 Thank you, everybody. Right, so we're going to get started in a minute. But just to give you some technical stuff quickly, if you'll need to, backboard. First of all, as I say, the talk and the video buttons at the top, if you can make sure they're switched off. We may have some time for questions and use that later on. But throughout the webinar, it would be best if they were kept off. Then you've got the list of participants. And just above that, there's the options to do two on your faces and also to pick or cross. And so the presenters may ask questions at times or ask for responses. If you can use those buttons, that would be great. And then below that, we've got the chat window. And you can post in there. And it would be great if you could post any questions in there as we go along. We will try to pick them up. We'll have time for questions, at which point we'll go back and look at the ones that have been posted in the chat window. But that would be the best way to place them. And equally, if you have problems with your audio, the first step is to go to Tools, Audio, and Audio Setup Wizard. If you're still having problems, if you could post them in the chat window, and I'll do my best to help. So I think that's everything for now. So I'm going to hand back over to the presenters. We hope you enjoy the session. Thank you very much, Caroline. Now, I have enabled video just because I thought it would be more personal, if you could see the faces behind the names. But if that causes problems or if we have any bandwidth, then please just give me a nudge in the chat window or something in Caroline. Slightly awkward because I have to move the window to the middle. So if I'm not looking at a sconce at the camera, I'm obscure as to chat slightly. But anyway, as I said already, welcome everybody to Week Zero of Octel. The purpose of the reason it's called Week Zero is that if you like, it's a foundational experience this week. It's just a process for everybody trying to get to learn the ropes and to get an understanding of how the course works. This is the second time that Octel has run as I commented on somebody's blog this morning. One of the things that I've noticed already is that whereas people who'd done a MOOC, which is the acronym for a massive open online course, whereas those people last year were in the minority, it seems my general impression is that they're now the majority. So I think people are more adept and more used to this kind of online learning. But that's not to, we need to recognize that not everybody is. And so Week Zero is a little bit of an exploration. We do start the discussion, start some discussions about technology-enhanced learning. But it's a means of really just getting to know how the environment works. It's slightly different from any other course you've done before, unless you did Octel last year. And I know a few people have. So it's just a little bit of introduction. And the people named on that slide, Sufali Martin-Woxy, Elizabeth Charles, Jim Kerr, Sandra Huskinson, and I, are just going to talk you through what they're going to present a little bit from their different perspectives of involvement in Octel last year and explain what they took away from that, what tips they have to pass on to participants in Octel this year. And I'm mostly just going to be just managing the conversation. We're going to have about five minutes, maximum of five minutes from everybody, perhaps a little bit more from Martin, because you've got more to tell you. And then we'll have a question and answer session for at least 15 minutes at the end of the webinar. And if you put things into the chat window, my job will be to pick those out and try and cluster them together. OK, but without further ado then, I'm going to hand over to Sufali from the University of Huddersfield. Su's going first because she's very kindly esponed another engagement that she had this afternoon. So she's going to tell us a little bit about her involvement in supporting learners on Octel last year. Over to you, Su. OK, thanks very much, David. I hope you all can hear me OK. I could just have a little smile to show some indication that you can hear me. Brilliant, OK. So welcome to this Octel webinar, the first one of the series. So my name is Sufali, and I work for the University of Huddersfield. My job title is Academic Development Advisor. So I coordinate and promote learning technologies across the university, particularly focusing on the sort of pedagogic side as opposed to the sort of techy side of things. And I've been asked to talk today very briefly to you because I have my involvement in Octel last year. So three types of involvement last year. I actually participated as a participant in the course. I acted as a general tutor for Octel and I also acted as a support tutor for a group of staff at the University of Huddersfield that were going through the program. So I'm not going to talk about my participant access as such just because you've got a couple of people coming up to give you that perspective, which is a general tutor. I wasn't assigned to a particular week. Some of the tutors had a particular week to look after a search, but I sort of just milled around answering or responding to tweets, to discussion board posts, and to comment on blog posts. But in some ways, Octel's very self-managing in that way. It's very hands-off. So what I just did is just responded to where there was gaps and jumps in there and that seemed to work, both for me and the people that were running it. But you can all play a part in this. As I say, to some extent, you know, everyone's a peer in this sort of course and there's