 I'm John Wilson, I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally, we prefer to work with what we feel is ethical industry. See? I'm really excited to be introducing what I think are going to be two really, really excellent talks. And without further ado, I'm going to hand you over to Doug Belshaw. Thank you very much, Nick. So I'm from Moodle HQ, and so you'll know Moodle from the learning platform. Can you just have a quick show of hands if you currently use Moodle or have done in the past? Just stick your hand up. That's everyone in the room. Thank you very much. Moodle is but ubiquitous, like over 100 million users of Moodle worldwide, but I'm not here to talk to you about the learning platform today. I'm here to talk to you about something new, and I want to kind of just riff off something that Amber did yesterday. I tried my best to try and represent my career history in the same way that Amber had done, but she must have some kind of advanced slide skills, because I couldn't seem to be able to do it as kind of cleanly as she did. So I resorted to a list, and I wanted to just situate what I'm doing in terms of my own practice, which has been a theme of this conference, and also just to echo what Amber said yesterday in terms of coming to learning technology, not from computer science or technical background, but instead, especially through trying to understand humans in society. So my background is philosophy in history. I was a history teacher. I also trained staff on using technology. I was a senior leader in schools, and then I went to work for JISC, and JISC have a heavy presence here at Alt-C. And I worked as a researcher analyst around OER, around mobile learning, and around digital literacies, which was a subject of my doctoral thesis. From there, I went to work for the Mozilla Foundation, and you probably know them best through Firefox, the web browser. I worked on Open Badges. I was on the Open Badges team from 2012, and I also worked as their web literacy lead. And then since then, I've been a consultant. I set up a co-op with some people who I used to work with at Mozilla, and also Brian Mothers, who you've seen some of his images already. You'll see some more in this presentation. I know he's watching this live stream, so hi, Brian. And also, since the start of this year, four days a week, I'm now leading the project that I want to talk about now, which is MoodleNet. I'm still doing consultancy and cooperating as well. I think it's important to do lots of different things, because it keeps you fresh. Okay, so the reason I joined Moodle, the reason that I decided to kind of not do as much consultancy, but to join Moodle, was because of Moodle's mission in the world, and Moodle exists to empower educators. As I've already mentioned, there's lots and lots of people who use Moodle worldwide, and they're all using Moodle slightly differently in different contexts. And that's one of the wonderful things about what Moodle provides. Just a quick explanation of how Moodle makes its money, if you didn't know. Moodle, like Catalyst, who's a partner of Moodle, Moodle has a number, lots of Moodle partners worldwide, and we get 10% of the revenue from their Moodle generating products and services. And also, we now have some shareholders, not venture capitalists, but people who are interested in the long term into kind of societal change and powering educators. Just in case you're wondering where Moodle gets its money from. We're not like other organisations in that respect. The other thing, just to flag up before we begin, is that just like Alt, Moodle believes in openness. All of the stuff that we do is open source, which means that you can take that and run it for your own purposes without having to be told what to do with it. You can use it for your own purposes, and we don't tell you how to use our products. And the same is for Alt, and we believe in working openly and transparently in everything we do, and that's how you can get involved in this project. So, if you've got a device in front of you, feel free to go to this link now. This is the canonical URL for the MoodleNet project. Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet, and everything that you need will be linked to from there. I'll make sure that the link to these slides is on there after I've finished talking. So, MoodleNet, before I get into what it is, I just want to zoom out and kind of situate it within the wider world, because I think we need to look up from what we're doing in learning technology and think about how it affects our world. If we're trying to empower educators to change our world, well, what are those things that need changing? You'll be familiar, I'm sure. Your university or institution is probably already talking about the global goals for sustainable development. Obviously, Moodle wants to contribute towards goal number four around quality education, but I think MoodleNet especially, as I come to tell you a bit more about, is focused on number 11 as well around sustainable cities and communities. Moodle, the learning platform, has been around for the last 16 years and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The same with MoodleNet. It's going to be around for a long time. So we're not just trying something out and then going to pull it. This is something which we're in for the long haul because we're trying to build a place where communities can thrive. Now, when Martin Dujamas, who's founder and CEO of Moodle, asked me if I'd like to lead this project, there were so many things that he was