if it were not recorded. Anyway, welcome everyone, a couple of things. One is the Hyperledger Antitrust Policy. If you do not know what the antitrust policy is, we could have a full hour of presentation on that but it is available on the website for all to look at. If you do not agree with the antitrust policy, please do not join the call. The other item that we have to talk about is the Hyperledger Code of Conduct, which is basically saying that even when you disagree with somebody, you shouldn't be disagreeable in short. In short, with Iroha, I was one of the early proponents of Iroha and having had a brush with Japanese culture, I know the importance of Iroha. In fact, I translated it, the words of the poem into English and posted it up on the Hyperledger TSC chat as soon as Iroha got status was promoted to a full project from incubation. So Iroha is a very familiar concept to me and obviously not everybody knows about it. And I'm so glad that we have three of the most important people in Iroha right here. Starts with Sarah, Zillia, and of course Makoto, Makoto Takamiya. Anyway, they'll start their presentation right away. Thank you for showing up and running the presentation. Hi, yeah, let me try and start to share my screen. Can you see it? The presentation right here, is it okay? No, it's not, it's not exactly working. Now we could see it briefly for a minute. Yeah, me too, that's very odd to be quite honest. Okay, so here it is, we can see it. Now I mean, this way it looks better, isn't it? So, hello, my name is Sarah. We also have Zillia and Makoto-san here today. And today we'll talk about Bakong, which is a central digital currency solution in Cambodia, which is built on Iroha. And we are very proud of this project because it's really important to the people and to the economics. So a little bit about us, Soromitsu. We were founded in 2016, we have more than 80 people. I think it's about like 100 people at the moment in from all over the world, like we have offices in five countries, I think. But we also have people from all around the world and we believe that talent is decentralized. You can't have all the talent in one place. So yeah, we're original contributors of Hyperledger Iroha and we are still like maintaining it and developing it. We have version one released in May, 2019 and now works being done on the second version. Then we worked with National Bank of Cambodia on Bakong project, which we will be talking about today. We also have other project based on Iroha, such as D3 Ledger and VCA. And we also do projects with Polkadot. So let's come to the Bakong. So what is Bakong? It's the first world retail payment system run by Central Bank that uses blockchain. Right now it has 50,000 users and 20 million dollars worth of assets in the system. So basically it's like 50,000 users using it all the time to make payments, send money. Yeah, anyone with a Cambodian phone number can download the app and start using it. Money can be sent to other people or pay in stores and everything will be recorded to the Central Bank's ledger. So the pilot launch was on July 17th, 2019. So you see on the right picture, there's like this sticker that says Bakong. It means that in this store, they can accept Bakong which is this like payment solution. System officially launched on October 28th this year. No, last year, no, it's last year already, sorry. Yeah, it took a little bit longer because of the COVID but we were very glad to, then it launched officially. So right now there are 20 banks in the system and counting. So the system is run by National Bank of Cambodia and commercial banks are connecting to it. And right now there are 20 and there are more I believe that are in the compliance stage at the moment. So yeah, it's a lot of banks that are ready and glad to work with the system. So what is Bakong basically? It's the core ledger that is run by the National Bank and there are applications. Mobile application for commercial bank clients to transfer money. I'll just show you the screenshots a little bit later to receive money, to send money to the bank account. And there is also like a identity solution for onboarding. There's also a desktop application for commercial banks to manage bank accounts, web client interface for commercial banks to monitor transactions. And there's like physical cards for secure transaction signing. I think it's in process. So yeah, even for even more security. So this is basically what the interface looks like. I think it was a little bit outdated recently, but it has pretty much the same functionality. It's easy to understand. There's like send money, receive money, deposit money, pay with the QR code. It's simple, it's easy to use, but it has very secure and good technology behind it. First of all, it's identity verification by face recognition. So when you download the application and start using it, one of the first things that you do is one of the first things that you see in the app is the first stage of verification. It takes your photo, it compares it with your passport or ID card. It takes the information from the ID card. And it also makes sure that it's a live face that's the check of liveness. And yeah, so with that, it's not a photo. So it helps a lot to proceed with the first level of verification. Because yeah, on the first level of verification, you don't need to go anywhere, so it's easy. And you can spend up to $25 a day. No, sorry, $250 a day. So yeah, you can increase this limit by going to commercial bank to do the second stage of verification. So basically to verify yourself. But it's going to be easy because it was done partially when you made a photo of yourself, made a photo of your document. So you don't need to insert this information. So it's rather easy. But also like $250 a day, it's also a very good limit. Yeah, now how you actually use the app. So you create a back on account and transfer from bank account to the account or just go to commercial bank to top up the account. We'll talk about this a little bit later. Zilla will talk about this later. Then you make a payment by scanning a QR code or you can send the money and yeah, it's done. Makoda san, I hope Makoda san will be able to show us today the demo, how easy and quick it is. Yeah, and this is what desktop app looks like. Yeah, I think that now I'm going to pass the mic to Zilla. Yeah, hello. Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, I just don't see any presentation now. Sorry, I tried to mute myself. So I wouldn't like make any extra noises. So sorry, let me go back to it. It's okay, don't worry. Stop happens. I just feel a little bit worried and embarrassed because like we're talking about technology here and having issues with technology feels a little bit embarrassing. So yeah, Zilla please, I'm sorry. Technology wouldn't be technology without glitches. Yeah, totally agree. Okay, hi all. So I'm Zilla and I'm a project manager at Sramitsu and I've been working on Bakong project and I was like in Cambodia for several times and I have been to Cambodia and we launched this product, interesting projects. So I continued to talk about the slides, how the banks top up the blockchain account. So first of all, the banks has a correspondent or reserve account and NBC and they send their real money to this account. And after that the NBC have like digital currency money and send these digital currency money to bank digital currency account. So there are accounts in Bakong and reserve accounts at NBC and it's like equal to the bank account. It became equal. So the next slide, I guess it's yeah, how the user top ups the bank account. So usually after user registration in the mobile app, there is a digital currency account for the user and he can top up it. For now, there is a possibility to pop into the bank branch and the user provides the cash and operator just to pops the user's account from banks digital currency account. That is easy. Yeah, there are also interbank money transfer using ICO message 222 and it's made automatically so that first of all, money moves from the reserve account and then initiate transaction in Bakong. And after that, when the receiver bank gets money in digital currency, it initiates transaction in the bank's reserve account and it goes to the traditional co-banking system. So the operation just takes few minutes and it's very fast and easy. Before like banked NBC has had like transaction settlements only two times per day and now it's like 24 hours and like every day is possible during the day and very fast. Next slide, please. So user can withdraw money from this digital currency account. There is a special button in the mobile app. It's called deposit. So what means deposit? It's deposit money to the traditional bank account. So it's done through ICO 2022 message. So the user specifies bank where he wants to transfer money and enters the bank account. And so using this ICO 2022 message it will go to the core banking system and also takes just few minutes. Next slide. So Bacong architecture is... So here in the center you can see NBC, Bacong Core and Hyperledger Roja. So NBC runs all the nodes of Hyperledger Roja and trans the core system. Participants, bank participants, they connect to core system and core system already sends to all transactions to Hyperledger Roja. So and participant, bank participants, they see only transactions of their bank clients and not others. And so ground truth about the balances of money it's on the central bank ledger on Hyperledger Roja. So and yeah, as I told, bank clients they connect to Bacong system through the bank and bank already then has connection to NBC, Bacong Core and Hyperledger Roja. Next slide. So here we can see the same structure a little bit in different way. As I told, blockchain platform is run by NBC and they has core system that and every bank runs payment gateway. And these payment gateway, it's integrates with core banking system using ICO 222 message and how banks can send interbank transactions. And also there is a desktop application that is connected to payment gateway. The desktop application they use by banks operator. And also commercial banks run the mobile API that's provide access to the Bacong system. There is a question. How does bank A transfer digital money to bank B? So it's done through ICO 222. So they initiate transactions through their core banking system and then it goes to Hyperledger Roja. It settles in Hyperledger Roja and send message to core banking system of receiver bank to create this receiver transaction. So actually it's done through Iroha blockchain on Iroha blockchain settlement is done and through messages. So and it's done via API through core NBC core. I'm not sure whether I answered the question or not. I think you have. Yeah.  