 I am indeed, yes. I hope you can hear me loud and clear. Wonderful, thank you. Well, I'd like to thank Alt for the opportunity of giving this presentation this afternoon for everyone for being here. So the object of the presentation is to talk about our new project from Nexis, which is promoting the Nexis Intersection of Interaction of Migrants through Active Citizenship. This is a three-year project we just started last September. So what problem are we trying to solve here? I mean, I think you can tease out the answer to that question by looking at some of the quotes from an EC White paper. Well, the first one, for example, that the idea that a number of young people involved in traditional structures is declining. It's like if you like a sense of alienation from classical, democratic and institutional processes. And we're particularly interested in what we can do to help people with these younger people, and specifically migrants. That doesn't mean we're trying to exclude other social groups, but previously we've worked with refugees and migrants. We're very interested in social inclusion, so therefore it kind of made sense to move forward with this area. Here's some very brief project information. It's a K203 Erasmus Plus project and we have partners, as you can see from seven countries here. And as I say, we started last September. Our objectives are various, whether we can actually get them all done at the by the end of the project is another matter, but we'll certainly give it our best shot. I mean, we certainly would like to try and innovate the civic education process. And as I say, we're starting off with migrant, higher education students because those are the students we have easier access to. But it doesn't mean we're not excluding anybody in there. We're also interested in exploring the relationship between the participatory digital tools and the actual e-democratic processes because there's a lot of tools available, but it's actually sometimes hard to quantitatively measure the cause and effect here. Perhaps what's a new inclusion for this kind of work is that of service learning. And in fact, we're trying to raise the bar a little here and introduce the concept of virtual service learning. I'll talk about this a little later on. When we talk about educator awareness, I mean, a lot of our projects we focus specifically on the students, but we'd like to also think about the educators here. It's a two-edged sword, if you like. I think there's a lot of transverse learning that students are lucky enough to receive when they start in higher education. And I think civics could also be part of that. We'd like to boldly take civics to the fourth level if I can split my infinities for a second and I'll define clearly what I mean about that a little later on. And then we've got some concrete actions we're going to try and do in the project, which once again I can come back to. So when we're talking about active citizenship, I think we can use the slide from breakaway here to give us a bit of a flavor of what we actually mean here. I don't want to get into defining it because I really haven't got enough time. But I mean, if you like, it's helping people to become, potentiating people, so they'll never come. Thank you, Trace. Another Trek fan in the room with us, this is good. Making people proactive and taking charge of their own process, but also helping them to be able to do that. When we talk about online democracy, digital democracy, e-democracy, there's not been published about this. I mean, I think the next figure is quite nicely used. It tends to be presented as a sequential process and I'm not sure that's necessarily the case, at least some of the thought we have in the project here. But we're certainly looking at exploring some of these nodes on this chart here. There's also a lot of work being done online. If you look on the right-hand side of this figure, these are the sorts of examples we can find online. For example, crowdsourcing ideas for local improvement. There's a couple of really nice projects been done in Iceland and we can find them online. On the left-hand side, it's just a small taste of the sorts of tools and online social environments where work's been presented on that. For example, in ParticipateDB, they've been working very hard and diligently for more than 25 years. They've got almost 400 tools completely. Blows me away every time I try and actually get my head around what's actually there. So we're trying to, if you like, focus in and develop a best-of-breed set of tools for people here. Okay, so if I'm able to quote a colleague of mine from the project, Elisa, if we can be a little bit more clear about this, about e-democracy as being the use of ICT to support the democratic decision-making process, then we can identify three parts. We've got the e-government, we've got e-transparency, and we've got the part which is interesting us, which is the e-participation. This is acting actively, trying to get people to actually participate in this feedback loop. And it's actually interesting because I haven't been lucky enough to have a lot of contact with refugees and the migrants in the past. A lot of people I have spoken to are only too pleased to be in a semi-stable social environment and really want to keep their head down below the radar and aren't necessarily keen to become active and participate with citizens and that's something that we're trying to help them with. There's a huge literature and a lot of previous work. I'm just including a taste here on the slide. I mean, for example, there's 17 different MOOCs that are going around. There's guides, there's some open courseware. There's what I'm calling text plus because in the majority there are texts, but if you have some interactive elements included and videos and text and TED talks as well. So it's not a question of being lost for things to use or reuse. It's a question of how we can actually pull out what's actually appropriate for each of the different strands of the activities we're trying to do in this project. Okay, one particular thing that does concern us from a scientific and research