Thank you everyone for attending my talk. I thought I was going to have to fly 34 hours and have nobody sort of sit here And that would have been more sort of mostly tragic for me and maybe a little bit sad So my name is John. I'm going to be talking about Our latest project project Athena where we're looking to sort of blow open the lid on defense Sort of information defense and military information particularly with the focus on Africa because you know We're all african defense review all four of us or sort of all five of us involved with it are Africans and it's our sort of wheelhouse and our sort of sort of area of expertise We do sort of leverage a other team of researchers, but for all intents and purposes. It's the five of us I should say having seen and attended some of these talks now I am a journalist first and foremost.  We're attempting to create a dashboard that's going to create a layer of transparency in the African defense sector There's very little transparency in the sector at the best of times I mean those of you who work we even sort of you know Tangentially sort of related or sort of interested in defense affairs even in the United States There's a lot of secrecy over this and it's even more so in compounded. So in Africa The defense sector is the least open worldwide and Africa is the least open of that least open sector You know that and that's creates a massive massive sort of fog of war if you will on terms of sort of a lack of information a creation of secrecy and thus a sort of vulnerability to corruption to arms proliferation and sort of illegal trafficking So we're essentially trying to break open that lid on defense data make it open make an open source platform where we can sort of look at Who is selling what to whom and where are these arms going those are two of the sort of fundamental questions? The consequences of this Of not doing this. I should say are pretty obvious I mean the the inability to accurately measure or catalog or sort of find this information Can essentially be measured in human lives, which I'll sort of be getting touching on a little bit as I go Just a little brief content warning in case you had noticed we're doing defense stuff here There's going to be images of war zones of conflict hardship You know, there will be some military equipment guns and tanks and things like that Nothing graphic in terms of sort of graphic or gratuitous violence, but just just a sort of heads up as we go So I'll just start right here This right here is a tank, but it's a specific tank as you can see in the top left It's a vickers mark one main battle tank and it was produced in the United Kingdom by BAE land systems way back when in the 1980s Nigeria bought 36 of these in 1981 At a price in sort of today's dollars of nine million per per tank not a bad price but 36 of these were bought back then and This has a major significance I'm going to use the tank as a vehicle excuse upon of Transporting you through how we're going to develop project Athena because this tank actually is essentially the sort of The main way that we can have explained what we at ADR are going to do or are doing I should say So how am I going to do this? We've got this tank and we're going to sort of talk about it in two major silos Okay, the first we're going to talk about The sort of minesweeper approach those of you played minesweeper back in the day or still do We'll know what I'm talking about those of you who don't we'll get there. Don't worry And that will relate to the sort of state-centric side of the defense research we're doing And then we have the scratch patch Side of things which I'm very curious to see if any of you know what a scratch patch actually is But again, we'll get there as we go And then finally I'll look at the actual tech of what we're doing and how all this information is going to be sort of placed into Something that can slice and dice this information into a useful and coherent fashion For for pretty much anybody who's interested mostly we're aiming this at journalists at humanitarian organizations Who would or should or need to know about these kinds of risks in terms of the areas of where they're going in terms of corruption risks? And so on So that's what we're going to do. So with this vickers mark one main battle tank on the left-hand side here We got the the nice sort of shiny version of it in the Nigerian armies warehouse Those are obviously just what have we got there? We got four of the 36 sitting in their warehouse What we have on the right is exactly the same tank But it's this is a photo captured sort of it's been recaptured from Boko Haram insurgents or terrorists depending on your politics in northeastern Nigeria this tank was purchased legally from BAE land systems in the United Kingdom and You know for all intents and purposes was purchased with a completely open and transparent defense deal And then wound up in the hands of what is now the most violent terrorist organization Worldwide they have forget about ISIS Boko Haram has killed more people in the world as a terrorist group than anybody else And that's kind of an alarming thing when you think about the fact that nobody at least on Twitter when we found this picture Actually knew what on earth this thing was in terms of what the tank was or where it comes from so immediately you start to see that there is this Lack of sort of real specific information about this and obviously I've seen this in the journalistic sphere as well people will see a tank and they don't actually understand what specific tank that is and It's not just a question of nerding out on the sort of technical details, especially if you know if you're an engineer You love that kind of stuff. I suppose It's important. It's important to know what the details is or are in terms of that that sort of tank So that tank even an old tank even a tank that was purchased 30 years ago by the Nigerian Army and completely above board Can still become a problem in the modern sort of a security environment say northeast Nigeria northeastern Nigeria If it falls into enemy hands, it has a hundred and five millimeter cannon It has been used in propaganda videos by Boko Haram as sort of firing said cannon You know, and that's that's an alarming thing when you have a terrorist organization or a militant group using a tank Anytime you have a non-state actor using a tank. That's quite alarming So to take this back to the two silo approach what I'm going to talk about is how This relates firstly to the state side on the on the left hand side and then the non-state side In the Boko Haram example that they're on the on the left. So minesweeper Project Athena and minesweeper is how we're going to make African military or African Department of Defense organizations Somewhat accountable or at least somewhat transparent whether or not they like it It doesn't matter and the same for sort of some of those global arms importers or exporters providing those sort of systems Okay The minesweeper approach is kind of what we're basing this on because a lot of this information is if it's not Easily available. It's just really really tricky to find that's not to say it's impossible But it is just really really difficult to find accurate data on what sort of what tanks or what? Rifles or what bombs are being purchased by what states and when and more importantly for how much? Okay So what we're trying to do is gather that research and gather that data You know just by sort of you know steady diligent patient research We all have at ADR. We have an expertise in actually doing this for our sins back in the day for the sort of dark side of you know, sort of For for profit consultancies. So we have an idea of how to find these procurement Sort of lists tender documents, you know, sort of open-source News coverage and things like that. There is another database the Cypri database Which is a useful sort of bottom water or the sort of lower watermark that we can use Which provides some export data for defense things But not all of it that tank that I mentioned for example is listed in the Cypri database But it's not listed as a mark one vickers mark one eagle main battle tank It's just listed as a main battle tank exported to Nigeria in 1981 So now we had to sort of make that research link between okay, it's a main battle tank But is it the one we want? That's just an idea of how we're trying to do that. So we're you know to take it back to Minesweeper We're never quite going to get Exactly the mine that we want But we're hoping through project Athena on the state side of things to eliminate as many of these gray boxes of Sort of confusion or of lack of transparency on that procurement side In order to give you as the researcher or citizen journalist or Humanitarian organization a better idea of what's going on in terms of that the sort of defense procurement space Okay, so what are the flags? How do we know that there's a flag there? You know, what's a corruption risk because obviously all militaries buy equipment, you know, we're at ADR We're not we're not pacifists. We do understand that states are going to buy tanks. They're gonna buy aircraft These things are gonna happen. So what is what what's the big deal? So how to raise those flags is when you start to look at the sort of things such as for example Underspending or overspending, you know, did that tank cost too much? Did it cost too little? Did it arrive way way later than it actually was sort of supposed to arrive all of these things are markers that weird We use to indicate possible risks in terms of malfeasance in terms of misconduct and in terms of potential corruption with the project Athena sort of purpose is not to Say this is a corrupt deal But it's to create those sort of things around which you can sort of start to raise the flag as a research and say This might be corrupt and let's look into it further and we're providing that sort of springboard that you can actually look for Okay So that's an essential the mind sweeper sort of things. I'm really blitzing through this but we're gonna get there Here's the fun part.  Does anyone know what it raise a show of hands? Does anybody know what a scratch patch is? Oh Thank you. There's one. Thank goodness.  