Yeah, just I want to clarify that means it still goes via the central banks API to the blockchain or directly to the blockchain. When a bank A sends a message Iso 222 is it going directly to the blockchain or via the core banking API provided by the central bank? Yeah. So the core banking API is used for reporting. And then also as Ziya talked about when topping up the background balance that a bank has you use, we created a technical account that uses the core banking system to transfer. So the transfer of digital money only happens using the Iroha blockchain but when you enter and exit the system it does the messaging with Iso 222. Hopefully that makes sense. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you for a question. I guess we can move to the next slide. So why Bacong? Why they decided to have this system? Why NBC wanted to have? So first of all, this is unbanked population that just they want to increase people who has access to financial services. Now only 22% of Cambodians have bank accounts and using this Bacong system there is a possibility to increase these numbers because Bacong is easy to install and use and mobile phones is like every Cambodian has mobile phones. It's like I was there and like every Cambodian has two or three mobile phones. It's not iOS, iPhone, but it's Android and everyone uses internet. Internet is very good in the overall of Cambodia and it's 4G and people use social media and et cetera. So they're very active mobile users. So using this Bacong application, NBC wants to improve these numbers. Also, large remittance markets, domestic money transfers really it's not so common, but I mean, I saw this domestic transfer but it's really cost, they have high fees and I guess it's probably for probably providers there and Bacong doesn't have any fees. Actually NBC doesn't have any fees but banks can apply some fees if they want. So it's very profitable actually for Cambodian people. Also, NBC wants to improve the usability of like internet commerce like page, digital and et cetera because credit cards are used very rare in Cambodia as well. Okay, next slide. I guess it's already for Makota-san. Yeah, so people always ask why did we use blockchain for the system and not just a regular database? It's a very obvious question, of course. There's a few reasons, some of them reasons I think are better than others but one of the main reasons is that it does give us a simplified architecture because of the different invariance of the system. Because of the different invariance that you have in the system about the validity of transactions and the trust that you can put into the ledger having the correct state because it's past distributed consensus. Also, I would like to point out that even though the central bank runs all the blockchain servers in this system, every device that includes every end user's cell phone is actually where the keys are generated. Every, it's massively distributed in that sense because every user creates their own keys and not even the central bank can take a transaction or change some data without it being tamper evident. So it also makes the system somewhat more secure and trust minimized because you don't have to trust that a single server is not going to get hacked or go down because there's no central database that has all the keys in the system. Instead, each end users has the keys that are used to sign the transaction. So it's very, I would say it's much more robust than if you used a normal database approach. Next slide. With respect to social impact, there's a lot of potential. I think we're just starting to see the potential being used. As Zia pointed out, every transaction is free of charge in the system and this allows people to quickly and easily send money back at home. I would also like to point out that one aspect that's often overlooked is that it does, it not only helps with financial inclusion but it gives greater control over finances. So in Cambodia, a lot of women, for instance, will go and work abroad or work in the capital and then those work hard, send money back home to pay for things like school or medical bills. But now they have to trust that other relatives or other people won't take the money when they remit the money back. But here, with this system, you can actually have end users pay directly to like a school or to a hospital in order to make the payments rather than having to trust or rely on other people. So it can give people who up until now have been kind of underserved and haven't really had access to controlling their own finances to actually having a lot more control and power which is, to me, that's really meaningful and very exciting use case. And I think we're starting to see a little bit of this being used in domestic remittances for now. In the future, we do hope that international remittances will also become a bigger part of the system. Next slide. So for potential impact, I mean, all this is speculative, of course, we kind of using some predictions from a bank Nagara report in Malaysia and then also a report from the bank for international settlements. It's expected that greater reduction in cash and more digital transactions can add about 1% to GDP to countries like Cambodia. And so that would equate to about a million dollars a day, which is a fairly meaningful contribution just from efficiency standpoints. There's a lot of other potential benefits, of course, too. So you can increase, a system like this increases the access that Cambodians have to banking services and as I just talked about to financial inclusion, it can also give greater transparency into the financial system which can help prevent financial crises and reduce reliance and shadow banking and things like that. I would also say that a system like this can also give access to more digital payments. And so this can help create an internet-based e-commerce industry that up until now hasn't really been a big thing in Cambodia because it's kind of hard to make digital payments. There's other problems too, of course, like logistics and things like that. But I think simplifying the payment space can help a lot because it's important to remember that unlike people in developed countries, it's people in Cambodia don't have... You can't easily get access to things like a credit card or something like that. So there are a lot of hurdles that the system helps to remove when it comes to digital payments. Next slide. So from effects of monetary policy, it's always important to keep in mind the phrase, do no evil. And really, we designed the system to not have any negative effects on monetary policy. And I think we did quite a lot of thought in this. So things like having a limit on how much can be sent per diem and designing the system so that banks are not disintermediated, but banks are actually required in the system. These help to make the system really a replacement, I would say, for curing around small amounts of cash in your wallet rather than a replacement for the banking system as a whole. And I think there's no negative effects that can be foreseen of the system, but there are new opportunities to do, I would say new types of targeted monetary policy. So for example, by doing analysis of the transactions potentially in real time, you can actually find maybe new types of statistics that are useful in analyzing the macroeconomic health of the country. And this could help with the targeted monetary policy. Next, please. Ah, let's see. Yeah, I think that's it for the demo. Yeah, I think it's really... If we have some time, I'll try to do demo. I don't have permission to share my screen, but I'm happy to... I think it's because I'm sharing mine, so probably that's the reason. Let me... Yeah, it should work now. Everybody should have the permission to share. There are no restrictions. Yeah, it works now. Okay, you should be able to see my phone here. Yeah, seems to be working. Okay, great. Hang on. Just... Oh, Jesus. Okay, there we go. Okay, so this is the app. This is actually the real app with live money. And it's slightly updated since the screenshots in the presentation materials, but the main features are the same. So you have a real account, a dollar account, because it's a dual currency system. You have the ability to receive money using DR code, which is pretty common in Asia. You can do a DR code payment. You can deposit into one of the partner institutions. So there's 20, I think, or 21, I guess it's 20, institutions that are banks and payment service providers that you can just choose one of them and put an account number. If you have an account number and you can send money to the account. But I think the main use case really besides QARP, pay would also be to send money to like a registered contact or like a phone number. So here I'll try to send the one real, maybe some message like, hello. So you can see there's the different information here. There's no transaction fee for sending one real, one real for those who don't know is about one fourth thousandth of a dollar. Okay, so I hit send and you can see there's the receipt of the transaction, including like the transaction hash. It's kind of a simplified hash for the display. It's actually already finished sending. Sending takes about maybe just two or three seconds. So you can see that already says funds were sent successfully, which is nice. And my account went from 421 real to 420. Yeah, that's about it. It's a very simple app. It's made to be very simple and easy to use. So it's about it. There's also at the bottom, you can see there's tabs for places. I'm not gonna show it because it will show my location right now. It's bad off sec. And let's see, the places just shows stores that you can use the system in. And then profile of course is profile and then you've got settings. So that's the basic features. Somebody put some, oh, okay. So there's a few questions in chat. I guess Sarah wrote that you can use, there's some promotional videos that NBC has online. And actually she's correct. They're a lot of fun to watch. They're amazing. I just, I just rewatch them all the time. They're so good. Yeah, they have Netflix. So you don't have Netflix. You just watch these videos. Believe me, Netflix is not that good sometimes. I mean, sometimes it is, but not always. Well, I'm just messing with you. A couple of questions obviously pop up. One is, you know, loss and revocation and device loss. What happens then? Okay, yeah, I'm happy to answer that. So yeah, any system that targets mass, you know, mass groups of users needs to be able to deal with when people lose their device.  In Daekwong, what we have is if you did KYC at a bank, so there's two tiers, right? So the first tier is just SMS. And then there's a higher tier, which is going to the bank and doing full KYC. If you went to the bank and did KYC, you actually will get the ability to recover your account.  