 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that time, we do report the show as we are doing this morning and it is then posted to our website for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have in the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to possibly your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska, so you will find topics on our show for all types of libraries, public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, something cool libraries are doing, book reviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We bring in guest speakers sometimes from around Nebraska and around the country to encompass live, but we also have a Nebraska Library Commission staff with your presentations for us. And that's what we have today. Today, because it is the last Wednesday of the month, it is pretty sweet tech day. Yay! With our technology innovation librarian, Amanda Sweet. Good morning, Amanda. Good morning. We have her come on once a month to do something tech related, so if you are the techie person at your library or something you're interested in, definitely keep an eye on signing up for her shows. Unless something comes up, it's always going to be the last Wednesday of the month. And today we're going to talk about what she's going to talk about, writing, writing a better world with technology. So I'm going to just hand it over to you, Amanda to take it away and tell us all about how we can do that. Sweet. So probably the approach that most libraries have taken to introducing technology is of course, makerspaces and kind of the mini activities and things to introduce people to those new tech topics. But kind of what I found out by going to this writing group that I go to, and this writing group is not affiliated with any libraries, it's just kind of a group that came together out of the wind. And we just write about anything and everything. It's called Healing with Words. It's based out of Omaha, but right now we've been virtual for about a year and a half now. And what I found out when we were kind of talking about technology is that the conversation really centered on those dystopian novels and dystopian movies. It was all 1984, Hunger Games, the world is going to end, we're all going to die. And if you have kind of a semi-academic background, you probably read all the papers that say that it's easier to think about negative topics than it is to think about positive. And it's kind of, and it's, it's a little true. It's kind of, you know, but it's kind of, it will be a happy ending, yes. Right. And it's sort of, it's the reason we watch the disaster movies and read the books and it's why they're all bestsellers. So we're kind of trying to change the narrative here. And kind of what I started saying in the writing group and in the activities that I started to play around with libraries. And when libraries asked me about activities to introduce tech now, I talk about writing prompts and book discussions and ways to reframe that topic. So it kind of interrupts that line of thought that says negative, negative, negative. And instead says, we'll give me an example. If you've ever looked at psychology and education or just psychology in general, you know that you can interrupt that thought process by just saying, give me an example. What does it look like? How do people behave? What does the world look like if it were different? And it was an extreme struggle for people in that writing group and in some of the library group, the libraries that I've talked to, to start to reframe that. So these are just the techniques that will go over to help you start to start that conversation and start to reframe this away from dystopia. And we all know this is true. We've seen it. These dystopian books are bestsellers. They fly off the shelves in the library. They're always checked out when they first come out. And then when the movie comes out, the cycle starts all over again. So instead, and this is not how I would normally do slides. This is just kind of my quick and easy way to give you the writing prompt so that you can use it in the future. But so this is the first one. First, we actually start kind of ridding this in the actual real world by saying, okay, you're trying to tell me that there's about a million and one problems. Technology is going to end the world. How? Let's just say that the worst happens, the world ended. Look at your community. How did it happen? What was the problem? What was the entry point? If you really want the world to end, tell me how it happened. And then most people don't do it. They just say, they start writing it out. And they say, I don't want this life. I'm not going to write this. I watched dystopia because it's over there. I know it's not going to happen. It's just something that I like to feel fear. It's like a human nature to want to feel fear. But I don't want it to come to life in my own community. So when people don't write that dystopia, and then they start saying, okay, so how can technology actually help? How is this going to what is the what is the role of people behind technology? So this is what I start to ask people to do. I just say, look at what's actually happening. I use the sustainable development goals as just kind of a lens to get people brainstorming and to say, yeah. I scatter them everywhere. But it's kind of like a, it's a brainstorming session because if you ask people to look at the problems in their own community, the mind usually goes blank. It's because there's so many different problems or they just, they need that visual starting point to actually look at what this would look like. So after people kind of brainstorm this through as a group, we start making a list. And we say, well, we kind of really have kind of an issue with gender equality and STEM. We don't have a lot of people like a lot of women in STEM right now. We don't have a lot of software engineers that are women. And this has really been impacting the way that tech has been shaping our community. Or we've had a lot of broken wells in the rural areas and we're having issues with getting clean water. And we've also had issues with attracting people to the sanitation field. We can't get people to get those jobs. And we also can't get the sewage system to work better. So you just start writing out just a kind of a mess of things about what you actually care