 Okay, hi everyone. I'm Steven Downs. I work with the National Research Council of Canada. And my presentation for you all today is open learning in the metaverse. And as I was commenting with a moderator beforehand, this is not one of the top 50 presentations at the conference. At the bottom, I don't know 100. I should have used Fediverse, maybe that would have made all the difference, or multiverse, whatever. I'm just kidding. I got a lot of stuff to talk about today. There will be room for questions. Moderator will be monitoring the chat. So if you have any urgent questions, she will jump in. Otherwise, we'll be holding them to the end, and I do intend to leave time for questions at the end, although I say that a lot and deliver a lot less frequently. But let's keep, let's get going. Here's the context. We've got a whole pile of new digital technologies, new terms, new concepts, the metaverse, Fediverse, blockchain, Web3, Activity Pub, and more. You know, that's the new world that we're in. What I want to do in this talk is show you the relation between them all. Now, I don't expect, you know, if I just give a presentation, which is a talk like this, I don't expect you to go away knowing all of these things. But these slides will be available. The link is or will be posted in the chat. They're on my website now. And so you can refer back to them. There's a few main points to keep in mind. I'll flag those as we go along. But what I'm really trying to do is to give you the core pattern to look at to recognize what people are talking about when they're talking about these new technologies. That's it. This is a non-technical presentation. I'm not going to be talking about tech, but you know, I'm not going to start getting into the details of the tech because this isn't the conference for that. I understand most people here are educators and even more importantly, few people want the deep tech stuff. Although I do like to talk about the deep tech stuff, but not today. I'm going to consider all of these technologies, not just from what they are, but also thinking about the risks, the impacts, the ethical considerations to some degree. And again, my thinking here is I want you to be, as I'm going through, again, don't try to remember. Try to think of ideas. Try to think of how does this relate to what I know about open education? That's how to do it. Now, if I was in a different way of doing these things, I'd have another screen just as big. You can jot down your thoughts as I went along. But most of us don't have two screens and extra places where we can type stuff. So the technology is not quite ready for that sort of interaction yet. So let's begin. I'm going to look at, first of all, the two major concepts in the title of this presentation. First of all, what is open learning? Obviously, this is a conference about the subject. I assume most of you know what it is or has what areas it covers. But it's based on principles of learner centeredness, lifelong learning, removal of barriers to access learning, recognition perhaps of credit for prior learning experience, open pedagogies and learning support, etc. This is just one way of characterizing open learning. There are a variety of ways. They all kind of revolve around these themes. Open learning has different areas. Yeah, I remember back in the early to mid 2000s, we were thinking of open curricula, open content, open assessment. Well, here's a presentation that looks at 10 different dimensions, content, pedagogy, access, pedagogy, access, research, etc. Again, everybody has their own list and that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. There is no one received official list of what constitutes open learning in my mind. The other side of the presentation is what is the Fediverse. That's a tougher one. It's tough. I know to wrap your mind around the concept. This is an introductory picture only. It looks a bit messy. Let's summarize what the Fediverse is in a phrase. I would say it's a network of networks. And you might have heard people say, well, that's what the Internet is. And yes, that is what the Internet is. The Internet is a Fediverse in many important respects and you should see that pattern throughout. Well, it is a Fediverse in many important respects. So although the Fediverse is a new thing, it's also a very old thing. Now, how does this come into contact with open learning or open education? Well, with respect to what's called the re-decentralization of the web, open learning advocates and Fediverse advocates have a lot in common. And I'll actually read this out from the re-decentralized website. We've had enough of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism. We want a world that works for everyone, just like the original intention of the web and net. We want a world of open platforms and protocols with real choices of applications and services for people. We care about privacy, transparency and autonomy. Our organizations and tools should be fun, should fundamentally be, should be fundamentally, it's probably a better way of saying it, accountable and resilient. You know, you think about the other sessions in this conference, all of that should kind of ring true, right? But now, again, it's hard to get your head around. So let's do a thought experiment. Think of Twitter. Now, if I was in a room, I'd say how many of you know about Twitter or how many of you use Twitter and everybody would raise their hands, right? How many of you would be, you know, establishing something in common? Now, Twitter is a single website. It's a silo, right? All the messages, all the users, everything that there is to Twitter all goes to that single site. Same with Facebook, same with Instagram, same with LinkedIn. That's that corporate siloizing surveillance