Welcome, everyone. I'm going to turn off my video here and share my screen with you. But it's great to be spending this time with you. Let me stop this video. So my name is Teresa Slotak, and I am going to be talking to you about North Star digital literacy assessments. Today, and I am not sure how many of you know about the assessments or not, so I'm going to pretty much go over everything with you. And if you have questions, I would love to hear them. Some of you may be familiar with North Star, and if that's the case, I will be talking about some of the ways that we're using North Star to help in this time when there's remote teaching. So, first of all, I want to start out by saying that North Star is a program of Literacy Minnesota, and you may have heard of us are our former name, we just changed our name this year was Literacy, was the Minnesota Literacy Council. And so we've been around for about 50 years, we are very involved in the adult basic education world and have, and we have six of our own schools here in Minnesota. We provide statewide training to programs for their staff, as well as for volunteer teachers that might teach at their schools and we are also nationally recognized for many of the free, much of the free curriculum teacher training tools that we have on our website. And the advocacy that we do. So that's kind of the bigger organization. North Star itself is a part of that. And you can see from this that we are used very widely across the United States and in several other countries. And as a matter of fact, we've had recently several countries ask us to North Star right now is only in English but they've asked if we could translate it into other languages. So it is something that around the world people are needing digital literacy and are finding North Star to be one of the only products that addresses digital literacy on a very basic level. So here's my question for you and you can put this in the chat. I actually let's put it in the q&a just so I can see that. So how does it affect people to not be able to use computers how have you seen it affect people you know your learners yourselves, maybe just type type in a couple examples in the q&a. Can access unemployment insurance. Yeah, can't use email to apply for jobs. That's right. You can't do banking online public applications the children's schoolwork or even talk to the teacher sometimes if they're sending emails. Yeah, a lot of jobs do require some digital knowledge. I'm registering for classes. All right, you all have great answers. Thank you very much. I am sure that there are many more. I won't read them all at this point. But I, I think those are like great examples of how detrimental it can be to people to not have digital, you know, basic digital literacy skills. That's my question, but most health care now are on portals. So to check your results of your lab. Those are someone wrote unable to get through life period and that's a very good, good answer. And someone wrote that they teach English, and a lot of their students aren't able to participate in the online class. So that's true, especially in this time, people are who are not digitally literate at the same time, not only for themselves learning English or going to school but also helping their children to who are now forced to online learning. I've also noticed known a lot of people who feel that they're disconnected. So maybe they don't know how they can. They want to have digital literacy to connect with their grandchildren. For example, I've heard quite a bit from people. There's also greater connection with just what's going on in the world if you can't access internet. So North Star was started in 2008. And at that time, if you remember, we were in a recession as well. And we, the local library here in St. Paul was seeing a lot of people coming in, asking for digital skills training. And the library did have a computer lab, but they didn't know for sure what they should be teaching or how to assess if people were actually learning it. So they asked us if we would make an assessment to help them, you know, with this issue. So we gathered experts from kind of around the nation and looked at what should the standards be for each, what we call modules. So for basically what do you need to know for email, what do you need to know for doing a career search online. And we created a, and then we built the assessments around those standards to show competency and understanding of those standards. And we also, because we are an organization that is an ABE, we wanted to create a product that was accessible by as many learners as possible. So we created the products to be used by learners who have an intermediate or higher English level. We weren't able to reach very basic English language learners, but the, the product was built so that they're as you'll kind of see there are words that are written and then there's a voice that's talking about what's being written and people can play that, that Oh, I'm sorry, someone asked what is ABE adult basic education is what we have done so, especially working with. We especially work with people who are either English language learners or getting their working on getting their high school equivalency degree. That's what we are organization often does. That's why we kind of our focus was on making this very accessible and easy language was easy to use. It was shorter sentences so this is something that wasn't really out there. So really believe that the that these assessments be used to help people rather than, for example, using them to not hire someone so we, we've, if organizations want to use them as a gatekeeper we kind of try to prevent that. We are non profit ourselves. And so we wanted to, well I should say back up a bit and say, so we created this initially for the St. Paul public libraries, and it's an online product and we really thought it would only be used in St. Paul. Because there's really nothing else at the time and still like it at this level. It just kind of spread on its own and became very widely used. And we, we, because we're a nonprofit we wanted it to be affordable to other nonprofits and you know, any any institution that would like to use it. So, there is an aspect of it that is free that anyone can use. And then there's also a subscription aspect and I'll, as it go along I'll kind of explain the differences. And the subscription aspect is it's a yearly subscription very moderately priced, we really only charge to be able to kind of keep up with new technology and add new add in new features. So that's our main goal in sharing and having North Star. So North Star as I said was started out as assessments. And for a long time that's, that's the main focus. And I will get into all four of these things as we go along. But at some point, many, many organizations were using us. And I should say too that we have organizations who are that that do career pathways we have community colleges we have some businesses we have libraries. We have, as I said it all basic education so there kind of runs the gamut a lot of different organizations use us workforce centers. People were saying, this is great we have the assessments, but if someone doesn't pass. In the past, we would direct them either to the site would have a class or they would somehow train the people or there are free online sources on the web that didn't always correlate exactly with the assessment or sometimes you'd have to go through a lot of extra information to, to learn different modules. So people were asking us, can you create curriculum. And we decided that we could. So we have, as I said, or I don't think I said but we have 12 assessments 12 assessment modules, we're about a little less than halfway through and creating the curriculum for those modules. So that would be more like a classroom led instruction or even a one on one tutoring. Well, then we, people are very happy about that but we also got feedback that could we do something where a learner could learn on their own. We've just recently in the past couple months released north star online learning. And that current currently has one module which I'll show you. And we are creating more modules for that as well. And then the last feature is also really important I think because it lets you, it gives you reporting features so that you can go to whoever your funders are or whoever you need to give results to and show, you know, assessments you've given how many how many have been successful. So it's just a really handy feature for that reason. I'm going to talk about assessments first. And, as you can see, the assessments are there's 12, and they're broken into kind of three general areas. The first is really the first essential computer skills the first three of those are something that everyone should be able to pass before they go on to other assessments. And that being said, you don't have to do them in any certain order you don't have to do all of them. You might just be interested in. You might have someone who's just interested in PowerPoint and and learning PowerPoint and seeing how well they do on that assessment or the career search skills for example.  It's really up to you and your learners as to what you what assessment modules you would want to use. The assessments are the assessments themselves are free to anybody to take on our website. And then if you have the subscription, of course, all the assessments are included as well. And the, I'll talk about the difference in a second. But when you have, when you take an assessment. It's the results page and we'll let you know if he passed or not. And we in our assessments say that you need 85% to pass. And if you look down at the green column, you can't see all of it because this is a picture but it would list all the skills that you had master. And then the purple column would list what you need to work on. So if let's say you got 70%. You can do those things that that you or your learner needed to to work on before you took the assessment again. If you are in a subscriber, you can claim a badge which are sometimes used in various educational settings and sometimes for jobs, which is basically a electronic certification.  