 and hello there it is our really hip opening music theme graphics designed by my colleague mario bedia and some open licensed music from the free music archive and here I am already giving attributions but first what the heck's going on here I'm Alan Levine and we are live on the internet this is part of an idea I had for open education week we're just to have sort of a daily twice a day show where we can talk about what's going on and a cat is walking in front of the camera so just beware and the whole idea is is not for me to talk about what's going on but to bring people in who are going to just engage in informal conversation and if there are people in our vast youtube audience who want to send us questions just send them through the chat and we'll pass it on but enough of me I you know I was going to talk about things that are coming up but you can look at the schedule there's like three I forget how many like 200 some different events going on if you go to oeweek.oeglobal.org you go to the schedule you can look by day all the times should be converted to your local time so we try to make it easy although I managed to confuse some of my guests with my mal time convergence but anyhow it's just a great honor to have two colleagues in here that I'm going to bring on screen and just really great to have Martin Weller from Cardiff Wales and Martin's an old blog friend we've hung out together I visited and we've done a lot of projects over the years and Florence Devois who is coming us I believe from Marseille and and we're in different times it's late and evening for them it's late in the afternoon for me according to Florence the schedule it's kind of early in her work day because she works into the late hours but just really great to be here so I'll just give a chance I'll pick on Martin first just you know tell us again where you are in the world you know obviously you're in front of your books but just say a little bit about the work you do in open education as if people don't know who Martin Weller is. Sure thanks Alan yeah so I'm Martin Weller I work at the Open University in the UK I've been there for 28 years now so last month my 28th anniversary I lead a project called GOGN the Global OER Graduate Network which is funded by the Hewlett Foundation that's in its 10th anniversary this year which is a global network of OER researchers and we'll talk about that later yeah and I'm in beautiful Cardiff in Wales we're due to get a light sprinkling of snow tomorrow which I think compared to what Alan was receiving is I think but we're all going into major panic in Britain there's snow coming it's the beast from the east everyone panic so that's what's happening here well we hope you survive the the big blizzard because I think I've seen on Instagram you already have flowers here so yeah that's right I don't lose those daffodils yeah but no it's great to have you and I really want to come back and talk about not only GOGN but I want to talk about your books and especially about metaphors so I can't like to see that but now we're going to go to Marseille to talk to Florence Duois and and I'm going to cut her off and say that means homework in French and so yeah does do you get teased for that that your name is homework not so much because guess what when I was a young lady I wasn't called Duois before I got married our children were not having fun about that but the second teaser is my maiden name has a meaning as well I'm not going to tell you you can find out on the internet what it is but it has a more embarrassing meaning than homework but yeah I only have trouble in the shops when I have to spell my names and everybody write it same way than homework it's very weird very embarrassing sometimes anyway it's we are in Marseille I am in Marseille this is in France south of France it is a night right now same for Martin I guess and yeah the place is great and the first flowers showed up this weekend I started to see the first roses so it's a good sign that the spring is coming so let me just briefly explain who I am I've been a wikipedia for 20 years so it's a very long time I joined wikipedia when the project existed for about a year so it would be quite complicated to explain all of what I've been doing on wikipedia for the past 10 years but I'm still a volunteer over there and I'm also working in that sector so very briefly I work in part in a South African organization called wikia in Africa and we can talk further afterwards of what I do in that association and I'm also known as the wikipedia in residence for WIPO which is the world intellectual property organization excellent and I mean there's lots of things we can talk about we and we have talked about before but like it's hard to imagine when wikipedia was kind of new and novel and there was all this you know really can we create an encyclopedia on the internet and to think of where it has come is just it's like one of the things when I get depressed about how things are going I was like thankfully we have this we have this it's a dinosaur project now it's still weird for me to think about it it's a dinosaur problem project but yeah thank god it's there and how do I get to know open education global I think it was already maybe four or five years from now I joined some of the conference in particular the one in France that took place a year ago and otherwise online event online activities I presented several times some project in the past and I think I joined the open education week last year with a couple of things as well so yeah it's I'm not completely new around but that's it right so I just want to ask like Martin you probably have known about open education week for a long time like what do you what's on your schedule for this week or what are you looking to be part of or to do well actually I'm going to be honest there isn't a lot on my schedule this week for open education week because I'm going to visit my daughter in America on Wednesday so that's my main plans for this week but I think a few of the gogm people are presenting on your shows Alan so that's that