capitalist kind of approach. And Twitter, like these other sites, contains a social network. It looks a bit like this only multiply it by 500 million. And Facebook looks like this only multiply it by a billion, right? It's got what we call a graph in it. There are users represented by the orange dot and may follow where they communicate with other users represented by the gray lines. So that's inside Twitter. One of the problems with Twitter is that it can't connect with other social networks. So if you don't like what Twitter's doing, or maybe if you don't like who owns Twitter, or who will own Twitter, if you jump to Facebook, and now you're blocked from all your Twitter friends. Like me, you hated Facebook, and years ago decided I don't want anything to do with this. You jumped from Facebook, or now you lose touch with all your Facebook friends and in fact I did. Super annoying. So, the problem is they have no common language or protocol, they have no way to speak to each other. So there actually isn't a way in Twitter for me to follow someone on Facebook and vice versa. So imagine a new protocol that could allow them to connect. That's not so hard to imagine right. If I was in Twitter I could just follow somebody's Facebook feed. If I was in Facebook I could just follow someone's Twitter feed, just like I follow other people inside Facebook or inside Twitter now. They could do this if they wanted. But they won't. It works against their business model their business model you know is basically where content goes to die. They draw you in they don't want you to leave. Instead, imagine an open source social network, kind of like Twitter that does connect with other services. That's what we have here. So here we have one social network we have another social network and we have a way to connect between them. The example I'm using here is a software called master them. This is the fediverse. The first picture of the fediverse in the fediverse individual social networks are called instances. So we have in our little tiny fediverse here to instances, and then whatever connects them is called a protocol. I'm being on technical and using the terms a little bit loosely forgive me if you're a technician forgive me. But that basically is what the fediverse is. So, why the fediverse. Well, one of the major reasons is my site, my rules. The fediverse here's another picture of the fediverse on the side we got individual master on instances individual WordPress instances and instances of other stuff I don't know what they are. Each one of them is owned by a different person or group of people, each one of them operates by its own rules, which means that you don't need to convince Elon Musk that a no Nazi rule should apply in your network. No Nazis in my network. And you don't have to deal with different perspectives on what should be allowed or not allowed. And we see that in actual practice. In the master on fediverse here this we've quoted Christina Hendricks here. But also a lot of people belong to an instance called scholar social which is pretty, pretty restrictive in terms of content. Other people belong to say truth dot social, which has its own content limitations and its own things that it allows everybody has your own rules. Now you notice they're all connected together here but it's the fediverse which means if you don't want to follow someone, if you don't want to follow another instance, or link to another instance, you don't have to. My network that I'm on master on social does not connect to truth dot social, which already makes it way better than Twitter for me. There are different ways of using this kind of system. And one of the best ways in my experience is experiencing the small and more intimate groups that you get in a federated social network. As compared to a mass social network like Twitter because you're not sharing with the entire world every time you share. We can explore, you know, we can explore narratives, we can explore how we form communities, alternate possibilities, we can accept the communities come and go and there's a flow, and all of that is, and more is documented in the paper called pedagogy of small, and I've put a link to it there. Also, there's just as an aside, if you get these slides forever you slide there's a notes page on every notes page there's a ton of links. Supporting what's on the slide. So, here's a, you know, and so this came about as a result of a couple of hashtags on mastodon, one of them is small poems, which, which I quite like another one is small stories. Again, we small ephemeral groups that form and disappear. OERU, Open Educational Resource University has created its own instance of mastodon so it's joined the Fediverse connecting people with hashtags here, using a scavenger hunt hashtag to have a worldwide scavenger hunt. Federated commenting. People have blog posts, or they might have static content on a website. Using an interface like this one described here allows for people to use their mastodon account, or their Fediverse account to comment on static content. It's still in trial, still being tested but again it's a learning application, just as an aside, and I probably should have mentioned this earlier. I did quite a bit of background reading for this and I'll actually link to some of it or show you some of it later on. I found very little in the way of resources on open education or open learning and the Fediverse and so a lot of these things, a lot of these areas there won't be a lot of resource solid federated commenting there isn't a whole lot of stuff that actually works yet. So, for those of you who are still looking for research projects there's tons of different research projects and things that you can try and evaluate. In broad scope here's here's