about. Because these things are what caused dystopia. Or you can flip them and make them better. So here is where we start rooting this in reality. This is your reality. This is your brainstorming point. And you're asking people to actively write a list. Choose the top three problems you actually care about. What do you care about enough to actually dig deeper and talk about it? Now, once you have an understanding of that problem, invent a character. Or you can either invent your own character or think of an actual person in your real life that's impacted by that problem. Now, flesh out that character. Make them real. This is going to be the character that's either going to go into dystopia or go into make the world better. So what does this actually look like? Who is this person? Put people before technology. So I found this awesome worksheet. And it's just the ultimate character questionnaire. This is one of the things that we've used in that writing group. And we kind of used it just and I've used it in a few writing workshops before. But it will run you down to 150 different character questions. If you don't want to lose your mind, I recommend not filling them out, like all out, because they'll be sitting there for like three days. But you can choose kind of like your top 20 and start to fill it out in the session. And you're trying to contextualize this person in that problem space. And incidentally, this character outline and this character thought process is also the same exact thing that tech people do to actually design and build their technology. It's user experience research to find out who's actually going to be using the technology, who's going to be using the product, and how will they actually physically use it in real life. So this is where you're starting to merge the writing process with the design process. And you're starting to overlap it. Because when you start digging deeper into this, it's the exact same thing. If you want user experience, ask a writer, ask an anthropologist, ask someone in social sciences, they know people. And you're also humanizing this. And what's really awesome is to be able to share these character sheets out. If you have kind of a small to a large group, once you have these sheets all worked out, pass them around and say, this is my problem, this is my person. And now we're going to put them on a trajectory to find out how this is all going to go down. And depending on how much time you have on your hands, you can do this writing prompt in one or two sessions. Sessions are about an hour long. In practice, I found that part one and two can usually be done within an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how detailed people get with that 150 questions. And sometimes part three spills over into a separate session. And it can also be easier to break part three down into separate mini writing prompts. So instead of just asking people write a world in which this character deserves to live, what does this world actually look like? Instead of just giving them an hour just to do that, you can also break it down into mini questions and help people kind of like piece that out and parse this out to make sure that they actually build kind of a full life for this person. And say that they're trying to use equine therapy for health and wellness. What does it look like if that character is actually trying to introduce the idea of equine therapy in a community that's never used it? They're facing resistance and they're facing, this is their antagonist that's trying to say that this is not going to work. And so what does this actually look like for them? And start writing, building out that narrative and put like a feature on technology in this entire narrative. Are there any questions about kind of what that looks like? I kind of wrote this in a big block which I don't normally do. But you're right, it's a great like one shot, like she does, here's what you can do, and then we'll expand on it. And we have any questions. Go ahead and type into the questions section or you go to Webinar interface. You'll want a man to expand right now on any of this. You have any questions about how to do any of this writing? I'm hoping some people when they're doing this would do use technology for good in a story in a future story. I know that's something we've talked about before with those that you were showing with the different issues that are going on. Yeah. And honestly just building out of some of the groups actually only made it as far as building out the character sheets because and that was mostly not for lack of interest. It was more for lack of time. They had only budgeted out an hour to an hour and a half to do it. And they thought that they'd be able to get through all three parts of this, but it didn't happen. That's a lot to do in a short amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. And so let me flip over to the next one. So I kind of gave the idea of how you can start rooting this idea of dystopia, an idea of reframing to use technology for good. But now what about just starting with technology and saying let's actually think about some examples of how technology has impacted our own community and just start rooting it in a tech first kind of way, which is not actually recommended for design, but work with me for a second here. But if you start in this writing prompt, we actually get together as a group and just start digging into examples, put them up on a shared board. People will have a, and this will be a really good idea of finding out what kind of technology is actually important to other people in your community and why. And then once you have an understanding of the way that people have viewed technology, you can back it back and say this is how this is actually rooted in reality. Let's say that someone, one of the most common examples of technology that people have said changed the world was the smartphone. So once you say this is a generic technology that changed it in what context, flush that out and say, and just kind of start writing a narrative about what this looks like in context. And then you're going to go and find out, okay, so we have a general understanding of the technology that actually changed the world. It's a smartphone. We have a, I've gotten internet of things using a community rain garden. But what's the origin story of this technology? If