So you can verify that they weren't using notes they weren't asking someone else that this is a true reflection of how much they know. If someone takes the assessment, the free assessment online. There is no certification because there's no verification that they didn't have help. So that's one of the major differences. When we first created their certifications we thought. I know the biggest benefit would be to show employers what people had learned. And that definitely does happen. There was, I know there was a patron at library who came in wanting to learn Excel, because he said that if his, that his boss said if he learned Excel he would get a promotion so he passed Excel certification or past Excel assessment and got the certification and brought to his boss and got the promotion. However, we found that actually the, the biggest benefit of certifications is the confidence it will build in your learners or your participants or whoever you're working with. Many people who I work, I help out in one of our computer labs. And at that computer lab we get a lot of people who are in their upper 50s, lower 60s who have been doing manual labor for most of their career, and now just physically can't. And so they're looking to, to reskill themselves, but it's been a long time since they've been in school. And sometimes they haven't had great experiences in school. So they're very nervous and scared and then compound that with computers which they may not know much about. And when they pass the assessment, it's like this light goes on in their eyes is, it's kind of amazing to see. And I've had people start crying for joy. I've had people give me high fives. And I, I see it too in them able to translate that new confidence into other things. So I was working with a woman who was interviewing for jobs. At the same time she was practicing her computer skills. And she was feeling kind of stuck and she was feeling like she wasn't getting second interviews and she was, I think, feeling quite down. And she passed after after some struggle. She passed the PowerPoint assessment and and she like got certification and she went out and she had another interview and she just brought that confidence to the interview and ended up getting a job and it was remarkable to see the change just in her, her demeanor and her kind of attitude, just from tackling that what to her had been a little bit difficult. It also helps with persistence because the modules themselves are short enough that you do get a win. You can see your results. So, for example, if you're studying for something long term like getting a GED or something that takes a while, it's hard to see the end and it's hard to feel like you're making progress sometimes. And here you can, you can definitely see the different, you know, that you are making progress that doesn't take that long to learn the materials and then pass the assessments. We at one point, we're going to give certificates with, you know, someone's name and then all the modules they had passed on one certification. And people didn't like that they wanted to have a separate one for every module they had passed and some people have framed them. Some people put them up on their Facebook page. So it's a really fun thing to see. I did have a organization that they are a prison and they, they have classes particularly for young men to get their GED and they weren't the young men weren't seeing the value of studying or being in school really. And at the same time, they started North Star and they, they all felt that they knew computers as they all had cell phones. But they realized that cell phones are different than computers and weren't able to pass the assessments right away. So then they were determined to study and, and did and pass the assessments and that kind of persistence and that idea that studying can help you get places transferred over to them, learning different, you know, more educational English and not English but math and science for their GED. So that was kind of exciting. This is a picture of one of our learners who did pass all 12 of the modules. I don't, I don't know that he's holding all 12 of the certifications but just to show that it is a really, really something of pride for people. All right, so what are assessments used for what do people what are organizations using them for. It can often people often use the organizations often use them. Let's say they're going to use a distance learning platform, a different distance learning platform. They might want they often will use the assessments to be sure that people have the minimal skills of email, internet basics and computer basics just so that they're able to do distance learning. They often are used they can be used for employment, obviously, for higher education. A lot of times, teaching staff or people who are tutoring themselves they may be proficient in digital literacy but they may not know they may not know how to teach it so this kind of gives them idea of what what standards are in each assessment. And also, I feel like even, even though I use computers a lot, I have definitely learned things by taking the assessments that I didn't know so they do help us all become more proficient. We do have several organizations that use them to upskill their own employees. And then people use them to, if they're going to use like if they're going to go to higher level computer skills they have people go through these assessments first to make sure they're ready for that. During this time, when we're all pretty much stay at home. I talked about how our assessments are proctored if you have a subscription, and we do now have remote proctoring available. And it's fairly easy you would just use something like zoom, and you kind of verify that the person's identity and you monitor them while they're taking the test. Star Star has a great document that kind of outlines exactly how to do it. It's, it's quite easy, but it's been very helpful to people who don't have brick and mortar places at the moment for their, for their learners or participants to come to. I'm going to switch to talking about curricula. And I kind of told you why we started creating it and you can see we have these six units now available. And then the next three should be available in the next couple of months. So, when we are, we're making curricula, we, again, went with the audience in mind of people who maybe English wasn't their first language, or maybe there are people who had not been around technology obviously for a while, or at all. And so we tried to, in the curricula, make it not only easy for teachers to use, but also to make it accessible for many different types of learners, job seekers, that kind of thing. So we aligned the each curriculum module with our standards. So the standards, the assessments and the curriculum are all aligned. We tried to, as you probably know, using computers, the best way to learn computers is to actually use them. So the curricula is meant to be either teacher led or tutor led, but is very interactive and I would say there's a lot of repetition, a lot of opportunity for repetition. And what's really nice about the curriculum is you don't have to teach it from start to finish. You can pick and choose what might be useful to you. And so, for example, I was talking to a group of people who were helping their participants get jobs. So they would pick out of the lessons, the aspects that dealt with applying for jobs. So it might be how to go online. The internet would be one, how to use, how to fill out forms online, how to use email, how to properly write an email, how to create a resume. So it would be kind of they could pick and choose different, different aspects of the curriculum that related to what they were doing. I myself don't have a teaching background, but I did teach the internet basics curriculum to a group of people. And it was very easy to use. So I didn't have to spend more than probably 15 minutes of time ahead of time with prep work, and that was mostly just making handouts. This was back when we were face to face. And so it is really well laid out. It's very easy to follow. And I, I really found it helpful to me as a teacher, to me teaching it, but also to the people that I was teaching. And in fact, one of the women, we had a break over the holidays, and she I'm in Minnesota, she had gone to Florida to be with family. And she came back and on the day that we had our class and she said, Oh, I came back on a one one a.m. flight, and our class was in the in the evening.  I know you're tired. And she said, Well, I could have come back tomorrow. It would have been half, half the cost. And this woman was a custodian. And she lived in public housing so she didn't have a lot of money. It's just that it would have been half the cost but I didn't want to miss the class because no one else has ever taken the time to teach me this. And so it was just very moving and at how important it was. Someone asked me if this is the curriculum is available in other languages beside English. And not at this time we are really hoping to translate everything of North Star into different languages. And I'm currently looking for funding to do that. So, but it would be great if we could do that. Each module has about six to eight lessons. And they, and again, you could teach this as a class or you could adapt it for one on one instruction. So, a lot of times as I'm working one on one with people. I'll just pull out some of the worksheets or some of the practices and we'll go through the practice of something that they need help with. I did not only as good as a curriculum but it's really good at letting you know how to talk to people and how to teach people this even in, let's say, not passing but in a smaller situation. So, depending on your class size and the background of the people, we say it takes about two hours for each lesson. Mine was a smaller group and, but it was composed of ELL learners. And it took maybe an hour and a half for each lesson for us to go through the lessons. And we, and they had a lot of questions and what was really fun was to see how engaged they were. The lessons are well written for adults so that they find it engaging and they relate it to their own lives. And that was very exciting to see. As we are all now working remotely. We also have created at North Star an instructional guide on how to use a curriculum remotely with your, with whoever you're helping. And so there, there are some very detailed step by step guide on how to do that and it's, it's actually quite easy to, to use it remotely. Of course, as long as your, your students have the, the capacity, which as we know is often a problem with digital literacy. The lessons are all, they kind of all follow the same format. They have the teacher modeling and explaining something, then they have ideally people working together if they, if they do, but you could skip that part if there's only one person. And then they, there's some repetition of practicing the skill. It also always includes vocabulary, because oftentimes, even, even those of us who use computers all the time. Sometimes people are like, what's the, where, where do I, what does URL stand for or something like that. So it kind of also uses that vocabulary so that everyone knows what is meant by a certain term. And this is not that clear. It doesn't come through that clear on your screen, I am sure, but it kind of gives you, this is what the first page of any lesson would look like. So you can see the vocabulary list in the, in the right hand, upper corner talks about what standards that addresses at the bottom it's great because it tells you as a teacher what you need to copy and any, any other prep that you need to do. So it's really nice if you're teaching to just quickly glance at it and see what this lessons and help. As I said, we recently have created what we call North Star online learning, so that with a little bit of help students can get started on this and it's something that they can see on their screen and it's a tutorial but then it also directs them to practice. So I am going to, I'm going to show you an example of what the basic computer module looks like. And what you should, once I click on the link, what you should see is you'll see, you'll see a picture of a computer, and then you'll hear a woman reading, and I will let her finish reading and then I'll talk again. But this is an example of one of the kind of instructional pieces of the North Star online learning. If you look closely at the outside of a computer, you will see buttons and many small holes. These holes are usually called ports. Each port has a specific shape for different uses and different types of plugs. So you can see that she reads very slowly and clearly for someone who, let's say, doesn't speak English as their first language, but also for someone who maybe is just concentrating a lot. It's not like they're rushing through and you can go back and listen to it again over here with a little arrow as many times as you want to. You can see the words in case you have someone who's deaf who's using it, which we have had. So it's trying to be as accessible to people as possible. So now if I click, that was kind of the one tiny bit of the tutorial. Then if I click next. Here is a flash drive that you can plug into a computer. Click on the port that matches it. You can see then that it asks the person viewing to test their skills to see if they actually understand what's going on. So then if I click on the port, it will tell me I got it right. If I got it wrong, it will tell me, you know, no, this is not a USB port. The USB port is here. And so that