talking about with MoodleNet, and I asked Brian to try and capture some of these. You can see some of them here in terms of having a dashboard with news coming in from trusted sources, about having a narrative of professional developments. You're linking to your portfolio, but like Seamalt, private conversations, public conversations, being able to find people in your locality that you can meet up with. It's about supporting other people through crowdsourcing and with your own money and OER and all of this kind of stuff. So we have to start somewhere with all of this. We're going to try and build all of it eventually, but we have to start somewhere in a place that I decided after lots of research, after talking to people like Amber and researching and talking and doing interviews with people, we decided to start with a resource-centric social network. And I'm going to explain what that means in due course, but it's basically about curating resources and sharing with other people. And as an educator, I feel that's something which is certainly intrinsic to my own practice. So if I had to describe it with words, I'd describe it as a social media platform for educators focused on professional development and open content, it's about sharing and learning to improve the content and the quality of education, and it's going to be an integral part of the Moodle ecosystem, but even if you're not using Moodle as a learning platform, you can still use MoodleNet. It's going to be focused on all of the things that you come to expect from Moodle in terms of it being a private space if you want it to be, being ethical and transparent, obviously being open, being safe, we're not going to be doing shady business practices, and also the whole point of it is to connect educators worldwide to build stronger relationships around the world, because Moodle is used in every country of the world in every single language. So, before I show you a quick video, an overview of where we've got to with a prototype of Moodle, I want to explain some of the stuff that you're going to see in that video and why it exists. So, as an educator, when you go looking for something for your course, you've got an intention, and sometimes you know exactly what it is that you want to search for. You're being proactive in that regard. The trouble is, sometimes you don't always know what it is that you're looking for. And I was at the OE Global Conference earlier this year where some Dutch librarians were doing some experimental work on how you can surface stuff to people who perhaps don't know the terms that they're looking for. I found this recently when I was trying to find a particular technical thing, and it turns out that it was called a faceted search, but it must have taken me a few days to figure out that that was the search term that I was looking for. Now, when I was doing my research and interviewing people, people said, well, one of the reasons I really like following other professionals in my sector on social networks is because it's like waiting for treasure to arrive. Every day I go on there and I find things that I wouldn't necessarily have been looking for, but is absolutely relevant to my practice. So we're trying to build something that can be used both proactively because you know what you're looking for, but also reactively because people within your network are showing things that you wouldn't necessarily have looked for. So what would that look like in practice? Well, something like this, where you have things which are surfaced from people that you're following, first of all, then from open education resource repositories and then from the open web. How this is going to work in the light of the EU copyright directive yesterday, we still have to figure out. So feel free to ask me questions about that later on. I'm going to show you without further ado some work that we did with a co-op called Outlandish in London three months ago. Martin Dugiama's fluo from Australia. It was the first day of work for our technical architect and we managed to produce in a weak sprint the following video which gives you a flavour of the kind of thing that we want MoodleNet to look like. There's no code behind this. This is one of those kind of mock-up prototypes, clickable prototypes that have been tested out by people in the Moodle community like Jess Gramp and some of the people who came there to help us test it out to give some feedback. So here we go. Just to say, I'm aware of the number of times I say certain words in this video and I am thinking about creating a drinking game based on that. I just want to show you a demo of what we've been working on this week too. MoodleNet designs have been here in London with Outlandish. Martin Dugiama's fluo in as well. So here's what we've been working on. Let's imagine that you're a teacher and you've been messing up with MoodleNet you joined last week and you're allowed going about your business of planning some lessons. So here you are at Google and you're searching for teaching the Bolshevik Revolution. You get your search results. Here they are. And one of them is MoodleNet. Great. Well, I already know what this is. So I'm going to go there and since last time MoodleNet has updated its privacy policy. So you'll need that in-depth. Click I agree. And then here we are at Bolshevik Revolution. Great. Well, you can see this is a collection, a collection of resources. And it says, finally a good collection of multimedia resources about the Bolshevik Revolution from a worker's perspective. You can see that there's some