no right or wrong ways for the discussion to develop. So please do engage and respond to as much as you can. In terms of the University of Huddersfield support, I promoted the course across the University and found out that there were 30 people that had signed up from the University of Huddersfield. So I decided to set up a bit of local support. So what I did, I provided some space on the University of the Aliens, which is Blackboard, to promote the course and also just to have discussions, to post up information, reminders, et cetera. I also asked people that had created blogs to actually put on their blog address so that I could actually keep an eye on their blogs, comment on it, and we could actually read each other's and encourage them to do that. I also set up a drop-in session once a week if anybody needed any help, and I did get quite a bit of takeup on that in terms of people wanting help with setting up Twitter accounts or with WordPress blog accounts and that sort of thing. I also set up a Yammer network, although that didn't have a lot of takeups. I think Yammer was pretty new to us all at that time, so that didn't take off as well. I was also gonna do a weekly face-to-face meeting or webinar, but after seeing that OCTEL was providing that and providing a lot of other support, I thought that would just add to Tutor's workload. Okay, so in terms of the Huddersfield people, half of them that attended say they got what they wanted from the course, which I think is really good stats from the MOOCs have course, where there's usually quite a lot of drop-outs and I got a lot of feedback. So in terms of this year, I'm going to be less, there's less people involved at Huddersfield, so I'm just gonna stick with the Yammer network in the one-to-one support. So in terms of just some tips for you in general, first of all, it can feel very, very overwhelming and you're probably feeling this already in terms of the vast amount of information that you could read and get involved in. But there's no right or wrong way of engaging with this course. It depends what suits you and what's right for you. And so you've got to decide how much time you spend on the course and your pathway through, which might involve only getting involved in one or two of the platforms, not all of them. It is very overwhelming and it's a piece of advice is just to decide what's good for you and just follow that path through and don't get too distracted by the amount of stuff. There's no way you can actually keep up with even half the content. So try and get that into your head. The second thing I would advise is to develop a sport network of some sort. So because MOOCs can feel very isolated and it's very normal to feel that you're very alone. So the best way to do that is to firstly just start to respond to people, whether it's via Twitter, discussion, threads, tweets, blogs, whatever. Just start responding to people, even if it's very, very small or very small replies. People like to know that you're actually responding and you'll start building up a rapport with those sorts of people and they'll remember you responded and respond back to you. If you can create a group, that would be great. So it might be like I'm doing a local face group or it might be a virtual group of people that are interested in the same sort of thing or at the same sort of situation as you. You can use the Octel website to create groups as well, which would be a really good way of doing it. And it will really make a difference if you can connect with a few people just to make your experience more enjoyable as you go through. And finally, just like anything, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it. So be brave and have some discussions. Actually just respond to some people, even if it's very small, because everybody's opinion does really matter and people will be really delighted that you've taken the time to respond to them. So that's all I'm going to say. Just have a good look with the course. Try and engage with it as much as you can and enjoy it. I'll just back to you, David, or Hans Martin. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sue. That's really helpful. One of the things that we've put on the Help page is just in terms of tutor support is what participants in Octel can expect from the course and in the way of the tutor support, which is almost all provided on a volunteer basis. So it's just a way of making sure that people feel that they are being heard. And I know I'm concentrating in particular on supporting and commenting on people's blogs, posts and things, but there's been a lot of discussion forums as well. I'm going to hand over now to Martin Hawksy. Martin is the architect, engineer, builder. The whole works basically in terms of building the Octel platform and managing it. And Martin's also the overall manager of the course this year. So he is the man. And he's going to take us through some of the features and things that you may still be exploring on the platform and how you can get the most out of them. Martin, over to you. Hi, David. Thanks very much. So I'm going to attempt to give you a live tour of the site. This wasn't working particularly well on the guided web tour of the network collaborate earlier. So I'm going to my desktop. So hopefully, if I could see some happy faces that you can see my desktop, maybe David would just confirm that. I can't see it just at the minute, Martin. That's OK. I've taken a snapshot just to hopefully you can see a snapshot rather than a live one. Yep. So I'll keep taking snapshots as I go, so hopefully you'll keep track of it. Just a quick context of what we've tried to do