 Good morning, God, it's been a long morning already. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to OER 22, and our session this morning is the, yeah, just checking I've got the right time, is the 10.40 in the UK time. No, it's not, this is 10.40 session, you hero and near future learning design adventure. And I'm very pleased to welcome all of our speakers this morning, Amon, Steve, Projactor, Tom, Claire, and Fiona. So thank you all so much for coming this morning. We're really looking forward to your presentation. So I will hand over to you guys. Hi, everybody, you're very welcome. OER 22 delegates to this presentation, a hi from the team here, part of the team. One is down in action, Fiona, and go away, she's listening in in spirit. And you're very welcome, you are particularly welcome because it's your adventure. You were the hero of our story today. We're gonna give you a brief flavor of an open game we have been developing. It's, there's finite games in life, there's zero-sum games where there's winners and losers. This is not one of those, this is an infinite game. It's unbounded, it has no end. We don't even know what we're doing or where it's gonna end. We're developing this game on lunchtime breaks in airport lounges, in phone calls at night. It's a very secretive and strange activity, but it's about learning design and the choices you make in your life and in your work and how you can use these in open or closed ways. But you are the hero of this adventure. And even though we don't know how it's gonna end or where it's going, we do know how it starts because it starts, waiting for Steve to share the screen for us there. That's okay, Steve, thank you. It starts with an ending because the interview ends. And at this point, you say, so let's see, let us see. Oh, Steve's on mute. Okay, and it's ending. And thank you indeed for all of that and for taking the time to come and interview with us today. We'll be in touch with you very shortly with the outcome. And oh, unless you have any questions for us, of course, because in learning design, as in life, you always have a choice. Do you say, no, none, that was all great. Thanks again, looking forward to hearing from you. Can you tell me about the toilet break policy again? C, what's the max salary after five years? Or D, what are my opportunities for advancement? So please tell us, is it A, B, or C? And I think I'm hearing a B here. So let's hit branch B and see where we end up. You're asking your interviewer and they tell you. So let's see what they say. That'll all be explained in the contract. The main thing is that everything we do is evidence informed. You say, ah, okay, thanks. I look forward to hearing from you. And then we go. So we're now in act two and two weeks later, the time is 10 30, the date is February 5th, 2024. You have just been hired as a learning designer and are working in the strangely named learning design deck, a department in the University of the near future. Now dedicated to post-digital learning. Now take a breath and A, meet one of your new colleagues in the animal A division or B, meet colleagues in the beginner's mind division. So please let us know if you would like A or B and maybe I'll just ask some of my co-designers here, which you would like to see A, can I get an A or a B please? A you maybe? A. Okay, I'm hearing A. So let's meet one of your new colleagues in the animal A division. Oh hi, how are you? How are you getting on so far? Good, good, good. I'm actually really sorry, I've actually forgotten your name. Lovely, of course. Well, welcome aboard the deck. As I say, you've chosen to work in the right division. Here in the animal A division, we have some really cool stuff going on. We are devoted to the new science of interspecies learning. I mean, we're all animals, right? Human mammals are not so special. So now, do you want to hear more about the animal A division or continue on? You, the pundering music, and we continue on. Hey, please, all right. So, go far so good. You meet with a new manager. She tells you about a new project in the early stages of planning. One that would support the Irish history curriculum and she wants you to handle it. The two of you have a great discussion for your ideas, Floyd-like sparks. You can see a lot of different versions of this project with different audiences and impacts. You can either keep the scope small and walk on supporting the curriculum or if you make a convincing case, you could expand the team and scope up the project to something more public-facing with a lot of video and multimedia content, but also with a lot of moving pieces, deadlines and pressure, as we all know. Which way do you want to take the project? A, keep it lean. You can always build on the success of a small force iteration or B, go big. You want to reach a wide audience and make a big impact and you're up for the challenge of managing all of those moving pieces. A very relatable conundrum, I'm sure. I think I'm gonna go for A, I would like to keep it lean. Oh no, Aimeen, we all know you're a B kind of person, but... We've got a A in the chat so far. So... Will we? Great outcome. Keeping the scope smaller and more manageable allowed you to go deep on making an unedited document archive that proved to be of great value in supporting student research in Irish history department. Several of the faculty have taken note and asked if you could meet to discuss helping them create resources for other projects. Go on, you encounter one of your colleagues and they tell you about a new project they're starting. Oh hi, did you hear about the new course in development? We're working on an online course. There's a lot of secrecy about who the students are, who will take this course. We must sign an NDA and management will only speak in analogies. They tell you the target audience can have a distant planet from which alien life forms are often to take a level seven special purpose of life to learn more about the