real police officer. And some of the feedback I had in the early days was, our students want something more interactive. We want to do something with you. Rather than just turning the lights on and talking at us, what can we do with you? So my first ever kind of real project that I created that was too many mine was a major incident exercise in line with public services curricula at colleges. And since then I think we now run 45 to 50 visits per year. We get lots of colleges coming in doing that exercise with us. And we can still sell the core self who we are and what we do. But fundamentally they learn when they're with us and we teach with them. And I get so much satisfaction even now after all these years of doing that type of work. But actually all of this activity of the past 10 years has generated lots of outputs, sometimes very sporadic in nature. But ultimately our students and our staff have always wanted to do more. And we've never lost anyone. So whenever we've run an exercise, we've always had those people return the following year. The only thing that's stopping us from on this kind of growth curve at the moment is the capacity issue that we have with the organization. But that is being solved slowly but surely, which I'll discuss in a second. That's kind of what we do. 90% of what we do would be regarded as hydro simulations. So what does that look like? At the start of a hydro day, you would come on to campus and you would sit in a plenary room. And this is where we would give you some context, we brief you on who you are in the exercise, what your role will be for the day. We'd also show how to use the hydro related technologies in the POD rooms. So when students go into these rooms, we don't physically interact with them. Once they're in there, that's their own micro world. That's where they work. When students leave this room for the first time, they go into the POD rooms, we have eight of these in the corridor. I will then sit with the subject matter experts and we will ultimately run the exercise, the scenario, from the control room. From the control room, we can observe, listen into the conversations. We can also see what type of information the students are accessing at any given time. Now, how seamless is this operation? That's John Manders. John would say to me, Dean, can you send video four into POD rooms one, two, and three? One click on my virtual storyboard, which you can see just there, we'll then send that information out to all of those problems. Dungeons and Dragons, the books, it's kind of like that, the most complex exercises that we've run are very much like that. However, a lot of the stuff that we do do is very linear. Okay, so a lot of the time we'll send a bulk of information into the POD rooms, students will solve the problem as a group. And in solving that problem, what they tend to do, most of the time, is they log their decisions and rationales in relation to that problem that we've sent them. So constantly they're making decisions as groups and logging that information electronically in their decision logs. When they're logging that information, such a matter of experts, people like myself, we can monitor that information line. So we know as they're progressing through an exercise, what they're deciding to do and why they're doing it. That information is then stored on our central hydrogen machine, and then periodically we take students from the POD rooms back to the plenary room, where all of their decision logs will be openly displayed for them to discuss. Okay. In essence, that's kind of what happens in a normal day. Our exercise is very considerably. Some run for four hours, half a day. Some exercises run for a full two weeks. I'm going to use one example of, I suppose, openness and sharing is primarily what I love to do. And I'm going to give you this one example of how I refer to it as exercise induced collaboration, a product which brings people into the environment. This is an exercise we created doing peak COVID. This is Ian Davis. And as we find out in a second, Ian Davis is not very good at using social media. He's lost a lot of jobs across policing, nursing, health and social care, social work. He's appeared in lots of different scenarios. But this was wonderful peak COVID, really. We were the first or one of the first groups in the university to bring students back to campus, and we actually modified all of our classrooms to become POD rooms. So these POD room spaces, which were no bigger than this per pod, we actually had to have full classrooms kitted out two meters apart, and we could actually run out of scenarios in the classroom environment. But we used Microsoft Teams, it was a real kind of, I want to say hybrid, but after yesterday's presentation, I don't really know what that means. So I've actually removed the term from some of the slides, but yeah, so we had this hybrid model running with Teams and Hydra technologies running. And it was okay. Ultimately, post COVID, we found lots of feedback, students and staff want the whites of the eyes. They want to be physically on campus doing these types of things. Here's an example of one exercise and how open we are with this type of material. That exercise was designed at level four policing, for a policing course. We store all of our raw materials in Hydra, all of the exercises that we do in a OneDrive folder and in Hydra in the cloud. In the OneDrive folder and the Hydra