within the Octel platform is for those familiar with the MOOC concept, the massive open online courses, you may have experienced things like Future Learn or Coursera. And there are very specific type of open course where the focus of the platform is very much about keeping you in there so they'll have assessments and activities and discussion forums all within the site. We've obviously got a site and it's got discussion forums. It's got the activities. But very much our viewpoint is we want you to be operating in your own spaces, so your personal space is online. And the primary reason for doing that is that a big part of this course is about creating opportunities for you to make connections. Connection is not just with knowledge, but with people. And we feel to have sustainability over that, having you creating those connections in your own spaces is a lot better in the long term. So how we do this, there are, as I mentioned, discussion spaces, which you'll see listed from the top menu. But I want to highlight some other particular features, which are in some ways a little unique to Octel. So the main one of those is the course reader. So what this does is, and I'll take a snapshot again, hopefully, I think the collaborates are causing me issues. So here we go. So our live web tours. The demo gods are not with me today. So you'll see within the help section that we've created various videos that talk about different things like the course reader and registering your profile. So what the course reader is doing is, if you are creating a blog somewhere, we ask you to just register where that blog is. And what we do within the site is we go off and see if there's anything that you've written about Octel. And we pull it back into the central site. So it's a nice way for you to get an overview of what's going on in the course. And as well as that, as we're collecting this data, we're also pushing it back out to you again. So we're pulling in blog posts, which you can read on the site. And you can do things like favoriting. But you can also go and then revisit those. And as well as that, we push those blog posts out into the daily newsletter. So this morning in the daily newsletter, you hopefully saw about seven or eight participants' blog posts. And we're up to 44 already. We're four days into the course. And we've already got 44 blog posts from participants, which I think is a great start for us. And something I hope we can continue as well. So to allow you to identify some people to connect with, you know, Sue was talking about increasing local connections with people. And I think finding people geographically local to yourself is quite useful as well. So one of the options within the discussion spaces is we've got a Twitter map. So this map is automatically generated with anyone that's using the octel hashtag. I'll put a pin in the marker, a pin in the map, so you can see what's going on there, who's local to you. I'm just going to stop sharing my application because I think that's causing some audio problems. So as well as that, we've got the forums, which are another space for you if you prefer not to have an external blog where, again, you can have discussions. And this year we're also experimenting with groups. So anyone registered in the course can create their own group. And we've already got a list of groups that you can sign up to and join. So these become separate spaces where you might want to discuss particular topics. Again, it's interesting that some of the people have started using these groups as opportunities to collect geographically. So I think there are a couple of regions now that have created their groups for discussions. One of the final pieces I want to just highlight is the fact that so far focused on recording blog posts, it's not just blog posts. We're trying to record as much activity that's going on across the web related to OCTEL as possible. So if you're using Twitter or Google+, we're collecting tweets and Google+, postings. So again, those can be browsed within the course reader. Bookmarking, we collect. If you're going around collecting resources into bookmarking sites like Delicious or Dio or Scoopit, again, we're trying to collect those back to the site. And hopefully you'll see a very rich activity stream of things going on. And the activity stream is an opportunity to identify people that you might want to connect with. I probably should, before I stop, just quickly mention Badges as well. This is a new innovation for us this year. And you'll see within Week 1 or Week 0, there are various badges that you can collect. So these are digital badges just used within the OCTEL site. And there's a badge even for just turning up to this webinar and entering the code. And I should give you the code now. The code word is rosebud. So if you enter rosebud into the badge for the webinar in Week 0, if you enter the term rosebud, we'll be awarding you a badge for that. So apologies for the technical difficulties. And I'll hand you back to David. OK, thanks very much, Martin, for that thing. And my apologies to everybody for our collections. These things are always a challenge when you're trying to do them live. I'd like to go over now to we've got three people who participated in OCTEL last year, Elizabeth, Jim, and Sandra. And actually, they're all involved, having participated as students and learners last year. They're helping us out with delivering the course this year. But they're just going to give us a few tips in terms of what worked and what didn't work and how to get the most out of OCTEL. I'm just going to ask you folks just to try and keep it three or four minutes, if you