Okay, so hi everyone and welcome to my talk. So, I wanted to talk a bit about making decisions because I think, like, how many of you are maybe leaders, like, yeah, team leads and managers, but actually all of you are probably leaders because you actually have to lead yourself at least. So that's something that is important and a great part of leadership is making decisions and some of the decisions have a fairly limited risk, like what is the next project that we should start working on in the next spring, right? This is a decision that we'll make. We don't even put so much effort into it because it's a low-risk decision, doesn't really, there is not much damage if we make the wrong choice. And then there are higher risk decisions, like, for example, should we enter a new market? And usually these higher impact decisions are made higher up in the org. Someone like a CTO or at least the head of engineering would make these high-stakes decisions. But even for a team, there can be some high-stakes decisions that you get involved with. But high-stakes decisions also come in our personal lives, like, for example, should you buy a house or should you rent one? How many of you had to make that decision in your life, right? And it's not easy because there are a lot of things that you have to consider. Am I going to live in that same city for a long time? When is the investment going to have a return on it? Stuff like that. So all these decisions are there and we make them. But how do we make them? You usually think about, like, a couple of things, right? One big one is that when you make a decision, it should consider the return on investment. You think about, what is it that I put into this decision or into this option? For example, when you buy a house, you are spending a lot of money upfront that you could be using in the next couple of years for something else. But you get something in return, which is the safety of knowing that you will have a house even when you don't have a salary, right? So you consider these pros and cons. You also think of the risks. So say you want to... You feel like your relationship is not working out anymore and you want to break up, but you feel like there is the risk of not finding someone else or someone better or whatever. And then how do you think about that risk? How do you mitigate the risk of feeling like you made a mistake there? Just a second, I want to get rid of that, yeah. So these are two very important things. And then there is a third thing that is fairly important with decision and that they should be done timely, in a timely manner, right? They shouldn't spend years and years thinking about a choice that you really should be making now because the wrong decision is always better than no decision at all. At least that's something that leadership gurus tend to say. So we will come back to that. So a couple of years ago, actually already four or five years ago, I had a big, big personal decision to make and it was a very hard decision indeed that had profound effects on my personal life and on my professional life as well. So that was a pretty hard period. But before I talk in more detail about that, how many of you need to know the matrix and move the matrix, just put your hands up, like, yeah, most of you. And there is this really famous red pill or blue pill scene. Let me play it for you. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.   It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. And this sentence is something that really stuck with me because it's such a great representation of what gender dysphoria feels like. There is this sense that you don't really know what it is. You couldn't explain it, but you know that it's there. It's just unexplainable and still there. And from fact, the creators of Matrix, the Bachevsky brothers, oh, sorry, the Bachevsky sisters are trans. And retrospectively, like they actually, I think Lily has talked about this in an interview not long ago, that they weren't consciously creating Matrix as a metaphor for being transgender, but their experiences heavily influenced the script. So this is one of those moments. And it's one of the, yeah, and probably that's why it spoke to me so much. So there is this moment where I have to choose, right? Either I decide to stay in, keep things as they are and struggle with this continuous cycles of depression and stay with my wife, with whom we were planning to have kids. And also, like I already had a lot of talks in conferences and YouTube channel and workshop that I've been running all around the world. By that point, I think we had about 30 different countries where my workshop was running. So I already had some amount of followership, in a sense, or I don't know. And I would have to come out to all of those people, right? And suddenly I was risking losing not just my wife because she clearly said that she supports me, but if I transitioned, then she's supporting me as a friend, which is fine, fair enough, I guess. But also like my career, do I get to keep my job? Do I face a lot of discrimination and end up not being able to sell my workshop anymore? So yeah, and not just that. If you think about one of the statistics that really stuck with me is this sexual assault statistic.  For trans women, it's one in two. It's horrendous, both statistics, by the way, even the one in four is horrendous. So and all that for just this hope of maybe the dysphoria of your fate, and I will get to function better. And I mean, going back to this idea of decisions, as a leader, I was used to making decisions, right? So small decisions like, do we have a production issue and there is a bug fix? Should we wait for QA to test it or release it right away? Because what's the bigger risk? If the bug stays in production for another hour or if I release it and maybe cause some other problem? You have to weigh the options there or do you keep your services and monoliths or do you break it up? Or one of the hardest decisions I had to make, like I had someone who was underperforming and do I let them go? And when do I let them go? Like that's a really hard decision, right? Because you like the person as a friend, or at least as a person.  But at the same time, you see that their actions are detrimental to the team. So we make all these decisions and basically the most important thing seems to be that we just make them in a timely manner, or is it? So with this particular case, with the gender transition part, I ran into an issue because all of the decisions that I mentioned, I would create a pro and con list. And maybe write down the risks and think about the mitigations. But in this case, for example, I have two options, right? One, I transition and I lose my wife, which is probably going to be like pretty depressing. So I end up being depressed, not a great option. The other option is that I don't transition and I keep on struggling with gender dysphoria, which leads to depression. So I will be depressed, depression versus depression. Which one do you choose? Like shooting your left or right leg? Also, there is no middle ground. And most importantly, I have a status quo. And if I change that status quo, it's really hard to go back. Like transitioning in the first place, that's a really hard thing to do. And going back, like reversing all the medical interventions and coming out once again to people that, sorry, I thought about it again. And maybe I'm a guy after all, no. That's like even harder, right?  