is really nice for people to get that real time feedback. And then what I also like about it is when I click next, it will give me a check mark to say, hey, you got it right. Here are some earbuds you can plug into a computer. Click on the port that matches them. So as we went as we would go through this module, this is a computer module. There would be at certain breaking points, there would be little quizzes. And then the person viewing it would have to get the quiz right in order to keep going. And if they didn't, they'd be directed to go back and listen again. And at the end of the module, there's another quiz. And if the person does well, then they're directed to take the assessment. So it kind of prepares you or it lets you know when you're ready to take the assessment. And what's really interesting is we used to have a computer lab that I help out in. We would have people take the assessment and then we had various free online resources that we had not created that have been created by other people that we would walk through and help people learn. And sometimes people would have to take this assessment several times, you know, with learning in between before they actually passed it. We found now that even if people come in and don't don't do very well in the initial assessment, once they do the online learning something like 95% of people are passing. So it is very effective. We found learning tool. So someone asked if these are free to use for a school. And that's a great question. Right now because of the pandemic. We are making North Star online learning free to anybody. So you can access it at our website which I will show you at the end of this presentation. Normally, this is something that only subscribers would get. Whether they're a school or not. And as I, as I think I said, we currently only have the basic computer skills online learning, we have internet basics and career search skills in the works and internet basics should be done by the end of May. So we have career search skills by the end of June. And then ultimately we plan to do all of the modules as we get the funding to do that. So I see a few more questions. Yeah, so good question someone said will free access continue through the end of May or the end of June or we playing it by ear. And that is a great question we are are playing it by ear to kind of, as this pandemic plays out. And well April for sure may. Yes, I don't know about June. So, we're kind of just doing this as, as people are kind of forced to stay at home and having to work remotely for now. And then our website will kind of keep people updated as to that piece. And one thing that's nice about the online learning is it's each student has their own account so if you, if you are a subscriber you are an admin administrator, and you can sign up students as you wish to have their own account. And if you do what that gives them is it lets them see their process their progress on. I'm sorry, the online learning, as well as the assessments. So I'm going to give you an example of what that looks like. So this is what an individual dashboard would look like. And right now as I said we only have the basic computer skills but ultimately, all of the modules are on here as you can see. So here it shows that this is for me, and it shows that I have done 27% of the practice questions, and I have not yet taken the assessment, but it would show my best. I had taken the assessment several times it would show my best score. And it gives so gives individuals as well as administrators and teachers, the ability to see how, how much of the online assessment someone's done, how what they, which assessments they've passed. And then if we hit details, it also will show us that but it will then go to the different parts of the online learning and say what I've done so I went through what are computers what kinds of computers are there, and you can see the green check here. As we get down farther it will show what I have not yet looked at. And if I wanted to go back to a specific, you know, like, I don't remember what the different mice are, I could go click here and it would take me back to that section of the online learning. I saw I had a few questions. So let me someone said can we subscribe with a personal account not associated with the school so we can tutor our own group of students. Usually it's an organization that would have the subscription, and then you can have you can give as many assessments at, at as many sites as you want to. So for example, you know, sometimes it'll just be one library let's say that hasn't has a subscription and then they can give the assessments to as many patrons as they want. We also have like the state of Georgia all their community colleges are are subscribed to North Star so then they all have their own site. Someone asked how much it costs. And so it depends again on your, your organization so it depends on how many have and how many assessments you think you'll be giving in a year. So yearly subscription in general, and you can look on the website but in general it's about $500 a year for a site, but if if you have a lot of sites we often give a bulk price. That's cheaper. So, and to, yeah someone asked to clarify current free access would mean students can do the one module online. Yep, that's true and then they can take the assessments without the certifications. So that's what is available available for free. We also have on our website for free links to curated online learning that we did not make but that we feel does a good job of, of meeting the standards. We also have the ability to do bulk creation of learner accounts so at this moment let's say you you have 30 people that you want to create online learning profiles for you don't have to go in and do everyone separately you can do them by pull them from a list you might have or an Excel spreadsheet or something like that so that just makes it a little bit easier to use. Someone asked if we use edu.gcfglobal.org as a resource. I personally don't know the answer to that question. I can check it out and get back to you, but I off the top of my head I don't know. Teresa, can I just chime in on that. Yeah, so GCF. Yeah, a lot of teachers know about GCF learn free, but I'm my understanding is that GCF learn free is its own website with its own created videos and its own created activities. Everything that you're seeing with North Star today is basically developed by North Star. Is that correct, Teresa? Yeah, that's right. Yes. Yes. So you're totally separate from any other other other websites that are out there other resources that are out there everything that you've developed is developed in-house by North Star. Yes, that's very true. The only maybe my confusing point was that on our website, the free part of the website, we do link to other organizations that we haven't worked with so we just found their sources useful but that is not been used to create North Star. That's kind of those are just external links. The other nice thing, like I said about well, one nice thing about North Star if you are a subscriber is you have a lot of control over the administration. So you can create your own administrators and proctors. You don't have to go to us every time you want to add someone or change something and you can run reports by yourself. Again, you have a lot of independence. We do have a help desk that we try to answer questions as quickly as possible. So if you do have a question or you're having a problem, you know, you can always reach us that way. But it's nice because you're not dependent on us to do a lot of the administrative aspects that you can do yourself. So I do want to show you a little bit some of the reports. So you can see what it is that you may find useful to see how much you're using North Star or how effective it is for your site. So one of the reports would show you per site what which of the assessments people are taking. So you can see here that, for example, over at this site, over 1000 people have taken 1000 assessments have been given for windows. So this can help you if you're trying to do if you have limited resources and you're thinking I can only do a few classes. This might tell you what people are wanting and what people are taking. You can also be used in, you know, reporting to say we've given these many assessments on these different topics, which is always nice. And then it also goes into of the assessments past what percentage of people have passed them. So you can kind of see what what things people struggle with the most and what they might need the most the hardest assessments, or they might just meet need more instruction on. But it also can give you an idea of a we gave you know however many career search skills and 72% of people have now passed them. So that can give you some insight into how your program is running. Someone asked if a person if a person can have a subscription, and the answer is no, it would just be an organization that would have the subscription. A person could use the free, the free assessments and the free right now the free online learning module. But they wouldn't be able to have a subscription, unless they were like a consultant perhaps, then using it for a lot of variety of learners. If you feel you have a unique situation like that, and you would want to discuss the possibility. I will show you our website address at the end of this presentation and you can can write in your, your question there and we can always discuss it if it seems like something that might be viable but in general I would say it's usually, but it has always been an organization. If we look at this report, you can see also based on modules which ones have how many have been given how many have passed what the percentage of passing is. If you go into one of the reports, you will see again that information, but it also tells you how long people are taking to take the assessment, which is just helpful in planning how long you might, you might need to proctor something or how long you can expect it will take. And it also shows you what questions people are getting wrong the most. So you can see here question 14. A lot of people are getting it wrong so it could be this can help inform your teaching because it could be that maybe you're not touching on it or something is confusing about it, or the question itself, maybe the vocabulary is not understood. So that can be really helpful in in creating your training that you're doing. And then if you are like, Oh, what was, what was question 14, why are so many people missing it. You can go down here and you can click and you'll actually be directed to the actual question on on the assessment. So you're, you're able to see what is that question about that someone asked what's the difference between new and legacy models modules. And the new modules are what's out there now the legacy modules are we last year, we redid the all the assessments, one to put them on a better web platform. And to just, you know, as you know digital literacy is constantly changing so we wanted to keep them up to date so the when you actually have the assessments you are just seeing the the new ones. But at this particular site that I'm showing you, they've been running for quite a while so it did not lose any of that information from the, the legacy assessments that they're that many of the learners took, you know, years in years past. Hopefully that makes sense. You can also see by individual kind of question by question, what they, how they are answering or what they're maybe having problems with. So for example, if we, if we look at this individual and we look at Microsoft Word. We can see that he passed what his score was how long it took him to take it, but also what standards he did master and what, what he did not. And then you could even as a, as a administrator or a teacher look and see, okay, well, he missed number 12 what was that question. Here's