contributors here. So it's a collection which is being made by people. Oh, great. I can add it to my Moodle. So I can add this to my Moodle course. And I can also add my own resources collection that looks like. So let's have a look what's in it. GCC history of the Bolshevik Revolution. So this is a website, Active History of Cody UK that's got some resources, interactive exercises for GCC history. And you can see here that some people have commented saying that there's a big two-minute scene which really brings this to life. Great. So there's kind of conversations and comments happening from some of my colleagues. What else is in here? Well, let's have a scroll down. Wish I'm a Bolshevik Revolution in 10 minutes. Well, this is a YouTube video. Again, there's other people who are commenting on this. This is great. This is exactly what I want from my teaching. So loads of resources here on this related collections as well. Other things that I might find useful. This is fantastic. And this is something which the Red Club has collected. So a community has curated this particular collection of resources. So let's find out a bit more about the Red Club. This renegade group of stockings have a shared interest in all things relating to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Well, that sounds like a lot like new. So I'm going to join this community. I can do that because this isn't one where I have to apply. I can just join and sign up straight away. So here I am. I'm now a member of the Red Club. I can join in the discussions and I can start helping them curate resources. Excellent. OK, well, let's see what's going on. I'm going to go to my profile. Here we are. This is me, Jeremy. And I was added to RuralNet by Andrea Leblanc. That's your new friend, Andrea. And I've started filling out my profile. I'm going to put an idea and I'll probably add my LinkedIn profile later on. You can see I'm now a member of three communities. I'm a history teacher. So I'm a member of these three groups. And I've started adding tags or interests, things that I'm interested in so that RuralNet can suggest things that I might be interested in. That's exactly what I want so I can make sure I've got good resources and good people I can lean on and I might be teaching them better. So now I'm going to go over to see what's been happening in the week that I since I joined RuralNet. So here's some updates. This is kind of a highly personalised feed of things which are useful to me. So I can see that Andrea is now also joining the Red Group. She must have seen that I'm in trumpet. There's new communities. People have added resources in there. Red Gens accepted my request to join that Red Group and my RuralNet profile is 78% complete. So what I'm going to have to do is to make sure I complete that. I'm going to have a look at communities. I can also search and here are my communities a really educated and friendly focus place where I can find resources and have discussions of my teaching and learning. So this prototype was built this week during this design split. I'm really interested, all of us at RuralNet are interested in finding out what we think of this. It's just a start-up attempt and we're going to iterate towards it. So tell us what you think. Get in touch and if not, you are well for everything to do with RuralNet is Moodle.com forward slash. So that's the kind of UX UI of what RuralNet could look like. It's just our first cut. The idea is that there's collections which are curated by communities. That's the idea behind it. That's the hypothesis that we're testing. Now, behind all of that, I want to dig into it because as learning technologists, we need to understand the technology which is underpinning all this. Has anyone heard of Mastodon or any kind of decentralized social network? Thank you, a few of you. So Mastodon is a bit like Twitter. So instead of you just signing up to a single instance like on Twitter, there are multiple instances. So, for example, I've been a member of one which is all about co-op. Those are the ones about art. Other ones about LGBT rights, all that kind of stuff. So you can see people on your instance and what they're talking about, but also the wider network as well, which means that you can move between them depending on your interests and depending on the kind of people you want to associate with. We're going to build something which is decentralized for MoodleNet, which is the hard option. It is not an easy thing to do, but we think it's the right thing to do because we want to build things which are empowering. We don't want to centralize everything on Moodle HQ. We want it to be like Moodle the learning platform where you can have power and control and authority and autonomy over what it is that you're doing, your learning technology. So this quotation talks about how decentralization is powerful because there's no single centralized authority. Instead, each party or peer makes local autonomous decisions and then shares that information with other peers and providers. So the advantages of having this instead of having a single centralized system, the advantages of having a decentralized system is that we do get diverse contribution from all around the world who might have different use cases to what we've envisaged. It means that it's more efficient to make local decisions instead of trying to get everything pushed into a centralized product. And it also means that you can keep some things private within your institution without having to share everything with the entire network. So we allow