So this is in Hyperledger, Iterahod's using the permissioning features that we have in Iterahod where you can grant the ability to add and remove signatories on your account to another user. And so when you do KYC at a bank, part of that process is granting the bank the ability to add and remove signatories on your account. So this allows them to change your keys. This also means they could just take your money if they wanted to, but banks are licensed and audited regularly, so it's not a huge risk. Now, if you lose your device and you didn't do KYC, if you only did the SMS verification, then it's treated like cash. So in that case, you just lose your money, which is a little bit harsh, but generally it's to also encourage people to do KYC and not just rely on SMS. So the SMS users are just receiving money because somebody who had been KYC's, KYC'd send them the money, right? Well, or another user with SMS send them the money. Yeah, actually anyone can send money to any account, but the thing is there's a sending limit as I think we had on the slide, but if you only do SMS, you're limited to $250 per day, which is okay for many normal users, but it's not enough to pay for anything big, like a car or something. So, I mean, I've been to Cambodia, maybe in the 90s and things are very different now, but $250 could buy you a lot. I mean, you know. Yeah, it's okay. It was really interesting because I don't think I spent more than $250 the whole time I was there. Well, of course, I was staying with the people. I was traveling very light in rural areas. So that was the very, I traveled on the boats and turn lights up and all that.  So the regular KYC people can spend more than 250 a day. Right? Yeah, actually the limit I believe is arbitrary and your bank can set it, I think most banks use a default limit of around like $2,500 per day, which is 10 times the SMS limit. But yeah, I believe you can change it if you need to. The goal of the system I don't think is really to replace all transactions and it's really made to be kind of a balance between financial inclusion and helping the financial system to be more efficient and still reducing the potential for financial crimes and things like that. That being said, you'd be pretty crazy to do illegal activity on the system because all the transactions are permanently recorded and could potentially be audited. If not now they could be audited in any time in the future. So I don't recommend to do anything bad in the system but still to reduce any kind of risk there is a transaction limit that's I would say pretty conservative right now. Yeah, anybody else has questions? Otherwise I have more. Oh yeah, money is asked, can you describe your work on the latest version of Iroha and your involvement with Polkadot? Do you have plans on interoperability between Iroha and Polkadot networks? Sure, I'm happy to talk about this and then if I miss anything maybe Sarah can chip in as well. Yeah, so the latest version of Iroha. So if you go to our GitHub there's been recently a new release which is 1.2 and 1.2 is pretty nice. It's pretty nice. There's borough integration so you can execute some Solidity contracts and there's various performance and security increases or improvements. So you can check that out. It's very interesting release. Also we have Hyperledger Ursa integration which is very nice cryptographic library that is in Hyperledger. I'm personally more involved nowadays with Iroha 2 which is a Rust based version of Iroha and I would say a lot of the design is very bold and different. You can read a lot of it on if you go to the Iroha GitHub you can go to the Hyperledger Wiki here. There's a Iroha 1, Iroha 2 sections and then in Iroha 2 you can read about things like the architecture. You can read about our design. We have a lot of architecture decision logs talking about different decisions. Also on GitHub we have docs and source and then Iroha 2 white papers. This is kind of like division document that talks a lot about division with Iroha 2 system. So we have performance goals of like 20K TPS and two, two second block times. So yeah, feel free to check this out and contribute, it's open source. It's always nice to have people coming in and helping out. As for the second question, what are we doing with Polkadot? Since I'm here on the screen already in Iroha 2 we've actually been working on a bridge to substrate. So for those who don't know substrate is so I don't think all the code is merged yet but we will merge it. For those who don't know substrate is a toolkit that is being used in the Polkadot ecosystem to build Polkadot blockchains and we did build a rudimentary bridge that will work with Iroha 2 to move assets from substrate to Iroha 2 and then from Iroha 2 to substrate. And this is like a two way peg bridge with federated set of notaries. It's not production ready right now but and the code is not yet merged in our public repository but we'll put that out there for people to play with. Gee, other things we're doing in the Polkadot ecosystem are things like Sora. So Sora is a decentralized economic system that currently we're using, I think it's been moved or something. Currently we use Hyperledger Iroha for the Sora version one network and then for Sora version two, we're using substrate. So we're building a pair of chain in the Polkadot ecosystem and version three, I think we'll use Iroha 2 but we'll wait for version three. And then we're also working on Pocaswap which is a DEX that's being built on top of on top of the Sora network which is using Sora V2 network which we'll use substrate. And then for those who are really interested we're also building a wallet called Fearless Wallet which is also on GitHub and completely open source. So you can play around with it if you want. You can just go to Sora Mitsu GitHub and find some of these things. And if you go to the Sora Mitsu GitHub we have lots of things that are open. But I don't want to spend too much time on the kind of non-hypology stuff but I'm pretty excited about especially the work in Iroha 2 with this substrate bridge because I think it's important to build tools that different ecosystems at least move assets tuned from each other. Yeah, thanks for the question. Oh, anybody else? Okay, hearing no questions I'm going to start asking some more if you don't mind Makoto.  So you talked about, let's go back to Bakon for a moment. You talked about the velocity of M1 but you also showed something that appeared to be M0 or some somewhat interbank transactions. So what about the velocity of M0? Do you have measurements of these? Well, yeah, so we don't have direct access to the system now that it's run by the central bank. In the test system we measured things of course but yeah, in production I don't have any data that suggests anything specific from, I mean, I just don't know the answer to this but in the cryptocurrency space at least, things like Bitcoin have a much higher velocity than US dollar, I think. I don't know what it is now, but a couple of years ago velocity of Bitcoin is about 10 times USD but it's hard to compare, right? Because it's a very different size of market caps are very different. Yeah, you can say that again. Yeah. USDT velocity is very high and USDC velocity is very high. Anyway, so that's a different story because we don't know who's moving these currents, these things, whether it's just wash trades, front running, whatever, these are all unknown to us but it would be interesting to go back to the Roja that to the Bakong system because if the Cambodian bank and the Cambodian ecosystem shares some of this information, it'll be useful for economies of similar scale and similar shape other than, you know, and maybe you can persuade them to be influential in this space because I keep hearing from central bankers that, oh, the small country shouldn't do this because they are not to set up, they're not technically savvy enough but I always see the leapfrogging effect is tremendous meaning people think other people are less sophisticated than them but, you know. Yeah, I think also in countries like Cambodia, there's a lot less baggage. Exactly. With developed countries that have many legacy systems but yeah, I totally agree that I hope that they can, you know, put out some research reports in the future and I'm sure if they have some interesting results then they would probably do that. They do publish reports sometimes. There's a brief white paper explaining this system and then a couple of weeks ago they did a macroeconomic conference at, well, they did online actually, anyone could join the NBC conference. So they are pretty good at communicating and they do, you know, they talk to other central banks of course like in the region and internationally. So I think other, you know, researchers will of course look at the data as it gets more robust. The system is still pretty small. It's only around 50k users but I think that, you know, in a year or two, you know, if everything goes well it can be quite a significant part of the payments framework in Southeast Asia. So the population of Cambodia is probably around 30 million or so, I don't know the latest number. Yeah, it's around 17 or 18, yeah. It is increasing but not that fast. Oh yeah, anyway, the thing that struck me about Cambodia was how similar it was to where I grew up in Kerala. The ponds and the, you know, the vegetation, everything was familiar to me. Anyway. Interesting. Yeah, I'd really want to go to Kerala as well. It looks very beautiful. Yeah, but we don't have a fantastic payment system like this but we do have in India there has been a lot of improvements in the payment infrastructure especially with India stack. And with the integration of the ADAR system into the whole payments infrastructure. Couple of other points about Bakong. One is benefit payments. Do you think that this could be used for benefit payment? Yeah, so this is something that I've heard some people talk about either Bakong or a similar type of system could be used to pay directly from the government or even pay salaries for government employees and things like that. I think that's a great use case. I think, I don't know if they will ever adopt anything like a UBI but if any country were going to do that than having a digital central bank money I think is an obvious choice. Even in places like the U.S. they keep air dropping money every few months it seems and so a place like that would be very good for digital infrastructure like this. Yeah, and there's a lot of, let's say friction in those air drops but with system like this it would be continuous. Now how many nodes are run by the central bank? That's a good question. I don't know how many they have in production right now but at least in the test system we used 22 I believe which is a three F plus one is the threshold for fault tolerance. So if you have seven simultaneous faults that requires 22 nodes. And there are a few different geographic locations that the nodes are put in which does help make the system more resilient in case there were at least a localized disaster or something like that. Though Cambodia is pretty secure they don't really have earthquakes or things like cyclones there. So the biggest threat of course would be something like flooding from the river or power outages which both of which are pretty easy to circumvent. What about cyber? Yeah, of