that question and although you would never share, you know, a direct answer with a user you could then kind of inform your teaching as to what they were missing or what they were confused with something like that. So that is kind of all I have. And I am wondering if you have any questions. This is the website here that you can go to and you can check out you yourself can check out the assessments and take them for free and, and just see what they're like. You can also from there if you're interested in trying out the North Star online yourself or with with any of your students that you're working with you, there are directions on how to give them access to that. If you want to subscribe. There's a place to enter your information and get pricing information based on how big you are and how many assessments you might give. And to ask any further questions, you can always direct questions to me about any of the information that I've talked about. If you have questions that come up, you know, in the next day or two or three that you think of, I'm happy to help you with those. And at this point, I'm going to ask if anyone has any questions. So, Teresa, I don't see any questions at the moment, but I'm wondering, since we have a few minutes, would you mind just kind of giving us a general orientation to the North Star website. And, you know, where we can find some of the things that you were talking about, you know, and how we can contact you if people have questions about pricing. So maybe just a couple of minutes to kind of orient us to what we're looking at when we, when we visit the North Star website. Well, that's a great idea. So let's go to the website. So this is the website. And if you scroll down, let's see, there's kind of three major sections. One is to take an assessment for free. And we'll go there. We will do that first. So if I click on that, it breaks it down into those three kind of major areas that I told you about. You can take whatever assessment you want. Once again, these are not proctored so there wouldn't be, you wouldn't be given a certificate for them. But if that is not important to you or your learners, you can take them all if you want to. We can take a look. I think. I'm going to skip some of this intro that would give an orientation. And then it will tell you how many questions there are. Select all of the internet browser icons, then click next. So this is an example of one of the first question. Someone taking the assessment can always click I don't know and move on. They can click to hear it again.  I answered question five wrong. I want to go back. You'd be able to go back. Once you complete the assessment, it also asks, are you sure you're ready to submit your answers or would you like to review any of them? So it gives you a lot of flexibility in thinking about how you might want to answer a question. If you wanted to become a testing location over here in the blue, you can, and a testing location would be to mean that you have a subscription. You can click here and it tells you a little bit and then it gives you a chance to fill out a form or ask a question about your site and what pricing would be like I said in general. So let's go ahead and roll. Let's just go here and see. It would have you fill out your information and then send it in and then you would get the pricing for your site. In general, it's about $500 a site.  So it's always good if you think you have a unique situation to explain that in this format. The other section was build your skills. And if we go there. That's where so that's where if you are someone who wanted to learn about how to go into a place to learn digital literacy. You could click here and then all of you who are subscribers would be listed by zip code so it would help someone find a place near them where they could actually work with a testing location. Here number two shows you how you can access the North Star online learning right now for free. And then as I mentioned here, we can click on this so these are other sources curated by North Star but not created by North Star. So this is the only part that we have not done ourselves that is linking to outside sources. For example, if you are using our just using the assessments for free and you don't have our curriculum, then you can use these other these free resources that are not tied in any way to North Star but we just have found them helpful. I have a few questions. Someone asked that this is accessible from a cell phone. It is but to be honest with you, some of the assessment questions are very difficult to do. So we, we are hoping to make it so that you can but at this point I wouldn't recommend that someone asked if you can get a free account or could use the assessments for free. So as you saw anyone can take the assessments for free you don't have to tell us you're going to take them for free you don't have to notify us in any way. And I, as of today over 4.2 million people have taken assessments. And many of them have done it for free. The curriculum you don't have access to unless you are a subscriber. And let's see someone said if we wanted to organize a North Star basic computing class online now and use the course management system with this require a subscription. If you wanted to. Yes, if you wanted to have reports on individuals learners if you wanted to have reports overall. It's true if you just wanted to direct, you know, some of your learners to the website to go through the actual North Star online learning for basic computing. You could do that you just want have access to the information of how many people had used it. How they're individual report card kind of. So if I'm a teacher. I see that you're logged into the site or signed into the site. Is there an account that I can use, or is it I can only create an account if I have the subscription. So, you can only create an account if you have subscription so once you subscribe, you would be given access as an administrator to your site and you would have as many sites as you wanted as many proctors as you wanted as many administrators as you wanted but you're given a unique kind of ID number to to access your information. And then so and if you can remind me again on this website because I've every so often I visit the North Star website. I know that there's a place and I'm not sure whether we've seen it yet where you have your kind of the standards laid out and the curriculum laid out so that I saw so that if I'm a teacher I understand kind of what is all the content that's on this North Star North Star website. Oh yeah, great, great question. So, we do have a link to the curriculum to the standards, so that you as an educator would know what are what are the standards. So here, if so what I did was I clicked on assessment info at the top. And then you can just scroll down to standards. And here you could get a list of all the updated standards for every module. And then you can also scroll down. And you can say I just want to know the standards for windows, for example, and then, and so if you would like we can look at, let's look at this one. And you what people should know in order to be proficient in this module. And then this is what we build the assessments around and what we build the curriculum around. And I've worked with teachers who aren't necessarily teaching digital literacy but they want to incorporate digital literacy into whatever it is they're teaching. So I found it helpful to look at the standards and say okay yeah this is this fits in with what I want to teach. And so, maybe we'll use this part of the curriculum or this part of the assessment, or this assessment to to work with my larger goal. So it's just in general. I mean do you find that that teachers are are have a like the method that they go about it is like they'll do an assessment as a pre test, and then do some instruction and then go back to the assessment as a post test, or are they just doing instruction and then doing the assessment like in general do you do you have some sense as as to how teachers are actually using the site. Yeah, so in general, teachers do do a pre assessment one to see if someone even needs to be in the class, you know, or to to see maybe what say they want to hold a class of 20 people. Maybe there's something that all everyone knows so they can just touch briefly on that or not even at all. So it can guide how they tailor their instruction, but also it's really helpful to the learner to see where they started and then after instruction, hopefully they pass that even if not how they've grown in their ability to understand the module. So, usually it's it's could either be a classroom type of situation, or sometimes it will be in your lab someone will come in. They're almost always given the, the basic computer assessment first, and if they pass that, then they might be given other assessments to kind of see what they know and how far along they are and where they're where maybe they need some help from an individual tutor. And so that's how I've seen it used. Like I say I've also known of organizations who have made all their teachers take the assessments, if as a prerequisite to show that they are are ready to teach digital literacy. So they have to pass the assessment before they can actually teach the digital literacy. So I've seen the assessments given to determine if a student is ready for other distance learning. I would say that's usually how I've seen it work. And I see a bunch of questions. So someone asked what what ESL levels is North Star appropriate for. So we created it created it to be used with intermediate ESL or higher, or, or native English speaker. So sometimes when I was teaching the class. I, I found that the English language learners could understand the lessons and they could understand the vocabulary that we went over. What sometimes was maybe needed more scaffolding was when, for example, they were, we were learning about websites, and they were searching for, I think they had to answer the question of the ZM website, how much is parking. Well, whatever, whatever the category that was under, if you weren't part of this culture, you might not recognize that as being where you'd find the parking information so those kinds of things sometimes I had to scaffold. But in general, for intermediate or above. Someone asked if I could answer or talk again about how much time lessons will take. So for each module, there's in general six to eight curriculum lessons that go with those modules. And we say it takes about two hours for each less lesson. And it was a class where they had a lot of questions. I would say it took about an hour and a half on average so it just depends on your class and, you know, how how adept people are, but we say two hours in general. And no, someone asked if your organization has an account is there any way to change the percentage required to pass. The answer is no, we have assessments themselves we cannot tailor to individual sites. One, we want to keep the integrity of the assessments, you know, just for our own sake. And that's really the main reason so the assessments themselves can't be changed. And so the percentage required to pass one be able to be changed. However, if you are administering assessments and you're finding something where you think the wording is is not clear or you have a question about one of the questions, or something in the curriculum, we get a lot of people. We get people writing to us who, who ask those kinds of things and, and often we will be able to work to make our product better because of what people are giving us feedback on. And also in terms of reporting, if you have specific reporting needs, we can sometimes create reports that are more specific to your organization. Any other questions that are coming up. Oh, they're actually the question just popped up in the Q&A. Okay. Someone asked what is the set percentage for passing it's 85% for