They're basically worthless, but you're picking you're picking what you think is sort of precious to you You then take it home and then annoy your parents forever by sort of leaving these things under the sides of couches and that When we were discussing, how do we start looking at the sort of bokeh rum tank tank side of things? How do we look at weapons that are not catalogued or not announced through the arm is sort of an arms deal or a procurement deal? How do we start to sort of look at that? And this is how we started to visualize things in terms of a scratch patch and then sort of ran into difficulties explaining that to anyone Who wasn't sort of a sort of child in sort of apartheid South Africa's or white South African with access to the scratch patch Nobody else knew what the hell we were talking about but now that you know you're part of it. So welcome You'll never be able to unsee this What the scratch patch essentially is is we're going to be cataloging and gathering as much Possible data that can be found social media Sort of you know by sort of we do sometimes get tip-offs and submissions of what you can see has weapons and and arms and explosives from captured stockpiles You know often on on social media You'll see militant groups and rebel organizations themselves post almost as a sort of form of propaganda The the various weapons they're using and those are very very good telltale signs for what What weapons are being used and more importantly where they came from? But this is just the tip of the spear what we're trying to do with ADR is we're actually sort of planning Almost as a bit of a product. Well, it is a prototype is to go to the DRC ourselves We're sending two researchers in country with the blessing and sort of embed of the the UN peacekeeping forces there Within a bed with the South African military and we're going to be stock or not stockpiling, but we're going to be cataloging armed sort of arms that have been captured or sort of recovered from armed groups and Sort of cataloging in terms of what are these weapon types? What are the serial numbers in the barrels in the receivers? And so start looking the ammunition types looking the little stamps sort of serial numbers and that the reason being is if you have a serial number You have an idea of where this thing was produced and you can start to actually track and trace Just where these weapons sort of came from and more importantly now how they've wound up in sort of a sort of non-state actor's hands Providing you know I talked to initially about sort of peeling the lid open on defense transparency We do that on the state side, but defense permit procurement data. This is how we peel it back from the other side By cataloging this data, so we're making this open source We're going to sort of open it up in terms of crowdsourcing trying to figure out You know if the internet can help us those of you are aware of Bellingcat a major sort of OSINT research group Have done this to great success in sort of Syria and the Ukraine as well So we're kind of hoping to do something similar For Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa if we can get enough information on it So now very briefly in the space of about a minute The tech which is probably what a lot of you are mostly interested in This is just a screenshot from the scratch patch side of things Where we're looking at sort of trying to map and catalog Weapon instances and sort of objects as and when and how we gain sort of gain them Obviously when we go to the DRC, we're going to have a big sort of even deeper red color there once we've got a whole bunch of information there But we're trying to essentially create this searchable Index for researchers to basically say I want to know how many Chinese aka pattern Assault rifles for example have been cited in Central Africa That information doesn't exist. It just does not exist not in any coherent sort of way So we're trying to actually create that coherent sort of pattern about it The the sort of details about it the sort of stack obviously our database will be built. We're using a thing called Elastic search. I think which uses archival and logging information, which is kind of its speciality So that's going to be a sort of a big help with this stuff Especially with the procurement data because that's literally just logging and archiving documents And then using kibana as the the visualization tool From that so yeah, that's pretty much in a very very quick sort of nutshell what we're doing with project Athena You know and again Hopefully you guys have got some questions about all of that stuff because I'd love to talk about it some more. Thank you Yes, the Yes is the answer to Where's it gone? Here we go This little thing. This isn't just something we found on the internet This is from a previous project we did where we sent journalists to South Sudan to uncover reports of human engineer or repop you human Repopulation or human engineering by the South Sudanese government It's you if you sort of just Google South Sudan African defense, so it's on our website pretty good story I think you should all read it is great But anyway point being is we had hundreds of gigs of footage and data and research in a country where it's illegal to photograph military personnel It's risky, but at the same time we encrypted the data we kept sort of USB Sticks in our socks and you just sort of you you take that risk with something like the DRC There's less of a risk because we're kind of doing it at the sort of invitation of the United Nations So that that does help a lot We're not expecting the Nigerian military for example to be friends with us You know if we uncover Nigerian sort of procurement, you know talking about that tank for example Weirdly we're doing this, you know We're also focusing on South Africa as a case study as well for this because that Africa is not you know despite You know South Africans consider themselves the Texans of Africa We think we're the biggest thing there and everything everything else kind of pales and significance We're kind of like the narcissists of of the world, but We're taking a look at South Africa because we're not immune to defense corruption either And we were sort of looking at that and weirdly we have got a bit of cooperation actually with the South African military nothing official But but certainly there's there's no pushback We do expect that to kind of change as we go into other other areas. Yeah Sorry You just mentioned that you Project Athena reason slacks are not be since in corruption I didn't mention that you know you check to see what say the price was sold what you know How the arms are sold and what I'm just curious as to like how do you how hard how does the project know that? so You will often find That I'm just trying to think of a good example, but something like a an aircraft for example I'm thinking of a recent thing we worked on in Angola where Angola purchased. I think it was seven su 32 flankers something like that for the princely sum of a billion dollars, which is way too much for that thing the jets were obsolete and all that Angola boasted about it They literally sort of were quite happy to say hey, we're spending a billion dollars on arms because for them It was a way of projecting military power. Hey, we're spending all this money in military means we're serious about it Other ways as often defense companies themselves will advertise it In the case of that tank for example BAE land systems the producer is obliged by their country's export law to announce Their their export destination and how much they're they're paying for it. That's not always the case particularly in sort of Russian exporters and Chinese exporters you often find that data is just Way more difficult to find And in that case that we kind of have to go a little bit further There's often local blogs where we have to go and use Google translate to figure out what Russian or Chinese is for This amount of money for this thing and it's not perfect. It's not accurate, but it's it's it's better than nothing And then we need to sort of extract or sort of compare that to the market cost for that class of weapon Which is generally quite well known within the defense industry Yeah There are people there is the the five of us and we have a network of researchers that we're using because it's it's incredibly niche research To be able to sort of know your Marco and vickers from an you know Sort of t72m from a t72k from you know It's it's very difficult research and we I mean if if anybody has any ideas about how to automate So please come talk to me. You will save me so many gray hairs in the future. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I was just wondering if you are developing using a That standard for modeling all that that you have Because I can see that to be very useful I mean beyond the the scope of the geographic scope that you you are working on but yeah America with all the war on drugs for instance. Yeah all the trafficking and so on even though That information that might not be open now. Yeah, it's text on there's some standard So at least is something and that people can just look into that and kind of Evolve from from that and it is available. Yeah, that's a good question actually So we're we're not project complete just yet We're hoping to sort of get this ready and rolled out by the before the end of the year But actually as we've been working on this it's actually South Africa's elections today I'm South African in case you hadn't noticed and we're having our national elections and we when we're working on So we're thinking this would actually be a great tool To visualize elections because essentially instead of sorry. I'm just trying to flick to it There we go, you know instead of tanks and weapons as being the objects your objects could be voters They could be constituents. It could be drug dealers in in South America. There could be Any kind of sort of object database and I think to answer your question is yes We certainly intend to make this available. We are in partnership with Code for Africa who generally Prefer us to have a github for everything so that you know everyone can sort of take a look see I hope I'm answering that sort of tech side again I'm not quite the developer but the idea is to develop this methodology as we go so that people can use this for other things We're kind of thought quite narrowly in terms of using it for defense outside of Africa But there's no reason if you think about outside the box why this couldn't be integrated into any number of other similar kinds of sort of projects where you've got procurement and you've got things that are Related to procurement, but perhaps sort of a bit off the books as it were Yeah, I hope that answers your question. I don't know a little bit Yeah, I did two questions One is why the name project Athena? It seems like to be like quite overloaded and it doesn't seem super relevant to Greek guide to to African homeland or whatever and to a lot of this data you're talking about has a Statistical like variance to it. It's not a hundred percent, right? So you point an image off Twitter that that is posted by somebody who might be related to some Entity that might be the thing you're looking at and I wonder if you thought about how to relate that in your Visualizations and how you explain this to the public. So I mean having worked in defense data in the past I've always been very careful to say like this is a weapon from this group at this point And I see a lot of assertions like that in your talk. I'm just curious how you Talk about that certainly so I'm glad you asked about the Athena name Our initial preference was actually for Oya, which is an African goddess of war and conflict and things like that But the idea is for this tool to be used sort of internationally And the sad thing is it's just Athena is a far more relatable, you know, sort of understandable term than Oya Unfortunately, oh, yeah, we've used now for another mapping tool that we've got I I would love to change it and it's not set in stone So we might depending Depending how we feel as we go further on actually sort of because we actually wanted to I should say that But we're also trying to get this tool as widely used as possible So it's it's kind of a catch-twint. What's not a