what the lay of the land is prefer you know the empirical projects and the pilot programs. That's still like a blue ocean as they say there's there's almost nothing in the literature covering this. Oh, my headline format is wrong. Now Twitter is micro contents and by micro contents you know I mean to post 256 characters or whatever. Mass do the same sort of thing, but the Fediverse because linking is so free and easy. So here's a few of the limitations. There can be multiple kinds of content and therefore multiple kinds of instances. And so here's a few on this slide for things like micro blogging or personal networking there's plamora or friend to cut. If you're interested in link aggregating sharing links, there's lemmy. There's hosting and sharing in a federated social network as an alternative say to YouTube. There's peer tube. Similarly as an alternative to Instagram or or to flicker. There's pixel fed and similarly as an alternative to I don't know what these days because it seems like Spotify owns everything. There's a federated pub past podcasting platform. And what's neat is these because these are all part of the Fediverse. They all connect together so if you're on mastodon you can follow at least in theory and the count on pixel fed, or you can follow somebody's video feed on peer tube, etc. I was doing some testing for this and with the idea of maybe I'll show you some of the stuff but first of all the probabilities of time but secondly I found it's not always working remember this. A lot of this is still leading edge technology and has it been widely made solid yet, although it gets better and better by the month. So, some of the things you can do. Here's an article from Matthew Turner, Matthew Turner on teaching and learning with friendica friendica is another platform, another place where you can create an instance. So in that way it's very similar to mastodon. And he writes, you can have absolute control over your data you can do whatever you want it to lead it forever. So that's one benefit another benefit. It's not subject to surveillance data mining profiling. You can control who accesses your social network. That's a really important thing. If you wanted, you can set up a social network and not linked to any of the other instances in the Fediverse, or maybe just one or two. You also can sort of create your own private subnet sub Fediverse net, whatever I don't know if there's a name for it, which isn't connected to the rest of it. And this creates a safe space for people to try out social networking without ruining their job prospects 20 years from now. I think that has to be a good thing. There's another application, a learning application right now. If we want to do live content streaming we typically turn to something like YouTube or Twitch, which is what I do, I do quite a bit of streaming on YouTube but there is an alternative, something I still need to learn to play with. And that's streaming jitzy through peer to live. So jitzy is a conferencing program. It's a lot like zoom, very similar to zoom. And we could have a conference in jitzy and using the Fediverse stream it through peer to so people could watch the content stream, just the way they could watch a constant content stream on YouTube if they want it. Another one which maybe is a bit of a controversial one but I want to mention, mention it here because it's important is the original conception of moodle net. Now this was created by Doug Belshaw and others originally, eventually moodle decided they didn't want to do it this way. And so they terminated that projecting dead moodle net as I've looked at it a very ordinary within a single LMS constant content sharing sort of thing wasn't open at all. That's open a little bit but but nothing like the Fediverse but the original version of moodle net. Invasion federated content sharing, you know, images, open educational resources, whatever, within a learning management system. I have no idea what the moodle politics were behind that and I don't even want to know, honestly. But I always thought the idea of having a federated open educational resource content sharing service attached to and usable by learning management systems and not just one brands like moodle, but all brands so that people can share no information they were necessarily using. I always thought that was a good idea. And as Doug Belshaw wrote in one of his posts, this would encourage participation, efficiency and privacy, all all told together in this resource sharing network. Also, a next generation digital learning ecosystem now you're I know you're probably thinking edgy cause when I come up with a mouthful like that. But this is what was created for only are you by Dave Lane and Claire good and other colleagues to federated infrastructure with different kinds of open linked technologies, being able to communicate with each other. It's a good chance to have Dave Lane give a talk and explain what he's done. Jump at the chance. The work is really good. The stuff behind the tech stuff behind the scenes is a bit daunting. But once you have it and you can have it on your own server or on the cloud installation. And the actual using of these kinds of systems is pretty easy it's no more complicated than using Twitter, or using a blogging software, etc. Now, I'm giving you a bunch of examples. I'm giving you some educational applications. The important part is now, and these are the elements of a Fediverse or federated software that they have in common. Sorry about the manual grammar there. So, I'm just going to take you all step by step through this. So first of all, we begin with instances and instance, sometimes called a hub sometimes called a server, sometimes called a pod. If you're Tim Berners-Lee. There are web servers that sit