should be good I'm not sure if he helps coming in I think maybe back and I'll send some of the others the gogm members and probably the main thing we were going not so much that's going to be going this week but we are partnerings with Alton I know you had Marilyn earlier to run OER 23 with the people up in Inverness with UHI from Inverness and that's in April so we've been working towards that and making sure so we're going to bring about 15 of our gogm members to Inverness from all around the world so we're busy organising that it's one of the things that takes always takes far longer than you think you could say try to organise flights and accommodation and work and stuff so we're busy during now let's go to some notes to the grindstone stuff to come and get that organised but yeah we're really excited about that so we did a bit last year for the OER conference in London we got about nine people together that was the first time back since Covid but this is our first big one so I'm really excited about that yeah and I'm on the conference committee and I've heard that they're even the interest for coming in person exceeded what they would thought so again there's this desire again to um yeah it was funny that last year it was you know you sort of forget already know I kind of forget what happened in lockdowns did we really believe through that this time last year it was really kind of people really very tentative that first meeting in April you know in 2022 you know it's still a lot people was the first time back it was my first conference back it was quite an emotional feeling I think that first time sort of meeting people again um yeah so this year I think people are more up for it and there's kind of a big role in its coming so I should be excited excellent yeah I'm looking forward to that I will I'll flip over to Florence um are you are you part of some things going on this week or um and there are big things going on that you want to talk about too I know with your wiki and african project yeah so I must be honest today I didn't have the time to join anything because last week was a super super busy day for a week for me because we launched three projects so I'm just you know piling the last elements of this project but I will have more time in the next few days I saw already that there was a show plan I think it's on Friday to talk about key weeks and about um uh wiki be there in the classrooms uh and I definitely will be there I really would like to uh I don't remember I know it's it's run by Bukola James Bucky uh and I saw that there was Mahabali on it so I really want to be there but otherwise I remember last year last year I attended mostly presentation about H5P or HP5 yeah um and I spent the entire year thinking I need to test more and I need to do a project with it and now I have the right elements to start guess what when you're later I'm still there it's still on my to the list so I know that if there is anything that somehow relates to this I will come again and and watch them yes attend that oh well when when you say I love H5P and I certainly like seeing interest I mean to me it encapsulates so much of what OER should be um and uh definitely been seeing a lot you know continue growing interest um in it I I have the same way I want to do something with wiki data I took the institute and I I understand it but then I got overwhelmed with how complex you know and I know the part it is defining something but I really think there is something um that could be designed you know perhaps through OE Global or some other group to just have some people do some simple things which is just adding information that they know in that structured format um and you know the the the benefit to me is like you see the impact right away like taking on editing an article is like a bit of a monolith but like wiki data is just like just a little stone that you can kick around yeah there are different approaches to it yeah yeah I'm just gonna say just for uh GoGen a couple years ago we worked with um some people in America who ran a training session for GoGen people ran up for and again it was partly because the Hewitt Foundation really wanted to get um the OER pages in wikipedia kind of updated and and we sort of brought in a few people then we repeated it last year and that's been really good that learning those not not the not so much the data but learning those editing skills and and they they edited some existing pages we also went off and created a lot of other pages around OER open education and social justice as one thing so I think it's been a really useful kind of bringing together those two things but also I think it's a really kind of valuable skill and that's as people having that training that kind of almost formal training was really useful for them and they've then gone off to teach others how to do it as well so I think it's probably really good and it's always been a shame that the the OER pages on wikipedia weren't very good they should be the one area that's really good to know that it's been a really useful thing to do to kind of update those of it yeah I know and and I think Florence posted something in our connect community space trying to say like let's take on some of these challenges and and I was like yeah yeah let's and then you know we all got busy or something and then at the same time when we do that there's conflict of interest so so it's complicated to talk about things we actually know well because yeah we are biased naturally so it should yeah it's a complicated thing yeah do you want to share some about you mentioned the three campaigns I'm really interested to know about um yeah three campaigns the wiki in Africa programs especially yeah so the first I could mention is actually in relation to wiki data so I think it's a it's a good way to mention it so very few people actually really understand and know wiki data and what it is useful for but essentially it's it's structured data about something and what we have been trying to do on in our ecosystem is to make sure that the images that are uploaded in