can, so that we have plenty of time for questions. And also just a reminder to everybody is questions occur to you or if you've got questions that you're bringing to the webinar, then please do put them in the chat window because we're going to have a panel session after these three folks have told you a little bit about their experience. So over to Elizabeth now, if you're ready to speak with us. OK, hi. Can you all hear me? If you could put smiley faces, I'd be grateful. I don't want to be. Excellent. That's great news. OK, my name is Elizabeth Charles, and I am my bike at Backback University of London, where I'm the head of E-Services and Systems. So I deal with the licenses for digital content and involved in a virtual learning environment where here we use Moodle. Last year, I took the first round of the OCTEL course, and it was extremely timely because at that stage I was on the group looking at technology-enhanced learning for the college. It was a working group. We'd also encountered quite a number of issues where lecturers and academics were somewhat reluctant to move some of their course content to Moodle. So this course allowed me to see some of the issues that they might be encountering. And some of the issues they needed to take into consideration in transitioning their courses from face-to-face to online environment. I thoroughly enjoyed the course. So much so that I was one of the major contributors, both in responding to comments put in the forum and also in publicizing and tweeting about OCTEL itself. It was not something that I've intended to do. It just happened that way, in that it fitted in with quite a lot I was doing at the time. I totally agree with some of the comments I've seen already from this year's group, where this mentions about being overwhelmed and not really sure where you're going. And I think what I really appreciated last year and this year about this course was that the week zero allowed you to find your feet, to look around, not worry about pressure of time and having a huge amount that you needed to do. So definitely making use of this week is really important. And keeping hold of the participants' handbook really, really helpful. I manage my time and contributions initially by just ensuring that I did the, if only you do, one thing section. And I always did something out of that from my first visit. And that helped me to get going. I've noticed that most of you seem to have set up geographical grouping. Last year it tended to be by professional interest. So it's quite strange that there's been a switch this year. So I set up a group for library and information workers and got into the habit of responding and welcoming people who joined the group. And that allowed me a way in that I looked for their comments and contributions in various forms and responded to that first. And once I found my feet, I went into the other groups and if there was something that was new or interesting or I just wanted more information or I could give more information, I contributed to those forms as well. It was fairly easy that way. So start off small and work out. And there's nothing wrong in being the lurker and just reading through what other people have to say until you find your voice and you feel that you can contribute in a way that's comfortable for you. The key thing is to remember from week to week what your big question is. And that will change as you go through the course. And as you learn more and discover more and learn from other people's experience. But if you hold your big question and your little question in mind from week to week, it will help you to focus in case you start to feel like you've been overwhelmed with things that is not really relevant to you. It was really enjoyable. I visited often and frequently, but in small bits. So my first visit would be if you only do one thing. And thereafter, once I've done that, I would, I think, two or three times a week I'd go in and have a look at what other people had to say, reflect on what they had to say, respond to that as well. And that's one other key part. Give you if you are reading resources about a new concept. Give yourself time to reflect upon it and digest it. This course is extremely rich resources-wise. So I certainly made great use of it in that I included quite a number of the resources in my scoop it account, which I set up as a direct result of this course as well. But give yourself reading time and processing time and time to think. But just visit when it's comfortable for you. That's really all I have to say about that. So thank you, David. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. A couple of things to just chip in there. Firstly, the people that you're going to be hearing from are people who, as Elizabeth mentioned, were particularly active on the course last year. Obviously, those people who were less involved in terms of volume are not taking part. That's not to say that they got, in some ways, a necessarily a lesser experience from the course. That is, volume isn't everything. It does mean that circumstance means that those people that were very heavily involved are the people that we then involved in delivering the course. But it's fine to just do... A lot of you will have a lot less involvement in this course in terms of time than Elizabeth or Jim or perhaps Sandra. But that's not to mean that your experience is lesser than that. And we were going to keep on reminding you of this point. It's in the handbook. We've created the handbook this year as a way of making sure that that's kept in the front of people's minds. We had a number of comments last time about people feeling that