you dig deeper and start digging into research online to find out, how is this stuff implemented? One person actually wrote a story about how it was implemented in Africa because they were a refugee. And they talked about how that smartphone no one had ever seen or heard of about it in their community. But it was introduced by an outside organization. And this organization was just, they all thought that they were crazy at first. Because they were trying to introduce the technology everyone thought was way too expensive for anyone to afford. And people who kind of talked themselves out of the idea that they could ever even get it. But he democratized it, made it affordable, showed people how and why it was important. And now everyone in Africa has a smartphone. Not everyone. I mean, that's, but most people, a lot more people. A lot more problems than expected at the beginning. And, but she kind of talked about that, how people were heavily resistant to the technology. Then she talked about how over time it kind of like got adopted by more and more people. And now there are some communities that can't even exist without it. They don't know what their life would look like without it. They do their finances on it. They used to get their money stolen when they were trying to travel from one village to another. But when they started using digital currency that was placed onto a card or placed under the phone itself, it reduced the theft of money. And that was actually because of the smartphone technology and because of that new technology. So in these writing prompts, you're collecting those little vignettes that say this is actually, if you want to tell people there's going to be a dystopia, you need to tell me how. And you're going to need to tell me what that's going to look like. But if you want to tell me that technology is going to do some good, which is what we want, you're going to need to know the people behind it, the origin story, how it was implemented, and write that invention story. You can either be the creator of the technology or you can be the community impacted by the technology. And just collecting those stories is, it's been kind of a powerful thing to read, especially that one from Africa that was kind of cool. Wasn't expecting that one. And so over time, I've also broken this innovation story out into different phases because you see in this part three, people were confused about that. They were like, you want me to write the creation invention story of technology when I don't actually know how technology is actually designed and invented in the first place. And I said, good point. And so if you're going to be using this to kind of train the innovator's mindset to show how people had to overcome challenges and had to, like if you think about, oh, do you remember the name of that? It was a book and a movie. And it was about the young kid who designed the windmill for his community in Africa because they didn't have any access to water. There was like a drought and he built a well to bring up water from underneath the ground. It was on Netflix, but it's basically telling that origin story, the innovator story. But these are the different phases of an innovation story as I broken it out. First, you kind of have to frame out what is this problem that the character is faced with? Why did they care about it? In the case of the windmill story, the problem was that there was a massive drought. Crops were dying. They could get access to water. People were dying. And so he was trying to gain access to education. He didn't have access to the books, materials or resources he needed to actually figure out if he could do the thing. He found a book in the library that was talking about how windmills worked and how like the little motor that would to rotate the blades on the windmill would work and how you can kind of provide alternative energy sources because they didn't have access to electricity. And he was fascinated by this. So that was kind of the problem leading into the design phase in the design phase. The boy who harnessed the wind is the name of it. Thank you. Thank you. I love that movie. Okay. But so that leads into the design phase. The design phase would be kind of like the rocky phase where he's like in his exercise phase. He's getting into shape. He's kind of primed and pumped to get into the ring. The design phase in an innovation story is figuring out the different steps that you need to actually solve the problem. In the windmill case, it was to gather different people who would be able to help build this giant machine that he couldn't build on his own and helping people understand the technology so that they would actually use it instead of being skeptical or rejected. And then he had to go through different design phases. He built like mini little prototypes to make sure that his larger design would actually work. And so then in any kind of these technology innovation stories, you actually write through the design thinking process without even thinking about it. In the writing groups, people don't actually call it design thinking. They call it the antagonist or the protagonist. And the antagonist would be the people in the village who are hesitant to adopt the technology. Or in the case of the windmill, it would be his... I don't want to give too many spoilers just in case you're actually going to watch this. There are people who were against the idea. And then fleshing out the people who actually helped make it happen. The people who came together to help build this, it's kind of like the people who were either the sounding board or you can build out kind of a support character sheet to say what their role was. This person helped them talk it through. This person helped them figure out this little bit of the technology and just what was that network and ecosystem that looked like that helped them make this thing happen. And so then the final phase would be what was your actual solution? What did it look like? How did people feel after this was in use? What was the end result? What was the impact? And how was the designer changed and how was the community changed after this technology was implemented? And I wish I could give you every single spoiler to that movie but I just can't do it to you. And so this is kind of the... You'll have this slide as a reference point if you want to be able