So I really wanted to avoid that. Yet, I have to make a decision. Because the wrong decision is better than no decision at all. This has been said by so many people. One of them tell the rules a lot. In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The next best thing is the wrong thing. And the worst thing you can do is nothing. Like it's the same quo and people keep saying this, leadership groups keep saying this. So maybe that's true, but is it the whole picture? So how do we make decisions in our work? And I think this is the part where this becomes a lot more interesting. Because if I think about it, what I usually do is I start from a hypothesis. I think that this action, creating this new service is the right thing to do. I have this hypothesis. And then what I do is I create metrics. How do I measure success? How do I know I'm there? And then I will act on it. And here is the beautiful thing about this approach. When you have this hypothesis and you start acting on it and measuring the results, by the time you found out that it was the right decision, you have already acted upon it. You are already on your way to fulfilling it, which is great. It's the best kind of decision that you can have where you can just start acting on it and see if it's the right thing. And what happens if it wasn't the right thing? Well, then you just go back. Maybe it was about extracting a new service. Fine, it wasn't the right decision. So we are going to move it back where it was. And basically, this gives you the ability to constantly course correct and navigate around obstacles. And even if we fail, we learn something important in the process, right? We are one data point closer to the right decision. Now, when does this break down? This breaks down in the situations where you don't have a way to act without making the decision final and irreversible. This is the hard part. And there are business decisions like that. Like, for example, and to be fair, you can create such business decisions by managing your team not so well. So one example, I would say, is remember Google circles when they released a huge thing at once, which was going to be the Facebook killer. And then it totally flopped. So there they actually made a huge investment up front. And once they made that investment because they didn't plan on releasing this in small batches and testing if the market is at all interested in a Facebook killer, they just wanted to release the perfect product at the end. What this resulted in is that they built something. They made a huge investment up front. And once they released, there was no going back. Even though it turned out that the product was not interesting for the community, they already spent that money and that money was gone. And of course, Google can survive a decision like that. But imagine a startup doing that. For a startup, this would be devastating. It would be the end of their existence. And whenever your costs are incurred immediately and the benefits come later, that's usually one of the situations where you can't make this course correcting approach that we usually have. So basically here, you cannot avoid the risk. You cannot transfer it to someone else. You actually have to accept it or maybe mitigate it a bit beforehand. And there could be other similar, like in business terms, like acquiring a company that's also something that could be a decision like that because you have to spend the money before you realize the benefits of having those companies together. And you actually have to buy the company and then you have to integrate things between the two companies in order to gain the benefits. So there are such decisions, but in these cases, I don't think that this iterative course correcting strategy works. But what works then? Well, I don't have a blueprint. I won't tell you the one definitive answer. But I will give you four strategies that you can use to help with decisions like this. So the first strategy is think of advantages instead of disadvantages. So that was one of the biggest mistakes that I made to begin with, is that I was focusing on either I lose my wife or I have to suffer from gender dysphoria the rest of my life. But if I phrased it slightly differently, I could say that maybe I lose my wife. But on the other hand, I get to experience my life in a different perspective. I get to live my true self. And on the other hand, that was one aspect of just focusing on what could be better. Sorry, I need lost connection as well. Right. All right. Yeah. The other thing is like leaning into your values, because what I found was that the decisions that are really hard are decisions where you have to choose between non-comparable things. Like for example, if you are thinking about your career choice, what do you value more? If you, for example, I wanted to meet a musician or a programmer. Both of them sounded really interesting, right? And then what do I look at as options? Like on one hand, I have really good salary.  But at that point when I had to choose, I valued financial stability more than standing on stage away. Maybe I found a way to compromise between the two. So this is kind of important, because what I find is that the decisions that you make and are not clear based on just that you cannot numerically compare two things and you still make a decision between those two things, those are the things that define your values. So if you think about it, when you make such a decision, people outside will see you based on your action. They will judge you based on your actions. And you are basically living up to the values based on which you made the decision. Or if you just make the decisions not based on your values, they become your values, at least from the outside. So another example I could give here is like the company I was working for at the time, they were nice people in many respects. One respect wasn't that they were transphobic. And they basically made a choice between like there was a situation where most of the company supported me as a trans woman. And there were a few people who didn't. And then the company knowingly or unknowingly made a decision between are we going to stand up against those people who are transphobic or are we going to let Yvette leave. And maybe that wasn't a very conscious decision on their part, but in the end, it defined that company's value, at least for me. So I think that just whenever you feel like there's a hard decision, just think about what you value and how that relates to it. Because in the end, it will define your values. Trust the scientific method because it's awesome. We love the scientific method. So what I was talking about in the beginning is like acting on a hypothesis and then measuring if it was the right decision to make. That's a scientific method, but there you are actually using your decision as an experiment. But that's not the only way you can experiment. You can also experiment by just designing some specific experiment that would prove your truths. And this is like when you want to acquire a company, maybe you have a hypothesis about how the two products could interact. And you don't have to go all the way and integrate the two things. You can have some kind of a minimum viable product that proves that the integration is at least possible. So trusting the scientific method, creating your hypothesis is and trying to create even if you can't test everything and you can't know for sure, mitigate the risk by testing the things that you can test. So run localized low risk experiments. That's probably how I should phrase it. And then finally, know when it's time to make up your mind because it's really hard. And give yourself a deadline because there is a problem here. You have a state of school. And we as humans love the state of school. We don't want to leave the state of school because it's well-known, it's cozy, it's friendly, and maybe it's horrible, but still it's the pain that I know, right? And when you have this kind of decision of I have the state of school and I want to change the state of school, should I do it? It's even more prone to this state of school bias because then you can delay the decision indefinitely and still keep the decision open for a long time until you actually make the change. And that's really risky in this sense. And you can lose a lot of time like that. And again, a few examples from the business world, an underperforming person, should you let them go? You are very likely to drag your feet on that, right? Dropping a confusing power feature that you know that a couple of your customers are really fond of. And if you drop that feature, they might leave. Even if they say they are definitely going to leave, it's still just a might. And another one is like staying in a relationship. You know that it's not the right relationship for you, but still it's like cozy. It's one sense of you know. You don't want to hurt that other person, know that. So it makes it hard, really hard. So decisions when you have to move away from the state of school and it's not like you go one or the other way at some point, but you can indefinitely drag your feet on it. Those are really dangerous decisions in this sense. OK. So these are the four strategies that I wanted to talk. But I also wanted to talk a bit about how I use them just as examples. So looking on the right