slow death of a planet from climate change. However, the course notes are contained in old tablets and need to be transcoded digitally. Most of the tablets are made from clay. Head of department wants to scan the tablet, but the lead learning designer feels that the format isn't conducive to the reuse of this. We advocate for adopting the content into smaller bite-sized chunks. This would damage the impurity of the world by the use of head of department. We hope to get up there and reach the end. That sounds like a yes. There are no other choices here. So, so far so good, but now we're in act three. Act three, endings for beginnings. It's been a wild ride and we can't determine what will happen to us, but we can decide how we will react. What overall approach do you choose? A, Ed Tech will save us. B, you quit. C, you embrace failure. Or D, keep trucking. That's how many of us try and do. So, which do you choose? A, B, or C? Let us know which one of these... I think we need more suspenseful music. I feel a lot of suspense with this one actually. I was trying to build up both hands here. I'm really hoping Ed Tech will save us. I'm really, that's kind of one of my hopes, but I think we might be in the wrong conference because a lot of skeptics around, you know, a lot of skeptics over the last couple of days. I'll believe it. Quitters. C, and... Oh, two C so far. At least quit yet. Shall we? Shall we embrace failure? Wouldn't be the first time. So, let's see. What is failure? Let's see. It's inseparable from growth. You transcend beyond the logic, structures, and subjectivities of the university and are elevated to a higher plane of consciousness. You retreat from the material world and move to inhabit the realm of ideas. What is a good life? And does any of this matter outside of the university walls? Hmm, good points for pondering. And we've reached the end of one of many branches. Thank you very much for that, Steve, Tom, Lily, Claire, and in absentia Fiona. And I'd like to maybe just open it up to the floor as well. And we'd like to take a bit of time now to tell you a bit about our process, how we created this game, what it was, but also to get your feedback. We'd like to hear from you first and just ask you for any comments and things you have. If there's any of these, we developed quite a large scenario of all these different types of things that could happen in a learning design workplace. It was challenging and tricky to develop this in a distributed way and to get all the narratives to fit together and so on, but it was a lot of fun and it was interesting. So thank you so much for your time today and helping us try it out. And we'd like to hear from you. And I suppose one of the motivations or the aims behind this was trying to think about careers in a fun way and what it looks like in a workplace and some of the issues that can come up for people working in third spaces, kind of ill-defined area of learning design, particularly as because learning designers have really been a lot of the language in the popular discourse and the literature has talked about learning designers as first responders and many of these things. It's also a case it can be quite a gender profession so there's a lot of women in it and it's often characterized as a caring profession, it's a service profession and there's been a lot of burnout in the area of learning design. There's a lot of issues around precarity of contracts. There's a lot of issues around career progression and development. And so these are some of the ideas we were using to use this game to explore. And we just like to, I just using that as an opener to start the conversation and I see a question from Janice from YouTube. Thank you Janice. What platform did you use to create this? So I'm gonna maybe ask Steve to answer this one. Great. I actually, I thought, I think Kerry you'll see that I requested a screen share there again. I'm just gonna show those. I saw that there, we saw that there was another session this morning I believe on twine as an open source platform for offering multi-threaded nonlinear narratives and basically right here at a very high level without zooming in too much. You can see kind of all of, you should be able to kind of get an idea of all of the different pathways and ways that these kind of scenarios, these mock scenarios, some of them very, very speculative but some taken much more materially from our own lived experience in a number of different contexts in learning design, instructional design. You know, we can, we tried to kind of take a few different approaches to kind of depicting realistic conundrums and choices that we've all had to make and might have to make in the profession. And then just seeing how many different ways we could weave that into different scenarios. Some more science fiction and some a little more kind of mundane and all too relatable. And we basically created a three act structure there. And yeah, it was a lot of fun but as Amon was saying, twine is a wonderful environment for kind of creating and illustrating these different branches but it was very, very challenging doing an asynchronous collaborative authoring process since it's such a centralized type of platform where really works best when one person is kind of doing all the moves as opposed to something more collaborative like a Google Docs for instance. So that was a really interesting and fun design challenge for all of us. And especially outside of COVID, I think this was the kind of activity that would have been great if we did like an all day workshop. We're all kind of doing a design thinking, putting post-it notes on a board, et cetera. But we did a lot of Zoom sessions and discussions and kind of collaborating through a script. Really fun, really interesting learning experience for all of us, I'd say. I see as well some great, just reading the comments. One of these things is like, it's kind of like flying a plane sometimes in these presentations. You