to refer back to this to know kind of the general phases to help people to help guide through people through breaking down the phases of an innovation story. But I've also included innovation story inspiration because a lot of times I found out that people just can't come out of this dry. You can't just say tell me a story about how technology was made and how it was able to change the world. If you don't have a background in technology, have no clue how this was made, you actually need to see examples in real life. So one of my favorite ones that I come... This is one that I came across years ago was tree planting drones in Myanmar. And this fast company article here, I put it... I use this link because it will run through kind of the origin story of what the founder had to do to make this happen. She talks about how she didn't actually have like an incredible background in actually designing those drones. She had a general concept of what it was, and she knew that it would probably solve her problem. So she had to collect a team of people that would actually be able to do that thing. But then she found out... So this little... This drone actually shoots seed pods into the ground to plant them. And their goal was to just plant millions of trees all over everywhere. And this is going to help the reforestation problem and it's going to help the... It also helps to build cleaner air because trees equal cleaner air. She talks about the benefits to the system, but then she talks about how it doesn't matter at all if they plant any trees, if they don't address the root cause. And it's because this is also the framing of the problem and how she noticed this in the first place. It's because the people in Myanmar were actually tearing down the trees because they needed to survive. They needed to sell the wood so that they could pay the bills and pay and actually just live life. And so they said, well, we kind of need to be able to create jobs and be able to show people why it's a really bad idea to tear down these trees without planting new ones. So she had to pair it together and this drone started out as a drone, but it wound up as an Economic Development Service and a job training program to help people learn how to use these drones and maintain them. So they created jobs and then they also helped people build up little micro-businesses and started partnering with other organizations to pull people away from pulling down trees and shift them over to other job opportunities because there would be absolutely no point in planting these trees if they're all going to get ripped down. It's going to keep tearing them down, yeah, taking them down. It's just a vicious cycle that you're never going to get out of, yeah. Right, yeah. So there are other tree pod companies that are out there that have kind of like followed after this, but not all of them actually address that root cause. So that's why I put this one in here first because they talk about the full origin story. So if you just, this is, I'm definitely not going to read all this right now because that would be a lot, but it's a good read. And so then I put this other one in here because this is actually more the story that you want people to start writing and processing. This is a YouTube video by a guy named Mark Rober. He's a really popular YouTuber and he actually makes this tree planting drone story entertaining. He builds it into like a little challenge program with another YouTuber named MrBeast. I had never heard of MrBeast before this YouTube video and I don't know, he's okay. I don't know. But they turned it into a challenge where they got like a whole mess of different people to start planting these trees and it was like people planting trees versus the drones planting trees to find out who could plant more of them in a certain amount of time. So you had all these people that ran out, got super sweaty, worked like almost night and day to get these planted, and then the drone just going like, I got this. And then they turned it into like a fundraiser for, oh god, what was the name of the organization again? Team Trees. So Team Trees works with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant trees based on donations that they get to the service. Apparently they got quite a few. They raised apparently 21,598,837. So I guess social media is another technology that is going to be helping the Arbor Day Foundation. Go YouTube. Yeah. So and this is also kind of more palatable to, for people to understand the concept instead of rating one of those drier fast company articles. I find fast company fascinating. Others don't. That's where YouTube comes in. And there are just little vignettes and origin stories that are similar to that tree planting drone. And you'll also start to learn a little bit more about how artificial intelligence is actually helping people. Normally in the dystopian novels, AI is going to be implanted, like put into a robot so that the robot becomes self-aware and is able to turn around and kill all humans. But AI, it's not there. Instead, we're going to start reframing this to intentionally look for examples about how artificial intelligence is actually trying to do something decent. So I pulled out garbage net. And this is actually a more realistic example of how AI is being used out in the real world. And it is... Oh, I was hoping that there would actually be a better picture of how this actually worked. But I'll just kind of describe it. So garbage net is a system that is analyzing images of trash. So a lot of the trash that goes out into the landfill doesn't actually have to be there. So this garbage net kind of runs through and visually says this is a plastic bottle. We're going to shuffle this into recycling. This is a glass bottle. We're going to shuffle this over into the recycling area over here. These are some different compostable items. This is an Apple core. We're going to put it into a massive shared compost bin. These are some fish heads. We're going to put it on that same compost bin. And this is like some batteries and some lithium batteries that probably shouldn't have been in the landfill in the first place. We're going to shuffle this into the harmful waste bin. And now this is kind of like a way to bucket out things in the landfill so that they can reduce the amount of waste that's getting stored and buried over time. And