they were behind on Octel. And we posted on the blog to say, there is no such thing as being behind on Octel because you take it at your pace and you define your own path and that's perfectly okay. So, having slightly abused my position as sort of chair there and chipped in with my own contribution, I'm gonna hand over to Jim on the other side of Atlantic to tell us a little bit about his experience with Octel. Jim. Thank you, David. I hope everyone can hear me all right. Some smileys if you can. Fantastic, thank you. As David mentioned, I was a participant in last year's Octel course, the initial run of the course I thought was extremely successful and at least in my own experience, a great time was had by all. The theme keeps coming up. There are two themes that I keep hearing this morning. Well, this morning for me this afternoon for most of you is that there are so many ways to feel overwhelmed. There are so many pathways, there are so many groups and communities and sources of information and participation. For myself last year, I spent a lot of time in the forums at the Octel site and working in my own blog and reading other people's blogs. The fact of the matter is that with this course and with a MOOC in general, it's a very personal experience. You customize your learning and experiment with learning and exploring places and resources and tools that maybe you haven't had an opportunity to before in a safe environment where you're surrounded by other learners who are also doing the same thing. People who are eager to explore and learn and people who are eager to share their own experiences. And that really is what it's all about, is about exploring and sharing. There are again so many different paths, so many different communities where you can find these learners and the learning that's happening. There's a Google Plus community, Twitter, Digo, the Octel site itself. And for those of you that are writing your own blogs, there's that opportunity to share your experiences and then to read other participants' blogs. It's rather dichotomous. You want to work in your own comfort zone, work where you feel comfortable in a space that you know and understand, but also to kind of push your own comfort zone and to explore new areas that you maybe haven't had an opportunity to in the past. Another feature of the MOOC style learning that Octel is providing is that if you have a question about something or there's a resource or a tool that you want to experience or want to learn, there's a pretty good chance that there's somebody and other participants that may have already done it or has a similar question who wants to explore it with you or somebody who's already done it and wants to share what they've learned with you. Again, it's the theme of sharing and exploration in Octel and MOOC style learning. Some recommendations for not feeling overwhelmed and for getting through it. Definitely make a path, make a participation plan. Kind of decide, okay, this is my big question. This is what I want to experience and what I want to focus on. And make a plan. It doesn't have to be set in concrete. It certainly shouldn't be one that tries to do everything, but make a participation plan and try to stick with it. If your goal is 30 minutes a day, try and actually meet that goal of 30 minutes a day of working in Octel. This is the course you cannot fail. This is the developer. My background is a consultant and as a designer. So I've been designing e-learning materials for quite a number of years. So before Octel, I've actually not done this type of course before, even though I'd tested in something moderating and done all sorts of different things with different universities over the years. From the course, I actually gained quite a lot of knowledge of areas I'd not actually had time to have a look at. I used to spend my time online on a Sunday actually looking. So I would be a person that would dip in and dip out. So from the point of view of looking at the way you handle your time, I would go in just on a Sunday morning. I might print off some of the materials during the week and spend some time reading. So my advice to people is to read a bit before you go back online again. I really enjoyed the process and it made it possible for me to make some more connections. In terms of handling your time, I used to read the materials and do the one task as Elizabeth was talking about every week and then see where I was after that. So in terms of doing the one task, I would actually write up my replies and answers in Evernote and then put them online afterwards. So do some probably what you call personal reflection on what materials would be being presented in the task we were set. And then I would post online afterwards. So for me, it was really quite a lot of the process was done offline even though I wasn't online at the time. So I'd then sit on a Sunday, see what everybody had posted, see what people were doing. One of the tips I'd give to people is to make sure you go around all the sites. You might be in certain groups, but it's worth having a look around every once a week, say what everybody's saying, what everybody's doing, because I found that really interesting. In terms of frustrations with the course, I think the first frustration I have was with the just mail list, which unfortunately didn't work very well the first time we used it. That's all been sorted out now. But that made things difficult because she was being overwhelmed with data. I found the whole thing really, really useful. And I've enjoyed talking to the people I met with online after the event as well. So you ended up with quite a network. The other thing I did was I used the forums on site. I don't have my own blog at this point. So all the whole thing was contained to me within the actual octal area itself. And at the end of the course, I also downloaded everything that I'd done. So I've got a record of what I'd written and then did some reflection right at the end. I hope that's enough, David. I have perhaps hand back to you now. That's lovely, Sandra. Thank you very much. And thank you for your range of different perspectives in terms of people who have had different experiences of participation. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to ask a couple of questions. And I'm going to ask anybody. I think Sue has probably had to leave us now. But I'm going to ask if not in Elizabeth, Jim, or Sandra would just answer when they're ready, if you like. And I picked up a couple of questions in the chat room. Some cases, particularly when people are putting smiley faces, the thing just scrolls past too fast for me to keep up. So keep them coming. What I'd like to ask is if my colleagues from Alton's elsewhere, the other moderators, if they catch anything, if they could just copy it into the moderators chat room, then we'll use that as a kind of scratchpad for me to pick up on a couple of things. But let me ask, first of all, the question from Colin that I noticed, which social media did last year's participants find most useful? And he adds my real preferences are Google+, and Twitter. So anybody got any reflections on what they found most useful last year? And why, perhaps? For me, Twitter was the most useful. It was the first time I'd really got to use Twitter in a proper way, really. So for me, I found that really interesting to see what people could do in that many words, which was really quite fascinating. I'd like to echo Sandra's comment about Twitter. The opt-out course really gave me the confidence and the push to actually use it. Since I've started, I've not stopped. But I would give a plug also for StoryFi, which I was introduced to on the EDC MOOC prior to doing the opt-out course. And that is quite useful. I found that quite useful because I didn't want to set up a WordPress blog. So what I remember, Elizabeth, you were very productive in that, in terms of using it as a way of curating the content and then pushing it out again and sharing it with other participants. Is that right? That's correct, yeah. I think if you're a first time and you don't want to commit to writing a blog, then StoryFi is a good way. A halfway house have actually been able to incorporate tweets, as well as your reflection on the discussions that have taken place. Great, thank you. Jim, anything you'd like to add? Well, I will also support the use of Twitter. The thing I really appreciated about using Twitter was just the sense of immediacy. And maybe that was just my instant gratification being satisfied. But to be able to rapidly communicate some ideas and get feedback from other participants who were also using Twitter, it was great for brainstorming. And again, just kind of the rapid fire exchange of ideas. But I also used my own blog for things that I didn't want to necessarily have. I needed to preserve more long term than the rather ephemeral nature of Twitter. Thanks, Jim. One of the things I'd add is that social media is always shifting. So it's a bit like your favorite bar. It's things change. And basically, social media is where most other people who are like you go. And therefore, if more people go to this particular bar and then they change their preferences and move to a different one, then it's usually that kind of thing rather than there being one final right answer in this kind of area. And just picking up Jim's point about blogs, I think that's one that we'll come back to. Just to say that one of the reasons that we encourage people to use their own blogs is that a blog is something that you kind of always carry with you, whereas things that you might write on a course forum like ours, a year or two down the line, you'll forget quite where it was. And while we may try and keep it online, your chances of remembering exactly where to find it and things are modest. Whereas whilst people go sometimes leave their blogs and I'm guilty of this as well, leaving a little bit more about the way that we're using badges this year, if that's all right. Oh, yeah. So as David mentioned, the bad team is new this year. So within each week, there are five different badges that you can collect. So some of them are very basic. So we've got a check-in badge. And I know there's a lot of debate about giving people credit for just turning up. But one of the reasons that we thought we'd include something like that is very low stakes. When you collect that badge, you can actually see who else has collected the badge as well. So it gives you a way of clustering around so around other people that are active in the course. And we have other badges for attending the webinar. And also, we've got the Tell One badge. So each week, we'll give you a suggestion of one thing to do. And if you do that, you'll get the badge. And as well as that, we have the Tell Explorer, which are for more advanced. And as well as this, we have each week when you collect three or more badges, you get the topic badge. So you basically, you've leveled up if you're familiar with kind of gamification terms. As David said, this is very much an experiment for us. We're seeing where these badges go. You're more than welcome if you get a badge you're proud of to display it in your own spaces. It's admittedly not easy to do. It's a bit of a juggling act to copy and paste. But something we're working