course. So cybersecurity is really important. And so the payment service providers and the banks are on a separate network with NBC. So it's not like a regular internet. It is kind of a special network that is a higher security. And yeah, I think they have pretty good infrastructure for this. They seem to care a lot about having like really good hardware and network infrastructure. So it's isolated is what you're saying. Yeah, the internal system is where the ledger is supposed to be not on the regular internet. And so it's a two-tier system. So you have the central bank system with the different banks and they already have had their own separate network for many years because they have other payment systems in the country. And so they already are reutilizing this network. Yeah, I mean, the taxonomy wise, yeah, you're right that it seems more like two-tier system, but the central bank is definitely issues back home, not the regular banks. And they have to have, it's a narrow banking concepts, right? Like the intermediate banks cannot generate, I mean, they have to have full reserves backing whatever they distribute as back home. Yeah, that's correct. So, and at the end of the day, because these are like tokenized deposits in the central bank, these are liabilities of the central bank. And so it's a little bit, it does blur the distinction a little bit though because the end user is kind of has custody over these assets, but it's not totally directly, it goes through the commercial banks. So it's kind of an interesting, it's an interesting dichotomy in a way. Yeah, I mean, I think it's not a pure, what do you call it? Two-tier system as the BIS node kind of created because the central banks are running the nodes and issuing the currency. The commercial banks are only a distribution layer and of course KYC and operational layer for recovery and other things. Yeah, and I think it's a very logical system designed too. And I think a lot of the researchers, especially in Europe are a little bit too conservative or there may be just idealistic, but just because the central bank makes a system and puts it out there, it doesn't mean that suddenly it replaces everything else that is in existence. Any system takes lots of time and effort to onboard people and to expand and become a major part of the economy. And I think what we've seen, so we started using real money in Bakuang and opened up the system to anyone using it in July, 2019. And the world hasn't ended since then. The country's been doing pretty fine even with COVID. And it shows that these systems are fairly robust in that just replacing some cash that's circulating in the economy with the digital version of it for low value payments is not really, it doesn't really change all that much overnight. So I don't think central banks should be as conservative or afraid about creating a system like this because it's not really going to instantly compete with commercial banks, especially if you design the system in the correct way. I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I'm a member of the DCGI Digital Currency Global Initiative, which is run out of the UN, ITU. And I'm actually sharing the interoperability workstream and I would be very interested in talking to you about the Polkadot stuff because that's one part. But the other part is having to listen to guys go on at length about the dangers without actually having built any systems, without having actually done anything, you know, and it's only through experiments like yours, which, you know, that we get to know more and more about the system. And that's why I think it's important that you guys have done this. It's fantastic. Yeah, I totally agree. You can't push humanity forward without taking some risks. That being said, of course, any risks should be measured, but you do have to, you know, at the end of the day, you do have to put your neck out and try to do something new, even if there is a slight unknowns or risks because, you know, that's what pushes every of us forward as a species. Yeah, otherwise I wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't be spending so much time on the capital market thing and bringing people like you and your knowledge into this. Anybody else has any other questions because we are going to close soon? I guess... Thank you so much, the Sarmitsu team. It's been great to always learn something new from your presentations about this project. Thank you for having us. Great. Check out the videos, they are good. Well, I've been on your Telegram channels if they are anything like that. Probably close. What is that? Probably very close, I'm joking, but yeah, the NBC videos are lots of fun. Great. So let's continue this conversation. I'm extremely interested in having somebody, maybe you Makoto, I don't know who, come and talk to the Interoperability Working Group in DCGI and it is a place where you can make a big difference because there are 197 central banks there, many of them are fearful and they already had a presentation on Bakong, but it was by someone not directly connected with the project and they had many sort of, let's say not very good data on what actually is going on. The other thing is I would love for those slides to be made available, if you can. And with that, I think we should close unless anybody else has any last minute burning questions. So could we have slides or no? Yeah, I think the slides are fine to make public, so I think maybe Sarah can make a PDF or someone can. Yeah, I will send you the PDF in the email thread. Is that okay? Yeah, you can do it in the email thread, you can send it to me directly, whatever. I'm going to put a link to it on the meeting website. Okay? Yeah, sure. Thank you.


My name is Renee Hobbs. We're offering this session called Online Video Creation by Undergraduates Consequences for Media Literacy. I'm a professor of communication at Temple University where I founded the Media Education Lab at the School of Communications and Theater. And beginning in January I'm going to be the founding director of the Harrington School for Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. It's a new communication school that's bringing together programs in journalism, film, media, communication, along with programs in writing and rhetoric and library and information studies. So I'm here with my colleague, Anu Vedantam. She's the director of the Weigel Information Commons at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. We're here to talk to you about the need for academic leaders to create learning environments that support student exploration of video production as an expanded conceptualization of literacy with sensitivity to gender and attention to instructional design. So today Anu and I are going to share with you two sets of experiences that we each have had at our respective institutions. Some research that Anu conducted with students at the University of Pennsylvania and some experiences that I've had working with faculty at Temple University and other places. But first we have to talk a little bit about this term media literacy. And I want to call your attention to a white paper that I wrote last year for the Aspen Institute, sponsored by the Knight Foundation on defining and conceptualizing digital and media literacy in relation both to K-12 education, to libraries, and to higher education in both formal and informal contexts. In that document I looked across the entire range of what we might call the new literacies field. Of course that goes all the way back to visual literacy which emerged in the 1960s, includes information literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, cyber literacy, news literacy, and now we're using the term digital literacy. But all of those new literacies share in common a set of practices that have to do with accessing, analyzing, composing, reflecting on, and taking action in the world in relation to the new kinds of texts, new kinds of tools, and new kinds of technologies that are how we share meaning. So the expanded conceptualization of literacy recognizes that humans share meaning through a variety of different text tools and technologies, and we try to look for the common threads rather than focus on the distinctive characteristics of each media or system. One of the reasons why we're here today is that we think it's really important to reflect on why video production or video creation experiences are so important for undergraduates. And from our point of view, a big part of faculty engagement in video production is sort of prioritizing some of these reasons. Why make time in your program? Why emphasize this? Well, we've identified six reasons why that seems to be important. The first one that everybody's talking about is engagement. Well, yesterday we heard a really interesting thesis around the role of intellectual vitality and promoting intellectual curiosity in learners. And so this idea of using video production experiences to increase students' motivation and engagement with new subject matter, pretty important. We're also quite keen on helping faculty and students appreciate the sort of energy around something that's called transmediation. It's really the practice of translating ideas and information from one medium to another, right?  So transmediation turns out to be a powerful tool to promote learning. It requires a lot of active engagement and involvement on the part of the learner and requires them to think really carefully about how different symbol systems can be used to share and represent ideas. Another important reason why video production is so useful to those of us who are trying to develop the knowledge and skills of undergraduates is that it promotes collaboration. It is, in fact, a way that undergraduates get the experience of encountering students who are on their own learning path, who are discovering their own way of understanding these ideas and discovering some of their talents and strengths through that collaborative process. Of course, from my point of view, the most interesting thing about online video creation projects for my students has to do with this skill of synthesis, because video production experiences require you to synthesize ideas from a bunch of different places and pull them together. And for undergraduates, that's a challenge because they're just beginning, many undergraduates are just beginning to figure out how to pull ideas together and how to develop a coherent line of inquiry using lots of different ideas. So synthesis is a skill we think gets activated through the process of video production. And of course, students tell us that one of the reasons why they like engaging in the process of video production as a learning experience in their undergraduate coursework is that they get to exercise their creativity. They get to sort of think of themselves as authors and think about the audiences they're trying to reach and they get to use their imagination to represent their knowledge in the field. So we'd like you, with the