catch-twint, too It's just a sort of cost benefit that we've sort of sort of decided to do on the data Absolutely agreed. It's you know, especially, you know, when I you know I am a journalist by day as well for for the normal political stuff And we when we're not being hacked by the Russians encounter sort of fake imagery and stuff like that as well And I would say as as much as social media is related It's sort of human-filtered as it were, you know, we have the five of us We're hoping I did mention crowdsourcing but perhaps only too briefly To adopt a sort of Bellingcat kind of model here where we sort of open this up To citizen researchers and say can you geolocate or sort of reference or sort of verify that this is actually This assault rifle from this area In the case of the DRC, that will be our own primary research So that's at least we we can use as a kind of like control study for them because obviously we want to have as clean a start as possible In in running this sort of project So we would like to have as sort of pure kind of research and material as possible So our catalog image of an assault rifle Could for all intents and purposes be a tweet because it's hey from this location This picture with this description We're just doing that ourselves instead of putting it on social media But the fields and objects that we would put into Athena in terms of the database would be more or less similar But then obviously as we go out information gets like it's perfect and then scrutiny needs to be a little bit more Sort of rigorous, I think as we go Okay Um So Please forgive me if this is if this is a very sort of naive question If you just abandoned kind of worries about like logistics and funding and all of the work that you have to do because this is a massive amount of work It's really impressive What what would be like the dream pathway to impact like if you if I asked you to just be like Like just imagine like the best case scenario for this project Well, who would pay attention and what would they do as a result? I mean honestly in a perfect world it would be if we could change this from project Athena to I thought it was me with that microphone change it from project Athena to wiki weapons You know and turn it into a sort of wikipedia level kind of thing where you have active sort of citizen engagement and contribution To this this knowledge Because it's it's it's our firm belief the whole reason we're doing this aside from we're not aside It's not the primary thing is not to nerd out on weapons The primary reason we're doing this is because we we genuinely believe this information needs to be made open source It needs to be Sort of opened up and made public domain whereas at the moment it absolutely is not Um, and that's that's the sort of mission we're trying to do this, you know, you mentioned funding and effort This is what we can do right now But again in a perfect world if we had more more sort of hands on deck and a little bit more funding and things like that Yeah, wiki weapons would be great. Also a cool name as well, I suppose. Yeah I think that's all we got for questions Thank you


and welcome to Coral's OER Hangout. My name is Carl Blythe and I'm the director of Coral and I'm really excited to have three teachers today, three French teachers who will be talking about how they have adapted an OER. That's the focus of our talk tonight. Our hangout title is Talk to Teachers Who Have Adopted and Adapted OER. And as I said they all three have adopted and adapted the same OER. So that will give us a kind of a thread, kind of a field conductor that makes all of this more coherent. Even though there'll be speaking about a French OER, if you don't, if your foreign language that you teach is another language don't worry because it should be applicable to people who teach different foreign languages and use different OERs. So I want to mention also at the beginning that Coral we have developed an OER course that really explains the ins and outs and the details of OER, from how to find OER, to how to implement OER, how to remix or adapt OER. The basics about creative commons licenses because licenses are so important to understanding the wonderful world of OER. So you'll find that under if you go to the Coral homepage there's a tab that says about and that's general information about Coral and just from that drop down menu select open education and we'll give you lots of background information including that course on open education and OER. So let me introduce our speakers tonight. Okay it looks like we lost Carl. This is Sarah from Coral so I'll just introduce the presenters while we wait for Carl to come back. So we have Alexandra Guiron from a French professor from South Puget Sound Community College and that's in Washington right? Yeah okay and then we have Don Michael, a French teacher from Reynoldsburg City Schools in Ohio and Valérie Morgant, a French lecturer from California State University St. Bernardino so he'll be talking to us very briefly about their experiences and then we'll do Q&A after that. So Alex would you like to go first? Sure yeah thank you. Hi my name is Alex Guiron and I am associate professor of French at South Puget Sound Community College. I first discovered Français Interactif way back when I was teaching at the Alliance Francaise a Pensiero. I originally discovered it through a graphic called La La Modette which is in Texas French grammar and I found it to be a playful and accessible and engaging and well presented way of introducing what's a rather difficult concept in French which is a type of passé composé, a type of past. It led me to use Texas French grammar more and more and from there I discovered Français Interactif. Back then I was still teaching at the Alliance Francaise so I didn't have a choice of textbook but I eventually moved to Olympia where I am in a very small French department in fact right now the French department is me so I get to pick my book and it was very very quickly I decided to adopt FI and move away from Valette and Valette type books which I found lack authenticity, lack idiomatic language not very vernacular, they always feel a little dated even when they're new and they're super expensive. Back then it was about 2007 my students were paying about 200 bucks for that book which I found to be hair-raising and I decided to choose Français Interactif because I really liked that the material is authentic that it's presented playfully. I love the ancillary materials like the companion page that each chapter has and Texas French grammar which I really mentioned before and really really like. I like that there's an emphasis on phonetics which is lacking in other textbooks and that there's a novel and brain-based way of acquiring vocabulary through the préparation du vocabulaire activities. I really like the fact that grammar is approached via inference and not lecture so that's novel and also very effective and also and most importantly price it's a really really accessible book especially considering that it's a high quality product so those were all the decisions and I've been using the book for a couple years when I want to grant from the state of Washington to develop OER material for the state of Washington and I'm going to share my screen here so this is the open course library and it's the state of Washington runs it and it's an initiative to develop high quality courses and course materials and everything has a cc by license all the course materials. The a major requirement for the program was that the textbook had to cost $30 or less so for me français interactif was an obvious choice a natural choice and obviously I went with it. It was a pretty rigorous process there was a heavy emphasis on alignment between outcomes objectives and assessments and a focus on universal design back when universal design wasn't quite such the buzzword that it is today so I did overcome some challenges adapting français interactif to to my classes and for the open course library and one of the big ones is that spscc runs on a quarterly system meaning that the book had to get split into three parts instead of two which seems like a simple process except that some concepts as a result get introduced in the second quarter instead of the first quarter and I'm thinking here specifically of the passé composé which I feel needs to be introduced as early as possible so there are some there was a little bit of shifting of material that I had to do for that to to happen. Another factor that I had to contend with is that the content load is not always very even from one chapter to the next. One example that jumps to mind is that chapter seven of the book is very content heavy and I'm talking here specifically about syntactically new concepts so concepts that don't occur in my students native languages English so and that they have to really work on very hard and so there's three big concepts that are introduced in one chapter and so that makes for a very very a lot of thinking on the part of my students I guess and another challenge which is really unique to Washington State is that we have a program called Running Start. High school students can attend college classes and graduate from high school with an AA if they have a GPA that meets basic requirements and that really does change the dynamic of the classroom at the community college. We have students who are between the ages of 16 and 19 and most of them live at home with their parents their commuters so they're not really experiencing the you know away from home for the first time and hanging out with friends and so I had to adapt some of the material to make it more relevant to them in terms of content. So yeah that's those are the big big changes I had to make I'm still happy that I made the switch to this book I'm going to continue to use it as long as I teach French and as long as as it's available to me. I also do want to note that I'm very grateful for the new edition the the changes that you made to the book I think really improve it for the better. So that's all I've got thank you so much for developing this amazing material and I'm very grateful that it's available to me. Thanks. So thanks Alex and we'll come back to you with some questions about how you've perhaps adapted it to your particular context in Washington. So let's pass it over to Dawn. Okay, bonsoir. So I am currently a high school French teacher but I started my career teaching university level for let's call it 10 years so I don't have to count right now. So my training was set as a university teacher so I'm definitely more comfortable with college level materials and then I started teaching high school as well as some adjunct work in 2002 and I used a variety of high school level textbooks none of which made me very happy for a variety of reasons mostly because starting out as a university level teacher university materials don't spend a lot of the time in the imagine your name is Juan and you and your friend Julio are on the subway in Madrid and all these kind of imaginary scenarios that a lot of high school and junior high materials go so I'm more comfortable with university level materials and I found myself in a situation where the textbooks that I had were outdated they did not align to the new act full