somewhere, maybe in the institutional infrastructure, maybe in the cloud somewhere that are accessible by the Internet. And there are different types of instances, as I've already mentioned, mastered on Frendica, etc. I can sit here, I could do an entire talk just on the different instances that there are there's many, many different kinds of instances. And loosely though, we'll focus on a few specific types of instance. Now, connecting these instances are what we will loosely call protocols. A protocol, we can think of it as just a language that these different instances use to talk to each other. We, the users of these instances, don't need to worry about the protocols at all, or hardly at all. We certainly don't know how to need to know how to speak that language. The whole point of the Fediverse is the software knows how to speak that language. So there are different protocols. One of them is called activity pub. I've already mentioned that that's used to connect to instances. Some others are diaspora, which is very old now. Oh, there you have 10 years. Zot, which I know almost nothing about. Adam, which is very old. And I just threw in SMTP, which stands for simple mail transport protocol. That's the protocol used to send email from one email server to another email server. And the new web is just like the old web, right? It's the weird centralized sites like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn that are the aberrations. It's important to remember that. So, also, all of these federated social network systems will have users of some sort. Sometimes they're called subscribers. Sometimes they're called members. Sometimes they're called accounts in grasshopper, my own software. I call them persons, which seems nicer. So and what happens is each user subscribes to an individual instance. So a person can subscribe to Master Don, a person can subscribe to peer tube, etc. And that's how you set up your individual network. So this is one network. And this is another network and then they're connected through our protocol. Users have their own addresses. That's how we identify individual users. Typically, what we do is we combine the name of the user with the name or the address of the instance to form our username. So the name of the user, the name of the instance, put them together. And that's the full username. So we have, for example, you one, which is user one, whoops. I shouldn't have done that. There we go. You one at instance two. So that's this user you one at instance to you to add instance one. So there's you to an instance one, etc. You may be asking, I certainly would ask nobody could stop me really. Can you have accounts on multiple instance. And the answer is yes. I have downs at master. I'm not social downs at pure tube dot org downs at pixel fed dot org, etc. So okay yeah you can. How do you know you one on one instance is the same as you one on another instance or downs at this is the same as downs at that you don't. That's one of the conundrums facing the Fediverse. So you one at instance one could be one person here in Canada, you one at instance to could be a completely different person, maybe in Germany. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. Another question people might have is suppose I'm you one at instance. I should say instance one. Oh how terrible. You wanted instance one. Would I just move my account to instance to yes you can. That's one of the great advantages of the Fediverse. You can move your entire account including your content and all of your followers all the people you're following from one instance over to another. And you simply cannot do with Twitter you simply cannot do with Facebook, even Google plus made it hard to do, you would have to use the Google plus take out application which is anyone who's used it knows that that's a nightmare. This is much easier. So there's some fluidity and some mobility here, but there are still some questions lingering in our mind right. Another common element that Fediverse software has is what we'll call client a client stands in between you and the instance. So think of it, you might recall the client tweet deck for Twitter. It was a time when tweet deck wasn't told by Twitter it was a separate standalone company, and you'd use tweet deck in order to access your Twitter account. Now of course Twitter owns everything, because that's what they do. Here we have clients that do the same sort of thing. It allows me to access the network from different devices so for example, I access the master on my master on account on my phone using something called tusky to access it on the web. I could use an application but I just use the plain old default website because I have no imagination at all. If I got an iPhone that I would ever get an iPhone, but if I got an iPhone, I could use a different application to connect to mess it on on the iPhone. I can even have a standalone desktop client that is not a web browser. I can use to access my master on account. Another way of accessing your Fediverse account is through plugins. A plugin is an extension to some other software that allows you to connect with the Fediverse, usually for publishing but not exclusively for publishing. Some more well known plugins exist for WordPress or Drupal, but as time goes by I can imagine Fediverse plugins beginning to be developed for even things like Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever. Or Google Doc, Google would never let you do that, would they? I don't know about Microsoft. And basically so the WordPress plugin, for example, I have a WordPress account called leftish.media and I write posts on that and I've set it up so that if I write a post on leftish it automatically sends the post to my master on account. I could, in