our system on wiki media comments platform get properly described and not only described by a big description in a certain language but also get described by keywords by key elements in particular elements that are structured data because at the end of the day if you want to describe an image I don't know about a tree you only need normally to tag a tree in one language and then normally it should be automatically understandable in any other single language and most of the images on comments are not this way so a few years ago the wiki media comments community decided to tackle this issue and to try to set up a system so that we could actually better describe in a structured way all the images and that got me thinking and we created a little tool which is called easy tool I thought I think I gave you the link to give you an example but what it does it's it's a super simple tool that you can use on your computer or on your cell phone when you're anywhere waiting in a maybe waiting at the doctors or just on in the transportation system you can go there and you tackle a topic a category of things and through a campaign and you will improve the description of all the images so this system will serve your images in a certain categories and all you have to do is enter a better description caption and keywords that we call depict but essentially that's keywords and every couple of months we run a new campaign and since this is March and in March it's important to talk about women women's rights we decided to do a special one related to all these activist women involved in fighting the climate the impact of climate change so we called it with this this this is a I don't see the info yourself maybe I don't know if you can share the screen so that we see we can see the this campaign but the women activists yep so we started it already well six days ago it was started on the first of March and we already collected over two thousands contribution on these images so there you go this is the tour also women on the frontline climate it's complicated for me in English and you see we have at the moment already two thousand two thousand seven hundred contribution on on less than two thousand images so these images will include women or events like strikes or a political statement being done by women related in relation to climate and it's that's an easy way to contribute to Wikipedia without having to get bothered into all the rules all the code something you can it's an easygoing project so yeah that's that's my first one and I must say that currently on Wikipedia there are other campaigns related to gender gaps so do not hesitate to have a look at what is currently proposed this is one of several campaigns right and then there are two other ones you got me you got me interested in December I joined in late to the she said campaign which is yeah editing wiki quote and yeah I got a little bit of a start but I love these approaches yeah so the fact is we are trying to work on other project than Wikipedia itself so that we explore different paths different directions wiki quotes is about quotes from notable women on various topics or quotes about women so that's one of the project we run every single year at the end of the year at the end of the year and we got excellent results this year as well so yeah that's our second big direction the third big direction we have is that we do a lot of mentorship for African women to try to understand better how the Wikimedia ecosystem work and so that they can get more involved and in particular get empowered to become leaders of communities and get empowered to run activities on their own to build projects build programs that could actually change things because we are very May world so yeah so that's one and wanted to mention two others completely different ones so we have a project running for two months March April which is called wiki loves Africa it's a photo campaign we have been running it for eight years now so we are on the ninth year and do you know Alan what's the topic this year every year we have a different topic what is the topic you know I oh it's a quiz and I know I saw and I'm gonna have some info somewhere and and look at it um I don't know come on climate and weather climate and weather well we were just talking about weather and yeah we were talking about weather yeah so the idea is very simple we ask African people to to participate to it to collect pictures in in relationship to weather and and climate so as to populate the database the Wikimedia database with images with videos with audios and graphics as well represent graphical representations and the idea is also to illustrate Wikipedia articles so that's the theme for this year um this is promoted on the side notice banner for everyone living in Africa and this is also on the main page of comments so you cannot miss it if you go to Wikimedia comments you will find a contest friends very well I'm beginning to think that it's probably one of perhaps the largest photo contest in Africa uh at the moment big participation from local communities and an opportunity for every group or every individuals to join the fun and to learn at the same time to collaborate with others and and feel better uh in the Wikimedia world by contributing this way so we're trying to find to fill some gaps there okay so that's the second fun one now I could click in but uh who or who is Wangari Matai ah Wangari Matai this is a woman she uh got the Nobel Prize in relation to her activity in fighting the climate change so uh this is a special day the uh African environment day and Wangari Matai day is actually on March 3rd and it celebrates all the things that are being done around climate environment in Africa excellent yeah and so that's linked to my third project okay and the third project is called it's not a very fancy name I must say but it's called African environment and this is a brand new project we have never run it that's something new so the first one was about data the second one was about images and the third one Martin what do you think it is about