side, I kind of touched on that. But losing her or living my truth or not living my truth, that was one point where I really had to consider how this plays out. But also I was really worried that I would lose my friends. But what if I phrase it differently? What if I say I might lose some friends, but this is a really good way to test friendships? Whoever is my real friend will stick by my side. And good news. Most did. Almost everyone. Like I did have a hunch that that particular company wouldn't be very keen on making sure that a trans person feels like they belong at that company. But I really hope that it would work out. But there was a chance that I would lose my job or I would have to quit. And in the end, I did. And it was a pretty bad situation. I will touch on that in a moment. But maybe it was time to move on. Like I've been at the company for seven years. Maybe it's time to try something new, find a company that is more welcoming. And in fact, the country that is more welcoming. Yeah, I moved from Hungary to Berlin. There are reasons. Then about leaning into my values. So just as I was pondering this option of doing this transition, or boss at that company died. And he was a very important person for the company. And we all really liked him. And when I was at his funeral, I was thinking, what if I died? Like he was 40 years old. And it's like out of the blue, right? What if I died? Would I want to look back at my life and say, yeah, that was a thing that I didn't do, that I really should have? There is something I regret because I didn't do it. And is it really like living up to social expectations? Living up to social expectations that I want to do? Or is it living my truth that I want to do? And I think living my truth was a more important value for me. Experiments, like this one I love. So I didn't know how this would play out, right? And I knew that I have this sense that I should be presenting as a female. How do I know if that's really the thing? I can start HRT, but once I started, then it's hard to go back. So is there a way to test that? And there is. You can learn to do really good makeup. I don't have makeup on anymore. But when I started out, I used a shit ton of makeup because if you are good at doing makeup, you can actually get to a point where in the bar in the evening, after a couple of beers, people don't notice. And that's what I did. I did learn how to do feminizing makeup, dressed up as a woman, and went to a bar with a couple of friends to whom I already came out. And after that, I realized that it was fine. It worked out. OK, what's next? Let's go to Pride. And then I went to Pride as a woman. And all these experiences helped me understand that, yes, this does feel much better. It does feel much more natural. And in fact, the last time when I went out like that, it was a festival, Cigar Festival, some of you may know from Budapest. There is this big music festival. And I was going there as a volunteer for an NGO. And I went as a woman. And then I went home. And I was supposed to dress back as a male and go work the next day. And I felt like I was shutting the jail cell on myself. Like, going back to the jail and shutting it and throwing the key away. And I was like, yo, I don't want to do this anymore. Like, not one more time. And that's when I finally decided. So experiments are really, really important. And then setting a deadline. Like, there will always be unknowns. And I knew that at some point I will have to make a decision. So I kind of actually made the decision like two or three weeks earlier than the deadline that I set myself. But it was really important to have that deadline. Because that kind of pressed me on to do more experiments, to put myself out there, get a bit more information. So because I knew that if I didn't get whatever information I don't get onto that deadline, I will regret not getting. Because when you make a decision like that, you want to be sure that you've done everything that you can to make sure that you're doing the right thing. So a year later, once I made up my mind. So there were still uncertainties. When I made the decision, I still didn't know what would happen. And even before that, I still don't know if I had communicated differently with my ex-wife would have that changed anything, right? Probably not. But it will always be with me. And I wouldn't say that I don't regret anything, because it was the right decision. But at the same time, there is still this sense of what if? But we never know. And it's fine. You have to be fine with that. And there were a lot of things that I didn't expect, right? I didn't expect that one day I will be walking out of the HR's office knowing that someone is complaining about me using the women's room, apparently, and not knowing who. Because they denied me that knowledge.  And I don't know who that is. How would you feel? Like, would you feel like you belong here? No, right? So these kinds of unexpected things happen. And whatever you do, you won't be able to mitigate that upfront. Like, I didn't know that the Hungarian government will completely outlaw and outlaw changing your gender. So on paper, I'm still male. Yay. And despite winning four consecutive court cases, I'm still male in paper. So what I'm trying to say is that I didn't know that things will be worse than I expected in certain areas. But at the same time, I did every piece of research I could. And I still feel that I made the right decision. Even if something came up that would change my mind, all of this didn't change my mind, by the way. I would still make the same decision if I knew it upfront. But even if something came up that would change my mind, I know that I did everything that I could to make sure that I'm making the right decision. And then there is no reason to regret it, right? Yeah. So I learned a lot. And during this process, sorry, again, I thought I turned off this thing to go to sleep. But it seems like it didn't work. But I'm close to the end, so come on. All right. So yeah, a couple of things that I learned. And I really wanted to highlight these, because these are not necessarily connected to decisions. But not sharing information upfront, that's something that your oaths trust. That was a painful learning. And that kind of goes back to a professional side as well, right, when you have someone who you want to give feedback to give it as soon as possible. Because if you give it later, then that person will feel like you've been keeping something from them, right? Lack of inclusion at a workplace, much worse than I expected. Yeah, you want to work in a place where we feel home. And if that's not true, then it's not working. Doing activism at work, I'm an activist. And I've been doing activism basically ever since I started my transition. At some point, before the government banned legal gender recognition in Hungary, I was the campaign face of a campaign organized by Amnesty International against that law. And I've been giving interviews four times a day and stuff like that. It was crazy, period. But doing activism is fine. Doing it at your work is not. That's a really important learning. Because once that sweeps into your work, you start feeling like you're not going to get your work done. And because of that, I have a rule that whoever wants to talk about trans issues, I'm happy to do that over a year after work. And that's really important. And that's why we need the lies. So at work, don't expect the minorities to be the activists. Be their ways. If you are not a part of a minority, or at least not that minority, try to be their ways and make sure that it's not them who keep repeating the same answers to the same questions. And finally, I kind of learned the most important lesson of all. And that most important lesson is that the wrong nearest mitigated decision is better than no decision at all. And I think that risk mitigation is really important. And once we add that in there, I can kind of agree with this sentiment. Yeah, just one more second. Yeah. So make your decision timely, but mitigate the risk. Have an escape strategy if you can. If you have difficult decisions and you can't have an escape strategy, then think about what are the options? How are they comparable if they are not comparable, lean into your values, and dissect the problem, and use the scientific methods on the parts that you can use it on? And remember that these