 So good afternoon everybody at this stage of the proceedings. My name is Pat Mere. I'm based at University College Coch and let me introduce my good friend and colleague here, Ronan Hennessy. We're part of this geoscience e-laboratory project, where the lead institution here, hence the reason we're here. If we just look at the team make-up, let me start by apologizing for the absence of our colleagues from Dublin and Galway. There's a national research review on today in Atlone of all places, so these guys are locked into being at that and they're saying their apologies. So again, we apologize for that. We're the only two geologists I think in the country who are not in Atlone today for that reason. So let's quickly go through the team. As I say, University College Coch are the lead partners on this. We've got Galway and Shane Terrell, who's a sedimentologist based in University College Galway is flying the flag for Galway. University College Dublin, we've got an igneous pathologist, a guy called Julian Manouge, who has been very active in the project. Trinity College Dublin deserves a special mention. Bells Camber, who's the Professor of Geology at Trinity, is the link partner here. And Trinity were very much instrumental in initially developing the use of the virtual microscope in this country back two or three years ago. So the genesis of this project has come from the work done at Trinity College Dublin. And last and by no means least the open university, the software that we're using, the virtual microscope software that we're using comes from the open university. And Professor Simon Kelly has very, very generously given his time and that resource to make this project happen. So I really do want to flag the importance of their contributions. What are we going to do? Or what did we say we're going to do five, six months ago? Well, the key thing here is that first point, developing teaching and learning resources using the virtual microscope. And we hope that this will be a game changer in terms of how we deliver undergraduate education, the geosciences and the areas of optical mineralogy and petrology. I'll come back to the reasons why we think that in a minute, but as part of that, to introduce something that, let's be honest, from as a geoscientist and a geologist, we are pretty traditional in how we deliver teaching in terms of petrology and mineralogy. The classic lab-based traditional approach has been in place for literally over a century at this stage. We're very slow to change and move. We are increasingly in areas like GIS and other technologies are starting to shift to a more progressive modern approach, if you like. So developing teaching enhanced learning will be, I would argue, probably one of the first national initiatives in this area for geoscience education in this country. This will allow students, and I suppose the key thing here is that we're going to, at the root of this was, I suppose in some respects, a resource issue. This idea that you, to train students in petrology and optical mineralogy, you need expensive microscopes, you need expensive materials, 10-sections, rock 10-sections, that has huge impact on what is limited resources for our institutions. So the idea of, through the virtual microscope, allowing students to access high-quality digital 10-sections, museum-quality 10-sections, allowing them to access it 24-7, there's no limit as far as lab time is concerned, we feel, is going to be really important for the future of geoscience education in this country, and in terms of international impact abroad. So I'm going to hand over to Ronan, who is the project assistant on the project, and he's going to go through the nuts and bolts of the project of progress to date, and I'll come back to you to finish up. Okay, so I guess one of the main challenges that we've had to address is, as a geologist, you can go to the field and you can look at rocks, something like this here. You can look as close as possible and lie down on the ground with a small little lens, but to be honest, you can't really see what's inside. And when you look close enough at rocks, it's quite often the minerals, the crystals that you're looking for. This is an essential skill of the geoscientist across the board. As Pat said there, generally one of the techniques that we would use is using the petrological microscope. We would use slides like this, which have been collected, which are in, I suppose, in drawers and in archives and people's offices in each of the partner institutions and in museums throughout the country and certainly even around the world. But as you can see there, these are made of glass, they break easily, etc., and also they can be in limited supply. So the virtual microscope essentially digitizes these thin sections, these slides, these .03 millimeter thick slices of rock. So thinner than the human hair, sliced through the rock. And when you slice through a rock like this, the colors and the shapes, to put it very simply, become quite beautiful, quite incredible. And then the methods that you use to actually analyze and to investigate these various minerals and crystals begin to tell you a lot about the rock and the processes and what's in there themselves. I'll just give you a quick look at what we're actually talking about just in a sense. So on the Open University's website, we have begun to get some of these resources, if you like, the hard resources themselves into digital format. Now the Open University have the virtual microscope.org website and they have various collections there. Here we have our own one which is a work in process as such. We have about at present four or five sections digitized. I've been over to visit the Open University and their virtual microscope lab in Milton Keynes. So I can open up one of these here and you can get a sense of what we're talking about. Now think about it, as a second or third year student, if you want access to these slides, you generally get it for maybe two or three hours a week. If you're missing for any reason or if you want to do revision towards the end of the year before your exams, time is limited. Through this, we can give 24-7 access to these slides themselves and they really are quite beautiful. But what the virtual microscope is doing for us is it's given us full interactivity and essentially we can use a lot of the techniques and the operations that you would use with the physical microscope itself. Nice to have on an internet browser, but likewise it also works perfectly well on a smartphone. I don't know if