haven't a clue what's going on. Your heart is going like a jackhammer. You've all these comments, you have co-presenters like it was chaos. So we couldn't actually, one of the questions from Yvonne here was, how did you, I think it was, were my responses timely enough, you know? And this is a big problem. We thought exactly what you thought about that about having a poll and getting people to respond to the poll. But we thought that could be kind of confusing as well and maybe take too much time. And we were trying to come up with a low friction, kind of low tech sort of way of doing that. So it was just kind of shouting out and putting into the chat. And sometimes I couldn't even see the comments. So then I was asking like, my colleagues in the presentation just to give me an option, you know? So we're kind of going back now and just reading the comments and it's great to see you're engaged. So even perhaps you may not have been, I think it's the key thing is just getting people to feel part of the story is very useful in the field. They have some kind of thing in it. And that's, I see a comment from Sarah as well about a link to play the game. Yeah, that's great. We have Fiona's is we're going to try and host it on because actually there's some loads of, there's actually some nice content in some other story paths that we never got to, you know? We had some lovely little story lines in there. And that's one of these things. So we did, and as Steve was saying, it's complex to work on these things in a distributed way. And there are recommends for things like you can use GitHub, for example, to work on these things collaboratively. But Twine is basically, for anyone not familiar, it's very, very easy to use. You don't need any kind of programming or technical ability. And it works in the client. So it just opens in the HTML window and that's all you need. So it's, but it's also very powerful and you can do programming and if you have a program where you can help with that or if you have some a little bit head for that, but also if you're somebody who knows a bit about design or making web pages, you can do that. You can include, we didn't get in the branches, but there's videos and stuff we had as well. Please multiply again. No. So any other questions? And I'm gonna... There's a good question, which is the critical path. I'll tell you, if you know that answer, I'll tell you, you're a better person than us when we did, which is it, yeah. I would say the process-wise. Well, the hook that Aiman really kind of built this around was that in learning design as in life, you always have a choice. And I think we've all seen different directions and different ways our careers could go based on the types of preferences, values, organizational kind of preferences that we've all had in different experiences and different contexts. And so I think we wanted to allow for a number of those different kind of styles. And this was kind of a proof of concept version one that I think we really could flesh out. And as an open resource, it could be, I don't know, helpful as a reflection on practice or maybe even as a taste of things to come for people early career. So this was kind of a way to get that up and running. And I don't know, I'd be interested in seeing what kind of future purposes or value people might find in such an open, multi-threaded, non-linear story. That's a reflection on learning design practice. I think it's a great question on what's the critical path? And you could read that question number of ways. What's the important path? What's critical? Or in the kind of sense in the scholar ledger about critical, taking a critical stance on something and considering it and kind of having a considered or reflective view on it, I should be like, and there's lots of threads and there's obviously no, there's many paths but there's only one way. I'm reading the Tao. I'm getting interested in reading Taoism at the moment. So, but I guess for me, there's lots of things. You look at learning design and this kind of activity or whatever we're doing in workplaces. And a lot of the path for me feels about what is the value and the quality of your work at a kind of micro level. You can like, there were some scenarios where you can take too much work on and things like that. But a lot of it as well can be kind of, which is a subtext of some of the things is how we treat other people or how we, because you can have, you can also have great values and be very well intentioned. And then just, you know, turn up to work stressed and shouting at people to do good stuff. So that's a challenge for me anyway, certainly. So I don't know if that answers that ending on or anything. So there's another particular one about twine, Steve, as to how you get that exactly. It's a download, isn't it? Yes, an open source tool. You should be able to see, let me see. I can share fire screen and twine narrative. And twine narrative. So twinary.org is the download for twine, and then it works in the browser as well. It's a very kind of low, low impact app. So only a few megs. And it does a lot for its kind of compact size. Not sure the degree to which we are announcing our version one. And it doesn't look like there's a good way for us to share in the chat, but this is the URL of our kind of version one proof of concept here, learningtale.com slash uhero.html. We could put it in Discord. Yes, we could. I was hoping that we'd have an interactive chat with those in the audience. Great, there you go. ALT just put that in there. So you can give a spin to a few of the different directions that we have here in version one. And it's such a good way of making yourself pull in different directions when there's no right answer. Like those are always the best decisions because you don't want to choose either of them. But as in life, you have to end up with one of them even though you're not 100% behind it. So really good for that kind of reflective prompt. Yeah, and