in kind of private spaces. An example of that, which I was talking to someone about earlier, might be that you have access to resources as your institution, which you don't have a license to share with the whole network, but you certainly want everybody at your institution to have access to those resources, which you'd be able to do within MoodleNet and then share other resources more publicly. Now, to dig even deeper into some of the technical stuff here, Mayor de Borneo, who is our technical architect Jason Athens in Greece. He couldn't be here today, but if you're interested in some of this on the development wiki, it does have a very deep dive into some of the programming languages we're using and some of the tech choices. But just to give you a flavor of that, if you imagine a spectrum between a fully decentralized system where every single peer is equal and a closed software as a service product like Twitter, we're somewhere in the middle because what we want to do is to have something which we need to rename. It's an API as a service, which basically means we're providing a service to everybody within the network. So you set up your own version of MoodleNet, you're sharing information in your own instance, but also across the entire network and we're providing services with that API around search so you can quickly and easily search across the network so that you can have nomadic identity so you can move around the network and still be the same person, have the same followers and also do privacy respecting and contact lookup. Mail's already got a prototype of how you could upload your contacts, your address book without actually showing the names and addresses and telephone numbers. You're showing the hashes of them and then you can check to see if that person exists on the network. I can go into more detail about that in questions or privately afterwards if you're interested. Just quickly in terms of the technical architecture here, just to point out that from a user's point of view they will not see this complexity. They will just see a very simple to use web app as you've seen some of the prototypes already. The web app will be the thing which we release in beta in January to a select group of testers and then we'll be developing a native app to be able to use via app stores and the back end all of these things here and all this diagram is available on the development wiki. Your organisation would take the code, develop it however you want and so long as you meet certain terms and conditions of our code of conduct and also the way in which you have a robust code base you'll be able to connect to the API as a service. If some of that went over your head don't worry, it's not fundamental to understanding what MoodleNet is about. I haven't got time today to go through all of the other screencasts that we've done. Some of the things we're putting out to the community for feedback. Some of them, which we've put out we've already kind of rejected as an idea. So there's one here around creating an alias which we've already thought actually and I don't think that's going to work very well because we've had some feedback from the community. So if you're interested in this please do have a look at what we're doing and give us feedback. We can only make it as good as the feedback we get from you. One thing you might be particularly interested in if you are using Moodle is the sending collection to Moodle prototype that we've just had a look on the screencast here. It shows how you would curate a collection with other people in MoodleNet and then send it into your Moodle course so you can use those resources. I talked at the start of this presentation about how Moodle is funded and one of the things we've been thinking about was how are we going to have a sustainable version of MoodleNet here. Obviously we work a lot through our partners so if you want to set up an instance of MoodleNet initially we'll probably go through partners but there's lots of things we could do. Some of them range from the sensible like referrals to Moodle Cloud or Moodle partners to the slightly crazy like equity crowd funding or sponsored content we could do that. I was over at the mountain moot in Montana early this year and they have Moodle box which is like an internal currency. My son is playing Fortnite all the time with V-box. We could do something like that. We could do crypto currency for goodness sake but more likely are donations, referrals and membership at different levels. So just to finish off we've done the research and planning. We've done the design sprint and specification. We've just kind of doing the prototype and testing at the moment and we're looking to launch a minimum viable product of MoodleNet in January 2019. And if you'd like to be part of the beta testing for that do let me know. If you want to contribute do go to Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet and click on the link to take to change map. You won't probably have seen change map before because it's currently in beta with a New Zealand-based organisation. If you've ever used an issue tracker before to figure out from a suggestion from the community all the way through to development it's like that but it's much more user friendly for colleagues who are less technical. So I've got some FAQs which I can go through but I'm sure that you've got some questions so before I go through those I'm going to point you again to Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet. You can email me at any time dugoutmoodle.com and