proficiency based standards and the state of Ohio standards which switched to proficiency based and I wasn't satisfied I also didn't have a textbook budget and I was familiar with Texas French grammar already I'd use that as a supplement so when I really started diving into Française Interactive I was very very pleased with what I found there so I would say in 2012 I started using Française Interactive as the basis for my level one and level two courses so I kind of divvied it up into what you would do is first semester I did this french one and then what you would do is second semester I did is french two leaving out a few things because there are some things that aren't necessary in level two our target level is novice high so students don't need to be able to use the subjunctive and you know the what Spanish speakers know as the preterite the perfect and the imperfect they don't have to use those handily to hit novice high in high school but when I rolled it out I did pretty much use I did pretty much use the the materials exactly as they were but over time I'm going to share my screen here over time I started adapting to more closely align with the state of Ohio and national actful standards because I was teaching for proficiency and not for the discrete grammar mastery that you know was being focused on so I wrote my curricula for levels one and levels two based generally on the the Française Interactive progression and I use many of the activities especially the learning the grammar through inference I use the cultural readings it's like this is my curriculum guide and it's based on having trouble scrolling here with all these things going on my screen and it's based on the contents of Française Interactive I use the video resources quite a bit the nice thing about them is that they're native speakers but they are using vocabulary that is included in the chapter and so that makes that makes the videos more comprehensible for my students so they get the advantage of native speakers without many authentic video resources are not comprehensible for novices and again I'm hanging up a bit so what I've done over the years I used to just use the the textbook materials straight up but what I've done over the years is started adapting it more so I'm just going to show a couple tools for anyone else this is a tool called insert learning it you can use it for several you can use several uses for free and then it is a subscription but it allows you to take a web page and so you can make a google doc or I'm not sure what the microsoft version would be of that and you can insert questions into the document itself you can also put video and other interactive activities in there so I sorry I was trying to show here I have done that you can kind of see in the background here this is from chapter one and I took some of the activities out of the PDF of the chapter and put them in and then I turn it into an interactive activity where there are some questions that are free response I want to try to show this and some questions are multiple choice so I've taken those paper activities and put them online and my students who use Chromebooks we do blended learning my students can do these same activities that would have been in the book but it's easier for me to grade and they can do them online so this is at the beginning of chapter one you can see I've taken the activities I've embedded the introductory video from the chapter and the students have to reflect on things that they'll learn I've taken some of the activities and posed other questions or included things there here's one of the fantastic inferential ways that grammar is presented so this is you know introducing definite articles and since I'm proficiency based we don't test grammar discreetly but obviously won't let the students to be familiar with what's going on so I've just taken the paper activity I've adapted it I've created some multiple choice and this way we can do this and this saves a lot here I've put in the note couture so I've got my cultural note and questions there and this just transformed brilliantly for me my students can access this from anything okay online it's easy to grade they can do it at home another tool that I use with the Francais interactive tools is because Francais active has all these videos that are wonderful and free that go with each chapter and if you're using the Spanish materials they have Spanish videos etc as well so I have taken these videos which are up on the right of my screen here I've taken those and I have added them to my YouTube channel and to make sure that I get subtitles for them and then I put them into ed puzzle and if you're not familiar with ed puzzle it's a great tool where you can insert questions directly into a video at the spot where you're looking for comprehension so I use ed puzzle for listening comprehension I found that it greatly increases listening comprehension success and so I'm trying to open folder here and show how many of the videos that I've used so I use them for practice purposes I use them for testing I use the Francais interactive testing videos that are available and I use those for my students and the students if respond very well to them they recognize the they're the same speakers over and over again they start to have opinions about the people they have fairly strong feelings about which people they like and which people they don't like they find some people harder to understand than others and they appreciate the the fact that their the video materials are designed to go with the curriculum and so they're comprehensible and they that's very helpful with high school students who frequently there's a high level of anxiety about language learning some of them have had negative experiences in the past so you can see if you go across these these several videos are from the Francais interactive they'll show you have a number of questions that are in there and so I again take advantage of all these resources which are fabulous because I know they go with my curriculum if I were just going to search out on youtube or generally on the internet to try to find level appropriate video resources audio video resources that go with my curriculum that's a challenge as far as the other resources that come with Francais interactive they're fabulous in particular the vocabulary prep that Alex mentioned my high school students need more scaffolding so the vocabulary prep template which is down on every chapter okay where is it okay the preparation to vocabulary there's a generic template that Francais interactive provides my high schoolers need more scaffolding than that so for each chapter I have a vocab prep that I have tailored I've taken that template and tailored it specifically for my high school students so I've given them the themes I've given them very specific instructions so rather than setting them loose and saying make 10 sets of words that are associated together I've given them specifically find these words that are associated for example in this is chapter three that I have up so I'd have find three weather phenomenon that happened in the spring in Ohio find three body words for bodies of water find three activities that you do outside so I've taken the template from Francais interactive because it's OER and I could do with it what I need I've adapted those things there are testing materials available initially I did use some of those but they just weren't appropriate for proficiency based and for the level of my students really as I discovered the hard way but I do use the testing videos quite a bit they're very helpful again the video resources for this are just gold also the cultural quests that come on the activity internet I enjoy using those with my students as well I do have to caution if someone is adapting any of these materials for k-12 use to make sure that you screen everything ahead of time including Texas French Grammar because they're definitely designed for university students so there are drug and alcohol use references and there's the complex relationship of Tex and Tammy Yarmadillo's and Betty the home wrecker so my kids kind of get a kick out of that but I always have to kind of feel out with the students how comfortable they're going to be and then I have to make judgments as I go through the activities and change some of the things up so that is something I would caution someone k-12 make sure you're previewing everything and you're probably going to need to adapt I did also want to point out I can't know that the the center also has other French resources and for many other languages so if you go to their home site they have lots and lots of resources I pointed my Spanish colleagues there for French I've used the intermediate and advanced level resources as well for my level three class which is intermediate and so they're doing more advanced things so I use some of the more advanced resources for my level three class the video resources in particular are fabulous I really appreciate the speaking with the native speakers I'm doing those interviews have been fabulous for me so that all in all this is transform my program I have no budget and I've been able to build so much just from this so high school teachers are always you know that I'm talking to on Twitter always talking about what can I do you know I don't have a budget or I have a very little budget these are fabulous tools and then you can adapt them and tweak them as you need and I'm happy to share you know whatever I have with people so that they can see what I've done I'm happy to share I've got Google Forms all kinds of embedded videos in Google Forms note Kutral embedded into Google Forms for reading comprehension all kinds of things that I've been able to do because this is an OER it's been fabulous all right thank you so much Dawn that's great I'm sure there are going to be other questions about specifics of adapting you mentioned a couple of really good tools insert learning in ed puzzle we're going to have to check those out afterwards okay so on to Valerie Valerie are you still there please I'm here can you see oh yes thank you and how do I unshare uh for me no stop sharing got it got it got it got it got it got it sharing there you go all right okay so my turn well uh so I'm last so um you've uh you impressed me and I was very impressed by what Alex said you know regarding the phonetics and and and so on and uh so I'm going to start with um how it all started with us so uh the problem with our the students in our community um have very few resources and we used to use a book and I think Alex mentioned that problem as well the book was our treacherously expensive and so I think the book that had to go with the online platform for all the homework and so on was over three hundred or three hundred and fifty dollars um and the kids could not sell that back I mean they could sell the book back but the online platform they were stuck with they could they were absolutely forbidden to exchange it or to share it so um and we try to negotiate directly with the publishers and they they offered maybe uh you know for the students to rent rather than to buy but nothing was really acceptable um so our program decided to to to to check out français interactif we just like uh Dawn and Alex