decisions that are hard decisions where you have non-comparable things and no way back, these decisions define you. These are the decisions you will always remember. And these are the decisions you should never regret. Thank you. Thank you. And just note, that is my YouTube show. If you want to check it out, a cup of good. And Lean Poker is my workshop. It's a really nice workshop for delivering value early enough. OK, any questions? If somebody has any questions, please walk by the mic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you share all this experience and all this decision making methods with us. For me, I really want to know, because sometimes everybody makes life decisions. And if you make a decision, and it's those kind of big decisions, there's no turning back. How do you kind of find peace within yourself? Sometimes you will have that feeling, right? Sometimes it's like, oh, what if, right? Did I do the right thing? Like, how do you find peace? That actually, it's fine. It's going to be fine. This decision will work out, even you doubt it. Yeah, so for me, and I think that's something that's very personal to every person. And maybe you need other strategies. But my strategy is that I make them sure that I did everything I could before the decision to know that it's the right decision. And then I accept that if it wasn't the right decision, then I won't regret it, because I just understand that at that point, with the information that I had, that was the right decision. Even if it's not the right decision anymore. At that point, I couldn't have made any other decision, because all the data supported what I did. And I think that's the only thing that I need. And maybe it's not the only thing that others need. Any other questions? So Greta, thank you very much for sharing. You said about how do you like to make the decision, like the time you decide for the deadline? So I wanted to know, like, how do you decide when it's time? Or if you have any tip about it. What should you be on deadline? Yeah, that's tough. So I think I don't have a recipe to start with. One thing that I did was to think about, OK, what are the experiments that I would want to run? These are the ones that I have in mind now. Then I just made an estimate of how much time do I need for making those experiments and added, like, 50%, just in case I have new ideas for experiments in the future. And that was it. And if you are interested in timeline, I think it was about in 2018, February, that I decided that I need to make a decision. And I made the decision early August. And my deadline was September. Thank you very much for the, there we go. Thank you very much. I find that not only inspiring, but also very informative. I think it's really nice to have advice that's concrete and practical. I liked your suggestions, the scientific method. A lot of the time, what makes that difficult is how good your information is. So you can use metrics to measure things, but sometimes those metrics are misleading, or they're not actually representative of what you're trying to get at. Do you have any kind of experiences or advice in trying to improve that information to inform your decision? So first of all, let me say this. An imperfect metric is better than no metric. So even if you know that it's not the right metric, if you have a metric, or if you have a couple of metrics, it's much better than having nothing. Even if it's just a lagging metric, or even if it's just you know that it's correlated with the thing usually, but you know. Or even if you just have a hunch that it's correlated, that's better than nothing. And then also you have to consider, again, the return on investment. Maybe if you put in more effort, you might get a better metric. But once you hit a point where we made an investment, it does provide some stability or some certainty. The rest is fine, we accept the rest of the risk. And as far as improving, I think there, I don't have like a good one advice other than read books on it. I think there are like hundreds of strategies that you can use to make your metrics better. And probably it should be a separate talk to talk about that. Yeah, so any more questions? No, right. So yeah, thanks a bit for this amazing talk. Thank you. Thank you.


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It's morning now. I'm already up at the box plot. We got out here a little earlier. Two-time D-knock arrow. You know, with this type hunting, just...  Gonna keep trucking, guys. It's all I'm not killing. Saw one doe at dark, bro. Tell me something. Zip out. Eat good. Refuel. Got one doe this morning. She came through. Corn's been eaten, but she just kind of breezed. And kept going.  We got a few cold bucks at our ranch, and he and Jared are going to our buddy's place. He's got some big cold bucks on his place. 130 to 150. We have made it to the Jag. This is a little bit more known space than the place we were just at. Me and Outlaw and Mike, we're about to split up. I'm gonna go with Mike's dad. This is a high fence. They have a lot of really, really big bucks. We could see some freakish big bucks, but that's not what I'm going after. I'm going after a couple of cold bucks that they have out here. And where Outlaw and Mike are going is about 20 miles down the road, and there's some megalodon freaks over there. Hope they get the chance at just a nice eight-point. Gets more meat in the freezer. Hopefully it works out that way, but it's hunting. You never know. I want us both to have some brown down tonight and celebrate with a Cerveza Golden. You know what I'm saying? Oh, man! Justin, we're splitting off. Jay Monty here is going to be in the stand, and he has the possibility of shooting a nice buck. He has the possibility of shooting some hogs. I'm going to have the opportunity to hopefully shoot a buck as well. It's kind of our last chance because tomorrow we can't hunt, man. It's just going to be raining all day and day. We're about to build an ark tomorrow if we want to hunt. You know, honestly, dude, we're just hoping to see something because the past two, three days have been absolutely horrendous. Been roughing corn cobs out there, but... Never heard that one. That was a good one. That's pretty good, actually. Thanks, man. Learned it from the woods. First hand.  Hopefully we both have something down we're going to celebrate. Good luck, man. Down, fly as it dies.  You guys wouldn't even believe it. Heading out for a little pre-hunt hunt. Big Mike, Mike's dad. He's got some hogs that have gotten in to this ranch. He's going to spot, and then I've got a fully suppressed 308 right here. So if we can take out a few hogs, it's going to help the property out, and it's also fun, so let's go see if we can get one. The full moon. Quite a doozy. It's been a while since I've seen one this bright. Me and Mike's dad, we rode around in the Easy Go. A lot of the animals are still laying down. Haven't even gotten up yet, and they're going to be getting up probably middle of the night. Fortunately, that puts a damper on evening hunts. However, there has been tremendous news from my counterparts. They have seen some Mado deer. Fortunately, the thing is, they got a little dark. They passed on some. They're going to be heading to this place, and we are going to be sitting inside of a stump. It's on another ranch, and the goal is to all get something tomorrow. I know this has been a crazy up-and-down deal. Go check out At Law and Mike down in the description. You can check out what happened over there. I literally have not even seen the footage. They've just told me about it, so I'm about to go see that too and get jacked up. What? In the world? What? Dude, that's a beautiful deer. Wow. Tomorrow.  It's been raining. Heavy, heavy, heavy rain. It's washed away all the scents. It's washed away all the deer, and hopefully they're going to come back out this evening. This is perfect timing to get back out. This is actually a good thing. I think this is going to set us up for a pretty active little hunt here tonight. Now my man, Jay Bowder. We're both trying to get some bucks.  What's your feelings about these conditions, and what do you think is going to come up? I'm feeling like it was corn. It's flooding right now. The storm is going to blow over. The ivy is going to blow over. Perfect conditions. Perfect conditions. That's what he just said right there. Perfect. I'm really sure kind of ju-ju we have going on right now, but I've been on a lot of hunts. It's not really undifferent, but it's a journey. And at this point we've had so many highs and lows.  It is time. The goal was that we all need to get something. A man at law came down here to get a big Texas buck, so that's what we're going after. Passed up on some bucks. You have passed up on some pretty good bucks. We're in the land of giants here. I think maybe the possible plan is we just need to shoot something. We need a squirrel. We need a small, like a doe or something.  I think that's what needs to happen, y'all. He needs some meat for his freezer. At this point we need something. We take that blood and we put it on our face. Literally, literally get it on there and just feel the uprising. We'll get something going, man. It's bottom of the night, guys. We need a butt. Eight hours left. Eight hours. And we're hunting hard. We ain't stopping today. We're not going in and calling the wives today. We're hunting hard. Honey, OSG, Miss Outlaw. Sorry, we're going hard today. So apologize, but we're going to get it done, guys. This is it. This is the last day. Day whatever it is. It's come down to this. Let's get it going.


