 and it is live. We are actually live on YouTube. I'm like this annoying voice that's coming out of the back of the television set. Like who knows what a television set is anymore. Like here we are. It's open education week. It's the last day and you're here for another one of Alan's talk show formats where I just ask people to come into the studio and have an open conversation. And we always attribute. Gotta be community. Giving the clouds music is always like that guy is prolific. I've been using this stuff for a long time. Hello friends and everybody. Welcome to O&G live. Let's all wave hello. And like you know this is where their faces are saying what have I gotten myself into. But like all great friends and colleagues and so I will ask just I'll do the column thing and just ask my guest to just give a quick introduction where they are and maybe say something about how the weather is today. That's always a good one. No not the weather. Just about maybe tell us you know about the environment. So I'm going to start. It's so good that Judith Sebasti is here and she's a longtime colleague and she just says yes when I invite her. So welcome Judith. Where are you right now? Hi Alan. It's great to see you and thanks for inviting me to join this amazing group of people. And I am based in Austin, Texas in the United States. And we have been having an unprecedented and unprecedentedly warm winter here in Austin. Thank you. Climate change and global warming. And today it's going to be about 83 degrees. Although we did have a big storm come in and got a little bit hell this morning. But it's beautiful and sunny today. And as you can see from my subtitle here in my name I run a higher education consulting business here in Austin. And I've just been so privileged to be able to work with OE Global in a number of capacities over about the past decade. So thanks Alan. Oh sure. And I don't know will we break out in song? I don't know but Gardner might help out. So next I'm so excited to talk to Ajita Nismuk who's come to us from New Delhi who has been very active. We've gotten to know each other and OEG Connect. And so she graciously agreed to come on in her Friday evening. So hello Ajita. Where are you right now? Yeah. Hello everyone. Can you hear me? I hope so. And I am currently just now today for two more days in New Delhi. That is the capital city of India and it's pretty cold here. But a very pleasant weather. We also have a kind of a festival today. But right now I am here on an official visit. And I also have been running activity at home on behalf of my department and on behalf of my college for the past four years. This is our fourth year. And in that with the kind permission from Alan we are going to run this activity at home for a month. And we are having seminars, sessions every Saturday. And it's a fabric of culture is the theme this year. So I hope it's an interesting thing and thank you very much. And lovely to see everyone here. Yes. It's fascinating because a lot of it is things because I've done some things asynchronously so I can do some of the activities and that's definitely hands on. And then next on the list, my good friend and colleague Gardner Campbell who I just said, do you want to come on to this thing and talk? And he said yes. So hello Gardner. Where are you today? Hi Alan. I think I heard do you want to talk? And the answer is always yes. Of course I'd like to talk. But yeah, it's so wonderful to be here with all these luminaries. And I look forward to being part of the conversation. Where am I right now? That's actually my backyard back there. It's green screen. You can tell by the attractive green halo around my head. But the I'm not in my backyard. I'm upstairs in Richmond, Virginia in the United States of America. I'm an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. I've been teaching fully online since the lockdown actually, which was four years ago this month here in the United States. And eager to be part of this conversation, I will let it have its head and go as it will. So thanks for let me be part of this. And Gardner's very humble. I have been in his classrooms. I have been in his online teaching and it's always like he the teaching he does is at a level that that many of us could wish to be at in terms of the way he involves and interacts with his students and gets them fully playing long. And I want to get back to some of your cinematic approaches too. Thank you. And then of course, good friend and colleague and former boss, Paul Stacey, who was gracious enough to volunteer twice for this dude. So tell us where you are right now, Paul. I'm in Vancouver, Canada. It's it's been, well, it's kind of a mix of winter and spring here right now, given we're talking about the weather. The mountains, which I can see out my window there, let me just see are shrouded in cloud and but are covered in snow. And then here here in here in my apartment, I decided to go with some spring tulips. Bring it into the house, right? Anyways, Ellen, it's always a treat to be part of these sessions and to have some opportunity to speak to you and and with others as we're doing this morning. So I look forward to how it unfolds. Yes, and I encourage everybody just to chip in. This is not this is not Alan's Inquisition, although it probably already sounds like that. Anybody want to go first or should I call on people? You call Judith. I'll ask Judith. I'll just I'll go the same order. Thank you, Ajita. So tell us what you've been up to, Judith. Oh, so first I want to say Gardner, so I have not had the chance to be in the lovely cities that Paul, you and Alan and Ajita are coming from. So but but but Gardner, I spent a little time only about a year in Richmond one time and it's just such a lovely city. I lived in a house in the fan, which is a historic district for those who might not know. So just really a new thing. But anyway, so thank you so much, Alan. And so what I've been working on lately is a pretty exciting project. It's a course that has been designed for and delivered to California Community Colleges on OER and Generative AI, a little bit of