have mentioned already we were familiar with the text french grammar and we use that as additional resources so it made sense to us to to look into that so we all created accounts and we were really interested in in the amount of material that was available for us because it wasn't like a starter pack we could start with it and then just go from there um so that's what we did uh we started with it and then little little we adapted it uh to be honest with you the first time I started it it just didn't exactly go very well with our student population in the sense that um there were things I'm not I was not too too impressed by for example the numbers that you start with just a few numbers up to 60 and then you're left uh until chapter three when you just learn 70 and uh and all that um I think Alex mentioned the passive composite until uh chapter six actually for me it's a different thing uh we actually are don't do not dwell on grammar quite so heavily uh so of course passive composite is important when it comes to conversations about the past um but we do not uh emphasizes or stress it until the second quarter um I think it's a little bit like second year at high school uh you go you you uh you dig deep into the present tense and the near future and then you go to the past during the second year anyway that's what I remembered because I used to teach at high school it seemed to me that it was like that and we've adapted that to a quarter system at at at university um so there are things that that I wasn't too impressed by but then but I think it's because I relied or we relied too heavily on the material trying to just use it use it as it was for example using the france interactive exams without necessarily thinking of our own student population um using the vocabulary um worksheets uh again that's something that I adapted because that didn't quite work for me it felt too dry and um not scaffolding enough I think uh don't you've mentioned it yourself so uh but my the biggest thing for me was not to have the comfort of a platform uh in which to um to use france interactive and to have maybe google forms and so on so similarly to alex we have a program called the affordable affordable learning solution and it's also for textbooks that are less than um I think the it's 50 or 40 or 50 dollars uh a week uh so I applied um I presented the project to use google tools associated with france interactive in order to form some kind of platform of course it's not going to be the kia or the henley platform but it's it's uh it's the best we could we could do um so I've uh I'm using the google classroom and in which the in which I offer every week um a homework menu uh that lots and lots of google forms that students can fill in if they're interested so the students are given a reflection part of a reflective part in their in their homework they have to reflect on their homework and decide on what they think is a priority as far as their concern whether it's grammar or vocabulary or all this combined or culture and so on I give them a menu to choose from and and lots and lots of google forms that I've uh that I've inserted in the google classroom some on the videos uh some on the vocabulary on the grammar and I think I probably have between 10 and 12 different google forms for each chapter but also they are a lot I use quizlets as well as as an option for homework there are a lot of really good quizlet um um uh how do you say games and so on out there I also use um I use duolingo quite a bit uh along with with France Interactive to reinforce certain concepts and especially the duolingo stories are great and students are always eager to uh to learn more if they have uh if they are I don't know if they have to wait for 10 minutes they're always with their phone uh around right so using using duolingo on their phone is is perfect um what else I lose a lot so lots of games and this is how I insert culture because as far as I'm concerned I don't know the culture okay I think um Don you mentioned the the culture in each chapter and I agree that's that's really good um but what I'm not too impressed about are the little notes on the side in the margins for culture they're fine a little bit dry so I like to uh have some cultural uh experiences such as uh going into google google maps and uh going to street level and walking along a street like rue de l'arrêt rue de la République in nion and and looking left and right and see um what kind of shops there are they are there and uh where would they like to stop and uh you know things like that um so basically I'm using français interactive as my main results but I'm also adding a lot of extra material and that works better for me um I also use video tutorials because some students are not very good at understanding the text grammar when they read it so I also have google forms to help them uh digest the material a little bit and maybe rephrase it but if it's a little bit difficult then I'm going to prepare a video using a Camtasia you know a video tutorial which I post in my in my class on blackboard and but yes I am thankful for français interactive I think it's an amazing resource and I'm a bit sad not to see more videos being constantly uh brought up because as you said we know these people um I'm my students are very fond of yas we like charles as well and now these people are much older than they were 10 years ago I'm sure what's happened to them I'd like to know uh we know everything about frank and Nancy and their two daughters so I just would I don't know I'd like to would like to see a bigger bigger library but it's already big enough I'm sure and they've put so much work into it and thankful I'm going to be eternally grateful and that's it I could have shared some but I forgot to share my my screens hang on I'm going to share my screen just just to share to show you um a couple of things for example this is a padlet that I use uh in my class I I like padlets and this is for their presentional written presentation or presentation of activities padlets are quite fun uh this is uh what I uh what I submitted for my proposal for affordable learning solution um and you have some comments from students here what they choose to do a lot of them just want to use their iPhones they they haven't bought them the the book but some of them choose to print out the book or they choose to buy uh the book another thing that I forgot to mention is that I also use um flip grid okay I don't know that's that's the problem when you're sharing is that I don't remember where they are okay flip grid oh there he is okay I also use flip grid for the uh oral presentations my students have to talk about for example here they talked about what they ate and they can ask each other questions I like I like flip grid a lot yes I think you need to to switch the screen we're still looking at the padlet oh you're still looking at the padlet yes okay all right uh meeting control I'm going to stop sharing for a while okay uh so then I'm okay so share again I suppose can so I think now you can see uh the affordable learning solution uh project that I posted that is posted on Merlot um which is for online resources okay and then I'm going to stop sharing this I don't know if I can okay stop sharing sharing and can you can you see the flip grid I'm sorry can you see my not yet no no okay now we can see it oh you could okay that's good so the flip grid is really useful and I think I'm gonna stop right now because I'm getting confused with how to share and stop sharing so there we go thank you thank you that's the excellent so that gives us still let's see we have plenty of time for a Q&A and I want to encourage you all the participants um remember to use your chat function at the bottom there's a little uh menu that says uh a little tab that says chat you can type your questions directly into the chat box and we will read them and make sure that our speakers address those issues so let me go ahead and start start things off I um wanted to I have a question that goes to Dawn you mentioned then the tools insert learning and ed puzzle I believe you said that insert learning was um an open resource but you did have to pay for it after it reached a certain level is that correct yes um it's it is it's a um extension that goes onto chrome or firefox or I believe internet um explore and I I'm a paid user but I believe you get three to five um that you can use free um and then you there's also a library so you can go on and see what other people have created and then after that um then there's a charge um it is fabulous if you are doing any kind of blended learning or you want to assign homework and um it's quite easy to take the pdf material from France Interactive or any of the other OERs and to put them into something and make it uh interactive and again you can embed the videos um in there as well you can embed um links to Flipgrid um as well which is another tool that I use so you could really turn um you know one one page into an activity where you were covering multiple skills um and multiple modes of communication um so it's it's um it's really been helpful for me um ed puzzle is another one where you get a certain amount for free and then you can pay there are institutional subscriptions so if there's you know multiple teachers in a department or a school um they do have a rate again I'm a super user so I'm I'm not paying right now but um and it it has improved listening comprehension results with my students I don't have a statistic to give you I can just say I can take the same listening comprehension video that I gave before using it and what I use with it use it now and the results are so much greater because you can place the question directly in the listening passage where they need to find they need to find the information um and it will pull in videos from YouTube and um all kinds of other places and you can upload your videos as well so and that's the the videos for Frantzana Artiva have been such a fantastic resource overall yeah so I want to make a point um just to follow up about all three of you mentioned that you like the videos that you use the videos in different ways and of course as a developer I like to hear that but um I wanted to stress the fact that what you've done with Ed Puzzle you take the videos because you can download all of this right we give you the rights to download it all and then you've actually edited the videos you've added a layer of information on top of the videos so that makes it I mean it basically you're seeing the same thing all of you is that you our materials were a good template a good starting point and then you took it one step further you added scaffolding that your students needed or you tweaked it in some way that made it you know work work with your student population and and what I wanted to say to all of you is that you mentioned also the piperation vocabulaire uh that's a template in itself and we meant it as a template we meant it as a starting point not as the end point and I think too many teachers look at textbooks and they think that that's it it doesn't give them any wiggle room to play with the materials but we wanted to kind of suggest to you well here's one way of doing it but you know go ahead and have fun and there is kind of