person sitting next to you, to identify if... think of the faculty and colleagues that you work with, think about the context in which you work. Why is online video production of interest to you and how do you think it benefits students? Introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you and talk it over. You have about two minutes, three minutes. Why is online video production important to you and your students and your faculty? That's your question. Okay, I think we will press on. One of the things that Anu and I talked about when we shared our thoughts was this idea that one of the reasons why student motivation and engagement is increased is because video is a highly familiar medium to them. It's a discourse that for them is baked in to their understanding of how ideas get exchanged. So they have a lot of comfort in sort of manipulating different stances and positions in expressing themselves through video production. So I want to turn it over to Anu who's going to talk to you a little bit about the kinds of video production projects that have been happening at the University of Pennsylvania and then a little bit about her own research looking at undergraduate video creation. Thank you. I'm very grateful to you for taking time to be interactive in this room that makes it really hard to be interactive. So we do appreciate it. So for me, the story behind today's talk actually starts in 2007 with the first mash-up contest that we did at the University of Pennsylvania. We decided to build on Laurence Lessig's book, Free Culture, which was the required freshman text that year. We designed a contest to give away a video camera as a prize for a mash-up video. And the idea behind a mash-up video is you take video that is at least partially made by somebody else and you reinterpret it in some creative way. That December, Peter D'Cerny and I were here at CNI and we did a project briefing about the mash-up contest. Four years later at UPenn, we have several hundred undergraduates that each semester are making videos for graded class assignments. It's been very interesting to watch their progress. Every year some of them show up as entries to our annual mash-up contest. ARL began a video contest at the Sparky Video Awards and several other campuses have begun holding their own mash-up contests and other types of video contests. At the Weigel Information Commons at Penn, we help faculty and students to learn how to make and edit videos and also to think about how video can get integrated into different disciplines. We've had pretty interesting results in some of the disciplines where we've seen video projects used include writing, law, urban studies, anthropology, etc. I'm going to mention just one mash-up video today. There are several winners that you might want to browse on our student work showcase on our website. I'm not going to play the video that you see on the screen and it's for a good reason. This particular video was created by William Strasser. It won first prize in our mash-up contest in 2009. Our panel of faculty and student judges they felt they had not seen anything like it. They really felt it was the best item to come out of the Weigel Information Commons and for those of you who've seen our viral music video you'll know that this is really high praise. It's really a work of art this particular video and as a work of art it makes me uncomfortable. It pains me to watch it and it forces me to confront social issues that I might prefer to just look away from. This is why I don't show it in public but I encourage you to watch it by yourself for yourself. I'll describe what it's about. It's the poem Musée de Beaux Arts written by W. H. Auden. It's read in the poet's own voice. The name of the mash-up is video plus poem plus painting and that is the poem part of the mash-up. The painting is Broigel's Icarus. It's from the 1500s and the video is Jay-Z's 99 Problems from the late 90s and the result is really a mash-up across centuries. It's quite remarkable to see. And the second video that's on our website the creator William Strasser explains the creative process that he embarked on to create the mash-up video. Along this way of watching students make video projects we've also begun to interview faculty who share in their words why video projects make sense in different disciplines. And on our website are links to the videos that I'm not showing just in the interests of time. This particular video has an urban studies professor Andy Lamas. He makes a powerful argument. He uses a metaphor of growing tomatoes in his backyard garden and he compares having his students make videos to the process of gardening, the process of growing your own tomato. And he compares that to going to a supermarket to buying a tomato would be like watching a video. So the process of creation results in something quite different. The next video that I am going to play for you is an interview with three undergraduates. What they're going to be talking about is how they found the process of making a video for an anthropology class and none of these three students had made videos before. So this was actually their first introduction to the process. In their remarks, I think you will hear some of the comments that Renee made about engagement, about motivation, and about creativity. The video is two minutes long. I'll start it now. It allowed for so much more creativity. It was a lot more fun. It was this new outlet to explore these ideas and it created sort of a visual effect that you just can't get from writing a paper. In the end, I enjoyed it so much more. It was something to be really proud of, I think. It was an accomplishment I hadn't achieved before. I've written countless papers, but I've never done something like this. The visual aspect, really, I think that's part of what makes you take so much pride in it because people can, with an essay, you'd have to read through it, but a video project is quicker and you also absorb all the images and text. Yeah, it's happening. It's in the now. So we basically are familiar with writing papers for every single class, but we're not always familiar with creating a video and I think that I was really proud of what I did and I would spend more time creating a video than I would actually writing a paper and I would put everything else off. If only two put it off. It was more interesting to spend more time on it and I put it on websites like YouTube to broadcast and showcase my work and be like, leave comments. Exactly that. Yeah, and I would go around parading it telling my friends, asking them to give feedback and sort of comment on it and they love the idea because, you know, normally your friends wouldn't read your papers. They're actually, they're not if you want to keep them as your friends. It's a labor of love, but the fact that it can be so one collaborative because people share their projects but also interactive with your friends outside of the class made it a really fun undertaking. I think the best part is when people, you know, watch whatever you've created and they just marvel and say, how did you do that? Yeah. That's the best part. It's kind of a secret. So just to move from the mash-up contest at Penn to the research I'm going to talk about, working with some of these student-created videos led me to the research questions for my dissertation. My committee was headed by Laura Perna and included Joni Finney and Yasmin Kafai who are all professors at Penn and I'm going to talk very briefly about my results and I'm going to invite you to get in touch if this is of interest to you. I'm going to start with my elevator speech. So YouTube began in 2005. Today we all watch hundreds of videos every year on it. I became curious about the creation of online videos, who makes the videos that are on YouTube. So men and women are both very comfortable with Facebook. We post on Facebook with about the same amount of ease. But men and women are very different in terms of our relationship to computer programming. The STEM literature provides decades of studies that talk about imbalance in gender-related. So I became very fascinated with this idea that online video is actually a hybrid. The reason you post a video online is for some of the same reasons that you post something on Facebook. You are sharing something that's of personal importance to you. But the process of making a video can be quite different. It can be the very quick click and upload from a cell phone or it can be a long drawn out editing process that really starts to involve social decisions that are closer to computer programming than they are to Facebook. So I was very curious about whether there would be any gender differences in online video creation and I found very little published. The only published information I found was from China and from the countries in that part of the world. So this is my overall research study and I'll start with my research questions. These were the three questions I asked. The first one is just are there differences in the kinds of videos that men and women create today? If there are differences, what might be ways in which we could explain some of these differences? And the third question has to do with this issue of confidence. I'm using the concept of self-efficacy theory. So I read a lot about what had been published in other fields and I spoke with many people including Joan Lippincott here at CNI and I basically developed a conceptual framework to start to look at this question of are there differences in the kinds of videos we make? This is the conceptual framework that I'm using for my study and I'll spend just a few minutes on it. It includes theories from gender studies, from business, from technology adoption, from sociology and psychology. It has three blocks to it. The first block is just simple demographics just to look at what differences there are. The second deals with self-efficacy theory which is this idea that if you approach a new task with confidence, there's a greater probability that you will succeed at it. And the third block looks at technology acceptance which starts to ask the question of why we like certain gadgets more than other gadgets. Why is YouTube so successful whereas other video programs may not be in a sense? So this is the conceptual framework I used and I'm going to quickly go through the data and hopefully have a little bit of discussion with you about some of the results I found. Now it is very new data because YouTube itself is only five years old and online videos have really only started taking off in the last year or two. I collected data. I studied first year students at one highly selective research university. I've placed my dissertation online through scholarly comments at Penns. You can see all the details. I wanted to present at CNI this year because I feel like this type of work is highly time sensitive. Yesterday Cliff talked about the changes in tablets, the fact that our new cell phones take video and we can now edit video right on the iPad. All of these things affect online video creation very intensely. So I do feel like there's a lot going on and it's a very fast-moving field. Basic information about my studies that included a lot of quantitative analysis, but really the joy for me was the qualitative data and I will show you some of the quotes from the young men and women that I interviewed. So these are the answers I found two of my three research questions and the first is yes, there are gender differences in the kinds of videos we create.  