this is what the way that the artificial intelligence is working with this is that you can train an AI system using a whole series of images and kind of training model and training sets that say this is a thousand examples of a glass bottle. Now we're going to feed this to the AI model so that it understands what a glass bottle is. So now when it sees a glass bottle, we're not going to tell it what it is. It's going to learn what it is. It has the examples. It's going to compare it against it. There's a good chance that it's going to be able to recognize that glass bottle. They build the system well enough until the AI model is able to understand it with a high degree of certainty and then they let it loosen the world. And so far it's been a lot more effective than having humans do it. If you have two humans that are standing on either side of a conveyor belt that's moving somewhat quickly and you're asking them to recognize plastic bottles versus glass bottles, in our mind we have an automatic little background that says this is what a plastic bottle looks like. This is how it reflects light. This is how you can differentiate it between the two. Humans can't get all those bottles because it's running too quick. Like the little conveyor belt is running too quick and they may like the human mind doesn't process things quite as quickly like our processing center isn't as quick as robots. So they might be able to get about 20 bottles but then you start to get fatigued and then you start accidentally missing bottles out of fatigue. Whereas the AI system doesn't have that. It just has a little grabber that just keeps on going no matter what it's doing. And so then this one actually talks about how they had to start testing it out and they can experiment with implementing it. So in a writing prompt this will actually help people get into the mind of a person who's actually designing AI. A person like this reading these types of articles will help people understand the processes that people actually have to go through to design a system that will actually work. And it talks about how implementing it is actually a little bit more difficult than you would think. And like the costliness of these kind of systems can actually make it more difficult to implement out in the real world. When people build the understanding of how this technology is actually made and used the idea of dystopia gets harder and harder to cling on to. So it's kind of pairing the writing prompt with reading articles about how things are actually made. And it just roots people into reality so that Hunger Games is just a distant memory. And it really is fiction. And yeah. The long one will always be fiction. Yeah. And so there's just a mess of these. And these are some of my this is basically just what I could fit onto a slide. There's like a ton of different examples. And if you go into the Silicon Prairie News that is run through the AEM Institute in the branch here in Nebraska and the surrounding area. They put together a bunch of little vignettes about how technology is changing Nebraska specifically. So if you are in Nebraska and you want specific information about tech in Nebraska Silicon Prairie News is a good one to go to. And the rest of these are just kind of nationwide or just kind of global cool stuff. So the last writing prompt that I'll kind of talk about is it kind of starts out in the same way by asking people to start building out two lists. And the first one will ask people how technology has positively impacted the community. And the second one is how technology has negatively impacted the community. And what our goal here is to help try to build out an understanding of what technology actively looks like rooted in the reality of your own community. And you're starting to build two separate narratives here. In every single group this has ever been done with there are some people who latch on to the positive examples and others who are trying to build into that cognitive bias that just says this is an example that's supporting that technology is a negative impact around me. And I'm going to feed into that. But in this later in this exercise we're going to try to flip that and rewrite it to say okay so what does this actually look like? We're going to pick one of the technologies that we just brainstormed together. And what actually did go wrong with it? What was it that made this not work? Was it because and nine times out of ten a technology doesn't work because either because it wasn't framed properly you built something that sounded really really cool but there wasn't actually a need for it in the community. And or the community just wasn't ready for it just yet. And an example would be here I'll actually pull this open here. So this is my technology failure inspiration. I just have a mess of stuff that just didn't work. And so the one that I'll pull up here is the poverty paradox. The poverty paradox and this is a YouTube video I'm not going to play the whole like play any of it for you right now you can watch it if you want to. But this is I oh just open this because I couldn't remember his name so I clicked it open to grab this. This is Afoza Jomo. He actually worked with Clayton and Clayton and Christensen. Clayton and Christensen is kind of one of the biggest voices in technology innovation. Unfortunately he has since passed away but kind of his work is still going everywhere. They talk a lot about why the process of innovation how it works why it works and why it fails. The innovators dilemma they first talked about what actually like the process of what actually worked and what just plummeted terribly. The other opening example in this in one of the books in that series was about how they dug wells. They dug just a series of wells to be able to help people gain better access to water but then after their organization left they found out they came back about five or ten years later found out all their wells were crumbling and then they realized oh yeah we kind of forgot to train the villagers how to keep these up and we didn't give them the resources to actually do it so it wasn't the technology itself that was the failure the wells were awesome the way the wells were built was awesome it was the maintenance plan that was the failure point the inability yeah important right and who knows if the drone people got the idea from them