this ludic or playful quality to our materials and that's we were trying to really invite people like yourselves to to play along with us so I'm it's really I must admit it's really great to hear all three of you talk about how you're playing with these materials because I look at textbooks as just templates anyhow and since they are made for a generic audience or in our case we made it for the University of Texas students and we figure it's it's up to everybody else in the world to adapt it to their students so it's really tremendous it's very it's pleasing for me to listen to you guys talk about your materials just to add on to that real quick we have that question from the audience from Elsie who was who was basically trying to define it and said you have adapted parts of France interactive but she was wondering if you have not created your own textbook also with with parts of I don't know but it didn't seem like you have just wanted to throw this in here who was wondering she was wondering if you had created your own textbook was that question for me or who is that question for everybody um I I wouldn't say I've created my own textbook but I've created my own curriculum that topically aligns with France interactive and then I have written a lot of materials some inspired from France interactive some simply based on the theme but I wouldn't call it a textbook I don't know about Valerie and Alex I also have not created a textbook I think the longer you teach the more material you generate and you sort of build this body of stuff that you can use but it's never been put together in one cohesive place other than my own head yes yes I would say it's the same I it's it's I think it's it's easy to have France interactive as a basis for what I'm going to do and then I add a lot of additional material um because um because yes as I think Alex was saying right we we've got tons of things that we've been using and it was the same with the other books as well so we don't have we don't create our own but we we adapt continuously great there is also um an earlier question from Julie um and she was interested the two this is for Alexandra she was interested to know what your favorite changes in the new edition were um I was thinking specifically about chapter four um I it's a chapter where there's a lot of physical descriptions and um since the book was first created I think that um more arrays have changed and times have changed and people have become much more sensitive to certain images and and the changes reflected students new values and so those that would be the the main the main things I think it was really an adaptation to changing times yeah can I just make a comment about that we were getting feedback from the University of Texas students that they were uncomfortable with some of the activities so what worked 10 years ago doesn't work anymore and they didn't want to describe people um even though these were caricatures caricatures are often playing awful sometimes sometimes ethnic stereotypes and it made them very uncomfortable so this is just an example of shifting of changing sensibilities what was okay 10 15 years ago is no longer okay and um you can see it all in in the ways society is changing dealing with the me too movement or whatever whatever the topic is what you used to be able to do is suddenly no longer appropriate and so we went through we got feedback from a number of of institutions and a number of students and we went through and made changes not just in chapter four it's pretty obvious but throughout the textbook so and that's just something that's kind of ongoing we often think of of adapting textbooks of to reflect who is now the president and what are the television programs but there's even something deeper and that is just the public's changing sensibilities of what you can do and what you can talk about and how you can talk about it which is just kind of interesting i want to ask a question a general question to all three of you and it sounds like there was a learning curve that you spent the first year so just learning the materials how long did it take you to feel that you had permission to actually adapt how long did it take you to feel like okay because sometimes people don't understand that open education that oer the whole point is adaptation that they um they they still use it like it's out of the box okay uh well didn't take me long at all it was more uh first uh the delay in uh in adding supplementary material was simply because i first wanted to really use what was there and uh and see how it worked so that that just had to do with checking it out with my students seeing how it works and then going from there so of course it took uh probably about a year at least for each level for each level to be completely uh consistent to know what needed to be done but for you um there was no no sense of you you knew that you had permission right from from the beginning yes because uh my uh my boss is really into oer so uh we we had talked about it a lot and and we knew it was it was fine and i think it's pretty clear on on your on your website too yeah we try to make it clear but you'd be surprised because people um since we're we're trying to retrain the public to understand that they can play along with us oh yes um have you have any of the three of you been inspired to create your own material really from the trash in other words not simply just adapt a lesson from posse anti-teeth but create your own content like be inspired by a lesson on i don't know like the you talked about the activity and and then do your own activity right yes can i please give me an example yes um so um definitely um often i've taken um for example uh chapter three which is um les vacances in france which is vacation in france so we cover geography and leisure activities and um i have scaffold that all into at the end of the chapter um the students doing research and planning vacations in france and then writing about it um writing about in um in french um how they're going to get to france where they're going to stay what season it will be in and what will the weather be like in that area when they're there and what are the local activities so um really embedding culture um as well as the language and then um speaking in terms of proficiency level um offering the opportunity for students to level up and write um in the present or teaching them the future push so that they can write in the near future um and expanding their their level um you know moving up their level so that would be something that i've done um also uh like taking um i've done for an exam for the chapter six which is about places in the city um i've done for an exam where i've given them um a map of a city and they have and said okay you're going to be a student studying abroad i usually pick two thoughts because that's where i studied um and you're going to need to find this list of places but then they would have to describe where places were located and you know relevant to each other but it was a very real life so really getting into the actual context of authenticity um so i've definitely taken i've definitely been inspired from what i found in france interactif and then to put those into as authentic of an learning experience and creating a product as possible and as tools especially all the google tools have evolved you know being able to use those incorporate so yes i would say i i'm constantly doing that and my class is never the same even though france interactif is my launching point um and then if i could quickly your question about knowing i could change things i always knew i could but it took me a year or two to figure out what exactly i was doing to figure out how to change things in the way that was best suited for my students also because the new actual standards came out and state of ohio and trying to be a standards aligned teacher and align that with france interactif it just took me a while to learn i think we have to remember that for a lot of teachers this is very difficult because especially k-12 teachers are not taught how to write materials and are not taught how to write you they don't necessarily know how to do this so um i think like like resources like this like your center and doing things like this are really important to help us teach our colleagues in the field you know everything whether it's a university level what ballerina alex have done or you know what i'm doing at k-12 to share all of these things that are possible that you can do it because i think a lot of people come out and are used to it being handed to them prescriptively and that's all they can do that's a very good point because i i remember hearing all the time when i was coming along in graduate school you know a textbook is not the curriculum but it it actually becomes the curriculum it becomes everything for certain or certainly for a beginning teacher because they feel like they either don't have permission to go beyond the textbook or they're not adept at it they hadn't been trained to do that but i'm i'm glad you made that point because um i think when you become a really good teacher is when you become creative and you start creating your own materials because number one you you know your students and everybody agrees that um the materials must be adapted to reflect the students interest and and only you know that so that's the point of getting around generic materials they're going to be generic by nature and i personally think that we should do more in teacher training with materials having them produce materials having them learn about these cool things like insert learning and edu puzzle and so that people aren't you know they're not starting from scratch there's a ton of open content out there that's really high quality that's the other point to make and that's being produced by all kinds of organizations professional uh educational organizations and so it's really becoming more and more a matter of learning how to adapt somebody else's material so um let's see do we have any other questions so Elsie was asking if she could remix parts that are on the website or in in the fi program and i answered her saying absolutely because it has the most open license if i has the most open license that means that you can take any videos audios any texts that is in the program and you can put it in your own google docs word docs and you can republish it and use it for your classroom that's right so if you wanted to produce your own textbook make a mashup of france anti-actif and other things that you find out there in the world on the internet you can create your own textbook and even try to make money off of it because it um it has a completely open license so i see that we're coming up on the hour and um i want to thank our three participants our three teachers who are doing who are our three adapters of france anti-actif it's really been a pleasure to listen to you talk about your own experiences and i wanted to mention in closing a couple of things we have something at coral called the learn community and of course that spell l oer in learn play on oer and and the community are people who have created oer who are implementing oer who are reviewing oer's for others so but all three of you are should be a member of the learn community and you can get badges for promoting creating and using oer so please go and visit that that tab on our website i mentioned at the beginning we have a new oer course there's always more information to learn because there are new developments with the licensing new things to learn in the wonderful world of open education so thank you all um i think alex and don and valérie merci bien and for all of you who are interested in france anti-actif just go visit the website and if you have questions you can give us a call or send us an email and we'll answer you thank you thank you so bye everybody bye