I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. So I'm going to stick this on the screen if you have a device in front of you and you'd rather not put up your hand you're very welcome to enter the ID 152788927. If you're watching this on the live stream you can do the same thing. And I'm not looking at my Twitter feed at the moment but Nick I don't know if there's any on the alt C thing very welcome to do that. Let's go in the room first because I want to stick up their hand and ask any questions. We've got a roaming mic over there. I'm happy to answer any questions. There's no stupid questions just my stupid answers. We have one over here. I guess one of my potential concerns not concerned but something to think about is how you can ensure that this gains enough momentum the fact that it's open it should do that but I'm thinking of things like dual room and others sort of learning resources positive trees in the past right that you know haven't sort of continued to evolve and with the community for various reasons. So I think for this a long-term impact it needs to reach that critical point and I'd just like to hear what your thoughts are on that. No absolutely I was on the steering board for dual room when I was at JISC and we have experiment with this in the past if you've ever been to Moodle.net If you go there now you can see that you can share entire courses. Now you have to form that as a product manager which is effectively what I am in this role you have to form that hypotheses based on the research that you do and also your own experience and that one of the hypotheses that I have is that educators sometimes want to download an entire course and look through what other people have done but mainly are looking for a resource for a specific part of the course and so what this will do is will allow educators to create collections of resources for a specific module or a specific day or event or whatever it is and some of them might actually be collections of courses or collections of plugins or collections of resources or whatever it is but the idea there is a community having a conversation to try and find the best resources for a particular thing. So this isn't trying to just create a massive place I don't think we've got a problem around not having enough resources in the world I think we've got a problem around discovery which is why we spend time thinking about proactive and reactive ways of discovering stuff I feel like social networks are great but are not geared up for educated discovery of resources in the way that this is now we'll rest answer all of your prayers in the first release no because we'll get some things wrong but that's why we need your feedback as a community to say well this is great but I really changed that and I would never use that so a kind of feedback but it's a good point thank you yes, thank you could this function as a community of practice? Absolutely so I didn't want to just drop people straight into a random community because what happens is you know when you signed up for a social network in like 2007 like I did with Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is you were totally up for trying all different types of social networks now you're like well I've got my I've got my crew on different social networks I'll try them out but really unless I get immediate traction I'm not that interested so I don't want to just drop people into like a moodle social network but that being said because we're starting around a particular thing which is the curation of resources that can totally pivot into more meta conversations around what do we mean by the best resources what do we mean by you know different views of this particular subject or whatever it is so the idea is that it will blossom into a much more general community of practice network etc. Will us be a bolt-on for existing installations of moodle in an institution or would it require an entirely separate installation and therefore have separate infrastructure support needs? The latter so this is completely separate to the moodle learning platform and it will have tight integration with moodle but even if you're using something different you can still use moodle net that's the idea and then finally ie as a distributed learning platform with user-generated content as opposed to just sharing already existing resources so I don't is that was a good I was a continue on it's been separated out yeah yes absolutely so to start off with the quickest way to get resources in there is to reference stuff which already exists so you saw on the thing was I was YouTube it was pulling stuff in from OER repositories all that kind of stuff but one of the things which is talked about and one of the screencasts is well okay I've got something like a moodle quiz and I want to share that how do I share that because it hasn't got a public URL so what we're going to do is to have like a moodle repository which can then be referenced so in the same way that will archive everything that currently exists on moodle.net to be available as stuff which can be cured into the new moodle net existing content in your moodle course will then be you'll be able to share that as a public URL in a collection that's that's the idea we very much want there to be lots of moodle content there obviously any final questions before I hand over to the next speaker can you yes where are you sorry yeah I had a question you mentioned oh there you are sorry sorry and you mentioned you had a developer in Greece and that we could access the work that he's doing is that on a separate