context without going into too much detail. But some of you might be aware that the governor of California, the state of California in the United States in 2021, allocated an unprecedented amount to the development of zero textbook cost degrees, including open educational resources, $115 million, and specifically to support community colleges in California to develop these degrees. So one aspect of that has been that the College of the Canyons, which is in the Los Angeles area in California, was allocated some funds to develop a technical assistance program to assist the community colleges in this. And leading that is the amazing James Glapa Grossglog. Those of you who have worked with Open Education Global would know that he is a great friend of Open Education Global. And he is at College of the Canyons and is leading this, this what we call the TAP program technical assistance. So he brought me on board. I've just been so privileged to be able to do this as the project manager for the TAP program. And as a part of that work, James charged me and a co developer Chloe McGinley at College of the Canyons with creating this course on Open Educational Resources and Generative AI. It's called Navigating the Future, Open Education with Generative AI. Now currently I will say that this course is open only to personnel at California Community Colleges. But the plan is that in early 2025 we will release this course to Canvas Commons, to the open instance of the LMS Canvas, and it will be available to all. But if you're in California and you're at a community college, then you can access this course through a kind of a virtual course network called Art1 that California has. But just to give you a little details about it in case you're curious, and I'm going to put a link in a minute in the chat that hopefully Alan, for those who might not be logged in and can't see the chat, you can share with everyone to an introductory video on YouTube so you can get a little more information about it that Chloe and I created. And Chloe and I both developed and co-facilitated the first offering of this course last month. And just to give you a little sense of it, our learning outcomes for the course are fourfold. Describe what Generative AI is and is not and how it's used in higher education. Implement strategies for using Generative AI with OER and Open Pedagogy. Articulate those important ethical concerns for using Gen AI with OER and Open Pedagogy. And describe probably one of the most complicated, there's four modules, one of the most complicated module. Describe evolving practices for licensing and attributing work created with Generative AI. So the first offering of this course last month, it filled up within a day. And we're offering it again for the California community colleges in May and in May and into June. And that also filled up within a day. So we're going to be offering other sections of this throughout the summer and the fall of 2024. As you can imagine, it hasn't been quite in demand, but we just had a cohort of 30 initial students or learners that were incredibly engaged. And Chloe and I learned a lot from them. As you know, it's just a constantly moving target, isn't it? So we've got some work to do to update the course for the next offering. And so we're excited about that. But that's a little bit of information about the course. Yeah, that's don't want to take too much time. But if you have any questions or We might circle back or we might go down the hole. But like just the challenge of trying to create a course around something that changes every day, you open up your screen. Yeah, go ahead. Definitely. And we were so gratified by the fact that many of our learners, they probably have, I think some of them have as much knowledge of AI as we as facilitators did. And, you know, we got some tips and strategies from them. And some of them said, Oh, by the way, this is now, you know, this being is now called this. And there's now a new version of chat GPT that you mentioned in here. And so along the way, we were actually doing a little bit of updating of those sorts of things. But you're right, Alan, I'm putting the link, by the way, into chat here up to this intro video. So you can say, Okay, yeah, that's fabulous. And I was, I was just thinking a little bit like yesterday, I tuned into webinar with Dave Cormier, who has this new book out about the abundance of pedagogy. And he really talks about how what we're dealing with is basically how to teach people to deal with uncertainty. And AI is right in that camp. So really, like, we're all kind of like, first of all, like, I know so little about AI, except, you know, what I'm trying to absorb. And that's why we have to hear more for Paul, too. Because Paul's laughing because he's like, everybody expects me to know everything, right, Paul? I mean, it's really complex, I will say. Sorry. I just want to jump in and say, Alan, for some reason, I wasn't able to access the public chat. I got it. Okay, good. Thank you. Go ahead. Well, yeah, I look forward to your course, Judith. I think that's really urgently needed in some way. As everyone's been trying to make sense of this. And I feel like lots of people have been jumping in and making use of it, regardless of any kinds of big picture context understanding. And I think that I think that's great in some ways. I love that, you know, let's just jump in and try and use it and experiment with it. I like that kind of attitude. But I also feel like there's some underlying risks and safety and legal and ethical and social concerns that perhaps we're not addressing as thoroughly as we ought to within the education space. And so those are a little bit concerning for me. I think it'll sort itself out over time. And I guess one of the things I've been advocating for, and I'll stop here, is just that we'd be proactive. Like, take it, like, have a say, you know, try to influence regulation, try to have a say in policy. Like, you know, the AI tech developers are seeing education as like a major sector for them. And so that's the case. And then we need to speak up and say what we want and what