theory, also set it up so that if somebody unmasked it on, commented on my post, and it wouldn't matter if they could be on my instance or some other instance or they could be using, I don't know, a peer tube. Make a video comment, I suppose. That could show up on my original WordPress post. Now, again, you're asking, well, doesn't that create a whole possibility of spam? Yeah, but less so than the traditional web. Because, again, we have the Federation which intermediates for us. So somebody on Truth Social who comments on my post, I'm never going to see it. And thank goodness, because I don't want to see it. Now there are different types of protocols. There's not just activity pub, there's a range of different protocols. And to give you a sense, you know, the web's full of protocols, but to give you a sense for that. And some of the other protocols that you know, like the content protocols, the ways we organize content, HTML, which is how we make web pages or XML or PDF or DocX or whatever. There are various data protocols that could have put SQL in there, JSON, etc. There are linking protocols. The href is how we link on the web. That is how we link in another system I'll talk about later. We have transit or transport protocols, HTTP, which is how we transmit data on the World Wide Web, Activity Pub, which I've talked about, is how we transmit data on the, in the Fediverse. Even syndication protocols, which are ways of providing information about how you can follow a person, how you can follow content, etc. So, again, protocols, it's an alphabet soup, but the main way to think about it is different languages for different purposes. Now I didn't make a slide here, but I thought about it. And because I thought about it, I share. It would be a fun exercise to have students create their own protocol. Back in the early days of the web, somebody once created PTP, the Pigeon Transport Protocol. It was the protocol for sending messages using carrier pigeons. Can you imagine the sorts of protocols that people would come up with, you know, just as an exercise, maybe a collaboration exercise or a team exercise. It's a great way of getting them thinking about, you know, what the mechanics are, what the issues are in the whole realm of sharing content. Anybody can create a protocol. That's one of the beautiful things about it. And because master done, and other Fediverse applications are open source, you could actually create a protocol from scratch, and edit it on so that it supports that protocol. Now, you need some good programming chops to do that, but you can imagine doing it. Another way of another set, another, how do I want to put this, another version of the Fediverse is what's called the indie web. I talked about using master done to publish your in your WordPress post right so you write a post on WordPress, and you publish it on master done and comments can show right up on WordPress. What if we changed a couple things what if we removed the middleman, which is master done. And just had our blogs communicate directly with each other. Now, my blog becomes an instance in a Fediverse. And your blog becomes an instance in your fed in your fediverse. Now, they're not really network, it's not really a network of networks anymore, or it is, but each network only has one person in it. And that's what characterizes the indie web. And also we're a related initiative from Jim Green called domain of one zone, where instead of having a bunch of people joined together to create an instance. You create an instance all by yourself now you could do that with master done. And that would probably be what I would do if I created a master done instance it would be just for me. Because if I opened it up I'd have about three people join and what's the point of that right. And, but most people do it with their blog. But if you use a protocol called web mentioned, and a syndication protocol called H card, then you can create a federated social network with your blocks. Detailed and technical, and it's not ready for prime time yet. But we can certainly imagine, which is the state where we're at right now. Imagine that anytime you created a blog, you could connect with a network of other blogs. So you can have a set of class blogs all interacting together, etc. You can get all the benefits of blogging, but without many of the problems of blogging and probably the big problem of blogging. I think for especially for newer bloggers is you write a blog post nobody reads it. Nobody likes that. This is being trialed in various places and here's an article from Mozilla, where they're using the indie web as I've just described to help students and educators create open educational resources so the way they do that as they create, or provide free websites to the students and the educators, then, and then they use these websites. Probably WordPress, although honestly I didn't chat. And indie web protocols to create this network. And, you know, now you have people creating learning resources, learning with learning resources and of course interacting with each other to my mind, a very empowering experience. One of the questions that comes up. And this is an important question is going to change, not just the Fediverse, but a lot of what we do generally in the world of open education is the question of persistence. And the question of persistence is essentially, how do you know one thing is the same as another thing, or over time, how do you know one thing now is the same as that thing later. Or if you're searching for a resource. How do you know the resource that you're getting is the resource that you asked for. Now, this, this is on the one hand a technical problem. And on the other hand, the social problem. And there have been all kinds of ways of trying to