you can see that there, but basically the same thing here. Now what this allows us to do is to give students the ability to move from the lab itself or from the teaching environment in the university to also couple this with field studies. So in other words, we can bring students out into the field to look at field locations. If it's not too bright and if the sun isn't shining too brightly, we can actually allow them to look at these on their smartphones or even later on back in the hostel if it's a residential field course. One of the tasks initially that we had to start out to do was among the partner organizations, the five organizations, was to look at various courses and programs that use the petrological microscope. So we basically made a table of them and began to look at what are the shared ingredients in each of the menus that the institutions deliver to their students. We also went to quite a intense look at what resources are available in each of their virtual learning environments. Each of the partner organizations in Ireland use Blackboard Learn. So that was very, very useful in identifying how we can, in a sense, throw the net and catch as much with what we're going to develop. So we have our first batch of rocks as I mentioned there. I was in the open university recently enough and it was quite a pleasure to be able to have the Irish samples of rocks alongside the other sample of rocks which are being developed at the moment which are moon rocks from the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. So what I'd like to, I suppose, get across with this is the virtual microscope is developing and when we talk about the impact for the future it's growing. It's got an international, I suppose, application and alongside the resources which will be specifically geared to teaching and learning here in Ireland students will, if you like, if they hit the wrong link they will end up on something very, very interesting as well. So, you know, either on the moon or elsewhere. We have our own dedicated website. The name of the project it's sent is G-Lab or the Geoscience e-laboratory. However, we've kind of tweaked it a little bit and introduced GeoLab. We think it communicates a bit more to students, to teachers. It even has a bit, it runs off the tongue a little bit easier. So we're hosting that website. That is, I guess, it's certainly in development and we'll tweak it as we go along. But this is just a quick look at it here where we will have links through to the virtual microscope where we'll have links to the Irish university collection and also we will tie in some of these samples into field sites so that we will actually have this macro-scaled availability of geological learning material. Everything from Google Earth, flyovers, movies, down to outcrop level, interactive, well not exactly interactive, very, very high quality panoramic images of field sites right down to microscopic level and hand specimens. So if you like giving students at the full, at the full scale altogether. As I mentioned there, yes, we're looking at, we have actually already two examples of field sites and on the website and we're looking at introducing published research that does use some of these thin sections of rock slides to actually help inform and integrate into our undergraduate teaching. So that's very nice. Pat, we'll drop back to you for this. Sure. So in terms of impact, I suppose the first and obvious thing is that we'll acquire a full set of Irish focus digitized material which is the first of its kind. Again, building on the initial materials developed by Trinity College Dublin. This is the first time I think, hand on my hat, that all the Irish Geoscience departments at schools, and they're quite small, have come together and worked in close collaboration with respect to teaching. And it's been great. You know, for the first time we've been speaking to colleagues with a shared vision and I think that cannot be understated here. We have the, in terms of the logistics and the practicalities, one of the core drivers here is to reduce costs and reduce resource costs, which are increasingly in the third level sector are a big issue for us. Again, this idea of having to produce very delicate rock-thin sections that are quite expensive to produce. They're over 30 to 50 euros of pop to produce. They're so easily broken, that will hopefully, or this initiative will focally address that. So in terms of national impact, we're reaching out to, the ideal, of course, will be that material that we produce will be, and certainly all the digitized slides that we produce, as part of the Open University collection, the Irish collection within the Open University collection will be online and open access. We will develop a number of e-tutorials and other teaching resources that again, that will be shared. In terms of promoting this, I think there's, we should mention Eyecracker, which is the Irish Centre for Research. This is a recently funded SFI national research initiative, and I think it's fair to say that this initiative had a big role in bringing together the teaching departments involved in putting in for this proposal and driving it. We're going to reach out to and have reached out to the Irish Geological Survey. We have an annual research meeting, and obviously I should say, which is not mentioned here, is that we will be looking to deliver papers at International Conference as well, in particular the European Geophysical Union meeting in Vienna. So I think in terms of sustainability, I think as it stands, we're going to produce, we'll have a series of digitized Irish rock 10 sections, up to 20 10 sections, we'll have a set of resources that in terms of long-term use, over the course of the 18 months of the project, as they're developed, will have a future, or will have a long-term impact to teaching in Irish, at level institutions. There will be there, there will be a resource that can be tapped into, I would say, for many years to come. The potential of this technology in terms of distance learning and adult and continued education is pretty obvious. This is user-friendly. This is accessible to people. The requirement for people to come in, to dedicated labs, in some respects, is reduced. And again, the fact that it's dovetailing very nicely with iCRAG, I think, will only add to the longer-term sustainability of the project. So I think I will leave it there. And again, let me take this opportunity to thank the National Forum for the support in this. It's been very, very beneficial. Thank you.