link or is that in the everything you need is on moodle.com forward slash moodle.net if you click on tech choices then you'll see lots of information about decentralisation federation and we're also using an not obscure but less well known this is not going to be built in PHP so some of the back end stuff we need high scalability and reliability so building it in a language called elixir and Mayor de Borneo who's a technical architect he has defended at length his decision as to why he's done that and we're actually currently in the process of hiring an elixir back end developer from our office in Barcelona so he'll be coming on board in the next two weeks to start building that out thank you okay so just while she sets up I'm going to introduce Samantha Clarke who is doing something very intriguing around bothersome beasties forward to this thank you okay so firstly it's very scary up here so hello to everyone out there and everyone who's joining us online so yeah I'm Sam Clarke and I'm from the disruptive media learning lab in commentary university so when I say that people usually ask me what do I do? okay and you know in the spirit of this talk I'm going to refer to myself as the chimera which is the three-headed beast although I think I'm more of a four-headed beast and that's because I'm a researcher I do a bit of teaching and I also make things as well at work but I'm also a mother and I take a lot of inspiration from my little beast as well so I'm just going to put my teaching head on for a second and one of the issues that we always have is this thing right in self reflection so I teach second year undergrads and they don't know even what self reflection means so I had a student ask me what do you mean by this and it's really hard so to be a second year undergrad and not know how important that this practice is for furthering your own learning development I think is a real big issue and also when I look at when I've been asked to self reflect it's really dry and hard work so it's something that you know it was it's quite a big issue okay and I'm going to take you on a little bit of a journey about my I've been a bit disillusioned for technology through all my hands up in the air and went ah I'm going back to paper based stuff so my primary background is in serious games game based learning gamification on that side and I am a massive geek so I at home I played engines and dragons which has anyone played before yeah okay just anyone not know what it is at all okay that's good but for the benefit of anyone at home it's a tabletop role playing game where you move you create a character you move around and you tackle problems and so I'd been faced with this problem at work and one evening I was playing engines and dragons and actually I just wanted to share because I'm not playing tonight because I'm here which leads my group to be very angry at me and I said well I'm actually quite scared of talking here and the response was you'll be fine just imagine them all as cobalds getting incinerated so there we go you are cobalds now okay so I was playing engines and dragons and then I was looking down at this character sheet which is kind of what makes up your character you're asked to kind of build your character around a set of attributes and one of the things that just jumped out at me all of a sudden was this idea of I could use this I could get them to reflect on these strengths and weaknesses that they have but in maybe a little bit more of an interesting way something that might reach out to them and of course then I was looking at the monster manual and I was thinking oh monsters beasts all of those issues that we're faced with maybe we can turn this into a way that they can identify the problems that they're having but turn them into beasts and actually look at what is the best way that they can combat them and then because I'm mental and I try and do everything all at once I went away and tried to do just that tried to solve everything all at once and as you can see from this this was kind of a weird paper I'm going to try and get them to do teamwork and then you know they were going to set goals and they were defined to find their epic quest and lots and lots of different things all in one thing but came up with some resources for this paper based version which was the character sheets and the attributes had been kind of changed to reflect things like you know motivation and collaboration so where did they kind of rank themselves on these different these areas and then I built these monsters taken from creative commons images where I just cut up a load of them and then got them to pick one that they thought represented them that week that issue that they were having and then they would reflect on that in a paper based journal and so we did some research we kind of asked them what they thought about that so it went through ethics and we did some focus group interviews and and just as I had suspected I tried to do too many things and it's not that they weren't good because the responses that were coming out of it was that they liked all of the stuff but it wasn't supported enough in each of the different areas so I tried to focus down a little bit about okay well what is this what is it that they really liked and they really liked the monsters so they thought it was creative so they really liked that idea of being able to to build monsters around these issues that they were having and then to reflect on how they could combat them but the problem was was that what they were saying was that it was creative