each module. And then if you remember the screen that showed once you take an assessment it will tell you what. The standards you passed and what you have not as we continue as we continue to add to the North Star online learning. One really nice feature is that once you take that assessment and you see what standards you still have to work on. If you click on that it will take you to that place and the online learning that is talking about that standard so let's say you. And there's really only one kind of, or maybe like three different standards you needed to work on. You won't have to go the entire online learning if you didn't want to you certainly could. But you could go specifically to those areas where you were having difficulty. Study them and, and, and hopefully then when you took the assessment again have learned what you needed to know. Oh, here's a great question. Do the tests allow for a redo to give the student a chance to pass. Yes, they do. You can only take at a proctored site so that would be a subscriber site. You can only take what an individual can only take the same assessment twice in any given day. On the free site you can only take it once in any given day. And the reason we limited it was because we were finding that in some instances, people just kept taking the assessment over and over and over again and so they were kind of learning the right answer just by kind of trial and error. And we wanted to really want to hope that people would actually learn, learn the information through other ways than just repeatedly taking the test. So, but people do take the assessments, sometimes multiple times if it's a, if it's a something they find challenging. And it's nice because then you can see your progress, even if you're not passing, you can still see your hopefully you're getting better as your percentage goes up. And that is very encouraging to the assessment taker. Someone asked if there are any digital literacy resources available for the beginning level ESL. So I have known teachers who have taken the North Star curriculum and really scaffolded it quite a bit down and so it might take a lot longer to do something. It might take more. There are quite a few pictures in the curriculum, but it might just take more time and more effort on the teachers part. I have known of teachers who have used it for beginning level ESL. At this moment in time with remote learning, it might be very difficult, especially if it's if they don't have digital literacy skills and they're beginning ESL might be difficult. Unless you maybe had an interpreter. But, but it certainly has been done in the classroom. Teresa, can we show people again that the place on the North Star site that links to the outside resources because I did notice that I think that North Star does link to some other websites that might be good for the beginning level ESL students. For example, learning chocolate I think is is linked to a number of times and teachers have found that particular site to be helpful when they're, especially when they're helping their students learn some of the basic vocabulary words. I haven't, I haven't looked too thoroughly through that part of the website but if you could show us again where that is, and then maybe folks can take a look at what you have listed there and think about maybe some of those other resources that they could also use in conjunction with the North Star site. Yeah, so on the main homepage. If you go to build your skills and click on the see more, you will find number three is view other resources from the web. And what's nice about this is we. So again, these are not things that we created, but we show whether it is a text resource media, or has the learner do an activity. And then it's again arranged by the modules. And so then it goes through the different standards and it says okay if you want to learn between different types of devices, there's a print resource and there's a media resource.  So that is all available on the North Star site. And then it kind of goes through all these different standards that are associated with this module and different resources that you can use to do it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really show you the name of the resource until you click on it.  So if you can't afford North Star at this time. This is a great way to go to different free websites. We try to keep this updated frequently, we try to update this frequently. Sometimes as you know, like websites or die or they, they go away so sometimes the links will perhaps not lead anywhere but we do our best to keep it to keep them viable. So someone said that their school has stopped using multiple choice test questions for summative assessment, they only use it for formative. Do we offer open ended questions or other writing tests. We do not. Mainly, I don't know. That's not how it was developed but also with the ELL component in mind I think it was felt that it would be more accessible to people if they weren't having to write the answers in this. So they weren't having to not only show their digital literacy but also their, their English language literacy. Would say that if you wanted to use the standard, I mean the standards as they are, it would require, you know, your site to create questions related to those standards. Again, I'm sorry on the North Star website was there an easy way to reach out to you to contact you with other questions. On the North Star website. Or should they just email you directly or. Yeah, so you can either on the North Star website you can either go to just on the homepage. There will be a at the top oops sorry where it says become a testing location if you press if you click learn more than there's a place to answer questions there like here if we go to learn more and then ask a question so any question and that would be answered by anyone on the help desk that would be answered by the person on the help desk who would be the best person to answer so if it was a very technical question are our, you know, computer designer would answer it if it was a pricing question pricing manager would answer it for example. However, if you have a question that you want to ask me personally I'm happy to to talk to you via email and my email is here on the slide. At the top. So either way is whatever you're most comfortable with is fine with me. So I want to thank Teresa for our presentation today that's been very very useful. I'm helping us learn a lot more about North Star. While we have a minute because I know a couple of people asked the question. Teresa if you wouldn't mind if you could stop sharing just so I can show people. The website really quickly. And then where we were going to post this information. So I'm going to open up my desktop here. Let me see if I can find the website. So, so for those of you wanting more information, please go to the website otan.us. If you look at the top story on our homepage, we do have information about the upcoming activities for the week. Webinars, our office hours are also posted here at the top. And then when you're at the website at the homepage please click on this COVID-19 field support button. This will bring you to our COVID-19 field support page where we're trying to organize a number of resources that we're want to share with the field. But in time we will, as soon as we can post Teresa's handout and a recording of today's session on this in the previous OTAN webinars table, which you find on the page. So again, as soon as we can get those resources accessible, we will make them available on the website. Also take a look at the OTAN resource guide. If you click on this link, it opens up a Google Doc and we actually do have a little bit of information about North Star here as well. We've worked with North Star for a number of years. And so if you click on the online curricula section, I believe that's where it is. No, no, no, actually I think it's on our homepage. Oh yeah, right at the beginning. Websites to acquire digital skills. So we do have a number of sites listed in addition to North Star digital literacy. And we actually have a previous video from I think last year's Technology and Distance Learning Symposium. So if you also want to learn more about North Star, you can do it by watching this video as well. Teresa, actually there's one more question in the Q&A, if you wouldn't mind. Oh, I see that. So the question was, I thought you said at the beginning that the online was free until the end of May. That is, we're kind of going with the pandemic and not are not sure how long we'll offer the free North Star online learning. But since it's, it will be at least until the end of May and then perhaps longer, it's hard to say at this point. I will officially say again, thank you Teresa so much for presenting today about North Star.


Today, Suresh would like to discuss the three eras of enterprise architecture and what is coming up in the new era of 3.0 and how the landscape of enterprise architecture is going to change. So a warm virtual welcome for Suresh over to you, sir. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. I hope that you're all staying safe in this COVID era. So today I would like to talk about the enterprise architecture in the digital age. So a little bit about myself, I think Simon has introduced me, but just to give a quick overview of what I did. So I've been in the industry for the past 30 years and I've provided enterprise architecture consulting services in various industries like finance, automotive, health and retail. So some of the success stories that I want to share with you is we brought business agility within the organizations by enabling the business capabilities by planning and implementing those business capabilities in an agile way. We have developed some technologies around that. And then we helped organizations to digitally transform basically by architecting the digital platforms for those organizations using SMAC IT. I will explain that abbreviation SMAC IT. And then we optimized the infrastructure within the organizations, which brought about 40 to 60% savings. And also we did some application portfolio management, which is kind of correlated with that one. In some organizations, we did it in a separate initiative, which achieved some about, you know, 50% optimization in the organizations. And we provided some security services to the organizations and establishing the security at an enterprise level. And also we got some accolades from the CIO review magazine. We've been recognized as the top 20 companies across the world. And then who are providing enterprise active services. And we've been recognized as a company of the month in the July 25, 2015 edition. Now I would like to walk you through the journey of the EA, the history of the EA, right? I would like to take you to the past and then I would like to take you to the future. Now, so again, a disclaimer here. So this is my classification of the history of the enterprise architecture. So I hope those who are in the EA space for long would agree that. But if you have any questions on this, please feel free to post it on the Q&A. We'll take it up after the presentation. Now, I categorize all the EA into three categories. So EA 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, right? So I think that, so I, the 1.0 started late 80s, right? So it started very low and you know the reasons in 90s, we were developing systems left and right, right? So there was no EA or very little EA, right? And then after the 2000.com bubble burst, the EA eruption rate picked up rampant, right? So and then after the 2010s, again, it started to go down because the technology was rampant after 2010. So we have all the latest technologies like the smackage, the social media, analytics, cloud computing, all this stuff. And we are at this 2020 with the COVID, right? And so with the COVID coming in, I'm guessing that again, the adoption rate