However, the theories do explain the gender differences so once you take into account concepts of computer confidence, concepts of tool use, concepts of attitude towards technology, the gender differences really do get explained, which was also very good to find. And the relationship between confidence and video creation was the same independent of gender. So that's the very quick summary of what I have found and I will show you three graphs. I'm going to leave them up so you have a little bit of time to think them through. So this is a quick discussion of the quantitative results and here's the first one. So first actually before I do this, let me just go back one. I'm going to ask for a quick show of hands just so that you have a sense of your experience compared to the people I have been studying. Let me do a quick show of hands. How many people have personally created a video and put it either on YouTube or Facebook? Okay, so I'm looking at about 30% of the room and so I'm assuming you've done this yourself and not asked somebody else to do it. Of all the people who have actually put a video online, how many of you have done fine editing, changing the quality and the clips? So we have four people with that experience and keep that in mind as you look through the data of what our first year college students were doing a year ago. So this is some of the data overall. So basically what you can see that in terms of percentages, more men than women made online videos. One particularly disturbing result for educators is the second bar is when they were assigned a video for a school project, more men than women made videos and this is something I will come back to because I feel like this is one of the places where policy and practice can make a difference. Furthermore, women perceived themselves as beginners much more than men when it came to video editing skills. No women thought of themselves as advanced video editing in terms of their skills. So this graph gets you back to my elevator speech in terms of confidence and how that might affect the ability to make videos. The next graph I'm going to show you takes the first set of bars just creating online videos and starts to break it down in a little bit more detail. So this is where it starts to get more interesting. I basically divided online video creation into specific tasks. So the very simple tasks are on the left side and as you move to the right hand side you're getting to more complicated tasks. So if I point my camera at you, I click record and then I click upload. That will be in the category of the cell phone webcam and you can see there were no differences between men and women. They were both very comfortable with simple clicking, simple uploading, simple moving on. As you get closer to the right hand side of the graph you get to things like fixing audio video quality, editing multiple clips, being the producer, the director, the manager of the video and there you do get significant gender differences and across the board in all cases men were more engaged than women. So it was kind of interesting to look at this as something more subtle. So basically it wasn't a simple answer about whether there were differences or there were not. These are specific tasks and I think the details will change over time as the software gets easier to use but the general differentiation between simple and complicated tasks I think will have some staying power. After I did this analysis which was basically looking at exactly what people were doing when they were making the online videos I did break down the identity of students and that was also quite interesting. So I'll show one quick graph here. So this is how the results broke down in terms of ethnicity, in terms of immigrant status and it was quite interesting. The Asian students really stood out in the study. Asian men, you could see 70% had made online videos and they were making much more complicated online videos than the rest of the sample. It reminded me of Ryan Leonard, the Asian student who won our first mash-up contest and who went on to become the creator of our music video that you will see on our site. But the more important part of the study is to look at why some of these differences exist. And what I basically found is that as long as we build in some understanding for things like computer confidence things like a positive attitude towards technology and having some time to explore technologies that the differences fall away and there are no demographic factors that stay once the conceptual framework is brought into the picture. So adding in the conceptual framework really removed the significance of gender completely for all the nine roles that I studied it was successful at explaining differences by gender and by ethnicity with these simple concepts and just a little bit about these concepts basically the attitude towards computers really made a difference. Confidence using computers made a difference and the ease of use made a difference. It was very interesting to look at the comments about the Mac Apple platform. You know there's a general sense that Apple makes it easier to make videos and it really stood out. People who had Mac experience were much more likely to make and publish videos and the ease of use in the user interface design is probably a big part of the reason why that is how it is. In a nutshell, addressing attitudes towards computers and technology acceptance could potentially help us reduce gender inequalities. The gender gap was especially huge on computer confidence and on this idea of learned helplessness. Helplessness is the idea that once people do things for you enough you stop even trying and you just kind of hand over control. So I'm going to talk very briefly about things that we have control over. I'm going to start with the required school projects. So there was a pretty big difference in male and female participation in required school projects and there's no logical reason for this. If we assign a video project as a school activity there's no reason why the men in the classes are doing the video editing more than the women. Assuming that our high schools are evenly distributed by gender. If video literacy matters then it should matter for both men and women and that was something that really stood out for me. Some aspects of video creation were gender neutral. These are the tasks that both men and women were very comfortable doing. There was no particular difference to be seen. However there were other roles that were not and these were the roles that came out again and again as being male. They were basically adding music, images, titles, improving the quality of the video and then the video production piece. I'm going to step back now from the study and I'm going to share just five quotes from the students that I interviewed. I think you'll find these interesting. They put a human face on some of the numbers that I've been showing. They were struck by how much video creation has really been integrated into the lives of our students. Students made videos to show their high school friends how their dorm rooms looked. They made videos as they walked around campus. They recorded birthday greetings as videos. Videos were part and parcel of their everyday lives more so actually than in their school lives. They recorded and shared the minutia of their lives. They recorded videos about political opinions, their favorite sports cars, their music. Video was just on a daily basis something they lived and the contrast between that and the show of hands we did earlier starts to point out some of the differences that we see just generationally. I've selected five quotes that echo for me some of the significant concepts from the quantitative analysis. This first one really spoke to me. This female student described a school video project saying, I just watched from the sidelines. That doesn't really sound like active participation in class activities. The second quote describes the general sense of who makes videos. I've never really met a girl that was very good at all those things. Some people who are good at these, most people who are good at these type of things are males. Just a perception of who does editing and who does not do editing. I've included three quotes from male students. The first one talks about the pride of creation. This is a male student talking about a video that he has made that he talks about on a regular basis. The second one just has the assumption that people should be able to do fine editing. The assumption that anybody who wanted to make a better video would be able to. The self-efficacy came through on that one. And the last one I'm going to show is this idea of confidence. It was so simple. Very user-friendly. I did it on my own, which was something I heard again and again from the men that I interviewed. There are many more quotes in the research write-up. I found this part of the study fascinating, and I'm very curious about whether it's a common experience or just this one institution that I've looked at. So I'm going to quickly finish with recommendations, hand it back over to Renee. I'm going to conclude with eight recommendations for practitioners. My dissertation includes recommendations for research and for replication. My selfish goal for asking to be here at CNI is that I'm hoping that I will contact other people interested in this topic. I would love to see something like this replicated on another campus to see if the conceptual framework has any value to it beyond this particular study. But the recommendations I'm giving are just on a practitioner basis. So just for eight thoughts for you to consider. What I found is that once somebody makes their first video, there are no longer differences that affect how many videos people make after that, which raises this issue of a threshold, that if we as educators can help women to make that first video, maybe that breaks the ice and makes it a little easier to get started. Building on the conceptual framework, I recommend activities that build computer confidence. And that focus on school projects that are designed carefully. And Renee is going to talk a little bit more about instructional design and how it can affect the experience that students have in the classroom. The reason that it's so important with school projects, just very quickly, we would not expect if we assign a group presentation that only the men would do the public speaking. If we assign a group