we don't want, and try to try to influence it while it's still at this very early stage. That's very helpful. I'm curious too, Ajita, like, because we're all here in North America, what what's I'm not going to ask you to speak for all of India, but in your realm, what are you seeing in terms of like the way people are reacting or thinking about? Now, of course, this is not what I invite you to talk about. Yes. Oh, there are two camps, two distinct camps. One, who are very much upbeat about it, like all of us who want to experiment. I also actually did one experiment with a batch of students last year, where I tried to make them use AI in an assignment and use them as co-creators. So there's this one distinct group. The other distinct group is we don't want AI because that is what the students are not going to use their brains. They're just going to use it and maybe copy paste. So it's a wild chasm there. But we cannot overlook AI. That is for sure. So it's here to stay and it will settle down is what I feel it it may take a bit of time. But I as I can't speak on behalf of the entire country, it's too large. But what I feel is we are looking at it in a much more positive way. And more in financial sector is what my own understanding of the country pulse goes that can we predict the stock market and the second area that is that's the health and then education. Agita, by the way, I think it is so well said when you said that we can't overlook it. We are doing our students a great disservice if we do. We need to be helping them ethically and responsibly use it to prepare them in the house for the workforce. That is already using it extensively so well said. Yes. And I just wanted to ask Judith, when is the course going to be free for all of us to move the table? There you go. No pressure. We will early 2025, we will be putting it out and I know. It's partly because of the grant funding that that that funded this and we're kind of obligated to ensure that it just is offered to California community colleges for a while. But we will be releasing it as an un-facilitated asynchronous course that folks can adapt to their own needs. So stay tuned. Thanks, Agita. I appreciate that. Sorry, it's going to be a well, I'll put you on the spot. Like, could you sometimes do like a little demo for us if we did some kind of like demo session? I will check with James. Okay. He can be part of the demo. The matter is that the content within this is openly licensed content that we've drawn from large. So once you get into it, you can use it for a variety of things, but you've got to get into the course to be able to see what we've got there. Yeah. Well, just to have a sense about what the flow is and what the activities and of course all the resources. So yeah. Well, I'll get back to you, Judith. I'll test you. Well, Alan and you probably, you and Paul could probably twist James arm a little bit. So we'll try. But Agita, I want to, I really want to hear you talk about your book, but can you tell us a little bit more about where you teach and what you teach? Oh, yes. Okay. So I currently teach at the MIT Art Design Technology University at Pune, which is a twin city of Bombay or Mumbai, as we now call it. So I am associated with School of Education and Research. And I lead the program of masters in e-learning, where I train my students to become instructional designers and content writers and course creators and other things. It's a newly developed course now that we are offering for two years. It's a master's program. And I have, I joined here five years ago and I started conducting, I should say I don't know whether it's a correct word or not, but conducting Open Education Week at my university at this. So this is the fourth year that we are having and we titled it as activityathon based on a marathon. So it's a slew of activities that take place asynchronously over an LMS. We circulate a particular flyer kind of a thing or a brochure kind of a thing. The best one that we have had, I was so glad that Alan was a part of that. I think it was 2021 or 2022, where the theme was heritage and culture. So we had stories about the objects that we had around our home that spoke about our culture and heritage. And this time it is the fabric of culture. And we are trying to attempt that, what is it that our fabrics talk about our identity, our culture, the embroidery, the patterns, the cloth. And maybe we are also trying to have those sessions where we are going to try one AI tool, one or a couple of AI tools demonstrations where we can do some pattern recognition with respect to a particular embroidery or a particular fabric. We also don't know exactly how it's going to go, but that's what we are trying. And along with that, we have a session, I mean, it will be a recorded session which will be released tomorrow on how fast fashion contributes to carbon footprint and what we as individuals can do to reduce it. So we're going to start. Yeah. Yeah. And I always, I mean, the way you approach that with terms of fabric, because I mean, it's every day in our life. I mean, obviously, but like, we have that connection, which then can launch us thinking about it more broadly. So wow, that is so beautiful. But what I really want to hear about G just been telling me through, through OEG Connect about this book that she's self publishing, which, which is both, well, I'll let her describe it because I just think it's brilliant. Okay, thank you. Well, this is a seed that germinated in my mind for quite, I should say a couple of years that I have grown up reading and listening to English fairy tales, which we call as legendary fairy tales, like Goldilocks, like Jack and the Beanstalk, like red riding hood and other stuff. But somehow I don't exactly recollect, but suddenly one day it was like this red riding hood, right? This has got a concept of cybersecurity there. And that was a time when I was active. I mean, I do a lot of work with the cybersecurity for school children and, you know, others. So like, was using the sessions and use taking some activities, I always used to find that no something is missing, I