of EA is going to go up because we need to consolidate the systems, we need to consolidate the infrastructure. Again, we need to optimize whatever we are doing, right? Otherwise, probably I wouldn't say so, but my guess is we are going, the EA eruption rate is going to go up, right? So that's how I would like to categorize the EA. Now, let me walk you through what happened during the EA 1.0, right? So it was all technology focused. We tried to optimize the technology, but business and IT were disconnected. They are all in silo, so there was no connection whatsoever between the business and the IT, right? And the development was a bit traditional, like a waterfall method and all that. And it's all like whatever the governance we have, the very little governance that we had, it is all gated, right? So at every stage, we used to review the projects and so it was a very traditional gated governance. So that was the 1.0. And one of the good initiatives what I had observed, and this is one of the clients did this one, is to optimize the technology stack, right? So for each and every layer, right, right from the hardware to the OAS to the database, application servers, the data servers and security, all the shared services, they picked a product for each layer and then they built this technology stack so that the development teams and the operation teams can use this stack, right? So when I said that optimization of the technology infrastructure, so this is one of the most cool thing that I have seen in the industry is building this technology stack so that the organizations were able to optimize their technology infrastructure. So that was one of the major initiatives that I had observed during that 1.0. And to be an enterprise architect, we needed mostly technology skills, technical skills, right? So we didn't need any business skills or anything else, right? So all that we had to focus as an enterprise architect is to build this technology infrastructure, the technology services, right? So most predominantly, you should be an expert in the technology architecture rather than anything else, right? So that was the 1.0 and the maturity model, if you look at for 1.0 was we used only, you know, CMMI related maturity models which are predominantly for the implementation side, right? So that was all the maturity we were assessing at that time. Now after that 2000, I'm sorry, again, the governance, if you take the governance, so it is all gated governance and we have several gates during the process of development, right? To screen the ideas, to scope the ideas, right? To build the business case, to develop, test and launch. So we used to have gates at every stage of the development and the governance process is a bit of a lengthy process and, you know, there used to be a lot of friction between the development and the boards and, you know, it was, it was not a smooth governance, I would say. But those days, we were just learning about enterprise architecture, right? Now came the 2.0, right? So after the 2000, 2000.com bubble bus, then we got the holistic enterprise architecture, meaning when we started to optimize technology infrastructure in the early 2000s, we realized that unless we look from a business perspective, unless we optimize the business and align IT to the business and architect IT to align to the business, we cannot achieve much benefit, right? So with that thought process, so we got the holistic enterprise architecture in place and by mid-thousands, we got that concept in concrete. And then business started to engage EA a bit more, so there was some kind of alignment between the business and the IT. And there was some agile development also going on parallely. There was some waterfall development, but in parallel, there was some agile development also. And the governance was a little bit collaborative than like gated before, right? So it was, you know, so there was a feedback mechanism from the implementation teams also. So it's a bit of collaborative governance rather than a traditional governance, I would say. And we started, so by mid-thousand, 2010s, I would say, or 2010 onwards, I would say, like so we started to get the digital transformation, taking off the new technologies coming in, right? So the cloud computing and all this. And the FinTech started to transform a little bit more. So we got the transformations going on in the mid-cycle of the 2.0 like from, you know, 2010 onwards, right? And for this, the skills needed to be an enterprise architect are, so we needed some soft skills, generic skills, right? How do we, you know, the leadership skills, written communication skills, so all the soft skills were needed. And then the business skills also were needed to build the business case, strategic planning, etc. And then enterprise architectural skills like building block design, modeling, right? And then program project management skills, where we have to manage the teams, right? And establish the programs to manage the projects and some general IT, general knowledge skills, right? Technical skills, technical IT skills, right? For the technology infrastructure and all, legal for the laws and regulations and all that. So the enterprise architect needs to be a kind of a jack-of-all, kind of a person to do enterprise architecture during that 2002, 2020, right? So that was the transformation of an enterprise architect. And then to do that, the maturity, we had to assess the maturity, we used the ACMM, which is from the US Department of Commerce. So this is the maturity model, there are six levels of maturity. So and then we use these nine elements for assessing the maturity of the organizations. So the architecture process, so how well the processes are being defined for the architecture and then how well the architecture development is done within the organizations and how well the business is linked to the enterprise architecture, right? And the senior management involves like how much, you know, we got the buy-in from the senior management, how much the business units are participating, right? How well we are communicating to the whole organization on the EA aspects, right? The artifacts are how much EA education is done across the enterprise. And security is from an IT perspective here. So how well the IT is integrated with the enterprise architecture. And then the architecture governance, how well we are governing, what are the, have we established the governance processes or not. And then the IT investment, how well the enterprise architecture is involved in the IT investment and acquisition study. So those are the nine elements that we considered to assess the maturity of the organization back then, right? And I see that there is a two schools of thought during this period. One went on in the traditional path where they still continued the waterfall kind of development. But what many organizations did was they reduce the quality gates, the governance gates, right? So instead of having five or six gates, now we have only three gates, like, so the governance was made a bit easy, a bit more collaborative, right? So that was the change I have seen in some organizations. And some organizations went agile, right? So it is all agile development, incremental development, and the governance was probably very less or even zero, I would say, right? And one of the drawbacks that I've seen in these two schools of thought was these organizations, so those who picked the traditional development path, they were developing all the applications and the same methodology, using the same methodology, either traditional or agile, right? So those who picked the agile, they were developing all the systems or the IT development on the agile development, right? So which is dangerous, which is not very good. I will explain why in a minute when we get into the 3.0, right? And so it was all, so it was big agile governance, right? So forecasting and budget was done dynamically and the measurements, it was all portfolio level metrics and measurements, and the compliance is also, it's all coordinated between the teams and it's a continuous process, right? Now coming to the 3.0, now this is one of the Harvard professor has come up with this, these are the transformations more from a business perspective, right? So they categorize the transformations into three categories which are like, so one is operational and the second one is the operational model and the third one is strategic. Operational means, so you're trying to bring operational efficiency, you're trying to make things faster, better, cheaper, right? Using the new technologies, so whatever the new technologies that we have, the SMAC IT, so which I will talk about again in a minute. And so that was just that, so bringing that operational efficiency is the first of the transformation. And the second transformation, which is the operational model itself, meaning doing something fundamentally in a different way, like Netflix, right? Being moving away from distributing the DVDs to streaming online, right? So they use the new technologies, but also they change the business model. So that is the second operational model. And the third one is you're completely changing the essence of the company, means you are crossing the boundaries of the business domains, right? So like Amazon going from retail to cloud computing or Google from advertising to the other areas, right? So the companies have crossed the boundaries, they were into multiple businesses and they were changing the whole essence of the company itself, right? They're completely transforming from a technology perspective as well as from a business perspective. So they're coming up with a completely new direction on how they are managing it, right? So now all the digital technologies that we can put in, so this is where only using the digital technologies is operational. But if you are changing the business model also, then you are into the operational model. But if you are changing the whole way that you are doing the business itself will be strategic, okay? Now, so in the book, Design for Digital, Gene Ross and the co-authors came up with these five building blocks to digitally transform any organization. So the first one is you need to have a shared customer insights, right? Unless you have the understanding of the customer needs, right, you cannot transform. So you can use any technologies like Big Data or whatever to get our social media to get the information from the customers, analyze it. So you need to have an understanding of what the customer needs, right? And you need to build a digital platform, again, using this market, right? Social media, mobility, analytics, cloud computing and the internet of things, right? So you need to build a platform so that the information can go from various platforms, from one platform to another, how you can make sense out of that information and how you can come up with some new business models, you know, how you can transform your business. And then you need an accountability framework, right? Who owns what? Who owns what components, what, you know, what business units are? So there should be an accountable framework so that you have an understanding of who owns what and the whole organization should operate in a collaborative way rather than fighting for each other. And then those organizations who kind of expose their digital platform functionality like Apple exposing their platform to the developers so that they can build their, you know, apps on top of their platform, right? So those organizations excel during this, you know, digital transformation. And then to operate all this, we need an operational backbone where you build, you identify your core systems, your data, your systems to operate efficiently, right? So these are the, so I kind of agree to this, you know, five billion blocks that we need to digitally transform any organization. And so I've been talking about this, you know, smack it concept, right? So how you can take the information from the social media, right? How you can analyze this, that information using big data or any analytics methods and how you can use the potential of the cloud computing to analyze that one.  