but not creative enough and that's the problem I kind of put my creativity into it but it was limited because there was only so much that I could do and actually that that autonomy was not coming from them they didn't have that that full scale well actually and one of the comments was well maybe none of those monsters reflect how I'm feeling at the moment I'd like to build my own and I was I was feeling right okay oh that's that's a big challenge how do you do that and the other comment that they wanted was that they wanted it to be online so this was a really really big thing is that they wanted to have this practice of sharing in this online space that they could access any time that they weren't going to lose bits of paper and things like that and I'm a fan of rapid prototyping because I've spent so long in the past designing serious games digital serious games which just takes so much time and energy and money and then at the end are not used because we've moved on you know it's not fit for perfect purpose anymore and one of the really great things about working in a multi disciplinary lab is that there are loads of people doing really interesting things and one of the the areas that some of my colleagues are working in is open education and introduced me to some really great people who are doing awesome things and that's Adam Levine I hope I said the right and Brian Lam and they're kind of you know we're working quite closely and they've done these really amazing things by giving more power back to educators and students about the work that are taking control of what they make and they've made these slots which stands for smallest possible online learning tool which I think is great it's a really cool name and they so we had this discussion about how we could maybe merge some of this you know this disciplinary stuff into into something combating this problem that I was having and so it was suggested that maybe this true collector theme that a slot could be useful and I was looking at this and I was thinking oh actually that kind of looks like the monster manual just an online version it's got a collection we can we can use that to put all of the beasties in but I had a bit of a an issue with at first the fact that it's anonymous because that scares me for a multiple multiple reasons mainly because I initially wanted to to use it as a way to log in and for myself to track what people were doing and also there's this this whole conversation about duty of care and usually anonymous voices on the internet well it's it opens up a lot of issues but I tried to look at this from another way especially trying to touch on some of the stuff that was being said earlier about actually giving a voice to those people who are you know who are not heard because it's those ones that shout latest in in the class that I know they're not doing well or they want this stuff but what about the people who are actually suffering in silence and that power of being anonymous online I think actually what I would like to do is try and turn this into a power of good so that one of the other issues that I have with my students is that they all hate each other they all come from again multi disciplines because I only have them for 11 weeks it's an 11 week course and it's mostly based on vocational skills and things like that they don't like working with each other and there is a real sense of competition and I've I've seen this more and more now and what I wanted to try and do is kind of grow this power of empathy and actually well do you realise what else is happening with the you know your your fellow students in class I mean you you might look at them and take a stab at them for I don't know being late or whatever but no one really knows what else is going on behind closed doors and I have some students or I had some students who we got all the way through the 11 weeks and then the final week they said I couldn't make it to class because of X, Y and Z and if they had come to me before that I could have helped them because but it was so late at that time couldn't help them at all and I wonder if partly it's that because there's no conversation or they don't want to have that conversation face to face so maybe this anonymous way of collecting issues was could actually be used for you know can actually be used to identify those most in need at an earlier stage so it kind of looks like this at the moment and it's new iteration and because we do just test and then rebuild so we'll see I'm going to use this as part of a study now coming September into September with some so not just my class but also some students from University of South Wales hopefully University of Salford and again any of you are more than welcome to to help I would be more grateful actually if you have students and I'm going to just go through the tool a little bit and show it anyway from what it does so kind of building on the idea of this is now the new monster manual as you can see the glaring fish biscuit eater which is the animated gif is a bit jarring but you know but what it is essentially is that people can post the issues in here and as but they're asked to reflect in them as as interesting creative beasts and let's bring this up and they can either get the images from creative commons or they can draw their own upload that that's no problem but what I'm asking them to do is reflect on what it is what is causing this issue but also to identify how to potentially combat that as a thing so you said it is anonymous they can put a character name or you know they can use a