need to bring in something. And I am a storyteller myself. And one day I just got this year, this has got a cybersecurity thing. Can I link more and more such stories? Then I could find out, let's say around 10 stories which do have a cybersecurity element in them, if I twist the story in that way. And yeah, so then I started writing about it. Now, when I started writing about it, I wanted to be very crisp and also like one page with the whole thought that what I want is the parents should sit or whatever the bedtime stories, right? They should also go back to the old original story. And it should also be a little bit nostalgic for them. But at the same time, it should be a message there. So the book is titled Once Upon an Online Time. Thank you. And I have tried to generate the images, relevant images using AI. And Ajita, don't the best children's book have something for the children and the parents? So I love that nostalgic factor, I think would serve that purpose. Yeah, because I really want, I mean, that's what I have been seeing that there's a disconnect that is in India, at least people have been talking about the children don't read so much, they don't know the stories that we have heard. So can this be just one link maybe, which can make the parents also sit and say that, oh, this is the story, this is something new, but you know, the original story is this. So I didn't want to actually tell the same old story. So it's a new story, but the terms are same. And that's how I don't know how it will be, but Wow, fantastic. And hopefully you said it's going to be almost ready next week, right? Yeah, it's actually it's almost ready. The only thing is why I'm like, I'm not doing it is just because I don't have all the things with me right now, because I'm in New Delhi. So let me just go back to Pune then. I'll read it. Right. And I know, I know you asked in Kinect about ways to self publish. Can you say which route you chose? Yeah, I have finally taken up press books. And there is one more member from OI Global from India. So she helped me, like, you know, chapterize it. And she has her own, what do I say, an instance, which is called a test write. So it will be hosted on that. And it's going to be CC licensed. So she's already offered it to translated into her region, her mother tongue, which is another language in South India. So yes, yes, we had all the suggestions that poured in at OI Global, because that is the place where I had asked that, what do you think, how should I publish? Yeah, and we had Paul was with us Monday when Chishuma was here talking about the translation. So fantastic. I'll just keep visiting the site and make sure that I see it when it comes in. I'm curious a little bit like the interesting fact that Western fairy tales are well known. Like, is there anything in the stories that just don't make sense in a cultural context of India? Like, you know, I don't know whether it's the beanstalk or the three bear part. I don't know. I think nothing makes sense. We all have grown up reading those. And I have personally grown up using, I mean, reading those stories and reading Enid Blighton. So as a kid, I have always imagined myself to be one of the famous five or the secret seven. But yeah, and it's there. So I don't know whether it makes sense or not. But we do relate a lot. And that is why even Harry Potter is extremely popular here. I was going to say cybersecurity is such an obviously such an important topic. And I would I would think that these stories could jumpstart or or kind of foment conversations between parents and their children because it's probably never too early for them to learn about security online. And this is going to become an increasing issue with AI and the use of AI and the sharing of data and ethical practices with that. So I think it's never too early to start talking with your students with your kids about these things, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I'm so glad that I think I should should continue in this vein and like do the famous five go to the world of open or something like that. Yeah, well, there's definitely lots of stories out there. So well, Gardner, I just called you in here and like, like, tell us tell us something about like what you're teaching or what's or what's what's got you peaked these days in interest because it's always fascinating just for me, Gardner and I just we talk every two weeks and we just we just we just chat like this. So I'm expanding our ketchup talk, Gardner. Well, I should say probably, first of all, I my projects are all now working on cultivating myself as a better teacher and a better scholar, which is a kind of a micro version of what I used to try to do when I was an ed tech administrator, if you want to call it that, for many years, I think about 13 or 14 years. So there's continuity there. But but now, you know, I'm very much trying to cultivate and use the metaphor of cultivation as I try to become a better teacher, a better scholar and help to lead by example for my students. I'll riff on something here that Ajita brought up because just last fall, I taught a course on a fairy tale. I'm sure we heard of Beauty and the Beast. Oh, there you go. It was a graduate level course. And it was entirely devoted to versions of Beauty and the Beast, including the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which is a let's say a somewhat more aggressive and intense version of Beauty and the Beast. But all of it was, you know, just the stuff I like. It was all very existential. It was all about poetry and metaphor and sorting things out as poor Psyche ends up having to do as one of her tasks. But but the thing that I did that I think is probably of interest to this audience is what I incorporated as the open education parts of the course. Because part of my idea of cultivation has always been, okay, this is not a set of outcomes. This is a garden. We're growing the garden. What shall we put here? What should what needs more sunlight? What needs more shade? What needs more water? What thrives in a somewhat more arid place in the garden? And how do you keep the