Good afternoon. First of all to thank LSE urban age for making it possible for us to be here today. I want to give a perspective of an African urban authority and urban center, different perhaps from what we have been looking at. I want to take the example from Campala where the challenges, the issues are basically the same or similar to a lot of developing countries in their urban settings. Campala transformational journey, I'm going to run this through, run through this very fast. Our population is as shown, 4 million during the day, that means we're commuting in. Urban population growth 5.2%. We contribute 60% of the city's GDP and the population is projected to grow to 10 million in the city by 2040. The transformation journey, I just want to emphasize that if we're going to transform urban centers, cities, particularly in developing countries, we've got to look at why they are the way that they are and most of the times you'll find that it's to do with the legislation, the policies, the politics and cultural and social issues that affect everything else in these urban centers. So for Campala 2010, a new law was passed that brought into place Campala capital city authority. That means we moved from being a local government to a central government cooperative, central government corporate entity running the city. We have been working on a lot of things before we came in for the last so many decades since independence. There was a lot of unplanned and uncontrolled settlements, growing slums, juxtaposed with urban affluence, these are pictures from then on the streets of Campala, breakdown of infrastructure, very, very poor service delivery, very, very high levels of corruption, total financial breakdown, the revenue was very poor and the institution had basically collapsed both in reputation and in services. So for the last five years we've been working on different aspects of restructuring the city, begun by restructuring the organization, setting up a new organization. I had the enviable task of firing over 1,500 staff and we, and hiring fresh people that had a different mindset, a different skill set. But in our setting it was quite colorful because everybody is connected to someone else and then people get quite loud sometimes depending on where they're coming from. We've done roads, we've done street lights, we have been working on urban planning, trying to streamline the city, increased waste management, we are promoting the use of renewable energy starting with the city, installing solar lighting and also planting trees in different parts of the city. We are building hospitals because we provide for the health services in the city and these are some of the things that we're doing, ambulances, garbage trucks, increased waste collection, we're now opening up a new landfill where we want to do recycling and generation of bioenergy and also improving sanitation in different parts of the city. We run 87 primary schools for low income families, so we've been building classrooms and equipping them and renovating them, providing education for these children who would otherwise have no chance. Also to provide for workspaces, we build markets, we're also helping young people start businesses by giving them startup capital and also encouraging urban farming through greenhouses, small scale agriculture projects, backyard farming, aquaculture, rearing pigs and chicken and things like that that people can do to improve their incomes but also improve their household nutrition levels. We've done all this but it's just a fraction of what the population in the city needs. We have been able to restore the institutional credibility and improved efficiency. That means people have confidence, institutions now have the confidence to deal with us because we are credible and we are accountable. We have increased revenue collection by 170%, simply by cutting out all the revenue leakages and making our revenue collection electronic away from the manual where people would sort of help themselves to the city revenue. We've also got very efficient online services. Again, Employment Services Bureau, recognitions that we've received but going forward even with the achievements that we've been able to make in the last five years, we're still faced with a lot of challenges. Yesterday I mentioned one of the main problems we have is the different land holdings in the city. So we're limited, we have like five different land holdings and each one very unique in itself. Government has not yet come up with a policy to bring all these holdings under one system and land is a very, very sensitive issue. So we would believe that if the Habitat 3 engagement looks at some of the issues that some urban centres are grappling with, perhaps in the legislation, perhaps in the policies, perhaps in the politics, we'd be able to get real solutions that would be able to address the real problems that we have to deal with which may not be problems in the West but problems for many of us in the developing countries. That is addressing the legislative regimes that support urbanisation, reinforcing urban planning as a condition perhaps to some of the funding that comes to us, innovative financing mechanisms we can afford which we can manage and also efforts to address climate change in the cities but addressing the real issues, why are there climate change challenges in the city? For example, in Uganda, a lot of the people depend on wood fuel for cooking. Now unless we give them viable, affordable alternatives to cooking fuel, they are still going to deplete our forest reserves by using firewood and charcoal for cooking. The other ones we need to establish an efficient public transport system. Right now we do not have a public transport system. Everybody sort of manages through commuter, small commuter buses, motorcycles and private, which is a nightmare in terms of controlling congestion in the city. So these are some of the basics that we need to get done and perhaps insist in some way on urban legislation to promote, as I said, proper development of these urban centres, financial sustainability and also addressing some of the challenges that we face as developing countries. Otherwise, without addressing these real issues, we would not be able to provide real sustainable answers for the developing countries and the developing urban centres. One of the initiatives we've taken as Kampala Capital City Authorities is to bring together African urban centres, leaders of African urban authorities to come up with solutions to the common problems that we have within the limitations of financing and capacity. So we set up the East Central and Southern Africa Cities Forum, which took place recently. And we're coming together to help one another, benchmark from one another, share capacity so that we can stretch the limited resources that we have further within ourselves, even as we reach out to other partners to help us. We think we can have solutions within ourselves. African cities providing African homegrown solutions within the African settings and then build on that to reach where Western brothers and sisters are at this time. And I want to thank you so much for giving me the opportunity.