video no no the second include no no the second include video it's images audio graphics the third one is about text it's about Wikipedia articles uh and we came from we noticed something when you go to the English Wikipedia and you look at the the article written about a country let's say UK you do have a dedicated article about climate in UK so you can talk about all this fascinating topic around weather because I know this is something important for UK people so you can talk about the weather you can talk about the climate and there's also an article about the impact of climate change in UK so all the problems we are all seeing right now for us it's mostly fires for others it's flawed there are many different impact and there is a dedicated article related to climate change in France climate change in UK climate change in Canada climate change in the USA all of this is covered but when it comes to Africa only three countries amongst all the African country the continent have an article about climate so if you look for an article about climate in Togo or climate in Benin or climate in Rwanda you do not have an article at all it's just nothing so we thought let's try to work on this and let's try to have you're not showing me the right I was right about that yeah it's not the right one it's the um african environment okay I'm sorry yeah so the wikimedia foundation the host of wikipedia teamed with african union and they decided to have a special a special project related to african environment in Africa uh writing on articles to try to fill the gaps and we had the chance to be awarded the implementation of this project so this started last week last Friday it's completely brand new and uh we have the opportunity to fund 17 groups to work on that project to fill up some text about Nigeria but Ghana but Togo about Rwanda and so on Malawi Zimbabwe 17 groups all together we work on this topic so we write articles and now why do I mention it aside from the fact it's very cool project and I love it and I work on it is that absolutely everyone can contribute to that it's not it's not restricted to these 17 groups everyone can contribute either by writing or by providing sources by providing information maybe martin you are aware of some interesting sources that we could use and you can then come to me and I we will add them in the resource section yeah and of course since we are all in the open knowledge sphere it would be awesome if this knowledge this source of information were under a free license but unfortunately we know it's not always the case so absolutely so so what's what's the what makes it one of these campaigns successful what does it take to get that level of activity lots of talk around um first uh publicity uh visibility of the program definitely is a plus but also all the groups locally that really really want to make a difference many of them are brand new to wikipedia or you know only one year old they don't have a lot of experience so it's fascinating because they have lots of new ideas lots of inspiration but we need to also help them on the path because otherwise they will full fully face you know the the dinos or editors were not always very welcoming so we have to to try to help uh the collaboration uh and the addition of these groups but um yeah that that will work i'm confident and the idea behind this is to make it something renewable uh in both sense renewable because the content produced will be reusable by anyone and renewable because we hope to do it again next year so whatever is built this year will be useful next year in the reiteration of that project fantastic and uh and definitely you know i want to try to do anything we can to help and rope some people into to participating because there's like you say there's so much everybody can do yeah yeah every person interested in climate change typically or every scholars who has access to some some for interesting information can can jump in uh it's not about necessarily writing a full complicated very meaty article it's it's starting from nothing and getting somewhere so anyone from anywhere can actually help it and of course it's not in english only i forgot to mention that so uh about one third of our groups will be french speaking and basically nearly all the 17 group want to also work in their local language so some will be working in swahili some will be in in hippos there's um at least yeah more than half of them have a local language in mind and will work at the same time either in english french or in their local and in their local language so it's it's going to be super interesting i think it definitely is and thank you for sharing all that and uh i want to come back and look at those i love those campaign tools um like those um what you've done to try to try and lower the threshold for participation so you know exactly the media articles is both a technical issue but mainly a process issue and you mentioned the kind of dinosaur answers you know and i think people just get up very quickly so anything you do to come out of that threshold of participation is really it's a good thing there there is that and there is something as well uh that is a bit weird for us uh well you're in canada i guess alan yes uh for canadian uk france we have many editors so it's normally quite easy to find a way to grab somebody with experience and and can help we actually have uh chapters in canada we have a chapter in uk we have a chapter in france they can help and the problem for these teams is that usually they're only a handful and all of them are brand new and if they wanted to build up an entire um project initiative on their own then they need skills um for social media and they need text skills and they need uh legal skills and they need so many skills and they are maybe a handful so the idea behind this project is also to provide a sort of um global initiative to which they can attach themselves and then they can focus on doing what they want to do uh even if it's a small part it will be great it will be useful and they do not have to care about all the part