perspective is this question of how to actually know if the students who are taking part in our repartition are actually achieving the outputs they want. Are they actually able to connect and collaborate and research and reach the issues they're trying to actually handle with. And that's actually leading us into because we don't have necessarily all the answers just yet. The right kind of metrics and rubrics we're going to be developing in combination with our tools and platforms to be able to pick up that information. And that's something that I hope we'll be able to contribute later on in the project. Service learning. I briefly mentioned this. I do apologize for screaming forward at the speed of light here, but there's a kind of a lot to get through. I mean, service learning is something which is not new in the sense it was presented in 1996 as a form of experiment experiential education. I'm engaging students in activities taking the beyond the cozy niche of academia into the real world. And it's received a lot of attention. It's popular in the US and it's also been criticized in the literature as should be the case. But we think for this operation, this notion of moving forward into virtual service learning could actually be quite an effective way of engaging students. We've done similar things with online work experience with students and we think we might have a way of being able to include this in the project. But I think it could be a good way because I mean, this is the best way to learn something is to teach it. And I think the best way to gain a competence is to actually try in a real world situation. And it could be win-win. It could be good for the community of the students actually helping the niche group and also good for them in terms of actually producing results and also improving their competencies in this area. So this is where we are at the moment. We're trying to develop based upon an analysis of the literature the actual units we want to have as micro learning units that can be used in face-to-face teaching and also for online mooks. And I put this here as proposed units because this is very much work in process. And this might well change over the next few months. At the time, I mean, we certainly want to lay the basis of what active citizenship is and why it should be of interest to our students and then move on to some of the things we think are most important, like telling stories with data. I mean, there's lots of open data around, but knowing what is good from the bad and how to analyze it, I think, is non-trivial. I put it mildly. How to change, how to monitor and influence different times of social groups. Si, did I hear something there? Hi, I think we're okay. Hello. We can hear you loud and clear. Oh, good. I didn't know I could hear somebody speaking. Sorry about that. I'll soldier on. So if you like the idea that we're thinking about for our curriculum design would be to combine explanatory materials given by people who are experts in each of these different areas with regional case studies. Because at the end of the day, if I'm trying to engage with Spanish students and I'm giving them a case study in Sweden, it might be hard for them to relate to and to participate in. So these really need to be regional studies and then combining the participative tools with virtual social learning. So this is where we are at the moment, okay? And where we're going to be in the next few months is basically preparing a couple of MOOCs. The first one, Civics for Active Citizenship and Participation in the Digital Age. We'll hopefully be getting this at the door in October of this year on our open UNED, OpenLX platform. And then we'll have a more vertically structured MOOC at the beginning of 2022 when we're coming towards the end of the project to actually help people to learn and to use the tools that we're promoting. One thing we're also working on is the idea of a civics toolbox to help people with the tools that are around. And as I mentioned before in the top, there's just so many. It's hard to know actually where to focus your attention here. So in a way, what we're humbly trying to do is to produce a short list of what we might want to call best-of-breed tools and produce the appropriate metadata and and tutorial material to actually help people to realize what they can actually do with the tools because most of the tools claim they're open source, but then when you come to use them, it's not always that easy, for example. The results of this toolbox will be similar to the result that we or colleagues of our from KIC produced in the EduHack project, which is actually quite a nice website with links to the tools and also the supporting information and actually the tools themselves. So we'll actually build a community around that. Okay. So as I'm coming towards the end of the of the talk here, let me get on just to the civics 4.0. And this is where I stick my neck out of it in the in the presentation because I think I said earlier at the beginning that, okay, we can quite easily accept it. Civics is the studying rights and duties of citizenship because there's both sides of the coin here. I mean, we have rights, but we also have responsibilities and both have to be accepted. So if we can we can look at 1.0, then I think that's the way that civics has been has been taught quite a lot in in face-to-face education. Then moving on to 2.0, then I think that's a pretty much a no brainer. The idea of just applying straight 2.0 techniques to civic education, a lot's been done. I think there's been some very admirable project work that I can speak highly enough about it. But I think it's analogous to the idea that if the only tool you have is a hammer and everything around you becomes nails. And I think that if we divide the project up in a different way, the problems we're trying to solve them, maybe we can come up with solutions that are slightly more flexible. 