is no single bullet, because economic inequality trends are increasingly global. Scotland has clearly seen less of an increase in economic inequality than other countries. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has acknowledged that most industrialised countries saw increases in inequality between the mid-1980s and the late 2000s. The Government's motion also refers to a £6 billion welfare cuts figure, a figure produced, perhaps inevitably and predictably, by the Scottish Government's own analysis, after the last budget in July 2014. However, its own welfare paper from where this figure originates admits that, by a considerable margin, the biggest saving was made by the changing of benefits uprating from the retail price index to the consumer price index, so the Scottish Government's motion is particularly bizarre. Given that the Scottish Government's pre-referendum welfare report supported the use of the consumer price index rather than the retail price index, another large saving that was identified by the Scottish Government's analysis was in changes to child benefit entitlement. That was a tapered reduction for families where one person has an income of over £50,000, reducing to zero child benefit for earners over £60,000. I do not recall the SNP campaigning on a platform of restoring child benefit for some of the top earners in our country, and I would be interested to hear what they believe the impact of this cut has been on inequality. In combination, those two areas account for more than half of the £6 billion figure. Savings at the SNP hasn't lifted a finger to oppose, and this is true of a number of other changes that fall under the umbrella of welfare reform. My colleague Mr Johnson amendment also touches on the conclusions of the finance committee's report last week. £500 million was voted by this Parliament to make a real shift towards preventative spend, which is a good thing in order to support a transition across public services away from dealing with the symptoms of disadvantage and inequality towards tackling the root causes, something that we all approve of. Despite that, the committee has concluded that this project, across the three trade change funds, has produced a lack of measurable outcomes and has expressed concerns over a lack of progress. Where the Scottish Government has real powers to end inequalities in education to which Christina McKelvie, or rather health to which she referred, we see a great deal of top but little achievement. Mr Macintosh rightly referred to education. We have lost 140,000 college places in Scotland, and yet further education colleges are a vital component of building vocational skills, allowing people to return to education to prepare them for the workplace. In access to university, in Scotland, the most disadvantaged are now the most excluded. England is doing better than we are in Scotland. In health, we have seen not only the problems with the change fund, but a real terms cut to the health budget while that same budget is growing in Scotland. That is just a reality check, Deputy Presiding Officer. I know from the murmurs that it does not suit the Government benches to hear those observations. I do welcome the Scottish Government's conclusion that work should be a route out of poverty, and Mr Neil and I agree on that. That is our priority. However, what the Scottish Government seems to have failed to address is opportunity. The opportunity is presented by job creation, the opportunity is provided by education and skills, the opportunity for positive intervention by the NHS such as using health visitors and improving health education. All issues controlled by this Parliament and all issues directly affecting constituents to whom, for example, Margaret McCulloch referred. I have to say that I thought that Roderick Campbell made an eloquent plea for those devolved issues, for example, health education, to have much more focused attention. Deputy Presiding Officer, the Scottish Government has become a ritual critic of the United Kingdom Government. Indeed, that is the Scottish Government's default position whenever it is confronted by any challenge. However, the reality is that an inert pass of Scottish Government is blind to opportunity and failing across a whole range of devolved issues for which it has been responsible for the last eight years. The Scottish Government should take a long, hard-clicked look in the mirror and start finding answers. I support the amendment in Alex Johnson's name. I am going to give you a recipe today, not for a nice cake or a dish, but a recipe cooked up by the world's economic gurus over the last 30 years. Here is a recipe that has created an economic system where wealth and power are transferred to, accumulated then, hoarded by a small, rich, powerful elite. At the same time, the mass of people have seen their power, wealth and influence stolen from them. That system of neoliberal economics is a theory, an ideology, some might say a religion, which exists to create inequality. That is its purpose, a system where the market is king, where competition decides everything, where global markets are opened up to so-called free trade and only the fittest survive. Of course, thatcher and Reagan, no doubt heroes of Mr Johnson, were the greatest disciples—I see him nodding in agreement, we are no surprise there—of this philosophy. True believers in the market's ability to answer every problem, irrespective of the consequences. In the UK, the Thatcher Government withdrew state subsidy from the car, in the steel, in the shipbuilding and other industries, preferring to see people part on unemployment or incapacity benefit in communities destroyed rather than see the state interfere in her beloved market. She created a narrative that said that wealth accumulation was how you measured success. Individualism and materialism was good collectivism and communitarianism bad. Unemployment became a method of social control setting worker against worker in a competition for new low-paid, deregulated, semi and unskilled service sector work. Home ownership was promoted as the barometer of personal success. Council housing sold off at discount and people encouraged to take mortgages at four, five and six times their salary, then to use credit cards and loans to finance their lifestyle move from being paid weekly to monthly left many needing a regular overdraft or exorbitant payday loans to get them to the end of the month. That, along with mass unemployment and a systematic crackdown on organised labour, ensured nothing stood in the way of this project. Low-paid homeowners up to their ears and debt, fearing for their job at a time of mass unemployment, would not go and strike to defend their jobs and conditions and those who promoted and created this system knew it. We saw our public assets flogged off to the deregulated city and people making fortunes out of their gas and electricity and telecoms industries that were once ours. All the time rich individuals, hedge funds and finance houses grew fatter on the spoils as corporate power milked this approach for all that was worth. I would say this not to give anyone history lesson, we all know the story but we have to understand today's debate against that context. I agree that having a sustainable and secure economy is vital for the wellbeing of society but what is essential in this debate is having the political will to ensure that the benefits of our economy are shared more equitably and progressively amongst all our people, not just those at the top. Mr Sheer. Mr Finlay has given us a wee history lesson there but it is a bit like 1984 in terms of the rewriting of history because he forgets the neoliberal agenda of Blairism because neoliberalism was entrenched in Blairism, was it not? Mr Finlay. I never forgot about that, Mr Sheer, because I was one of its biggest critics also and I am prepared to say that. That's the difference between you and I, Mr Sheer, because for my part to get things wrong I'm willing to say so. None of the sheep on those benches are ever willing to do so. Not one of the sheep. Look at them. Let me say this. I welcome some of the speeches today. I thought that Christine Grahame's speech was excellent and I think that many of the issues that she raised in relation to prisoners we could also raise in relation to young people leaving care. I thought that Rhoda Grant made an excellent speech on health inequalities. Duncan MacNeill's speech is one of the best speeches I've heard in this Parliament and I don't give Duncan MacNeill many compliments, I'm sure he'll agree. I'm only joking, Duncan. His speech was a challenge to each and every one of us and I think that we should hear more speeches like that in this Parliament. I also commend Cara Hylton's comments on education, but of course those were serious speeches, but we had knock-about also. We heard Christina McKelvie—I don't know if she's backing us, but she's backing her place—mentioned the last Labour Government while asking what they did for working people in trade unions. Let me tell her that we introduced the minimum wage, we introduced the social chapter, extended parental rights, increased compensation for unfair dismissal, gave a legal right to trade union representation and when elected in May we'll take action in zero in those contracts, low pay, agency workers, the quality of apprenticeships, blacklisting, bogus self-employment, pay differentials and a whole lot more that the trade unions have called for and have been part of our policy process in writing. Christina McKelvie. Maybe after that big list of stuff that the Labour Party promised the last time in their manifesto and didn't deliver, Mr Finlay can tell us which specific trade union piece of legislation brought in by Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair over time. Any of it? Ms McKelvie looks at her party's own record. She promised to overturn none of that, either, so maybe she wants to have a look at her own party rather than criticise others. Of course, Ken Macintosh was right to challenge the minister. Who appears didn't know that the Parliament is getting taxation powers to see if the SNP will implement a 50p top tax rate. Maybe Mr Neil, an ex-socialist who once believed in redistribution, he'll be able to tell us if they believe in the bankers' bonus tax to fund youth unemployment initiatives, do the support, the mansion tax to fund extra nurses in our LNHS, because I think we know the answer to that, Presiding Officer. The answer is no, so much for the progressive policies of the SNP. Mind you, it was the backbench member for Aberdeen East who said he didn't mind thatcherite economics. Three