 So I'm going to give this short talk, a non-technical talk, about my experience teaching university students about self-publishing and trying to reflect that in terms of contributing to WordPress. And trying to reflect that into the meaning of the democratized publishing. So, my introduction was already said, so I'm going to skip most of this, but just a note is that I had a career to be a teacher. I had no intention to be a teacher, always had an interest in education as I work at the university. So I'm actually a staff. And how did I go to teach? Well, this is a photo from World Campus Tokyo 2017. I was involved as an organizer and I'm here doing, I'm seeing at English speaking session tracks. Yes, we have that kind of track. And a guy at the bottom left of the corner with straw hat happened to be someone that I know, Shinya Watanabe, who is art professor at Tempo University Japan Campus. We know each other for maybe six, seven years, but he knew nothing that I'm so involved with WordPress and my expertise level of WordPress. At the end of all of this, he asked me, would you be interested in teaching? There's an art class which involves WordPress. I thought, really? There isn't such a class? I said, yeah, and well, after a few discussions and some paperwork and things, I'm going to offer to co-teach with him for the semester of summer 2018. A class called Internet Imaging and a course number starts with art, so you can say that's an art course. The first paragraph is a quote, straight quote from syllabus, and it's written in a very academic way, so I'm not going to read it out. But basically what it means is students will learn what and how online self-publication is done. The main scope of this is because the art student is to promote their artwork, so IE portfolio. But we wanted them to think beyond that, beyond just being a portfolio. And we don't expect them to be a developer. We're not going to teach to that level, but we wanted them to learn and just have a grasp on the technical aspects of things, particularly related to images like even simple stuff like you put up, high quality images, looks beautiful, but it's going to take years to load the page and that kind of stuff. And I'm going to share four of my experiences first. One, and this is more of my, come from my inexperiences with teaching students, the younger generation particularly, because I had a conception that they'll grow up in the age of all this internet and web devices and everything and they'll be comfortable with the web, yes they will. They'll probably do fine with running maybe HTML, CSS, Mantix to the very basic fundamental level. And they were okay, but CSS layout they found it very difficult, but then most of people do, right, it's pretty confusing. They're reasonably aware of security risks, I mean that by, I say to them, 20 times don't use the same password for everything and they know what that means, they're pretty fine to understand what that means. Or more like they use it for many passwords and they kind of got lost which password they were. But they found the programming to be difficult and this is a level like, one task for them was to make a child thing. So the base, this is like those one line or the three lines of PHP code you have to write in the child theme, to draw the parent theme's style sheet, some people are very confused even with just that. So it reminded me that while programming is another couple of steps above of writing just basic HTML, CSS. Pretty obvious to maybe those who teaches. Second point, customers is great. There was one class that I went through some option setting and I was going to go through some customizer setting and stuff, but a lot of time and I asked them to have a look at the house so I can go by the details in the next class. Come next class, well I didn't need to go any details because they found it was very easy to use, intuitive, they found everything and like time knows you like a widget which in my experience you have to explain to people, for example it was in meetups, what the widget mean, but one of the students said it's pretty much self-explanatory. It's fine. So like, if you're like a veteran developer community person you go to the meetups and wallcams and you talk to everyone and so we call the community. You ask about customizers and how they use it and they say, oh the customizer, no, no they don't want to use customizer. We only use it for the first time when we install the site so we don't really spend time on it, but then I think it kind of reminds me that it's often overlooked how helpful this feature is. Now we didn't really have time to go through Gutenberg in our semester, but I just have to make a quick quote from David Besit who I gave, I believe gave a talk called Gutenberg and use WorldCamp, recent WorldCamp, I'm not quite sure. Basically it's a similar conclusion here saying that these young ones tend to favor Gutenberg in a positive light and I just saw that very similar to my finding with customizer and newer generations and in the light of that 5.0 is now interesting to see what this new generation really finds this user interface. The third point, university is internationally diverse and this depends on which university it is that you look at it I think, but I have some students in my class, amongst them they can communicate in five or more languages which is pretty impressive I think. And there just happened to be a translation contribution day at local WordPress Meetup, that's Meetup Tokyo and we advised them to have, we didn't make them but we advised them to come and join, see how things are working and what we do and stuff. Some of them did, six of them did actually and it's very interesting because she's teaching her about the codecs and