 Hello everybody. I want to speak to you today about the Teaching for Transitions team. And in particular, I want to speak to you about using a fairly, I suppose, difficult topic, or a difficult strategy, social media for a transformative pedagogy. There's been a lot of discussion recently about the relative merits of using social media in the classroom. And here we can see very much why social media isn't needed, because here we all are. And I can eyeball every single one of you, and I can tell very clearly whether or not you're watching me, or listening to me, or whether you're engaged. However, when we begin to take classes online, or either totally online or in a blended environment, well then clearly we begin to lose that personal connection. And we'd say my, you know, staggering abilities as a stand-up comedian and teacher, all of a sudden become dissipated as the barriers, or the perceived barriers of distance and time begin to impinge on the core course content. So what I'm going to suggest now is a strategy perhaps for us to get beyond those boundaries of space and time. And to see where the virtual can actually be personal, and how the virtual can actually be material. So I'm going to use the exemplar of our MA in Digital Cultures in UCC, which is the fourth new program that this particular stream of digital humanities has brought online in the past four years. And why has there been such, I suppose, a demand for these programs? It's coming from the students themselves, it's coming from the world at large, but also it's coming from us as educators, because we see these incredible young people in front of us who, because they're coming perhaps from something that's not a STEM background, see themselves as somehow disadvantaged in the world of work, because they're historians, or because they're philosophers, or because they're archaeologists or geographers. In my case, I come from the School of English. And because of that, I'm very keenly aware of what it means to, if you like, write ourselves or inscribe ourselves on the world. So how we communicate is critical to how we are assessed and how we deliver our person to the world. And in that way then, it's becoming increasingly important to have an embedded digital literacy as part and parcel of all of the work that we as educators do. Not as a peripheral thing or not on the side, but I think that it's possible to have it embedded within each and every one of our courses. So nobody has written an essay for me since 2008, right? And that coming from an English department is an absolutely heretical statement. That is anathema to many of my colleagues, right? But what they've done instead is they have published their work online. So since 2008, 2009, 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, I have archives of all of the students' work of the transition that I have made myself from somebody who's very tentatively dipping their foot in the water, right? To somebody who's dived in. Absolutely hook, line, sinker, right? And I'm now totally submerged, hopefully still breathing, right, in this new world. So how have we achieved that? So we've achieved it not from a very techno-managerialist approach of monetizing stuff and getting it online for the sake of it. We've achieved it not because it's the zeitgeist and because everybody's on it, but through profound engagement with what it means to be readers, writers, critical thinkers, engaged participants, knowledge makers. Lawrence Lessig in his book, The Future of Ideas, has a gorgeous thought that we're moving now through Web Point 2.0 technologies from a situation where passive consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere to become active producers of that culture. And that's a huge shift in transition for many of us. So all the more so then for students who, for the most part on the springboard program, are people who see themselves as disenfranchised from university. We have a very broad range of ethnicities. We have a broad range of ages. We have a broad range similar to Anna in the occupational health and safety at work program. We have people who have a junior cert and we have people who have PhDs in the room. So how then can we bring them to the space? And luckily, technology for the most part for many of them is new. So then what do you do? What does everybody in this room have? Everybody has some kind of a device in their hand or in their pocket. So we connect them using ubiquitous technologies, stuff that they might already use, whether that is Facebook, whether that is Twitter, whether that is simply creating websites and being online. And that has a profound infrastructural impact on the university because we're demanding things like virtual personal service bases from the computer center, which is a first. And that's good. Why? Because they are building and they're performing their learning out in the world. This is public and at times this is dangerous. I don't know what they're going to say all of the time, you know. And it may or may not be woohoo. That's a fantastic course. They may be asking deep questions about why we do what we do, how we do what we do, and why this is meaningful for them in the world. So then we're deliberately making a culture of active learners, active engaged participants in local, national and international debates. We set, for instance, a hashtag for the group. So that if I'm not there, somebody else will be there. That there is a movement beyond the hour, beyond the space of the room. And there is an active engagement with other communities of learners, whether they're here in Ireland, everybody here is probably familiar with the Ed Chat, i.e. hashtag that's ongoing. But every discipline here has an international community of engaged scholars who are working every day on a particular hashtag. So you can't get to that conference, well then you can just track what's happening. In this room today, every single link that was put up there on the screen could, for instance, be archived and curated. And for assessment, that's what we do. We ask them to curate. We ask them to create a curation in their own web space. We ask them to know each other. We ask them to comment on each other's work. There is a profound peer-to-peer engagement. And that's what has transformed their capacity and their belief in themselves in terms of their own ability to communicate, not just with the people in the room, but in local, national and international debate. And they've done that over the last number of years. Thank you so much for your attention.