policies that we have put forward, taking money from the wealthy to create jobs and put cash into the pockets of working people and they don't support any of them. Of course, what has been the main redistributive policy of the SNP in recent years is a policy to cut corporation taxes to one of the lowest rates in the European Union. That is why we are critical and sceptical of the Scottish Government's rhetoric. Willie Rennie was right to point out that not an extra penny was promised in the white paper. Of course, this week we will see the Scottish Government's own staff in this very building and outside it going on strike over low pay. I am glad that the culture secretary is here. She has had a dispute in her own directorate for over a year, where £3,000 will be taken off the lowest-paid staff and weekend allowances, and nothing has happened for a year. Only today, as Kara Hilton mentioned, we see the PCS union highlighting whom members of the Scottish Government staff are relying on credit and food banks to get through the month. We need a change of philosophy and a change of approach across Government to tackle those issues. The cabinet secretary, Alex Neil, to wind up the debate, you have until five o'clock. First of all, I will say to Willie Rennie that Roseanna Cunningham and I are members of the 99 group, but we would not describe ourselves as old-stagers. I will also say to Mr Finlay that he says that I am an ex-socialist. Mr Finlay is just ex, as far as I am concerned. Let me begin by putting it on the record that the Government will not be accepting any of the amendments today. I think that there is a degree of unanimity in the chamber that the level of poverty in Scotland and indeed the level of poverty elsewhere in the UK and in the wider world is totally unacceptable. Some of the statistics have already been mentioned about Scotland. 19 per cent of our population, one million people in Scotland living in poverty. One figure that has not been mentioned is that out of that, 230,000 are living in severe poverty. 59 per cent of children in poverty are living in a household where somebody is in work. Of course, our disabled community has suffered the most in recent years, and many of them are particularly living in poverty. Whether the measure is educational attainment or the gap in life expectancy between the wealthier and poorer parts of our society, I hope that we would all agree that although the UK is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the OECD, it is totally unacceptable that we have the fourth ranking for the level of poverty across the United Kingdom throughout the whole of the OECD. That is totally unacceptable for an economy as rich as the UK to have the fourth largest level of poverty in the whole of the OECD. I think that there has been broad agreement across the chamber this afternoon about the problem of inequality in this country and our desire to tackle it. On that note, the Labour benches are prepared to vote for the SNP amendment. What is wrong with the Labour amendment that the SNP will not vote for it? What is the word? Cabinet Secretary. Well, a number of things are wrong with it, and I will come to that in a minute. First of all, we have got to look at why poverty has got so much worse over the past few years. I have to say to both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats that they do hold responsibility for that. There are four or five major contributing factors, but before I go into them, it is easy to band around statistics and to make points about various measures and so on. At the end of the day, what poverty is about is human misery. I suspect that, like many other MSPs in the chamber, I can reel off literally hundreds of examples of my constituents coming into my surgery to tell me about the desperate financial state that they and their families find themselves in. Quite recently, I had a visit from a single mother who had three children, all of whom had autism, and the Department of Work and Pensions had left her with £18 a week to look after her and her children. I find that totally unacceptable in 2015. We were able to get her to a food bank, we were able to get her emergency money to see her through the weekend, we were able to get her fixed up with welfare rights to see if she was getting everything that she was entitled to. However, because of various measures taken by the Department of Work and Pensions, that family was left with £18 to live on. There are too many examples of that. George Adam, for example, referred to the implications and the consequences of sanctioning by the Department of Work and Pensions. That is now a major cause of short-term poverty in Scotland—the sanctioning of people who are already down at the hill in terms of their income and their ability to make ends meet from week to week. I would hope that, when we get the transfer of additional powers over welfare, I hope that we get control over issues like that, because there are many of those issues that are causing so much hardship to our people. If you look at the benefit changes in recent years, most of those who have not been reforms have been cuts to benefits for people who are the most vulnerable members of our society. That is a major contributing factor to the increase in poverty. The fact that the minimum wage has not kept level with inflation is a major contributing factor to in-work poverty. That happened both under Labour and the coalition Government. Public spending cuts to a whole range of policy areas then passed on to Scotland has been a major contributing factor to poverty. It is utterly deplorable that, on top of the existing cuts that the Labour Party joined the Tories and the Liberals in voting for another £30 billion of cuts. When I hear lip service from Ken Macintosh and Neil Findlay saying that they care about the poor, if they care about the poor, condemn that, vote the other night in the House of Commons, I'll take Mr Johnson. Alex Johnson. It is not ironic that the cabinet secretary talks about cuts to the housing budget when his own Government sought to target the housing budget for disproportional cuts year on year. It was only the Barnett consequentials that allowed him to reverse part of that cuts. It is targeted for disproportional cuts as a block grant from your Government in Westminster to the Scottish Government. We have seen our capital budget slice to ribbons by 26 per cent over recent years and the resource budget cut in real terms by 10 per cent. If our budget is cut by 10 per cent and 26 per cent on capital, we have to live within our means. If it hadn't been for all the work of John Swinney, the Scottish Futures Trust and all the other initiatives that we have taken, we wouldn't be building the number of houses that we are building now in Scotland every year. I also want to mention this point about the income tax cuts, because the Tories and the Liberals make a big issue about the increase in the personal allowance. They forget to tell us on the day that they started cutting the personal allowance, the increased value added tax from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent. That is a regressive tax. That means that it hits the poorest more than the wealthiest, so the Liberals and the Tories have no excuse. The impact of the rise and fall on poorer people was far greater than the benefit from any cut in the personal allowance. The reality is that, over the past four or five years under the coalition and over the previous 13, Kevin Stewart was a bit inaccurate when he said just that Blair was a guru of what Mr Finlay called neoliberal economics. Blair wasn't the only Labour guru, Gordon Brown was a neoliberal, Peter Mandelson was a neoliberal and Jim Murphy was a neoliberal economist as well, so we won't be taking any lessons to only one in the Scottish Labour Party. Who isn't a neoliberal is Katie Clark, who courageously voted against the cuts the other night in the House of Commons. Unlike Mr Finlay, she has stuck to the promises she made in the leadership election for the Labour Party. The askers about what we are doing and the conclusion, let me remind the chamber what we are doing to tackle poverty. We are implementing the living wage. We are implementing the rise for NHS workers. We are going to be spending nearly £300 million on welfare mitigation. We are investing in public services. We will get free prescription, free school meals and free higher education. We have kept educational maintenance allowance. We are increasing childcare. We are extending eligibility for childcare. We are getting gift-fect modern apprenticeships and a whole range of other things that we are doing, Presiding Officer. They pay lip service. We act on poverty and inequality. Traffling inequalities, we now move to the next item of business, which is consideration of motion number 12096, in the name of Richard Lochhead on the Public Body's abolition of home, Grom Timber advisory committee order 2015, UK legislation, and I call on Richard Lochhead to move the motion, cabinet secretary. The question on this most will be put at decision time. There are five questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first question is that amendment number 12095.4, in the name of Ken Macintosh, which seeks to amend motion number 12095, in the name of Alex Neil on tackling inequalities, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parrots not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12095.4, in the name of Ken Macintosh, is as follows. Yes, 30. No, 80. There were no extensions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. Can I remind members that, in relation to today's debates, if the amendment in the name of Alex Johnson is agreed, the amendment in the name of Willie Rennie falls? The next question is that amendment number 12095.2, in the name of Alex Johnson, which seeks to amend motion number 12095, in the name of Alex Neil on tackling inequalities, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parrots not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12095.2, in the name of Alex Johnson, is as follows. Yes, 14. No, 97. There were no extensions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is that amendment number 12095.1, in the name of Willie Rennie, which seeks to amend motion number 12095, in the name of Alex Neil on tackling inequalities, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parrots not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12095.1, in the name of Willie Rennie, is as follows. Yes, 18. No, 93. There were no extensions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is that motion number 12095, in the name of Alex Neil on tackling inequalities, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? Parrots not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 12095, in the name of Alex Neil, is as follows. Yes, 93. No, 18. There were no extensions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is that motion number 12096, in the name of Richard Lochhead, on the public body's abolition of the homegrown timber advisory committee order 2015, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. That concludes decision time. We now move to members' business. Members who leave the chamber should do so quickly and quietly.