report, we would not expect that only the men would do the writing. So why is it that we are comfortable assigning a video project and not in any way setting up a structure that makes sure that men don't hog the keyboard, hog the mouse, hog the video camera, and you might see this as you observe the way students work in groups on video projects. Media literacy is important for all our students, so the way we structure the school project becomes quite important. YouTube videos are watched by millions of people. Do we want one group of people making them and another group watching on the sidelines, going back to the quote that I gave earlier? My fourth recommendation builds on this idea of ease of use. If you make something look easy, it's much easier for people to get started with it. So just a couple of suggestions. You know, use a flip camera instead of the really expensive multifunction one that makes people intimidated. Use iMovie or use Jing instead of using something that is professional grade like Final Cut Pro or Premiere. Simple projects that really build confidence can help people to make that first video, which might then get them interested in the other aspects of learning about video production. I'm almost done. My last four recommendations. Both men and women need to believe that video creation is valuable before they're going to put the time in to do any good editing. And number six is really important. The theoretical constructs of self-efficacy, stereotype threat, and learned helplessness, they do explain the gender differences in online video creation, so I think we need to address them explicitly. We need to do something to tackle them with care and sensitivity. One aspect perhaps unique to video creation, especially performance, is this idea of social risk. Students need to feel comfortable being funny, to be the class clown, to make a joke, to just be more casual on camera. Again and again, what I heard from both men and women in my interviews is both men and women feel that men make funnier videos, that they're just more entertaining, they're willing to take risks on camera, which comes back to this idea of social risk. How can we make a safe space for people to feel comfortable taking social risks? And lastly, perhaps as a minor point, I found that international students are really just getting started with video creation, and a little bit of additional help might help them. To summarize, before I hand the microphone back over to Renee, easy to use technologies in video creation are gender neutral. The more complicated aspects of video creation, people will need help with, and they may need some scaffolding to get there. Class projects really show gender imbalances, and those we should be able to address explicitly. In the question and answer session, I hope you will share with me your impressions about how men and women on your campus are making videos and are there differences you observe. I'm going to go ahead and hand things over back to Renee. So, Anu has helped us understand a little bit about some patterns that happen among undergraduates, and one of the things you noticed was undergraduates are experimenting with making online videos outside of school for their own informal social relationship purposes, and they have some experience making videos in school. Working at a school of communication and theater, we experience this tension quite a lot, and I want to talk now a little bit about those faculty who are not really responsible for teaching media production, but the faculty who are responsible for theory courses or writing or history courses, because one of the things that's really interesting about online video creation is to think about ways that faculty who are teaching theory or content courses can begin to experiment with video production. And as I've interviewed those teachers, and this work comes from my new book, which is called Digital and Media Literacy, Connecting Classroom and Culture, what I found was that faculty who experiment with offering video production assignments to students experience certain challenges, and so for some of those faculty, they try a video production assignment once, and then they won't try it again. For most faculty, the biggest challenge to take into consideration is time. Time's a zero-sum game. I only have so many assignments I can make. I only have so many hours of expectations that I can have for student work. If I ask them to do a video production assignment, then something else has to go in my program. And so faculty who have taken the first step to require or make possible a video production assignment often get flustered when these six things happen. And it's possible that in your own work with faculty, you have encountered a faculty who experienced these challenges. So while Anu talked a little bit about the experience from students' point of view, I'm now going to share with you from the faculty point of view some of the challenges that instructors face when they use video assignments in their theory or content classes, right? First one, non-collaboration. And this is true with lots of things that we like students to collaborate on, right? One kid does all the work, and the rest of them sit on the sidelines. And it's a very common strategy for undergraduate collaboration for the divide and conquer to fall disproportionately on the burden, on the head of the one lead kid who pulls it all together. So that's a challenge faced by instructors, especially when it comes time for assessment, right? Who gets credit for that project when it was done by the one kid and then all five students essentially come along for the ride. Another challenge that faculty tell me about is something I call imitating the worst of Hollywood, which is that one of the reasons why video production is so engaging and motivating for undergraduates is because they're so familiar with it. They know, they have a lot of cards in their card catalog about things they could do, right? And they borrow sometimes a lot of tropes and a lot of characteristics of sometimes the worst aspects of Hollywood. The most common thing that faculty tell me about is students reproducing gender or racial stereotypes in their own productions, right? So the dumb blonde will frequently appear in undergrad student video productions, right? The geeky Asian will sometimes appear in student video productions. So this represents a really interesting challenge for faculty who want to provide space for sort of moving out and beyond sort of the Hollywood representations to broader topics. But when students reproduce those stereotypes, faculty can be frustrated or annoyed. Another challenge is that I think we see not just with online video creation but with all student multimedia production is the challenge of style over substance. Those of you who've watched undergraduates work with PowerPoint or we're using today Prezi or making movies on an iMac or with Movie Maker is that students will spend a lot of time on the font and the color and the titles and like the ideas. Well, they won't really think so carefully about those. And getting students to think about the relationship between style and substance and getting them to value the substance, the content of their videos, that balance can be a challenging for faculty. Faculty tell me they're also frustrated when goofy gets transgressive. Because YouTube videos have created new social norms, students sometimes are not sensitive to the distinct arenas in which what's appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another setting. And this blurring of boundaries is something we can't blame undergraduates for because they're growing up in a culture where, well, my sophomores and juniors have been watching YouTube videos since they were 13 or 14 years old. So for them, transgression, sort of edgy, risky, and in fact inappropriate elements are to be used in school projects and that can rattle faculty. And so a faculty who's screened a student video project like this may or may not feel completely comfortable doing that assignment again. Students have that opportunity or possibility of introducing transgressions related to bodily functions, sex, drug, and alcohol use, and just the list goes on and on. One of the challenges faculty have talked to me about is when the major production goes unfinished. Faculty have been complaining about undergraduate student time management since the dawn of history, I guess. But boy, is that a difficult lesson for undergraduates to learn when they can't complete their project by the deadline and when essentially that project goes unfinished to the faculty member experiences frustration, the students are upset, it becomes what I have called a non-optimal learning experience. From my point of view, the thing I struggle with in my own teaching, where I require students to make videos every semester in all my theory classes, is finding a way to address the opportunity to reflect and critique those videos. For many years, the only strategy I used for showcasing student performances would be the last day of class or close to the last day of class where we would watch student video productions, we would clap appreciatively and move on to the next one. Creating a celebration of sorts, but not actually providing a space for the kind of reflection and critique that is at the heart of what we do when we comment on student papers, offering feedback that helps enable and support intellectual growth. And so if we don't do that for students' video production, we're missing out on a real opportunity to facilitate students' intellectual development. And too often, the video production becomes a mere celebration without providing opportunity to give students real feedback on their work. So with the person sitting next to you, I bet you may have a story or two that relates to one of the six challenges that I've identified. Why don't you share a story with the person sitting next to you and colleagues that you work with have experienced any challenges associated with video production? So take about three minutes. Okay, I think we'll press on to our conclusion and hopefully we're going to leave a little bit of time for comments and questions where we hope to hear some of your stories or the ideas that got generated by your dialogue there. So my experience in trying to design my way out of those problems, through the way I design the assignment, includes these five recommendations. Model a short, simple media production activity to inspire creative thinking and reduce technology anxiety. When students do a small, simple media production, often I do that in class so that in the hour and a half, we have completed a project, often using a flip camera. Then first of all, that helps students to understand how much time it takes to do something. It took an hour and a half to do this little thing and that helps them adjust their expectations about what's possible for them to do. But it also gets them thinking about the creativity involved in trans