varmints out? So I won't go for that metaphor past that, but I don't mean the students either. Maybe I mean predatory algorithmically driven. I'll go there. So what did what did I do that was open? I've always asked students to, except for maybe a few introductory courses, to blog once a week reflectively in the open as a way of generating the story of their own learning. And since the entire course was devoted to particular kinds of storytelling across many genres, we even did Jane Eyre, which is Beauty and the Beast as a novel. As I did that, I want them to understand what they're doing week by week, not just as whack-a-mole or things on a pegboard, but I want them to see how they are cultivating their own learning. They're going to get some good stuff from me. I hope they're going to get a lot of good stuff from each other. I hope, but I want them to think about this as something that is growing, that is not simply a steady state. And to be honest, a number of my students these days seem to expect that the course will reinforce what they already know, that there will be something there that will not be terribly new, maybe a little challenging, maybe a little exciting, but is not fundamentally anything that is going to try to, you know, put their heads in another space. I can't do that for them, but I can raise their awareness. And the blogging in the open, because I want them to understand the beauty of this is that their story could be read by anyone on the web. There's some threat to that as well, I understand. But there's something about it that's not just we're doing this for the class, we're doing this for the teacher. We're doing this because this telling of the story of our learning and cultivation could be an interesting narrative that people might stumble on and might take some nourishment from it themselves. And typically by the end of the course, if the students have done that assignment well, they will see themselves as a learner in a new light. I had one student in the graduate class who said, I've never been asked to tell the story of my learning before. I'm not even sure that I've ever thought about myself as a learner. And so you know me, I'm here rubbing my hands. Let's get going on that. That should be interesting. And lo and behold, it does become interesting. The other open part of it that I was very excited about students were really resistant to this at first. And by the end, they were all very proud of what they had done, which I mean, you can't hope for more than that. I said that their seminar project had to be taking something connected with Beauty and the Beast or one of its many adaptations or the tale of Cupid and Psyche and one of its many adaptations. And make a Wikipedia article better, substantially better as a result of the research they had done as a result of their own sense of the conversation. Now they weren't used to that. They're used to writing argumentative papers. They're used to writing, you know, particular theses driven papers. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that at all. I've done my share of those assignments as a student, as a teacher. I thought that this would be different. And because especially, and Gigi, you made me think of this with this idea of how universal the act of storytelling is and how there are adaptations of Beauty and the Beast across many different cultures. It's a folktale that has been adapted over and over and over. I thought this is an opportunity to do something that will take your privileged moment in a graduate seminar that could contribute to the betterment of humankind by contributing to something very primal, very foundational, these fairy tales as they continue to repeat themselves in so many different ways. I had really, after some coaching, because of course they would come in and say, I have no idea what to work on. I say, well, okay, let's just talk about Beauty and the Beast. What interests you? The rose, the father, the wolf, what is it that you, and after a while they settled on something and they got excited. And they got excited also by the culture of the Wikipedia's who would come in and often immediately begin to say, this is really interesting. Would you join this project over here? It wasn't a hundred percent, but it was so valuable and it was so different from anything else they had done. I was very, very pleased that most of the students felt that this was something that had helped them as researchers and it also been something that was giving something back to the world, which you don't get to do every day. So that's been inspired by many other people's projects in the past, starting with the Murder and Mayhem course from long, long ago. But I was happy with that. It's a hard slog, but I have to say that Wiki Education, which is an extraordinary set of resources to coach students and of course teachers who sometimes need more coaching through what are the steps of contributing to a Wikipedia article? What are your options? What sorts of things do you need to know? They've been such an extraordinary help every step of the way and it takes a lot of energy and a lot of stamina for everyone involved, but I was very pleased with the results. So that's one thing I've done recently. I'm so struck by your metaphor of cultivation. I'm just thinking to myself when you destined to be interested in gardening, cultivation grows because of your name, but you're just making so much of Leonard Bernstein's beautiful musical candied from back in the early 1970s and if folks don't know it, get on YouTube, find a version and listen to the song Make Our Garden Grow. It's a beautiful song about hope, about cultivation, about love, about all of these things and I just I love you using that as a metaphor for teaching and for students growth and oh, so inspired Gardner. Wow. Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you, Judy. That's very kind. I will say just to raise the weirdness quotient, you are in Austin after all. I will tell you that not only because my name is Gardner, do I think of things like cultivation, but my research specialty is the poetry of John Milton, including Paradise Lost, which has this little thing called the Garden of Eden in it. And I get to talk about Milton's wild conception of gardens. You know, the garden is interesting as it essays about the garden starts to flourish in the Renaissance. I'm not going to start a lecture here. Don't worry. It will be over soon. And it won't. So you'll feel slight sense of pressure. The garden is the place where human ingenuity and natural flourishing meet. It's not the wild spaces, but it's not something that's so tamed and regimented that it's just, you know, there's nothing there. It's only the human traces that you see. It's that combination. We sculpt something from the garden, but we're guided by the vegetation into thinking about what we might want to make. So it's a metaphor that I obviously return to a lot. And though I do not spell my name the way a gardener does, if I'm being honest, the origin is exactly that. It's a trade. So yeah, in that strange, I was going to be a psychology major, but somehow the vegetation called. I think I think y'all have a sense why I wanted to have Gardner come in here. Yeah, he said that this is not going to be a lecture, but I was just going to say that you keep on talking and keep on listening. I know I feel like I just got to be in a little graduate seminar again. I can tell you, Paul, you might remember in Gardner's keynotes, he's actually read. I would never, who wants to listen to somebody read unless it's Gardner. And Gardner, you might love my neighborhood because near where I live, there's a beautiful community garden, which I really love. It's like an old railway bed that was, and the rail doesn't run there anymore. And so they converted it into plots that all of us in the neighborhood can potentially get a plot. Although I was told I have to wait, a five year waiting list to get a plot. But nonetheless, it's a beautiful, like there's a nice path that walks through it. So you're sort of watching people doing their gardening on a daily basis. And it's just a kind of beautiful little example of how the community can come together and create something beautiful that benefits themselves both by producing food, but also with flowers and just making everything special. There's one near me as well, Paul. And it's the same way. It's the waiting list is years now. Well, I love that because sorry, Ajita, go ahead. Just because Paul just said that there's a beautiful garden out there. And I would have loved to open the curtains here and show you the greenery out there. But it's almost, yeah, it's 10, 15 years. I can show you that. But currently I am here at the National Council of Education Research and Training, which is the apex body for school education in India. And because Paul was also talking about the community, the way in which the community comes together and does this. Maybe in a few days I'll click some photos which I have already clicked and I'll post it in the OE group. But here what they have done is they have a garden where they cultivate vegetables and it's used by the faculty members and also the canteen or the mess as we call it. And also then they're sold to all the faculty members or anyone else who wants to take it. So and it's springtime actually in India. So lovely flowers are blooming and I will definitely post a few photos there. That's fantastic. I think we can do so. I'm going to start something to have a sharing of garden photos, but also like the whole metaphor too because I think like communities have everything to do with gardening. You don't just throw the seeds in and walk away. I mean you have to cultivate. Well and just to pick up on one thing that Paul said, you go to the community garden you see other people tending their gardens. Oh well now we'll have a conversation. What are you growing? What do you know about getting this to? I can never get this to grow. What are you doing? Your focuses are so lovely or whatever that's going to be. And so another advantage of doing things in the open is that learners have the chance to contact other learners across time and space. I know they can do that within what I know people call a learning management system. I'm not going to go into my screen there, but it's richly documented on my blog. However, there is a sense that by enacting our gardening in a communal space we are in this together. I tell my students this. We are writing this course into being together. It's true. I'm the expert. I'm the leader. I'm driving the bus lots of times, of course. I'm not saying that's not happening. At the same time, if you're not here, there's no course. If Gardener is standing in the middle of a garden throwing seeds wildly around, there's no garden. We must be in this together. So I love the idea of the gardeners watching each other, being with each other as this cultivation is happening. We have so many things we can learn from each other. We may be a garden of gardeners and that would be a great outcome. I know when I go to a city like Vancouver, I just like to wander. You just wander the neighborhoods and you come across these all the time. It feels like that's part of the culture of Vancouver. Paul, how's the AI gardening going? Well, I did a talk yesterday on this for the University of Technology in Sydney. And certainly, I'm sure, as Judith has probably experienced too, the interest in coming to grips maybe is how I might say it with AI is really high right now, which is good. But I will also say that it's also ever-changing, rapidly-changing, a bit complex, and in some ways, a bit of a downer, I would say personally, because of the behavior I would maybe call it of the AI tech space. It's sort of like the same old, same old kind of approach to things. And so I do sometimes like to just talk about something different, and I wonder if I can just talk about something different now. Yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh, I have no, oh my gosh, they think I have rules. Yes, talk about anything different, Paul. Okay, well, here's another, here's something that actually has been taking up more of my time and it has nothing to do, well, it