solve this and you're probably familiar with digital object identifier or the hand up protocol or Pearl, the urn which is the actual way that we use to address resources on the worldwide web. What they all have in common is they don't work. The web sort of works DOI sort of works, but I can't tell you how many times I've clicked on a DOI or a handle and gotten something like this resource is no longer available. And I'm sure other people have had that experience too. And persistence becomes even more of a problem. Once we get into a distributed or decentralized network on Twitter. I'm going to add downs because I have the little blue Twitter thing right and so yeah okay Twitter verifies my identity. But on a distributed network, it's hard to do. So what's happening in education you've probably all seen this to some degree or another is an identity Federation, which is another kind of Fediverse is set up the same way it has instances and protocols and all the rest. But I just described, but it's used for identity in common for example which many of you would use at your own universities mostly in the US is is used to login using your university account it uses an identity registration system called chivalrous, which is the master on a federated identity and chivalrous uses something called security assertion markup language or SAML, which is the activity pub of distributed identity seems it's all the same right. Well, we can have a single sign on kind of system but there's, to my mind, a big huge problem with that. And that is, what if you don't go to university or you don't work for university. I had I experienced that with edgy realm I experienced that with all of these federated systems, because I worked for the federal government and I don't belong to any of them. And similarly people outside the federal government can't connect or sign into our systems either isn't a big mess. So, that's where Federation sits with respect to identity right now. And then down the pipe is decentralized identity sometimes also called self sovereign identity which is really a bad name for it. This is a worldwide web consortium. Protocol, basically. You can name a method and then the actual identifier. Now, there can be all kinds of different methods and all kinds of different identifiers. But this basically is the name of the protocol that you're using. This basically is your username in that protocol. That's one way around this and that way everybody would get their own unique identifier. Now there's questions of privacy with this. There's questions of, you know, who controls it a big part of decentralized identity is that it should be standalone such that nobody controls it. There are people trying to move distributed identity into the fediverse so that you remember I asked you know how do I know that downs at scholar social is the same person as downs at Bastadon social right now you don't. But if I could connect both of those to a distributed identity, then I, you could know that it's one in the same person. Or more to the point I as that person could prove it other people might not know necessarily. And again it's one of these ethical questions you asked right what's the right answer here. The main point of this is to enable follow it. I encourage you to look at this is Clint LaLonde's link here. Open educators on Macedon it's a whole list of open educators on Macedon. There's a site out there called trunk, which does the same sort of thing but with different communities and users. This is one of the future learning applications right, you can get collections of people, different interest groups, different lists of people similar to Twitter lists. There are people who are in many different fediverse instances on they maybe in pixel fan hubzilla diaspora whatever they can all be on the list, and you can subscribe to or follow them all. And trunk actually kind of almost allows a mass following so that you're not constantly entering every single name into a form. There are many other types of decentralization. And I knew ahead of time I wouldn't have a whole lot of time to talk about them, but I want to tweak them in your mind so you realize. Oh yeah, same thing different place so you have HTML pages soccer that's where is messaging content and data ledgers and finance and virtual world briefly decentralized content and data. There's a federated system called interplanetary file system. There's also the dat protocol for decentralized content. So whole mechanism here for decentralized content. I've written about it and tested it to create something I called content addressable resources for education. In this case instead of creating an identifier for a person, I created an identifier for each individual piece of content, and then I link those identifiers together. And the trick here is to create a unique identifier for each piece of content, based on the content of that content. There's also distributed ledgers. You've heard of them is blockchain Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the rest. Again, it's just a federation. Each person in the federation takes care of recording financial transactions. A digital coin like Bitcoin is a protocol for how you record and track these transactions and how you come to agreement on what transactions has happened. It's all it is all the rest of it is fluff. Decentralized credentials can use something like a blockchain network in order to ensure that this credential actually does belong to this person and was guaranteed by that institution because you have identifiers for all three of them. And that way you can have a distributed network of credentials. Tons of open learning applications here, some of them are already talked about under the heading of badges, and even some talk about