or if they just kind of saw it on their own but having this understanding prevents future technology failures and also helps people kind of write through and work through what that actually looks like in real life because if you can't write out the process of how technology is implemented or write through the process of how it failed and humanize that process to say it wasn't the robot maybe it was the people then this is the whole purpose of that writing prompt is to be able to put it out on paper and break it down into what is the reality of what failed was it technology or was it s was it the people were we just resistant to a technology that would have otherwise worked or did we just not build a sustainable plan so also in here to help people build out that understanding of like I put in some of the failure inspiration but I also put in articles about how technology is actually implemented this is kind of the one of the better most detailed versions that I found and incidentally it's just from it's from Harvard Business Review but this is kind of the almost a step by step process for how technology is designed within an organization and then implemented out to users and kind of the best practices for how this is supposed to happen it doesn't always happen that way and there's like a high high failure rate for what this actually looks like so if you pair this writing prompt that says oh let me go back here so you just made a list of the technology that impacted the community those people in the groups that I talked to had no idea how this stuff was actually made the impact it was supposed to have versus the impact it did have and they couldn't they didn't understand the process well enough to pinpoint why it didn't work when they actually read the article that said well this is how it's supposed to work they were able to circle back to this and say oh well now I know what went wrong and it was kind of there were also been some kind of cool stories that came up with that and it's kind of one of the most common so as I ran through this kind of activity with the group and with different people that I've talked to over time the most common problem that with technology is that people were resistant to it they were just like nope and then they denied it just from the start and the second most common was that it was just designed poorly it didn't do what it said it was going to do it was overhyped it was um it was just over promising what it was actually capable of doing and then the third biggest thing was that oh I don't actually remember I had written this out but just in case this happened as it sometimes does I did find pure research that says the major causes that technology the tech causes more problems than it solves and it goes through a lot of the different failure points about why tech just didn't work and a couple of them overlapped with what I found with the writing groups and some of them were newer and some of them I wouldn't have even thought about if I had never actually read this article but one of the biggest ones is privacy security so misinformation is one of the top reasons that technology goes wrong and it's because in the case of artificial intelligence we are actively telling ourselves in the back of our mind that AI is evil AI is terrible and AI is going to kill us all it's taking our jobs we just shouldn't use it we're going to shut this down and because we have kind of like that societal narrative going on in the back of our mind anytime you hear AI machine learning or any of those key buzzwords people's brains tend to shut down they say this is too hard this is stealing our private this is stealing our data this is stealing or whatever it's going to kill us all hunger games is on the way we're all going to die and then they just don't do it and that's why a lot of the tech companies started advertising these products without saying AI or machine learning so now more often than not you don't know you're actually using machine learning or AI and then it's starting to spread that sort of misinformation because that's mislabeling the product you're actually using they call it a software program or an app that can tell the future but it's actually machine learning and artificial intelligence so you don't know to look for the privacy security concerns that you may have otherwise looked for if you had heard that kind of trigger word AI or machine learning but if they said AI or machine learning we wouldn't use it we wouldn't touch you with a 10 foot pole but your smartphone has AI machine learning you've probably heard that everywhere your camera has AI machine learning if your camera is correcting itself or adding focus or clarity or blurring out the background machine learning and so there are some companies that are collecting that data and some companies that aren't some that say they aren't that actually are and now this misinformation is going haywire it's part of why the internet of things and smart homes have been having so much trouble catching on and it's because some of it is predatory companies some of it is mistrust and some of it is just incompatibility so we're asking people to talk through and actually visualize what failure looks like what could you do differently to make this technology work better someone wrote a story about how they stopped using all Google products be even though they loved the user interface and loved how the products worked but they stopped using them because they didn't trust them so I asked them to write a story about what it would look like to actually have that technology that you trust what would it look like if you could actually use this technology in your to collect data but the weather around you to collect data about your own personal personal health and you felt comfortable feeding health information into these systems that you just previously stopped using how would you need it to work for you to feel safe using it yep and so when you start actively looking at that and digging into it and kind of taking the hood off of it it got a lot better and it started saying and people stopped talking about how things were all going to end and started talking about let's start a conversation about how we can fix it I just wrote this out I know how people would actually behave in this future world where we actually trust technology I know how technology companies