Even using the mobile technologies and all. So this smack it becomes the backbone of this digital transformation, right? And within the open group, I don't know if you are familiar with, we have a forum called Open Platform, where in, we are trying to come up with the specifications on how these various platforms can exchange the information and how we can make sense out of that information and how we can transform our organizations, right? So those who want to look into that open platform, you can look into that. So basically the open platform or this market, which is an extension, the open platform is an extension of that smack it is transforming various industries, right? So you can take any industry, retail or, you know, agriculture, transportation, healthcare, right? So you take any industry, this market of the open platform, the digital platform is kind of transforming the organizations within any organization, right? And to build this, what do we need, right? So I took the skillset that we needed earlier, but I kind of expanded that a little bit. So now the business skills that we need is should be cross-domain, cross-industry, because as you have seen, any strategic organization is crossing the boundaries of the organizations. And then we need to have that smack it kind of skills to do that. And moreover, in this, you know, post-COVID era, right, we need to embed ethical skills within the organizations, right? So having, you know, justice, service, community, right? So these are the things that we need to embed within the employees of any organization or within the citizens of any country as well, right? And this is the maturity model. I took the same maturity ACMM, but so, okay, actually, Terry and I are coming up with some maturity model, which is in working progress. So instead of business linkage, I would say you should be business technology. Why? Because technology should be part and parcel of the business. Now, you can't think of technology outside the business or you can think of business outside the technology. That should be one and the same. And that is going to happen. And then the enterprise security, so instead of IT security, I kind of made it generic so that, you know, you can look into all the security aspects, rather than just the IT security. And also enterprise investment and acquisition strategy should be so that I made it a bit more generic. And these are the quality attributes for any architecture. You should have those architecture should be fit for decision making, right? So it should be agile, interoperable, so the usable, secure and open. So these are the qualities that we are, you know, Terry and I, I'm thinking of for any architecture to have this quality. Now, coming to the governance model, I kind of lean to the bimodal governance model because all the projects cannot be implemented either traditionally or in agile way. So you should have both the things going on, right? So some has to go through the traditional development methodology and some has to be agile, right? So that is what, so a bimodal governance model helps the organizations to transform a bit more, you know, in a faster way, right? So those initiatives, which are long term, which impacts many business units, if you are building something core to the organization, those have to go through a traditional development and some innovative projects where you don't know the requirements that, you know, that clearly. So if you want to get the feedback from the business units, then you have to, you can go through the agile method. And so again, the organizations has to be agile end to end, right? So again, we have, we are agile in one or two, right? So maybe in the development and the operations with the DevOps, but the agility should come from the architecture, from come from the planning itself, right? So agility, I think, should be end to end. Now, having said all this, right? So especially when we are developing new technologies, we have to make sure that the new technologies are built in such a way that that are beneficial to the society. Right? So now there are some ethical frameworks within the industry, especially for AI, because when you take AI, when you are training the systems, right? If in a good way, they act in a good way. If you are training them in a bad way, they act in a bad way, right? So we should take the responsibility of building the systems in a good way, right? So I think, so these are the principles that we need to follow. Beneficience means, now, what is the benefit, what is the benefit to the society, right? And what harm, what not harm should, should we do, right? So we should avoid the harm, right? And it should be autonomous, right? And then give justice to the, to the whole society. And how, so we should take the accountability for what we are doing, right? So these are the ethical, you know, the principles that we need to follow when developing the digital transformation, digital technologies. And Australian government has come up with some principles and same, the Singapore government also, they had come up with some principles, which are pretty much the same, you should be human centric, right? You should be transparent, you should do something good rather than doing anything harm. And Singapore government went to an extent and they gave some guidance on when humans should interact with these AI systems, right? When they should be out, right? If the probability of harm and the severity are both low, here humans can be out of the loop. But if both are severe humans should be in the loop and then if it is, you know, low severity or, you know, low probability and all. So then humans can be over the loop, meaning they have to define like when you have to intervene or when you can pull off out of that, you know, the decision making process or whatever it is, right? And then so Singapore also came up with a governance framework that helps the organizations to build the systems in a better way, right? And even IEEE, you can check, there are some standards how we can develop the systems in an ethical manner, which are beneficial to the whole society as such. So here are some takeaways. So Enterprise Architecture has evolved from technology to strategic. So we started with the technology, right? And so now we are just strategic. Now you can see that the cycle has changed. So cycle is kind of, you know, we are getting into the cycle again. So we were at probably 1.0 where we started at the 2.0. But so the initiatives that happened in the 2.0, early 2.0 when enterprises started to optimize the technology infrastructure, that was a big disaster. So we were not able to achieve the optimization that we wanted. But hopefully in this cycle, at least we do some better things and the business leaders can take better decisions to optimize the technology that is beneficial to the organization as well as to the society and build the digital transformation building blocks. So in whatever way you want, right? In whatever order you want, you can build those five building blocks. And we need to always balance between the standardization and innovation, right? So you cannot go extreme for anything, which will be a disaster again. And you need a different set of skills. As I said, in the coming era, we need cross-domain, cross-industry skills to be an enterprise architect. And you have to choose the right method for development. As I said, you have to choose the right development methodology for right products, projects. And then use the technology for the benefit of society. And also you can embed ethical, you should embed ethical values within the enterprises, within the citizens of the enterprise. So I'm thinking that I went a little bit overboard, but so that's my presentation. If you have any questions, you can shoot me an email or you can post the questions in the Q&A. We will take up those questions now.


Our next speaker is Joana Silva from the Facultad de Ciencias de Tecnología de la Universidad Nova de Lisboa. Joana has completed the master degree in conservation and restoration with specialization in photography in Facultad de Ciencias de Tecnología de la Universidad Nova in 2009. She worked for Luis Papao between 2009 and 2014 at the library from Ducunda Sound, Calustre, Gulben and Cain. Personally, she's doing her PhD in conservation and restoration of cultural heritage at the same university. So good morning. I'm happy to be there today to present you my work. I'm going to present you part of the work I'm doing in my PhD which focuses on the photographic and filmy collection of the Portuguese artist Angelou de Souza, more precisely in Sulá's state-based chromogenic reversal film. So Angelou de Souza is one of the most important contemporary Portuguese artists. He's characterized by an experimentalism that enabled him to achieve exceptional originality. With his death, he left a broad legacy of painting, sculptures, drawings and also experimental film and photography. The collection is mainly gathered in the artist's house.  Here are some paintings and some drawings, sculptures in traditional materials and also contemporary materials, just plastics, experimental film and photography. In all the materials he explored, he frequently worked the idea of color. He frequently used the three primary colors for the use, for example, for his paintings, the subtractive mixture and for his photographs and films, the additive mixture. Coating José Gilles Angelou through his whole life did nothing but conceive sets of color movements. He's a colorographer, a painter intoxicated with and addicted to color, a chromo addict. So this is an example of... This work is called Sliged Cavalette from 1978-79. It's a work composed of 100 slides. And it's a perfect example of his interest and knowledge and control of the primary colors. Because to produce these images, he exposed the same frame to lights of the primary colors, so red, green and blue lights. And he creates these amazing images. So before the beginning of the study, there was no idea about the characteristics of the collection, so we decided that the survey would be prior to our re-teary task. So in order to understand a little bit more about the collection, we tried to trace the history of the collection, looking at its background, the house characteristics and the storage conditions, since almost all the photographic collection is gathered in a single room. We also made a topographic inventory or an inventory in a database, trying to collect as much as information about typology, quantities, organization and conservation conditions, among other information. So this is the room before the survey. We did also some cleaning and tried to stabilize some photographs we found that were at risk here. And this was the room before the survey. So it is now possible to say that the collection is composed of 85,650 photographs. We can mainly compose of three groups, the negatives, mainly black and white negatives with Souleau's estate base, 35 millimeters. The reversal films, mainly chromogenic reversal films with Souleau's estate support, also 35 millimeters, or slides, and the prints, mainly black and white prints with developing outpapers. So although the collection is mainly composed of Souleau's estate base supports, 84 percent, no signs of vinegar syndrome were found. Here is the conservation condition of the DOP prints. So basically they present some dirt, fingerprints, silver mirroring, yellowing, curving, so they were considered in fair condition. The black and white negatives, well, we didn't find any signs of vinegar syndrome. But the photographs shows, probably due to the handling, they show a lot of