towards during the course is actually, as David's eddy's asking, make them miserable back badges. So currently, the badges, they're digital badges. And there are various forms of digital badges. And they just sit within the octal site. And what you can actually do is that already those badges are in a format that potentially makes them compatible with other badging systems. And one of the most popular ones right now is open badges, which the Mozilla Foundation were initially reading on. And so what we need, the little hurdle that we need to get over is currently the plug-in that we use for the badging links in with a separate service called Creadly. And we didn't feel it appropriate to issue an open Mozilla open badge. We basically had to send you via Creadly to collect it. And we didn't think that was particularly nice or fair. So what we're doing is we're actually looking at creating a direct route. So hopefully by the end of the course, we'll be issuing not only digital badges, but we'll be issuing Mozilla open badges, which you then can use and display in different contexts on different sites that are compatible with open badges. So your feedback on badging is very welcome, which really value your opinion on. And it's already quite interesting to see some of the debates going on the octal hashtag and elsewhere about the value of badging. And so we're quite keen to keep that debate going. Thank you very much, very much, Benjamin, and seeing the contribution to this challenge about the exchange of data tools and the size of the question again, and such likes and some of the various comments on badges. I'd just like to pick up one comment that I think was from Raymond, who I think is playing a little bit of the devil's advocate here. He says, you can't fail the course in inverted commas. I'm wondering if even after a nonlinear course as time frame is over, there shouldn't be at least a bare minimum pass, straight, tried, hard, but didn't meet expectations kind of benchmark, I think. And my answer to that, I guess, would be there probably is, but it's something that you should set yourself. I'm sorry, Mina, for having problems with the sound still. What I'm wondering about, we've been talking through badges and tools, and what I'd like to do maybe in our last five minutes or so is some of the conversations have been going around. I'm imagining for somebody for whom this is the first experience of an online course, it might all seem terribly geeky. And certainly the overwhelming issue that people have reported in the past is this sense of being overwhelmed by the range of different options. And one of the ways of thinking about that, I'll say that straight away, is to think of this kind of like a festival, whereas at a festival, there's always more than you can possibly manage to keep up with, but just don't let that bother you. Let just enjoy the stuff, find some stuff that you enjoy and concentrates on enjoying it, engaging with it. And if you hear about other stuff that went off somewhere else, while you were doing that, then that's OK. Maybe you can follow it up later, because most of the stuff is recorded here. But don't let yourself feel anxious about that. There's no way that anybody can keep up with this all the time. What I'd like to ask is if anybody would like to, and I think I'm going to experiment here and suggest that just to keep things simple, we actually hand over the talk button so that you should see underneath where you see my talking head, a little button called talk. And if anybody would like to raise their hand and then maybe click the talk button just to ask a question, then we can do this directly to anybody who's in our panel of presenters this morning. Anybody like to jump in and press talk and see what happens? I had a brief bit of white noise, but I'm not sure if that was Jim. They always tend to be resounding silent when it's suggested that somebody wants to say anything. So I think it's going to be the chat box until people are a bit comfortable or confident about speaking out. Hello. This is Claire Raistrick. I just thought I'd speak just to show folks if it can be done. I'm not reading that correctly. I have my long sighted. Hello. Hello, David. Yep, I can do it, too. Hello, do you have any questions for anybody? Hello. Do I ask a question, please? Hello, I'm not sure if you can hear me. My name is Leigh Mogue. I'm from Ireland. I'm just wondering how do I find out where geographical people are? How do I know if people are geographically in my area or whatever? There was a Twitter map that I noticed in passing was that somebody had compiled. Can anybody, I didn't actually see it myself. I just saw one of those things that passed me in the activity stream. Is there anybody around? Did somebody get to find it? They could put a link into that stream? Yep, if it doesn't. OK, Leigh. That's good. Thanks, yeah. OK, hello, Leigh. Tom, speak. Right, I'm going. Kenny Leigh, where are you? I'm up in Dundark, Tom, but I am off and in Kerry. All right, I'm the only one I'm off and in business, so we might have the opportunity to link up. I'm up and building tomorrow. Yeah, good, yeah, that's delighted. I'm just wondering, should I have put something in my identity stream to say where I'm from? I see Tony Bork University of Westminster. Shall I have done that? And how do I go back and do that in my profiles or whatever? If you go to the Help page, there is a screencast that Martin has put together that details how to edit your profile. So that would be the starting off point. Go to the Help page, see how to edit your profile, and then you can add whatever you would like to help