We're doing a live fire demonstration as part of the excise dynamic front 23 the largest artillery exercise in Europe Well, the new guys that are shooting today. They're getting experience with How to prepare themselves for actually an actual live fire instead of a dry fire for all the new crews and the old ones Going up to the field really lets you get to know the person to your left and your right Honestly it builds up a camaraderie So that now that I know, you know my chief and my gunner and I know I'm personally I'll be more motivated to do my job because I don't want them down. I Have a pretty rookie platoon. So right now they're kind of gaining a lot of experience working amongst themselves The training time that we're really getting We don't really get to do that or see that a lot in garrison So just coming out here really going through it actually applying the techniques that we preach about we talk about Out here we're actually getting to do soldier skills, soldier tasks. So that really benefits the crews Opponents in the time brings to the table a lot of more experience than all the other mikes Like he can give us an overall picture of what's going on So the army is a human business. It's a people business. Soldiers are gonna fight and win


Bridging the standardization gap is important to connect the unconnected, enhance the capacity of the stakeholders to participate and enhance the acceptability of implementation of standards based solution.  In India, we are planning a series of run-up events to spread the word about WTSA 24. The side events like Expo, Cladioscope and now will also promote and help bridging the standardization divide. ITU Area Office and the Innovation Centre in Delhi can plan a regional workshops, outreach events in coordination with Department of Telecommunication to promote the WTSA 24 and promote bridging of standardization gap. It could plan a brainstorming session in which key stakeholders would discuss a detailed action plan to be implemented to help bridging the standardization gap.


State officials say Minnesota's individual health insurance market may be stabilizing, but there are still signs of trouble. A Minnesota Department of Health study released Friday shows insurers selling plans directly to consumers aren't losing as much money as in years past. Heavy losses in 2014 and 2015 drove double digit premium hikes for shoppers. The department says the financial turnaround signals the market has stabilized after years of uncertainty. But the report also warns that the shrinking size of the individual market could cause problems. Just 166,000 Minnesotans were enrolled as of the middle of 2017. That's down from 309,000 in 2015. The report says healthy individuals leaving the market could spark additional instability. Open enrollment for 2018 ends on Sunday. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Good morning or afternoon, depending on where you're located. This is Una Daly from the Community College Consortium for OER. And welcome, everyone. This is our April community advisory meeting. And I'm very excited about the topic of open pedagogy. And we'll get to that in just a moment. And of course, we'll have Quill West presenting on that. And she's leaving a discussion this morning based on an article, a chapter that was sent out a week ago with our announcement. And again, yesterday, this is a article by Robin DeRosa and Scott Robison on open pedagogy that was recently published in the open book editors from Steve and Robert Fisbos. So I hope some of you have seen that and had a chance to read it. So, really exciting to try a new model. We're also using go to meetings this morning. So the nice thing about that is that our chat window is available to everybody and we'll be taking a look at the chat as we go through their comments there. And in addition, there's going to be live notes that will be taken as well. We're looking for a volunteer on that one. So please let us know if you can help out with that piece of it. I hope everyone can find the chat window there in their little control panel. All right, so we're going to welcome our new members. We have a number of new members that have come in in the last three months. We're really excited about that. We have a couple of quick announcements about some of the successes in the open education community that I think probably many of you have heard, and I'd like to share them one more time. And then we'll get to the open pedagogy topic. And finally, at the very end, we'll have some time for open discussion if you have things that you'd like to bring up. All right, well, first of all, of course, I want to welcome everybody who's here this morning, our old and new members. And if you would share in the chat window your name and what institution you're with and what you're interested in OER. But I want to make a special welcome to the following colleges, which just joined us as CCCOER members. We are part of the larger global community, the Open Education Consortium. And so these folks are now members of CCCOER at the Open Education Consortium. So the IT Tech Community College in Indiana, we're very pleased to have them join us. I don't know if anyone is on there. Is on today from Ivy Tech. Second up, and these are in alphabetical order. So it is Lakeland College from Ohio, and we're very pleased to have Lakeland College. That is our second college in Ohio. So very pleased to have them on board. Mira Coast and Community College in California just joined us this month, and we're very pleased to have them on board. We have quite a number of California colleges, but we always love to have more. And California has 115 community colleges. So it's a big one. We also would like to welcome Mitchell College, which just applied last week, and is in the process of a formal acceptance, but we expect to accept them in May. They're from North Carolina, and that's our first member college in North Carolina. Here's College District. Jeff joined us from Washington State. We're very pleased to have them. We have a number of college, joined us earlier this year in February, and they're in Florida, and we're very pleased to have them. We have a number of Florida colleges for members. San Jose City College in San Jose, California joined us last month in March, just in time for Open Ed Week, and we're very pleased to have them on board. Tarrant County Community College in Texas joined us this last month, joining quite a number of colleges that we have in Texas. And then finally, Ventura Community College District in California joined us. We're very pleased to have them. They're down kind of Southern California way, and they joined a number of California community colleges. So welcome to all of you, and I hope some of you are online today, but this, of course, is being recorded for those who have other activities. Just a couple of announcements. These were some highlights over the last couple of weeks. Our friends, our OER friends in New York, CUNY, the City University of New York, and SUNY, the State University of New York, received $8 million in state funding for OER. And of course, these systems are huge, and they include the community colleges, and so we're just so pleased to hear that. New York State is really supporting Open Education. Earlier this week, the Open Access Week theme for 2017 was announced. I think many