I think with case studies and with different kinds of storytelling, helping the learner or the audience get to those kinds of relatable decision points is always a challenge. So I think we've tried to get a few good ones in there. A couple of thinkers, a couple of reflective questions that really make you relate to experiences where you have to make a decision about what kind of environment you want to work in, what kind of style you have for working. So yes, it'd be interesting to see everyone if you have a go at it and then post later on Twitter or Discord the decisions you made where you ended up. Yeah, please do. A broken ed tech or a very rich and successful one. I'm just thinking actually, have we got a hashtag for people to post or follow? Do we have a, do you hear them maybe? Do you hear them? Do you hear them? So hashtag you hero, please. That'd be so lovely if anybody wants to have a look at them. See how you get on. Just put a version of it in the chat to carry maybe, yeah. Okay, he's already done that, thanks. Awesome, excellent. Yeah, I think that'd be very, very interesting to do. Yeah, it could form the basis of a very, very interesting presentation at OBR23 about some sort of crowdsourced project. Well, you know, since we have the chat coming in from the audience, but I do have a question for the other participants here. What do we see as an ideal future iteration for this as an open education resource? Well, like a starting point as in designing your own teaching materials and also that reflective prompt. So I think it's got two starters for me professionally. Yeah, I think as a grad student or early career instructional designers slash learning designers and related fields, it's one thing when we learn a lot of theory in a vacuum, so to speak, in the academy. And there's really very little professional preparation in grad school around instructional design for the actual kind of pragmatics of collaboration and kind of navigating organizational challenges. So I think this is kind of like a, not exactly a case study, but as a kind of inhabited narrative. Might help prepare people for some of the challenges that they don't expect after, you know, doing their dissertation, for instance. I think as well, it's got a lot of potential for starting conversations with other people regarding the technical surveillance. So we didn't get into that thread in our iteration, but it's a really clear way of showing some of those, perhaps arbitrary things we decide at policy level and seeing it in action. No animals are harmed in the making of this game, by the way, but there's potential human harm. Now, I agree with you, Claire. I think one of the real benefits of something like this is by presenting it in such a way, it encourages to engage in conversations. Sometimes, so to say, but twine being a non-linear, sometimes our head is full of stuff. This is just a way of just getting it out there and just sort of having someone out and part in conversations. Because sometimes, you know, true word is said in jest, and you can have a bit of fun in the game, but it can raise us to, even in putting the game together, it encourages you to say stuff that you wouldn't do if you're writing a document or something formal. I thought that was good. Amen, there was one thing you said very recently that really struck me as being a salient. I think you were mentioning something about how you enter a new position with all sorts of values and priorities, and then you find yourself in a system and suddenly everything has changed and your ability to kind of navigate and do things might be hindered. I didn't want to reuse your words, but does that ring a bell for you? Yeah, there's often, John John had a great title of a paper, one turn about ed tech and kind of choices and things, and it was any color you liked, as long as it's blackboard. And it was an allusion to Henry Ford's kind of thing about the Model T and the production model of technology, you know, and you just have a big technology, you have to kind of use it. And I think, you know, you often don't have choices or you're in a bind, and I think that's really stressful when you feel you don't have a good choice in life, you know, you're really just like, all my choices are shit, what am I gonna do now? And ed tech will save us is the promise that there's some amazing choice out there that's gonna fix everything, and you know, we just get some technology in and we'll Netflix this problem, and you know, someone in Silicon Valley is gonna buy us and make it all better. You know, we'll have an edit button and we can go back and undo all the things we said. Not gonna happen, doesn't exist. So I think it's a great way for having questions, asking questions. I think you can use kind of creative approaches and playful kind of science fiction type approaches. Also, it's kind of protective for participants because you can talk about scenarios without, you know, you can talk about something in a workplace that you may not be able to talk about otherwise, that you could get punished for, or you could talk about a product that you could get sued for. I think pro for example, if someone is getting sued for a property product, so I better stop talking soon because I think we might be, we might be able to get sued. So thanks everyone for coming along. Yep. Thank you. Thank you very much. Just want to say a very big thank you to Claire, Projector, Amon, Steve and Tom for a fantastic presentation this morning. Really good fun, really interesting to see what you've created there in Twine. And I've not heard of Twine, so there's another thing to add to the arsenal of equipment to have a play with this afternoon. So thank you all very much. I think now we are gonna have a short break in the program. So do go and stretch your legs and grab yourself a tea or a coffee and then come back again about 1120 for the next set of sessions. So thank you all so much. Hope you enjoy the rest of OER 22. Bye-bye.