using blockchain for credentials at this conference and other conferences. But the question for educators is, what happens when anybody can produce a credential. That's what this allows. That is open education, though, isn't it? Decentralized worlds. You know, right now you think of virtual reality, you think of you go to one environment and virtual reality and it's kind of like, you know, virtual reality silo. I play No Man's Sky, which is almost like a VR game. And, you know, I can't go from No Man's Sky to Minecraft. But imagine I could. All of these questions about persistence come up again, like for example, suppose I have a sword in No Man's Sky. I don't have a, I have a phase or multi tool. I have a multi tool in No Man's Sky. I go to Minecraft. Do I still have my multi tool? Suppose I had money units in No Man's Sky. I go to Minecraft. Do I still have money? Am I the same person in No Man's Sky or Minecraft? Is the person who's hosting it the same person, etc. All these questions come up. These are all addressed under the heading of persistence. Steven, I'm sorry to interrupt. You know, we have five minutes left. Keep going on. Or if you want to take questions. I've got one minute left. Got it. I admit there will be time for questions. So, and two things I want to say. First, Web three, you've heard it. You didn't know what it was. Now you know what it is. Web three is everything I've talked about so far up to and including persistence up to and including blockchain and distributed identity and all of the rest. All of that together is Web three. Different people will emphasize different aspects of it. Like, for example, here in digital, they talk about based on proof cryptographic proof of who you are your distributed identity, but doesn't matter. All of it is Web three. And the metaverse, you've heard a lot about the metaverse. Well, that's our decentralized virtual worlds, either virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed reality. They're combined with persistence. So that may mean digital currencies. That may mean digital identities, or that may mean digital objects such as non fungible tokens. And all that means when I talk about persistent digital objects is they each have a unique and verifiable digital ID. But the issues and the questions. That's the presentation. Oh, I accidentally hit on the link instead of changing the page. Sorry about that. I'm Steven Downs, www.downs.ca comments questions I certainly welcome them. I have a question in the chat. I think we all thought it was very interesting I'm sure a lot of us have no idea about any of this. I didn't. But Lorraine asked if this is basically like social media or would repositories be a part of it. So repositories would definitely be a part of it, I think. Yeah, you can build a standalone silo repository using d space or whatever. But, you know, that's part of what mood on that the original version, not the current version was intended to be was an OER repository using activity pub which made it part of the Fediverse. So definitely. And if you think about it. Yeah, you can have persistent identifiers. And you can have persistent identity for that for the authors persistent identifiers for the objects. And that makes it much more flexible and much easier to share content than what we currently do. Especially to ensure that the content you've shared is the content that was originally requested. If anyone has any other questions feel free to put those in the chat or you can raise your hand or feel free to unmute yourself as well. So I'm looking at Emma Woods comment so enjoying this tremendously thank you Emma. This is a completely new concept. Yeah, I know that. And that's why I thought it was important to do this presentation at this conference. Open education and open educational resources are in some important ways, still in the world of the late 1990s and early 2000s and we ours come out of the concept called learning objects and now these these were. And that could be said about learning objects with this idea of being able to create and share and rebuild and reuse digital contents. And the rest of the world moved on. First of all, it moved into silos. And so, you know, we got real usability problems with shared digital objects. And now it's moving away from the silos. And it's, you know, the way we move away from the silos creates new kinds of openness for us. I mean, sometimes I pose this as a challenge, but I also pose this as an opportunity, you know, how can we be open in different ways like I mentioned the identity Federation, the in common. It's used by say edgy cause and other organizations. Is it part of open education to have identity federations that support, not just people who've paid tuition and can access the university, but the general public as a whole. It seems to me that it is. I mentioned earlier. The, the idea of not simply the idea of open credentials people have talked about that before but if you mix open credentials into something like a Fediverse kind of environment, then anyone can create credentials. I have created, you know, I have created my own badges I've awarded badges for participation in a mood. And these can be shared in the Fediverse as part of your personal portfolio or whatever. So, how do we talk about good badges versus bad badges is the capacity to create and earn badges part of open education or not. These are important questions to my mind, but there are also opportunities. Stephen we are at time so I'm going to stop the recording but there is another question in there as well from Emma about do you anticipate federated social networks were replaced the silo type at some point or coexist and I'm just going to stop the recording but people can still keep talking. Yeah, they, they will coexist.