exercises, we have all of the subject areas that we work with. You click on that, the exercise loads up in a separate folder. That folder is then shared with the subject matter expert, the person who designed the exercise with originally. However, lots of the content is shared with any staff member who has any interest in that type of content. So we designed two versions of that exercise. All of a sudden, as part of this Hydra, this Hydra wide family, when police asked us if we could simply transfer that material for their investigation training that particular year, this one back last year. Fine, we send those materials over. It was used for promotional training. Since then, other forces using the Hydra technologies have simply requested the content and the exercise. One click their end on the Hydra system, notifies us that someone wants that content, we simply click yes. That content is now shared between the organizations. And what you hope is that you have this reciprocal relationship where we provide something, they modify something, send it back, we all get a shared different exercise. That same exercise has been used for induction activities and undergraduate teaching across the organization. Slightly different. You would change the profession, some of the tweets or some of the chirps that we create as part of the exercise. Those chirps are created, I guess, on real life evidence, real life problems. And to date, I think that was correct. It's definitely more than 2000 students have experienced that kind of exercise in our Hydra simulation environments. The future for us, pretty straightforward. Lots of demand, we're growing every year. Hydra will feature physically on all of our campuses in the next three years. But we're also networking a lot of our simulation spaces. So you've got this kind of neural network, I suppose, being created between the simulation spaces across the university. This is the next big thing for us in particular. Again, go back to that term hybrid. This is the team's version of Hydra, essentially. So you're not required to be physically on campus or present. You can use, this has been developed right now. We're going to be the first university to use it. But this is essentially, you can be anywhere in the world, any device, you'll be able to engage in some kind of physical Hydra exercise. Now, Keith mentioned UHI yesterday. I didn't realize that that's UHI. I had no idea. And I thought straight away, well, actually, wouldn't Hydra presence be wonderful to have that type of team's like platform running amongst all of your organizations? The wonderful thing is there is one suite already in Scotland, and it actually belongs to, I don't know how you pronounce that. Tally Allen? Okay. So I've been told that's an amazing suite, and it's full of old beams and it's stunning. I've not been invited up there yet. It's not better about a thought. But actually, it's fantastic suite. And I think typically what's going to happen with this type of software is that it's only going to be given to Hydra suite, which already exists physically. So actually, who knows in the future, why not approach an organization like that to potentially help you run these types of exercises? Something I learned yesterday as well. I didn't know about this. So just here in Inverness, there's nursing education, BSEs in nursing. Our biggest users of the suite right now and growth over the last two years has been health and nursing related courses. If UHI become Hydractive tomorrow, they would have access to all of this content. It's taken us, the organization, hundreds and hundreds of hours, tens of thousands of pounds in terms of cost to create. That would be openly accessible for that organization to you. And that's how, I suppose, we've always worked really across, not only the university, but across other organizations as well. How much time do I have? About eight minutes? Lovely. Okay. Every presentation I've done in the last five years, there's never enough time for questions. What I'm going to do, I'm going to skip all this. Personally, there's something I'm working on right now, which is a simulation framework for the university. What we do is wonderful. We've been acknowledged in many ways, but in some ways extremely inefficient as well. And my plan is to help the university do something about that long term, I suppose. We will continue growing. People will always see the uniqueness of the environment. Students will always enjoy it. But whether we're truly generating the best simulated experiences, which truly replicate the complexities of the real world, I'm not really sure. But we need to start somewhere. And this is what I'm currently working on right now. If you have any questions, I'm around today. And one of the advice really would be, if you work anywhere near a hydra, so you can go to this website and check where these sites exist. I've met some of the most wonderful, collaborative people through hydra and I'm sure they'll be more than welcome to discuss any ideas that you have potentially for your own organisation. And just one disclaimer, I don't work for the hydra foundation. Okay, thank you. We have about six minutes for questions. That gets us to 12.50. But then of course, if you want to continue chatting to me, I'm sure it's open to that. And I will definitely make a note for our nurses because I've worked with them at this such a meeting. But any questions? That