to get there so that's the idea behind what we're trying to do at wikin africa is is trying to build a global ecosystem for for the african continent all right thank you so much and uh i want to get a chance too to hear from martin about well i follow what you do but i think other people should know um and and i don't know i want to talk about sharks why is there a shark on your blog okay so there's a lump in a short answer so i wrote a book called metaphors of ed tech um which is published by athabasca university press so open access open myself to the freestyle mode uh and it takes a number of metaphors of educational technology um and one of which is about the film jaws and the online pivots during the pandemic um and that's partly just because i'm a big jaws fan so i just wanted to make sure i got in there and then when i was um thinking about the cover i worked with brian mathers who um we do a lot of work with so uh if ever you've seen in any of the gogian graphics there's the all the penguins and stuff come from brian uh and we so i asked him to do a cover for the book and he came up with a number of different sketches um related to different metaphors uh i thank you for putting on the screen yet uh and i liked all of them they're all good you know rules of the creative process and so which one do you think is best if one just go for the one you like the most and i thought here's my chance to have the jaws type cover on the book that i've written and so i took it but i think also you can there is quite a lot of metaphor you can think about what is the shark representing this metaphors of ed tech is it the technology what are the people on the boat represent us even the plight and also i think it's quite a nice it stands out enough kind of on your social medias and stuff together for make it recognizable that's a fantastic shark thing you can't see here but i've got the original jaws poster up there next to me and the metaphors red tech poster up there in my books absolutely and actually i i think i remember i went to the theater to see the premiere of jaws cool and it's it's scared the the scrap the bleep out of me because we are going we're going the next weekend for a trip to the beach oh wow okay i'm not going into it it's a very metaphorical feeling well it is like think about the reaction to artificial intelligence right now it's it's a big shark and yeah we're on that boat trying to figure out what are we gonna like what kind of trauma it was interesting in the pandemic you know it's like lots of universities and governments over tried to stay open and and even at the time people said they're just like the mayor in jaws so those beaches will be open on the 4th of July you know so i can you know how that ended yeah so and what else is kind of piquing your interest these days and what kinds of curious yes um we've just checked before we came in here so i've just started podcasting uh metaphors of air tech podcast um and i know i'm very late to this game it's just interesting with podcasting i think there was i don't know if we're in the second or third wave of it you know i remember when it's in the mid-2000s and people started playing with it it seemed you know interesting but i didn't get into it and i've just been amazed by how popular it's become over the past like five ten years then all the all the true crime podcasts and stuff you know i'm a big audiobook fan so i don't actually listen to that many podcasts i think there's only so many so many things you can listen to and i like listening to audiobooks but um you know lots of what i know come and just listen to podcasts on the go all the time and i think the tools have really become so much easier with that so i used anchor which i know the evil spotify version of it but it's a really easy tool to you're using those like really simplistic you know i'm sure if you're doing really professional podcasts you know it's sophisticated enough but it you know it works really easily you can publish all the different platforms boom you're done you know it provides you with sounds for like transitions what that stuff so i think just these are producing them it's interesting um i write on the uh i'm part of the teams at a different university and in the institute of edge because technology why uh live we um where i work we have uh this thing called innovative pedagogy report which we produce every year and it's all lists 10 different pedagogies uh we think are interesting um and this year one of the ones we're writing about is um the pedagogy of podcasts and i was talking to one of the people right with stage issues saying i have uh she's in south africa so i'm how students there really started to demand podcasts they don't want to sit at a computer and have video like someone's talking actually they can they'd much rather have a podcast they can be doing other things at the same time it's that kind of partial attention so i think you know it's really in some way that you know i listen to audiobooks while i'm walking the dogs and i think students really like the podcast format and i think a lot of that increased during the pandemic as well you know and when everyone was forced to go online actually you know podcasts or audio you know and often unless the lecture is really presenting something that you need to kind of visual representational you know a podcast was really well so i think that's that's kind of uh piquing my interest at the moment enjoying playing with that um yeah oh and no i remember i was talking to a professor in california who instead of doing a an open textbook he did his as um he basically did it as a podcast yeah um because and his students said you know a lot of students because he's in the los angeles area i mean they have to dry 45 minutes yeah just to get the class and and to me like that that's a beautiful way to um you know get some content that you can do while you're doing other things the sort of inspiration for me finally getting into it was my previous book 25 years of edtech also at athabasca press uh clint along bro canadian um i thought