would behave if they were actually trustworthy I've written out I can actually envision this I've built written out a full-on story about this I wrote a character sheet out about the new Mark Zuckerberg replacement that people actually trust more and I have no real commentary on Mark Zuckerberg I don't know the dude but it's people a lot of people don't use their products because they don't trust them Mark Zuckerberg wrote like this massive manifesto about how privacy and security were going to be top-level concerns and then that giant Cambridge Analytica scandal came out and it was a whole thing so it's kind of what would that society look like if it were better and so we kind of I touched on that for the most part you can run through these examples about turning failure into later success and learning from failure and just asking your writing groups to even just sift through a couple of these or watch through some of the videos if you prefer videos over articles and once people have that base level understanding the workshop usually goes a lot smoother otherwise it's just a quiet confused chaos so if you don't want to do the writing groups you can also do book discussion groups so these books are also digging into how technology innovation can do something better. The Prosperity Paradox is written by that Afoza Ajomo can't guarantee I pronounce that right but it's a really good book and it's under Clayton M. Christensen so Prosperity Paradox talks about the economic development and talks about technology innovation you can pair this over with the innovators dilemma and there's a whole series of books by Clayton M. Christensen or by his team many of them are co-authored the promise of a pencil is kind of another origin story this is one of the origin type stories that you want your writing groups to actually start talking about and this is how he this guy actually had absolutely no background in nonprofits he had no background in schools or education he had a university degree but then he decided to start traveling and when he found out when he started talking people talking to people and collecting stories about how they were living and how what life looked like he found out that kids in different countries they just needed access to education so he decided to start a nonprofit to open schools and then he he talks about his origin story and the actual design process and the kind of his failure points what he had to overcome and how he had to just keep trying over and over and over again even though people are telling him he either couldn't do it or that he shouldn't do it or he just he was able to kind of shape the world around him so that he could actually open these schools even though he had no background in doing it and now he's pretty much thriving with it and the faster his future or the future is faster than you think is came from Peter H. Diamantis to be honest I think most people actually read him because he's super rich and they also probably want to become super rich but a lot of the ideas that he talks about in here are about how we kind of tell ourselves a story that we can't actually use technology but if we just kind of try it and start to even if we don't have an intense background in either the technology or the actual problem space itself if you start digging a deeper understanding into the problems facing the world and connect them over to different technology tools this book talks about the process that it would take to actually start an enterprise or start a business that will actually help solve those problems and it talks about how technology can either take a left turn and kill us all or we can take control of it and start to do some good with it and I usually don't read manifestos I usually avoid manifestos like the plague and I kind of wish that she had written that she had called this something else but manifesto for a moral evolution talks about how she basically turned a social enterprise she built a social enterprise and she now goes around to different communities and helps them better themselves and helps them turn problems into business solutions and that kind of pairs over into the social entrepreneurship concept and you can notice the theme going on here it's a lot of save the world and but it's starting to kind of reframe and read this so that people come first and businesses that are started should actually solve a problem and then it digs into the process of how innovation actually works how stuff is made how it's designed why it works why it doesn't and just starting that conversation to say let's look at this stuff and start to look at what technology actually is and now let's open up a conversation about how this technology would look like in our community start asking people questions about you just learned something about artificial intelligence named three examples of artificial intelligence that are right in your backyard are they good or are they bad and open up a dialogue and you as the library staff might think that people are going to hate on AI but maybe they won't and start talking about smart communities start talking about if there were a parking space that was able to recognize whether a car was parked there or not do we actually want that or do we want to let people keep feeding the meter without any reprise and I kind of hope that the that they do keep letting me feed the meter without any consequence that'd be cool I know I've done that I've had to do that many times and yes yeah it's a thing lack of technology lack of AI in that case right yeah doesn't need to be and so there are these books and this is what I could fit on the slide there are about 10 million more I did another encompass that was recommending other books I'm struggling to remember the what I actually called that one is that the tech friendly book club ideas one yes yeah yeah tech friendly book club ideas it was on August 25th of this year cool and so if you want to find out more oh sorry but if you want to find out more books that are more tech specific like this is AI or this is oh let me just go into my slides while we're talking about slides I mentioned that along with recording the link to the google slides that Amanda's been using here will be available to so all those links to the different videos and articles and things you will have access to all of those as well and so this will