was really fascinating. Thank you so much. So do you have sort of almost like a pattern that sets the patterns for developing these simulations that you share? Because I think that would be even just sharing those patterns more widely in the lessons that would be really useful. Go back to that framework very quickly. One of the big things I've worked on is actually explaining or trying to create some guidance for senior managers across the organisation showing sometimes how complex these exercises can be and how much time is spent not just by the academic bias and media teams and people that we bring in to create these scenarios. We have a kind of standard design model for a couple of years ago. For the first time ever, I was asked to create some kind of workload for what we do. And that was very foreign to me. I've never really worked with. I've never really worked with a workload before. So all I could do really was go back over all of the exercise that we created today. And you have those exercises which, yes, they've run for four hours and it may have taken two or three days to work with development time. Then you have an exercise that runs for two weeks and that took six months to develop. And that exercise in particular required the buying of an external police organisation consent from the family whose daughter, sadly, was murdered many years ago. And trying to recreate those real-life things really just takes time. Even like freedom of information requests, for example, just took so much time. But trying to articulate that, especially when workloads are what they are and every hour is accounted for and every development hour is accounted for. It's trying to break that kind of mold really and trying to get people to see how complex these things can be really. A common question always is how long do these things take? I had a question. I did something on simulation research education last year and we were looking at how we can combine actually across kind of encourage cross-collaboration between different disciplines, so nursing, business and various other courses. So I'm just wondering if there is currently any content within this hydra system which can be used in business management courses to teach negotiation skills or perhaps some other piece of skills that are quite important for business management students. Okay, so our most impactful peer-reviewed publication came from business, would you believe, and it was a simulation assessment which I could talk to you about outside the activity pack. With negotiation, I suppose hostage and negotiation, sometimes straight away, because I can think of all the stuff that... One thing I didn't show you actually was the cloud system itself. When I log on to hydra, I get to see all of the other organizations across the world who are online and I'm able to simply browse all of their content at any time. So for example, the stuff you're looking for, you might find that UCANN has an exercise specifically designed for negotiation. Now if you're part of that hydra family, it's a simple case of requesting and asking for information. Lots of exercises like major incidents for example, in the real world they're solved by multiple agencies. So straight away within the HE, we've got multiple subject areas that should be working together. So when we... And that's what I talked about earlier about exercise-induced collaboration. Very often we sell these exercises which have multiple violins from multiple subject areas and academics. So that was a good question. Yeah, that was fascinating. I still don't understand, I suppose, obviously you're in an academic environment and you quoted Professor Craigle in that agreement, but it sounds like it was widely used for outside environment, or in a sense there's two different products or versions of it. Maybe they're not that different. So I suppose it was born in policing, the actual environment fundamentally. For example, if you look at, I have a suite and you look to compare that with the London Metropolitan Police Service, technologically the hydra suites built the same. But the practice which is conducted in them are very, very different. One example, Sir, on top of my head, in hydra, in a police service, you might create an incident, let's say a stabbing incident, and officers are turning up to a scene to deal with this incident. For the police officers who are currently in the role or SIOs or senior investigators, they'll simply be left with that information. What are you going to do next? There's no task, there's no direction. With level three, level four, level five out of six students, we're very prescriptive sometimes in the way in which we want the students to work. In that, they don't have that operational, that real life experience. So even though the exercise content could be the same between HEE and a police service, the way in which we design it and actually facilitate the information may be very different. The actual types of activities that we do, for example, the pod rooms, we conduct escape rooms in induction periods for students. That's probably not done in any other hydra suite across the UK, but that's what we've used, the learning environment, to create these wonderful experiences really. And with that, for one minute until 12.50, so maybe we'll just bring the lunch. Please help me give another round of applause to and then we'll repeat that too. Enjoy the rest of the session.