of our members have librarians who are very active on our list and within our consortium, and they really participate in Open Access Week, and we support it fully as well. And that's usually in October. It is in October this year, and the new theme is Open in Order 2. How many folks out there participate in Open Access Week? Just out of curiosity. You could put that in the chat window, and if you've got activities planned. Another big success for one of our community members, Open Oregon. Open Oregon is the statewide effort in Oregon. They've presented with us many times. Amy Hofer announced that they had hit 300 adoptions in the state. I think it was last week, and you can see more about that at the link there, openorgan.org resources, but these are individual adoptions by faculty at their colleges, and they also specify what the open resource they're using. So it's a really, not only a very helpful site for those of you who might be looking for OER, but it's also a real success story. And finally, Open Education Week. I know a lot of our members participated in that. It was the last week of March, and just a quick report on that. We had 3,600 visitors from 136 countries. There were 156 events that were locally or online listed and that folks sent to us and were put on the calendar. We know that there were other events going on, but they didn't quite make it onto the calendar. Not everyone sends us their events, but that Open Education Week site stays up all year. So, you know, feel free to go up there. There's lots of wonderful resources, not only webinars, but there were projects that were submitted as well. And finally, I just wanted to let you know we are having an exciting webinar. Aren't they all exciting on May 10th? About setting OER. So about the OER selection process. One topic that we haven't talked about before is how the state culturally includes the content for how to find it and then adapt it if needed to be culturally inclusive. And Bunkford Hill Community College has been a leader in this area, and we have Lori Catalozzi, who's the Dean of Humanities and Learning Community, who's going to be hosting at that webinar on May 10th. We also, of course, have the very important accessibility and licensing issues which we will have Paula Mission-Neweth, and I'm probably torturing her name. She's an instructional designer at Salt Lake Community College who will be sharing and our own Quill Pierce, our president of CCCOER. We'll be talking about open licensing and how that process is best implemented at your institution. And now I'm going to turn it over to Quill. Thank you so much, Una. And are you going to give me the screen? Oh, yes. Thank you, Quill, for... Okay, everybody, and hopefully you're looking at a slide that says discussion from OER to open. And I want to first thank Paige very much for agreeing to run the slide. Okay, so let's just give a couple of things here. I just want to make sure that everybody can see I'm getting some feedback. Is anybody else getting feedback? Okay. So we're using GoToMeeting today, which is different. Make sure that you find the chat button because that's where most of the conversation is going to happen. If you happen to be on with the phone, please make sure that your phone is muted. Microphones default to muted, but your phone doesn't. And so when somebody else is speaking, it's just a good idea to mute yourself because otherwise we get feedback. Okay, and can everybody hear me now? Is the theme better, Quill? I muted all of our... I'm sorry, I muted all of our attendees for now until we get to an open time. Perfect. Okay, so just to give a sense of what we're going to be doing today, I will kind of go through the article. I've gone through the article and I'll pose some specific questions. Please use the chat to respond if you would like to. I get that mark. And then we'll turn the mics back on. The idea is just to eliminate extra feedback because this service does allow that. So if you'll just take a break, count two alligators between each speaker just to give people time to finish their talk. And then Paige has been kind enough to agree to take live notes as we're doing this. So we're looking at the live slide show right now. This is an experiment. We're going to see how it works for us. So I think it's really important when we're talking about open education to note that it means different things for different people and in different contexts. I know that I use the idea of open education differently when I'm talking about, for example, grant work versus the work we do with our classes that aren't a part of a grant. So I use terms this way. So I say open education to mean the entire field, everything we study, it's kind of like instructional design as a field. So we're going to talk about that with open education. Today we're going to be curious about what we mean by OER. So when we talk about the resources with OER, we really are talking about the full five-hour definition because open pedagogy kind of depends on that five-hour definition in terms of the ability to reuse work. And then open education practices is a term that I'm becoming more and more familiar with, which is teaching effectively with OER and then we're going to come up with a definition ourselves of open pedagogy as we work through the article today. Is there any other terminology or any clarifications on this terminology that people want to add? I'm going to take this quiet in the chat window to mean yes. So let's start with this first quote, and I'm not going to read it to you because you can read it to yourself. But this is at the start of Derosa and Robeson's article and I really love this idea of the learning materials responding to the learner to think in terms of that rather than the learner's responsibility to respond to materials, the materials should also, there should be a conversation and the materials really shouldn't be static. I love that idea. So working with that concept, thinking in terms of how we're talking about the student's relationship to material and the material's relationship to the student and how they should respond to each other. I'm curious to know, because I work with faculty so often, how does the instructor's relationship to the material change if we're changing that relationship between students and materials? So how does it have to change the way instructors think about resources? Preston, would you like to share more about what you mean by keeps them current? Sure. I think when you're talking about the relationship between students and OER materials, I think it allows you to really take an applied approach to teaching and learning, and instead of relying on what may be outdated information, regardless of the topic, even courses like history and philosophy, which are oftentimes looking back at historical documents and data, applying concepts from those courses to current issues and situations is a very important way to reinforce learning, and I think this is a good way to keep folks current by making sure that you are taking content that is updated regularly, content that is newly released and made available, and incorporating that into teaching and learning. Preston, you used a phrase in there, and I didn't catch the whole thing. I was trying to write it down, and I didn't catch it all. You said applied something, and can you say that