it'd be a good idea to create an audiobook version and he put in so much work sort of rounded up different people to read each chapter and then laura prescreen he said why don't we do a podcast for each chapter as well and she you know organized all that and got different people to come in and speak each week about the chapter and obviously it's an excellent book but actually i think that audiobook and podcast is more interesting than the book in the way it's that people having that conversation around the the source is actually the really interesting thing and hearing other people's reflections and things that i've missed in the book or in their experience of what i was talking about i think you did a version did you do an audiobook or i did that i was on the show with laura yeah yeah that's right yeah and we talked about what it's about system like hearing other people's experiences about their stuff makes it a really rich resource then and i think you can see how that would work the students get them to be co-creators of podcasts and stuff so i think that's that's really exciting and i think um you know when you mention um people looking at the pedagogy of podcast that i'd really be i mean i i know people have probably like spent time trying to study that and make come up with ideas but just like what makes for a good learning experience um when you um you know are in audio and and i've always to me like creating with audio offers a real opportunity because your your um audio has to sort of set the scene and then the person listening it's not as literal as video and so they they construct the meaning as they're listening and i think it's such a rich uh possibility for thinking about learning content um because video is easy to do i mean your point of camera it's something and you shoot it but good audio takes some skills to produce i would jump in i would jump in here to say that the only i i'm a big fan of podcast i i listen probably two hours a week a day podcast when i'm driving when i'm at the gym and so on but there's one thing that we're missing compared to the uh the video format is the translation or at least subtitling so for me i can actually actively listen to english and french podcast and there's so much more variety in the english one for the news way more opportunities for education way more opportunities than in french and uh that's the only reason why i'm a little bit missing things when uh so many people turn away from video and instead choose podcasts because i know many people cannot listen to them it's too complicated but it's so rich it's so rich it gives so many opportunities we actually we we ran a podcast last year uh it's called inspiring open we got 16 women uh african leaders interviewed uh that was our first one that was not simple i must say so martin i'm i think i'm going to read your blogs for ideas that was challenging i thought it was to to make something uh professional to make something really good and quality that's quite a lot of work actually and i've seen i've set the threshold low it depends how professional you want to be yeah but now okay we are not professional but you know good enough and i've noticed that since the pandemics there was many wikipedia's who decided to run a podcast so we have now quite a few podcasts of very different formats and some of them are absolutely wonderful and some of them are just right not much because it seems to be simple but actually is not no it's it's more than just clicking record there's a lot to take take to do that but yeah i love the podcast that you did for um the wikilews women they they were really well produced and i understand what it takes as i'm looking at i have podcasts that i recorded more than a month ago that i i need to to get in but maybe i mean to me one of the places where this ai technology has come into play has been in the transcription oh yeah and i'm using a new tool called the script um where it does the transcript but you can edit the audio by editing the text so you take out all the ums and things like that and it's kind of changing the way i'm going about my audio editing because um i don't know i'm kind of i get overly precise about trying to get the sound perfect not only perfect but um taking out things i don't want to be in the final production um so um and i've seen some things where the translation capabilities um are quite amazing yeah yeah it's pretty come on the past few years that's lots of good stuff yeah transcription first translation second um it's often complicated for us because of the jargon the jargon doesn't go through so well so it's it still requires a lot of editing afterwards but yeah for news it's great for news it's it's it's definitely a tool that can be used and um are you um do you teach anymore martin are you involved in some of the master's program still yeah that's right yeah so we've um so the university is all distance education so we don't have classes um and most of our students are part-time but where i work in the in it we've got a master's in online teaching that's just being launched um so that's really exciting i think you know during the it's interesting during the pandemic you know lots of people came to the open university so you know we need to shift online you know tell us how to do this online learning stuff you know and so and we had uh some some MOOCs or open courses and we had we had some micro credentials we would take but i think you know bundling that up now into kind of more formal offering of a master's now i think there's kind of a big big need for that and and it's great you get the Commonwealth of Learning are sponsoring um some scholarships to study on that as well so yeah that's all coming together so yeah i think you know that's it's interesting to kind of be in that space now you know it's like a you remember when during the pandemic it suddenly felt like you know all these people have been trying to get people to talk to them about online learning suddenly their phones were ringing off the hook you know tell me how to do this stuff you know it's like an emergency