does have to do with open, actually. So here's, I'll just try to summarize it fairly quickly, but it's been quite absorbing. This June, my high school is having their 50th reunion, the graduating class from 1974. And so there's like an organizing committee and all kinds of events are happening, but I was asked if I could put together some music from those years. So in the usual kind of open approach to this, what I asked the committee to do is send an invitation to all of those that are invited to attend this high school reunion and ask them to send me their 10 most memorable songs from our high school years. And so you never really know what you're going to get, but it's like an open call, right? Try to make it a crowdsourced participatory process, that was my thinking. I thought, oh, maybe no one will send in anything, but I got 15 hours of music were submitted, like almost 300 songs. And then it was like, so then it was quite a process actually, like, oh my God. And I became quite interested in what is it people are submitting? And it was just like they were given a form, submit your songs. And some people submitted their songs and the memory, the high school memory associated with that song, like, oh, I remember singing this song in the car on the way to the cottage with a bunch of other boys. And so I started to capture the memories. And then I created, I actually then analyzed all the songs to figure out whether how many songs were submitted by more than one person. And initially it was like hardly any. And I was like, wow, you know, those years, 1969 to 1974, wow, we had such an amazing, what a talented set of musicians we had and what amazing music we had in those years. But then eventually over the, you know, I gave like a about a six month period of time for people to submit songs. And in the end, it became clear that there were a number of songs that really essentially became the top 50 people. All the songs that we have, we have a top 50. And then, you know, I created Spotify playlists of all of them. And those were distributed to all the invitees to listen to in advance of the reunion and anticipation of being there in person. But even if you can't come, you can listen to them and kind of maybe have some memories happen for yourself. And then when all of this kind of got shared, then it became possible or people began to say, well, hey, maybe you can be the DJ for, for, for, you know, the barbecue and pub night and so on. So I'm like, um, I hadn't really planned on that, but okay, okay, I can do that. And then I have a friend here in Vancouver who's celebrating their 70th birthday this weekend. And they rented a like a yacht in the harbor to do a little cruise. And but the yacht won't play music. So she said, well, will you be my, will you do the music for my birthday? And so then again, with her, I kind of co-created like two playlists, one that we call soft dining for when people arrive and are just having lunch. And then another one called lively dancing, which is like after lunch, let's get things ramped up. And, but the challenge became like, well, how do I actually play the music? Right? So if we're in an outdoor barbecue, let's say, or on this yacht. And so I've been really doing a fairly deep dive on, on kind of what constitutes being a DJ, and how can I play music without access to wifi? And, and also I've been exploring the idea, which I've never seen done before, but probably has been of being not a DJ that sort of stands on a stage or is that like a table, but actually walks around amongst the people that are there. And so I've, I figured out ways to play everything from my phone. And I now have this ability to, to play the Bluetooth wireless speakers. So I can play the, the music fine. And then I have this thing that I can plug into my phone that actually I then can plug a microphone into so I can actually walk around and say, Hey, you know, what do you remember from, do you have a song, do you have a request? Oh, and it's sort of like, it's been very fun. And people have been really engaged in this idea, the amount of participation or, you know, community gardening around this concept has been unexpected and really quite, everyone's having a lot of fun with it. Wow. Nothing to do with AI. No, I'm glad. I'm glad because there's actually an interesting thread here. But like, I know both Gardner and Judith and maybe Ajita, because I don't know her well, have an intense interest and knowledge of music and are ready to chime in. But, but I think going from, you know, Ajita's talk about the use of fabric as a metaphor, gardening as a metaphor, music as a metaphor, these are all meaningful things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I couldn't help but look up cop songs of 1974. Wow. Is Abba's song, Waterloo, Waterloo. Let's just say one, like one of the funny things that happened, Judith was like, okay, so people are sending in songs and my partner starts doing what you just did. Like they, they send in a song and she, and she goes, well, I think that's not from the 69 to 74. That song's much later. And then, then it's like, well, so do you accept that song? And she says, oh, we can't accept that song. You know, that's like, that happened in 1985. We can't, but I'm like, no, no, if people send in a song for some reason, it conjures up a high school memory and it didn't have to happen during that time. You know, it may have happened later, but it still makes them think of high school. We all accept everything. It's like, there's no rules around disqualification of songs. But that idea of playing the music dynamically as or with the audience does a nice like feedback loop. Yeah. And being able to talk to people, like, well, it's like, it's like being in the community garden and speaking to the gardeners like gardener was suggesting. I remember I went to a talk by Ira Glass, who does this American life podcast. And on stage, he had like an iPad and he would, he was like pulling from a jukebox when he wanted to play something. So it wasn't pre-programmed. And it just reminds me of what you're talking about. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah. I should say that at the beginning of each of my online classes, and all of them are synchronous in that we meet together at a time, though the assignments, of course, are asynchronous, as long as they're by the deadline. But at the beginning, I always have a song on the entrance title slide as the students are coming on. And the song, I try very hard to make it thematically appropriate. So try to set the mood, but also get their heads into, I don't know, sympathy for the devil the day we're doing, you know, to a paradise possible or whatever. And the other thing I just wanted to say really quickly, in addition to at one point being DJ on the radio myself, which was immensely satisfying, but I became a professor instead. Failure if it's nerve. I always tell my students about the music of the spheres, because there's all this rich tradition of ideas about music that link what's going on with this song in your memory right here to something that's in the cosmos somehow, if only the mathematical proportions of the planets in their orbits. And I just bear down on that so hard. And the students will, you know, their eyes just get bigger and bigger. And I finally said, look, if you were listening carefully, the proportions of the walls in the room you're in would sing to you. That's what I'm talking about. And by that time I look around and I think, where did everybody go? But still, what a lovely thing to walk through the crowd, activating these things that everyone will be vibing to. That's just, I love to imagine that. So wonderful. Yeah, well, music crosses all the cultures, I guess. And because Alan asked that whether music is very, very much embedded into the Indian souls, our music is quite different, I would say. But yeah, and I also was imagining Paul as a DJ and actually moving around. And it was quite a good imagination. But yeah, I can also relate to that lady who said that, oh, this was much later something. Actually, we are here in New Delhi. So yesterday I had gone out with my friends and to a restaurant and there was light music. And that music was, of course, we have something called as a Bollywood genre, that is, that's a movie music. So there was live music and I could remember almost all the songs that were being played were batten. So I was just joking with my friends, I was telling them that I might forget an important thing, which I had done two days ago, but just see this, these songs are so old, but I remember them still. And that's something with the memory and music, memory, and maybe the culture, memory and the flowers that you see or the experience that you have shared. I can very well relate. And Paul, you have given a lovely idea, actually. And it's making the oral physical, A-U-R-A-L, you're embodying, going to encourage embodying the music in a way that's similar to dance, I think, Paul. And I'm sure people will be dancing. I mean, if you're playing a water louver, we hold out the band high, people are going to dance. But you're going to make that connection for them, I think, and it's a really neat idea. I have to ask Paul, do you know about Beat Saber? Do you know about these various fitness apps that are all key to music? It's a VR experience and you're taking these virtual katans and striking at targets to the music. And what happens when the music comes on, if it's something that's meaningful to you, you find that you have superpowers. You're able to go faster and go stronger than you were ever able to do. The other day, I did this to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which came up in an app that I used. And I was like, what? But it was extraordinary. It's that embodiment, I think, to your point, Judith. That's just, that's so amazing. Beat Saber, like lightsaber. Sorry, wrong, wrong one. Okay. But I know Gardner and I, we talk about this a lot. He tells me his Beat Saber. He's like, you got to get this. Okay. Paul, thank you so much for not talking about AI. This is quite better. And look forward to hearing. When is the reunion? The reunion is in June. The boat cruises on Saturday. I'm not quite ready for it yet, but I hope to be. That's tomorrow. Anyways, yeah. It's all in good fun. And I think that's part of the joy of learning, right? Is if we can have fun with it and make it experiential in this way. I really feel like I'm kind of exploring something new that I never imagined. And it's always due to sharing things with this large community of friends and then going with where they want that to go. Or maybe say one last thing, and I know we're down to the last couple of minutes now. But another thing that happened with this was in high school, our band did a tour of Bermuda, our high school band, believe it or not. And while we were touring around Bermuda, we recorded all of the concerts that we did. And then on our return, those were made into an album, an actual album. Remember those? And one of the people that I've been communicating with from those high school years, he actually still has the album. So he, he, he hooked up with a friend and they've now taken the album and converted it all to mp3, mp3.wav files. And he sent it, he doesn't know anything technically. So he's sending it to me and I hope to put it up online and make it available for everyone to listen to. So I just think it's so great because obviously that album is not like a best seller or anything, but it still will conjure up lots of memories. Paul, I remember that you recently got interested in mixology, didn't you? Cocktail making talents, that's your reunion. That's right. I did a course on, I became, I got certified as a bartender because I was interested in remix. This is another side topic, a separate session perhaps, but what could we learn from bartending that would be relevant for open education? That was my interest. All right, we'll come back for that one. Thank you so much friends. I just, this is exactly what I hope happens, the unexpected. So very much appreciate you coming in here for the show. Oh, it's a delight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to fade out and thanks to our online.