dirt, fingerprints and also abrasion, and also some silver mirroring and apparently fungi. So they were considered in fair condition. The chromogenic reversal films, no signs of vinegar syndrome were found here too. And probably because the slides were processed in external laboratories, they only present slight dirt and were considered in good condition. Unfortunately, almost 30 percent of the collections of these sets present color change and fading, which was considered a problem. So after surveying all the collection, we consider that this set was the set at highest risk. It is also a representative part of the photographic collection, almost 40 percent. And as we saw before, color is a very important issue in Angelou's work. So we decided to do a material research in order to study chromogenic reversal dyes and its fading. So before I explain the work I'm doing, I'm just going to try to explain briefly what chromogenic processes are. So basically, the chromogenic processes use a subtractive method to produce all the colors of the reality. Initially, before the processing, we have three superimposed black and white emulsions with silver salts that are each one of its only sensitive to a specific spectral region. Additionally to those silver salts, there are color couplers that will be responsible for the creation of the yellow magenta and cyan layers. So after exposure and during development, the developer will develop silver salts and the oxidized developer will react with those color couplers to produce the dye. In the end of the processing, the silver is bleached and we will only have the dyes in the final emulsions. On the right, you can see these cross sections of chromogenic reversal films where you can see the yellow magenta and cyan layers. And on this image on your left, you can see the surface of the same sample and the dye clouds are discernible. So chromogenic dyes generally are susceptible to degradation both by hydrolysis and oxidation and also other type of reactions may occur. For example, the interaction between the residual color couplers with dye molecules but basically both relative humidity and temperature and or light will cause the fading, the yellowing and the change in color. So if in these images where we have an identified object of the reality it may be quite easy to say if we are having color change. In these images, for example, one of the images of Slagskavoleta, I showed you before it may be quite difficult to say if there is occurring color change. So it is common practice in photography industry and conservation to study dye fading using a desitometer. The desitometer basically measures the optical density which is a measure of the percentage of reflected light for opaque objects such as a print and transmitted light for objects such as slides that are transparent. So by measuring the optical density it is possible to do kinetic studies of dye fading based on accelerated aging samples and then to estimate the lifetime of a product or compare different products. So in this study we are proposing to use another analytical technique to study dye fading which is a UVV spectrophotometer. So the UVV spectrophotometer basically measures the relative amount of electromagnetic power reflected or transmitted at individual wavelengths of the spectrum. Based on Lambert Beer's law, the absorption is dependent of the intensity of incident light and the intensity of light that passes through the sample. That basically is a measure of the transmittance. And as you may see, the observance and transmittance are inversely proportional. The UVV spectrophotometer will give us a spectra that is basically a fingerprint that is characteristic for a specific material and also allows us to characterize the color of the material. So from this spectra we can access the optical density similarly with the desitometer because in our spectra that you can see, for example here, it is the intensity maximum. So this spectra, you can see three different bands. It is a spectra of a slide. You have the three bands that correspond to the three dyes. So in the blue region of the spectra we have the yellow dye, in the green region of the spectra the magenta dye and in the red region of the spectra the cyan dye. So additionally to this spectra we can convert it into three stimulus values and then convert them into CLAP coordinates that is basically a measure of the color based on the perception of our eyes. So we can access those coordinates individually or as assessments of the overall color change. So this is the UVVs of the university that is being used this Saturday. It uses optical probes as you may see there. So we can do the analysis in a non-invasive way in a very small area of the sample. So what is the difference between a desitometer and a UVV spectrophotometer? A desitometer allows us to see the optical density and then to access color levels. And UVV spectrophotometer allows us to access the same and gives us a spectra that allows us to convert this into values such as the three stimulus values and then be converted into a color space such as CLAP and therefore it is possible to access color variation. Also the desitometer is an apparatus that is becoming a little bit obsolete. So in this study we are proposing to study the collection. To do that we have to do an accelerated aging to samples that are representative from the collection. From this accelerated aging we aim to do a kinetic study of the dye fading and calculate the lifetime of each dye. Therefore understand which dyes are more unstable, estimate the change in color balance and predict how the works will change over time. Ultimately we want to develop strategies or tools to try to restore or reconstruct what was the original image. Also we want to define a methodology to study dye fading using the UVV spectrophotometer. So we decided to use to age those samples for GPROVIA 400x and why those samples because we found unexposed films in Anjoud Sosa's house and so we know a little bit what is its story and they are representative. And this brand is the fourth most representative brand. Also the films are outdated but are still possible to use. So taking into account the ESO standard 18909 from 2006 we will do this aging using two relative humidities 45% which is a group practice condition and 60% which is the average condition found in Anjoud Sosa's archive. These two relative humidities will be tested at four different temperatures 15, 16, 17, 18 degrees and also room temperature for comparison. So before doing the accelerated aging we did an accelerated aging test to test this methodology to a set of duplication sites with images from Armenia. We decided the most aggressive, the more aggressive the temperature 80 degrees at both relative humidities and the samples were aged during 42 days. So the samples were kept inside desiccators during 15 days so that the emulsion gets this relative humidity and were sealed inside polyethylene bags and then were replaced inside the oven. So I'm going to present you the results for one sample age in each condition. So sample one was aged at 62% humidity and 80 degrees Celsius and sample two aged at 48% of relative humidity. All the samples were analyzed in three different areas and the results were quite consistent so I'm also going to present you only the results for one area for each sample. Here you can see the results of the scanned image before and after the aging and as you may see the image tend to be pinkish with aging and if you look in further detail also the image is becoming less sharp. Here you have the spectra from the UVV spectrophotometer. We can see the three vents from the three dyes and in the line here in light gray it's before aging and the dark gray after the aging. So we can see a global decrease in the observance intensity that means that the dyes are fading. Globally we can see that in the sample one aged at 62% relative humidity cyan dye was the most unstable. Yellow dye followed by the yellow dye and magenta dye was clearly the most stable dye and the results are a little bit the same. In the two samples. Looking at the CLF coordinates we can see that in both cases L increased meaning that the sample is becoming lighter. The A coordinate increased also meaning that the sample is becoming redder and B decreased meaning that it's becoming less yellow. The same was found with sample two and we can see that in the total color variation was bigger in sample one aged at 62% than in sample two aged at 48%. So basically we may say that cyan dye was the least stable followed by yellow dye and magenta was clearly more stable than the others. From the CLF coordinates we can say that the image is becoming lighter because of the fading that was what was expected and more red and more blue so more magenta and those results are quite consistent with the images I showed you in the beginning that are becoming pinkish. Also we can see an apparent influence of the relative humidity in the dye fading so with the higher humidity we have more degradation. We also did the FTIR to the Sulawes estate in order to access if there was any difference before and after the aging and although we need to do more access more accurately those bands we may say that there was no considerable change in the base. So for conclusions I would say that although the collection has so many Sulawes estate supports no signs of Inager syndrome were found and we can say that dye fading appears as a problem before the degradation of the support. Regarding UVVS petrophotometry it looks like it is a good technique to access dye fading in slides and this methodology may be applied in a serrated aging test and specifically to the case study I am doing and maybe to other collections. Thank you for your attention. And sorry I would like to thank the foundation of American Institute for Conservation for the funding that allows me to be there today.


Take you down to Brainer now with the Warriors taking on the otters of Fergus Falls and some boys basketball. First half we go, Joey Sauer finds Brandon Bergraf in the corner. He hits the three to tie the game at 18. Flock winding down now in the first half. Sauer comes up with the steal. Can't knock down the easy layup but Chris Carls is down there to clean it up. Brainer with trail at the half though. Then later in the second half Brainer down big. Michael Beganick drives to the bucket. Finds Tanner Lundberg behind the arc then. He knocks down the three but it was too little too late. Fergus Falls takes down Brainer tonight 70 to 56. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


exploring different types of fear. In our last video, we dove into the science behind fear. Today, we're going to explore the different types of fear, from acute and chronic fear to phobias and existential fears. Did you know that phobias, which are irrational fears of specific things or situations, can sometimes influence your lifestyle or even your health? Join us in the next video where we'll explore fear's impact on our mental health and ways to manage it.


I want to say here, there's this gross, incessant need to try to take away from what this kid, not a first round draft pick, not a first round, what Brock Purdy is doing, and it's becoming gross. It's just nauseating. You can't go on Twitter during a Niners game without seeing people just trying to poke holes in his lack of air yards or depth of target or comparing him to Jimmy Garoppolo up and down. There are also people like our guy though, Sam Munson, who we love, a PFF fame who are saying, yeah, let's give 100% of the credit to Kyle Shanahan. We love you, Munson, but come on. The Brock Purdy has proven he's good. Come on, what, I, Sam and I love you, and I love you. No one wants to admit it, question mark. Like what, what are we, is it the draft choice? Is it the, are we still in the world and the air and the smoke of trey lamps? Like what are we doing here?