real name if they want to but it's it's not required but the other the other nice thing is that you can comment directly back on on its and again in an anonymous form if you like and and then offer advice directly to them there is a way that they can when we build a beast that they can ask for direct contact between you and so you can actually pick up if there is someone who's really struggling and needs direct contact you can do that as well and but they're they're also asked to tag the beast about what's you know what is the what is it is it a a confidence issue and if you clicked on that there's none in there at the moment but you know there's wellbeing so there's coupling wellbeing and actually I think part of this tool so I'll be using it to to look at the students on the how they're dealing with the course but I know some of my colleagues and other universities are going to use it for the more pastoral care so looking at that wellbeing side which is massively important and a growing conversation that I think that we need to kind of address and I'm just going to so it's got all of the reasoning why behind it but I'm going to create a beastie and I'm going to invite you to create it your own beastie as well if you want to and I was thinking about this last night and true to I think the the conference I'm going to call it the imp Oster I'm going to not select an image but let's get one from creative commons and I found one last night so I hope they don't mind me messing with this Oh, they're different ones okay we're going to use this one but if you just do a search for bothersome beasties it will come up anyway thank you on online so I'm not going to do that because I'm going to take too much time doing that but basically you can put the title you can upload your your image there you can set yourself as anonymous if you want you describe your beastie and how you would combat that you can enter sort of where you got your image from because obviously it's really important and the license if it's under creative commons you can check what that that beastie represents so it's really easy then to just pull up a list of all of those and different ones so maybe it's in confidence and we've given them a create your own as well which is great and then you can tag your beast as well so we're using this to track different cohorts and universities using this tool so if so if the University of South Wales going to what use it for putting loads of beasts in then they're going to use their own tag and it means that when you're back then here you can just click on that and it will bring up all of the the beasts associated to to your own course so in short this is so this is open for everyone to use I'm happy for anyone to use this all you know the templates and do your own thing you know if you want to create pastly pixies or whatever that's you know it's fine and also the fact that this whole looking at this open technology in this way is has really kind of given me a little bit more of a love of it because I was very very just like I said disillusioned with the time the resource that you know the effort that takes to create something but actually I think you can create something really simple and this kind of cross disciplinary stuff has really helped my own practice and understanding and I hope it gives a voice now to the students who are feeling like we're kind of leaving them behind I don't know potentially but that's it so any questions so actually so the students that we asked they they there was actually no comment about it potentially I don't know maybe it's because usually the self reflection we ask them to do is very I said reflect in a journal they actually really enjoyed this kind of creative side now there's the cohort that we tested with our design students but they are multidisciplinary so they come from the business school they come from health they come from all over our faculty so it wasn't really an issue across across the cohorts but this I think this is this is going to be part of what we're doing next so you know do they find it childish or do do they actually respond really well I need to do it with larger numbers to really understand what's going on I think can this be embedded into the VLE I have no idea sorry I am it it's one of those questions that that has been in the back of my mind of you know with this I'd love to see a more supportive platform with some creative things in it and I've certainly been thinking about what can this be like an add-on to to what we do but I quite like the fact that anyone can go on it as well and offer advice or support that doesn't mean to say that I'm also massively aware of the the moderation and you know like said we do have a sense of duty okay so what happens if a student says that there's suicidal on it you know there are there are issues with this being anonymous and but you know these are things that are all questions that we're going to be addressing so so yeah any other questions from the room I'm John Wilson I'm the CEO at Agenta we're a technology company that focuses on education and learning we build, manage and operate platforms for education for video collaboration externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare we feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilise what we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas by investing in broadband in these local areas we can attract more talent we can attract more companies and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools within disparate regions within Scotland