people find you and connect with you. So would your profile modifications show up in this participant list? That's the question I'm asking. Not in Blackboard Collaborate, no. It would show up, it would be linked from wherever you participated in the forums or on the site, but we don't suck data between the site and Blackboard Collaborate, I'm afraid. So how did Tony Bork, Bracket University of Westminster, how did he get that name there? How do I do something similar? When you log in, where you put Liam, then if you put in brackets, your location after that. Does that apply for every webinar? So next week I'll have to do the same thing. So maybe everybody would do that. Indeed. Oh, so anybody who wants to identify their location would put that at the input of the starter at the initial login of the webinar, stuff like that. Indeed, indeed. OK, Sirbert, thank you very much. OK, thanks, Liam. We're going to get Liam and E.T. Tralee, if you want to look me up. Thanks, Tom. True. OK, I've been attending to the conversation, so I'm not picked up if there have been any other questions in the chat room that you'd like to ask. But if anybody else would like to ask questions in the chat room or directly on the audio, then please do so. Otherwise, we can maybe finish a minute or two earlier. I know that you wanted to ask a question. I'm just not quite sure what the issue is with taking over the microphone. I can do it now. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. I just didn't want to because you invited several people to ask questions, and I didn't want any overlaps. My question is, there are different ideas about the composition of groups. Geographically, we have three terms up. Subjects-wise, it's a bit less certain because people can coach their subjects that are in profiles, I suppose. So that would involve going through 127 or whatever number of people there are profiles to identify some of this. You may be interested to be in the same group together. Are there any ways you could recommend doing it to make it more effective? We provide, I'll have a go at this, and then Martin or others can chip in if they wish to. We provide a set of tools. I think that the science or the engineering of finding the most effective way of connecting like-minded people has yet to be invented to the best of my knowledge. I know there are various ways in terms of network maps and things like that, but I'm sure people here, some people here know a lot more about than I do, that can help towards that. But what we try to do is just provide the tools and then we leave it kind of to an organic process for people to scan the discussions that are going on to spot people that appear to have things in common with them and then to explore. So it's, again, taking a festival idea or a party idea. There's a little bit of plenary discussion that goes on where you get a little bit of a sense of what people's interests are, and people can raise their hand and say what they're interested in, and then people cluster around that. But there's no kind of definitive way in which we direct people to what would be the best people to collaborate with or the best way to collaborate. Can I just come in here, David, and just a minute. So what we're keen for you to do, as David was indicating, is to create your own spaces where you want to come together. So for example, last year, we had a list of spaces created. So for example, we had a Daigo group set up. But it was great to see a group of participants just decide to create a Google Pass community where they could come together. And then I spotted quite a few people in the chat mentioning LinkedIn groups. And we would actually encourage you to go off and create those by yourself. And what we would do is help you publicize those spaces. So if you do create a space on LinkedIn or if you do create a map from there's a list of mapping services where you can basically put a pin in the map, if you do go off and create that, let us know about it. And we'll help publicize that so that more people can potentially come and cluster around those different spaces. Thanks, Jim. Sorry, thanks, Martin. We're coming to the end of our hour now. And I noticed that some people are already leaving the webinar. So I'm just going to ask now, if anybody has any burning questions, then please to ask them now. Otherwise, while you're thinking about that, the following webinars that in weeks one through six will probably follow a slightly different format from this one. There will be more presentation led, if you like, in terms of there being one or two people that present. But we will always try and include some question and answer element of them. So I hope this has been useful in terms of just giving you an overview of how the different parts of what we're going to tell, what freedoms and the few constraints that you might have on what you can do in terms of discussing and connecting with people in the course. Anybody for any last questions or issues? Where do I enter the word rosebud? Martin, can you just answer that question, please? When the octal light gets back up again after our vanilla service attacks, you'll see you can either enter it on the week zero course information, course material. There's the badge there. Or in the badges menu, you'll see week zero badges. Also there. OK, thanks, Martin. I don't think I'm seeing any other things. It is two o'clock, so I'm going to say thank you very much to everybody who attended. And thank you particularly to Sue, Martin, Elizabeth, Jim, and Sandra for their contributions this afternoon. Thank you, everybody, and see you next week and online in the interim. Goodbye.