3.0, which is something we came across when we were putting this project proposal together a while ago, was this idea of bottom-up community-driven transformation. And I think we've seen a lot of this going on. There's a really nice examples going on like the yellow jackets in France, the Catalan independence in the north, east of Spain, there I mentioned Brexit. But anyway, there's lots of examples going on. So I mean here we can see some really exciting changes and contrast between representative democracy and direct democracy. And I think we're beginning to see the power of the community. So what we're hoping to do with 4.0 here is to really potentiate the connection of students to their institutions in the digital age because sometimes when I'm lucky enough to have conversations with students about this and they complain about things. I mean it doesn't have to be big, solving third world hunger problems. It can be something as much as the fact that they're not particularly happy about the way their local community is working when they're where they live. So the typical answer is well that's really good, why don't you do something about it, take part, go and shake some of the people who actually have some power in this and try and produce some change. And they want to, they like it, but they're not always clear of the best ways to do that. So I think if we can really harness on this idea of service learning and the tools we want to connect in, then I think we could, even if we can't particularly solve it, we can certainly try and take a step towards this particular solution. So thank you very much. That's what I wanted to say briefly in this presentation. I very much hope to be able to be back next year. Hopefully face to face to give you an update on this and more than grateful for any comments or criticisms or questions that anybody has. Thank you very much. Thanks so much Timothy for that. That's really interesting. If anyone has any questions you can raise your hand and you can have the mic or we can take them in the chat as well. So there's just a question here for you Timothy from Greg. Greg wants to know if there's a website where he can keep updated on this? Not right now. We're we're prototyping the web development at the moment and we'll have one out in the in hopefully or by next week. It would have been nice to have had it done by now but it's been developed and I'll make a note of your contact Greg and send that to you. Thanks. Thanks Timothy. There's also just a second question here from Gabby and that's, she wants to know if if we do the MOOC we'll get to explore all of those cool tools. I wish. My experience of doing MOOCs is the four plus two model works. I mean we've been doing MOOCs for quite a long time now and the four plus two is one week warm up four weeks of work and one week cool down. So in four weeks being able to try out all the tools I think would be a little hard work and as I said if we go to the participate DB they've got at least 400 so we go crazy. I think what we'll do would be to go back to the curriculum design we've got here. If you can see the slides on I'm not sure if it's still on this. And for example for each particular unit is where we'd send to the tools. At least that's in the in the first MOOC. The first MOOC is going to be broad and shallow so the idea is to give people a general understanding of the questions about dying in the process. So for example in organizing campaigns we could probably put the top in our opinion maybe the top three or five tools that are actually useful in a particular application of ordering organizing campaigns and then in the regional case studies getting people to find a particular issue that's close to them and then try the tools out in that context. But I mean you're completely right I mean people have to use the tools. If you don't use the tools you're not really going to get much from it. And then toward the end of the project when we do the vertical MOOC and we're more focusing in on specific tools then it will be more of a workshop about trying the tools out. And if I'm throwing stones at my own roof here as we like to say one of the criticisms of some of the tools I found is they're really great. I mean some people you can tell they've gone to a lot of trouble to spend tens of thousands of years developing open apps and stuff and then when you're actually trying to apply them in different contexts it's not always quite so easy. But I don't wish to criticise anyone here because I'm not sure I could do any better but it's just things that you need to be aware of when you're trying to think of the the tools that are actually available. That's great thanks Timothy and there's just one final question here from Theresa and she's asking if you could unpack the problem you briefly mentioned around open source tools. That's not sure I really understand the question I'm unpacked the the question is I mean perhaps it's a question of of how many different tools there are. So for example if hypothetically speaking I'm trying to locate I'm getting contact with my my regional councils to complain about for example bus services. I mean for example where I live bus services aren't radial they're there they are radial they go from where I live in my village to the very centre of the city and back out again which is not necessarily the best way of of of doing it so wouldn't it be nice if I could actually get my voice heard and while open government and transparent information and access to these resources are terribly popular in inverted commerce well I actually try and find the damn tool and contact communicate and transmit my frustrations I find it very difficult. So if I find it difficult who perhaps is an academic I'm used to trawling my way through these sorts of tools then how my other people with maybe not so much experience actually find it difficult to to do oh thanks Tori so sorry I won't repeat myself if I seem to have answered the answer the question but I mean I think we do need to focus in really and help people to find the most appropriate tools. Thanks very much Timothy that's really really interesting and thanks for your questions as well and if we could give Timothy a actual round of applause and that would be very very nice for him. Thank you and don't forget there's these social space as well so if anyone wants