also go through and it just opened it so these are some recommended books for understanding the technology itself and opening up a conversation about how technology is changing jobs how technology is impacting the community what design thinking actually looks like how you can start like building an innovative mindset so that you can actually start creating the jobs of the future and just talking about what all this stuff is going to mean for the world so this will be I'll just put this link into the chat if you want the book recommendations and chat book friendly tech friendly and some of these books actually have a discussion guide with them not all of them but some of them right so let me pop back in the original and actually I don't think that I put a question slide and this one but I will put it up with here so we're just almost at 11 o'clock so I'll just put up this slide for anyone who might have any questions you can feel free to email if you'd like to learn anything more but otherwise that is pretty much the long and the short of what I've got for you I did other sessions about maker activities so I didn't put it in here again yeah this is about the whole this is just one aspect of things yes anybody have any questions comments thoughts go ahead and type into your question section yeah some thank yous coming in I think this is this is really good just it's good to hear that you know people can come up with these ideas and you know just you know it helps I think deal with a lot of the issues going on today if you can cut you know rather than just passively sitting and reading all the news reading all the horror stories and and the fear of technology you know come up with it yourself and this is some sort of this is a program you could do at your library isn't having these writing groups for these discussions or the book clubs discussions if you want to go that way yeah I think it might help a lot of us handle how things are going and might go little dust dystopia little more hopeful yeah I don't see any questions popping up I can't see when you're actually typing after waiting for the question to come in you all know where to contact Amanda and where to get access I'll show you just in a bit here where to have access to I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen there we go all right so here is our encompass live website you can use your search engine of choice and look up encompass live you'll find this either upcoming shows but our archive a link to archive is right below this is where and these are most recent ones the top of the list so today's show will be posted on here as soon as it's processed and ready to go I will email everyone who attended today and and um register today show to let you know when the recording is available and as I said we'll have a link to the google slides new ones for today one that you just shared that was for the previous that will be included in there and while we're here I'll show you there is a search feature here you can search our full show archives or just the most recent 12 months that is because this is our full show archives and I won't scroll all the way this is a very long page going back to the very beginning of encompass live we premiered in January 2009 so we have all of our um recordings here on our library commissions youtube channel so if you are watching any of our archives just pay attention to the original broadcast date some of our sessions will stand the test of time some things may become old or outdated we'll have bad leaks now or information and resources resources may have changed drastically so just pay attention um and I'll show you here I did a search earlier for when we were talking about it sweet tech and um we'll bring up some of the pretty sweet tech sessions that we've had and the one that we were talking about they're tech friendly book club ideas so this is the link to the recording and the presentation and the resources she has for um that previous session about the list of book titles if you wanted to go and watch that recording well and I do have here's the link to the slides for today so this will be included as I said I think made up for with um the recording today we also have a facebook page you can see that it's linked up here it's linked to each of our session pages if you like to use facebook uh give us a like over there and uh you'll get reminders here's login reminders login today's show and for our presenters when our recordings are available we post on here and the other things related to public live or things public libraries are doing so if you do like use facebook give us like over there you can also you look for us on instagram and twitter we use the and comp live little abbreviation for a hashtag anything about the show will be posted um with that hashtag link to it i don't see any questions coming in all right so that will wrap it up for today our final show of 2021 wow that's crazy we made it through the year it's a marathon um so um happy new year to everyone have a probably have a good new year um coming up this weekend and our next show will be our first show of 2022 will be sally snider our coordinator for children and young adult library services here at the library commission will be with us to talk about the best new team titles of 2021 books they will actually read changing some of the hardest ones to do this is an annual um session that sally does for us this is a companion piece i'd say to the show that she did uh earlier in december best new children's books of 2021 just as long as dana fontaine librarian at our fremont high school here in nebraska so if you are the youth or children teams librarian the children's book session the recording is available and then the teen book session will be coming up next week um in our 2022 for show of the year so thank you everybody for being here today thank you so much Amanda we'll see you in another month at the end of january for your next uh um pretty sweet tech not sure the topic is but keep on our website and we'll come up with see what that's going to be do you have any ideas or not sure yet um no rush i have a couple ideas but i'll send it later we'll see what comes up with yes i keep an eye on that um so thank you man just thank you everyone for being here and i will do the cliche we'll see you all next year on and come back on and come back live bye