how to translate with the polyglot interface and then you get a question like can I translate from Japanese to Taiwanese and then Taiwanese to Japanese, but at the moment you can only translate from English to Japanese or the English to Taiwanese. That kind of perspective never really occurred to me even I've been around for 10 years. If that can be possible then maybe more people could join to translate perhaps maybe. Also we talked to Japanese professor, she said they're always looking for opportunities for students, students to put their language skills that they learned into practice. And now a translation like this could really be perhaps something that they could work on, sorry. So my thought from here is that if you want to do this kind of translation contribution day at local Meetup, have a look at your local universities, it might be quite internationally diverse. Last point is inspire them, inspiration. So we had four guest lectures across and in a WordPress community has many life changing personal stories. Yeah your e-commerce site went up by 10% or your company site went up by access went up by 120% or something, yeah that's great too. But you have personal stories like how self-publishing and your activity in the community have changed their lives, have changed their careers. And also for example, Fumiki who is on this photo here, he's actually a core contributor and he's a developer. But he always wanted to be a novelist. So outside work uses things like WordPress to publish his own literature work. And he always think about how he can monetize all this and trying to think about how one critic can make it Amazon Kindle and so on and whatever. That kind of story, students were really, really interested in that kind of story. How to monetize things, to earn things, to get extra earning perhaps, and how that can help their careers. Because these students were going to graduate in maybe a year or two years time and they start thinking about what to do next with their careers. And so technical aspect is fine too, but how that can tie up with your near future career and life, I think they were very, very interested in this. And there are a lot of questions that were asked. And they asked in Japanese which I was very, very surprised that they could all communicate in Japanese very well. And I had no Japanese students in the class too. So finally I would like to somehow reflect that in terms of contribution. In a way, because I've been thinking about what does the meaning of the democratized publishing mean for about this around the year. Just my personal thinking really. We were going to use WordPress right from the beginning, but we did ask ourselves how is it really the suitable choice of publishing platform to teach online self-publishing. Because now there are so many different tools, apps, open source proprietary, different technologies. So many choices there for that student might find easy to use or better to use. And then there's like mobile phone devices that change everything or where you interact with your life, your life with the internet. Take away the barriers and time and places. So I mean I only did this for semester so I can't really say yes that was the right choice. But then both Shinya, the core teacher and I agree that it's, I think it was a quite suitable choice. I'm not only saying that because I'm speaking of WorldCam, but really I didn't think WordPress is like a crossroads of different web technologies and cultures. So you can start with WordPress, but you can go into different areas, you can run about front-end development, back-end development, software development. Not only technical stuff, but like marketing, writing, editing and also internet culture as well because of how, because of the maturity of this WordPress community. And you can also run about how to do online collaboration internationally to make something on the web. So I think it was quite a good choice to use WordPress. And I would like to somehow reflect that in terms of democratized publishing is something that one interpretation that came up with this. If use of WordPress has a role in education for students to be introduced, studied and to get inspired about self-publishing, then isn't this democratized publishing? And that's regardless of whether students continue to keep using WordPress or not. A couple years later they might find that different tools are better suits for life or they might find that self-publishing isn't really the cup of their tea. But it's okay, it's something web and interaction with web and self-publishing is something that a younger one needs to be exposed in their life, a future life. So if WordPress has some kind of role in introducing them about that, I did feel that's pretty good itself. That's my conclusion. Thank you very much. So we do have time for one question and one question only. I see in the back someone jump up, so you're the lucky question asker today. Well, thank you. Do you have any plans to recreate the course in an online environment? An online environment? Online course? No, not at the moment. I'm actually scheduled to co-teach this again next summer semester. This is why I'm not doing this semester, next semester is like administration of the university stuff is detailed. No, not online stuff. I'm not quite sure whether the main campus, the Tempo University offers any of it, but I'm not, no, no problem. Alright, thank you very much. One more big applause for Toru. Thank you. Also, can I just say one thing? Yes, you can. So if anyone's interested to come to Japan World Camp next year, or I don't know if anyone's planning at the moment to be honest, but get connected. I hope you can come to Japan one day. Ray just taught us how to do that, so go talk to him.