service so i think it's going to be interesting but it's also interesting the kind of now we've gone back to some element of face-to-face teaching the kind of backlash okay it's much that online i don't know if you've seen this in France Florence but certainly in the UK there's been all these kind of headlines about universities must go back to face-to-face you know we're going to punish them if they're doing online learning because if it's some kind of like harm that we're doing to people rather than kind of save the education during during the pandemic you know so yeah i still have a daughter with a student she has been coupling quite a lot with the situation and my husband actually is a university professor so it's an ongoing conversation at home well it almost in some ways it makes you wonder about like what have we learned because i mean we're going back to something that doesn't exist and like what we did wasn't exactly the best way and so i mean what's what's the new direction will we create one and well i think i think openness does to bless bring us back onto track there there is a role for openness that i think you know it's like it was interesting we saw the kind of price hike around open tech around textbooks during the pandemic and then the sOS textbook campaign though to kind of move through openness but also i just think increasingly it's difficult i think one of the problems that campus-based universities have is you're trying to operate dual systems simultaneously so people want the face-to-face then you've probably seen all these twitter threads about you know lecturers turning up to to lecturers just being no students there whatsoever and they can't move fully online because they've still got this campus and they're trying to on that and so trying to operate that hybrid model could be there's kind of different economies to both of those things from start and i think i wonder if you know i know i think every five years so the people in the RER world say our time has come but i think there is a kind of a moment here you know it's like if you need to make some of that shift to online learning but you're still operating the campus model you can't put in the the time it takes to produce that high quality distance education material you know like we do at the university so OER provides you at least a kind of a midway point you know you can take that you can take that content and just reuse it and i would say it shows that we didn't it didn't make a big difference but i experienced once last fall one conference organized in the Wikimedia sphere that was face-to-face and online at the same time and i was completely amazed by what they did it required a lot of technology a lot of human work before but they really managed to do something where you felt really felt that the people online were with you and on equal standing that the people in the room that that's the only case i could see that work for maybe around 100 people at most that was great otherwise we are slowly slowly reverting to the old model yeah it's strange i think the the OER by domain's 21 conference that happens during that lockdown was a really good example of that so you know Jim Groom and Lauren and the team that reclaimed work with Mara and the team Alt and that really felt like you know you're capturing that spirit of you know an online conference being different and i think you know just the use of the stream yard and right here and discord and those kind of things it really sort of felt like it operated differently like a proper online conference rather than just the the lecture deficit model which we kind of had generally with people just streaming talks and stuff yeah that was a yeah that was one of the favorites i saw during that time so last thing maybe what do you think a year from now when i call up you both what are we going to be talking about you have to try the branching scenario yeah i i know yeah that's the you certainly know about this this scenario but um a woman trying to uh to fight uh violence human violence of a woman that's home with her husband yeah and is this person and when i saw that presentation i was oh my god this is so awesome and i want to do something similar but i can't imagine the amount of work that must have been required that don't start with that one believe me it's a branching scenario is really amazing well i i have to say i love h5p and you can see why people get interested but when you get into and start making it you find there's a lot of little subtle things that that catch you by surprise yeah but in terms of what it does for making something reusable and attaching the metadata and attribution for all the parts and and and the the localization of language or being able to change the interface there's so many good things about h5p yeah yeah so that's my exploration for last year and next year okay well you know where to find me yeah i know i i've i've wanted to try to get some people together to work on some h5p um but yeah it's it's actually a little bit harder to do um over the asynchronous space yeah i i think we'll be saying what a great oe global conference we had in ed pansell i look forward to that yeah absolutely that that will be one that i can get to without an airplane that's right yeah you can see that yeah yeah definitely well i um i really appreciate you both taking time um late in the night and and dealing with my my schedule snafus but um this is the kind of thing you know i really wanted to do is just have informal conversations with interesting people it's been great to meet you florid's yep catch up again anam yep i'm going to read on your blog now well i may well be in touch actually when we come to the uh so we do this um thing with the gogen network every year about you know updating our real pages so uh i've already touched it that'd be great sure awesome all right well have a great evening i'm going to play the exit music so the video can be complete um and just thanks again for being part of this and have a great rest of the week thank you for having us thank you alan thank you