mediation and thinking about how to express an idea visually through linear video production. And it also helps me to identify who has tech anxiety, right? And so then that clues me in to who I need to support and how I can structure teams so that the kids who have tech anxiety don't get paired with somebody who's gonna take over the project and do it all. It's really important for me to provide time for collaboration in the classroom. And boy, is that painful for me because time's such a zero-sum game. I don't like to provide time for collaboration, but I find that when I do, especially early on in the project in pre-production, when they're developing the idea for the project, that that time pays off in enormous ways in terms of the quality of the learning experience. I think it's really important to establish clear expectations about audience, purpose, and tone. I do that through an evaluation rubric where I let students know, here's the project and here's how I'm gonna be grading it and here's how you're gonna get points and here's what it needs to accomplish. And having that set of clear expectations really helps students avoid being transgressive and avoid non-collaboration and avoid focusing on style over substance. It's important for faculty to establish those clear expectations and hold students to be accountable to that. I think it's also important to ask students to reflect on the process of collaboration. I do this by asking students to write a reflection that is part of the grade for the project where students write about their experience of collaboration because I emphasize the learning experience is really about process and product. I'm not just grading the product. It's the process by which it was created that counts for me as well. And then ensuring time for screening and critique. What that means is I have to chunk out three classes at the end of the semester to do that work. And when I did it the first semester, it was so painful for me. I was like, oh my goodness, this is so much time. This is time I could be transmitting valuable information to them. Why am I spending this much time on this? But what I found happened is that the conversation around their videos and the depth and richness and sophistication of those conversations was phenomenal and gave me plenty of opportunities to underline the big ideas that I wanted students to come away with in the course. So it was the hardest decision I made as a faculty member but the most rewarding in terms of seeing what happened in terms of the dialogue in the classroom. Okay, so I think we've shown plenty of evidence today why academic leaders should create learning environments that support student exploration of video production as an expanded conception of literacy with sensitivity to gender and attention to instructional design. Thanks so much for joining us on this adventure today. And I guess what we'll do on is let's go down and see if we have maybe only five minutes for conversation. Have you experimented with multi-channel videos like you might show PowerPoint on one channel and the speaker on the other, a lab experiment on one channel or an operation and somebody discussing it while it's going on? Wow, no, I haven't done that. That sounds really cool. Why would that be pedagogically effective or useful from your point of view? Well, you not only see the description of the process, you visually see the process itself and then you get somebody describing it as it's going on and you can control each channel separately. For example, if you wanted to go to four channels in a production or music, you could have a conductor, the first violinist, the orchestra and the audience, all four channels showing at the same time and you can see how the reactions are happening in this process. And we found it very, very useful working with one of the universities you work with. That sounds great. Thank you for sharing that. Other comments, questions, feedback, ideas that this conversation has sparked for you. Hi. I know that libraries often provide help desks for digital content, for digital production, for media, for students. And I wonder what your thoughts are about the best ways that libraries in offering these kinds of help services could support the pedagogical outcomes that you've just discussed. Great question. Anu, you take it first and I'll comment. Is this mic is fine? So this is something we actually, if you want to get in touch with us, we've been doing for a little while. What we found is really helpful is we try to meet with the professor at the very beginning of the semester, ask for a copy of the assignment and we get all of the files that the students are expected to use and we put them on the server in our media lab. And then us, the staff in the library all become familiar with the assignments that we're supporting. So when a student walks into the media lab, we will usually ask them, are they working on a video for a class project? If they say yes, we already have the information we need. And one of the things that's really helpful to us is to ask professors, something that Renee mentioned, what their expectations are for the assignment, in particular what they feel is an A assignment, what's a B assignment, what's a C assignment. That way we can just give students some suggestions. So if we have some professors, for example, that give no grading weight to the quality of the editing, they're really looking for content. So if we know that it's that kind of an assignment, we can guide students to not spend a lot of their time getting their soundtrack to be exactly right, because that's not going to be that important. So having that conversation in September helps us in December when the students are kind of staying up all night. I was mentioning to Renee, the one of the things she mentioned was an obstacle, was this issue of the unfinished product, and often we in the library get to witness the students who are really struggling. They've been staying up all night, and their project is not done, and we can feel the pain in a sense. So having some advanced conversations with professors really helps us to handle questions that come up. Other comments, questions? In the video, one of the students compared making videos to writing essays. And over the years, large numbers of disciplines have found ways that essays are useful parts of teaching their discipline. But not all disciplines use essays. And it seems to me with making videos can contribute to learning in some disciplines, but not all disciplines. And I wonder if you have any sort of feeling for which disciplines this is most effective in. I'll comment on that a little bit because I think I held that point of view pretty robustly. Pretty confident in working with faculty in literature and in history and in sociology that this transmediation process makes sense. You have to develop an argument, then you have to figure out a way to... It's a linear media. It uses language, language image sound. So what I was surprised to find out was that faculty in the sciences who made video production a part of their program had interesting kinds of discoveries as well. So I'll describe one that I think goes at this question of which disciplines can benefit best from this. This is a teacher who basically said to students in the biology by the third time they did an experiment, you will get extra credit if you videotape your experiment and you produce a video of the results of your experiment. And the way he introduced this assignment was by showing a very poor quality video of an experiment. Everything about that video was horrible. It was just a mess. As you watched it, you couldn't tell what was going on. You didn't know what materials were being used. You didn't know what chemical processes were being activated or whatever. And he said, what's wrong with this video? And the students generated a long list. It should have done this. It should have done this. It should have done this. You should have done that. You should have done this. And then what he found was that students who took him up on that offer did the experiment like six times. They videotaped it six times and they edited together. They had a long shot. They had a close-up. They thought about transitions. They thought about titling. He said in the end that what he thought happened was that because students had to think about representing the sequence of the experiment itself and how to communicate that to an audience, that they were way more attentive to the concepts and the practices than they might have been had they just, you know, done the experiment. So that was a surprise for me because I think I would have thought, as you pointed out, that really the humanities and social sciences might have a particular edge on this. But that faculty's experience made me think, I'm not so sure. I guess, you know, just to add on what Renee has mentioned, we have actually been very surprised that there's not too many disciplines that have not found a way.  So if one professor comes up with an idea for how a video assignment might work in their class and they talk with colleagues, that makes a huge difference in the way this kind of expands over time. Very, you know, basically I feel like video is just a new medium that we will start to take for granted in every discipline. The way it used to be we would all get all of our knowledge from books. And I really see now that we are getting much of our knowledge from video in one way or the other. So I don't see it as a discipline-specific issue. I do see that the class size makes a difference. If I'm teaching a 300-student class, I'm going to be much more careful in making any changes to my curriculum because it will affect so many people. The support issues are larger. And a lot of science classes are taught in large lecture. So it might be more of a structural and curriculum situation that causes obstacles. But yeah, we have seen some really interesting ways in which the same lesson idea jumps across discipline. So just one quick example. In October, we had a professor of South Asia studies who did something very simple. Her students made Jing videos, where basically you make a PowerPoint presentation and you talk over the presentation. It turns it into a very quick video. There's really no tech skills involved. So her class was about commodities. They were looking at coffee and chocolate and commodities like that that cross cultural boundaries. She did a presentation about how she used this particular assignment in her class. And a professor from the vet school is now interested in trying this with small animals. And I don't think we would have seen that discipline jump coming. But it turned out that it was something that was easy to visualize. And the technology seemed simple enough that somebody else was comfortable trying it out. I hope that answers your question. Okay, we'd like to thank you for coming to this session. And especially because you had so many other good choices. So thanks again.