again? Because I really liked it, and I want to write it down. I don't exactly remember exactly what I said. I apologize for that. But I know from my own teaching experience, I really try to sort of translate concepts from historical perspectives into modern situations by using an applied approach where you can take material and ideas and concepts and relate them to current issues or problems so that you're focusing not only on learning what particular material may be, but how to use that to solve current or future problems. And it's something that involves students, and you can really use that for students to interact with one another, to have a more dynamic relationship with the faculty member. I hope the recording caught the actual phrase that you found a value because sometimes my mouth works faster than my brain, and I can't recall exactly what I stated. No, that's perfect. Paige actually caught it. The slides were updating, so I've changed the view of our slides so we can see the summary as Paige is typing, and hopefully that's okay with everybody. So I like how you're saying that. The really big concept that you're getting there is applying the materials to problem solving, which you're calling an applied approach, and I like that. What are some other things? For anybody else, does it change? Yeah, so, Ryar, I really like your concept there about co-creation of knowledge and understanding. So how does that co-creation work for folks who've worked with it? Suzanne, thank you. Yeah, the role of a guide. So what does that mean for us in terms of how we think about creating courses or curating materials together for courses if we're more of a guide rather than a sage? Yeah, I like that point of students being more engaged and also understanding the expectations of a discipline and getting to practice that discipline as a part of it. Okay, yeah. So hold that thought on creating courses that bring students into the process of academics because we are going to talk some more about that. So many comments at once. Alexandra, I really like that concept of being able to ask the students to surface their thinking in writing. That's perfect, Paige. Feel free to copy and paste where you can. So Ryar hits on something that is really important here is that there is a power shift in the dynamic that's happening in some of these classes where the faculty member is taking a little bit of a leap of faith and giving up some control over the material and over the way students consume and interact with the material. And I'm curious to know how others have managed that. Okay. So this is a great point that folks are making about giving up some of the power in it and it being a good thing. It can also be, I don't know, for me it feels very, it feels good, but it also feels kind of scary. So one of the things that happens, let's move on to talking about assignments a little bit just to fill in our time and we can come back to this concept because I really like it. But in Derosa and Robinson's article, they talk about some samples of Open Pedagogy. They give kind of 4K studies of things that they have done or seen done. And we have some wonderful case studies amongst our own attendees here today so we can share more points. But I'm curious to know from kind of the group, let's talk a little bit about how, what you see working really well in these types of assignments and what you see as tension points. Oh, that's a great one that students, this is also a lot of freedom for the students. And I'm not sure, like somebody said to me one time, a teacher said to me one time about teaching a math class with open resources, that she spent half the quarter retraining the students how to think differently about math and then the rest of the quarter teaching math. And then they had to go back to their next class and read, learn how to take math classes again because she changed so much on them in one quarter. So it's interesting because if we're going to, oh, somebody's chiming in. So I guess my question would be, because some students get really excited about this and for some people it can be uncomfortable. One of the questions to focus on the tension points is how do we facilitate these kinds of courses and this kind of learning while still supporting the fact that our colleagues aren't going to do it the same way and they don't have to. I mean, I think if every class was as involved as some of the open pedagogy classes that I've taught, students would rebel about the amount of energy and work it takes. I'm going to try and jump in by the microphone. Does it work? Yep. Very exciting. Yeah, I think that the main thing that has helped with having students not freak out so much is to really scaffold it a lot more than other assignments. So give them a very clear list of this is what you're learning and here's the approach that we're going to use, which I didn't have to do before, but it seems necessary in this case. I'm really liking that point about communication technology tools and I think it's interesting. I saw this amazing group of presentations at OpenEd at the Global Conference from folks who were trying to do open pedagogy because of infrastructure issues at their institution with students who had little access to technology or web services. And it was really interesting to see the questions they ran into or the... For them, the things that didn't work were the things that I thought would be really easy, like students being able to communicate with teachers in multiple formats. So I'm curious to know how have folks worked with that in terms of teaching that, in terms of teaching technology and communication skills. Alexandra, I would love to see some of your assignments because some of those things you're asking for are really high-level work. So I'd love to hear what other open pedagogy folks are engaging in in terms of this is partially a way to help us define what we mean by open pedagogy because some people are purists that they're saying that if it's open pedagogy, everything the students are presenting and creating then adds back into the larger discourse and that is open pedagogy. And it's all openly licensed. Some are saying that maybe it's not all openly licensed. And sometimes it's not all or nothing. For example, I think I saw that quote in the chat from Harris. So I would love to know what other things are folks doing and calling open pedagogy and can we come up with a kind of sense of what an open pedagogy looks like? This is actually a question I've had too with the is open pedagogy the pedagogy of creating open things or the pedagogy of using open things? I mean either way would work but that's kind of where I get stuck because I don't want to force students to have to make have to share their work if they're not comfortable but I do want to show them where they can get work that is shareable and is usable. So really focusing on kind of information literacy like where do you find things that you can use thoroughly versus where are you kind of plagiarizing and not realizing it? Suzanne, I think you hit the essence of the question for me in terms of sometimes in my classes using open things appropriately and even blending open things with less open things to create new knowledge and then sharing that. So I feel like open pedagogy should have a creative element to it in the terms of what comes out of it should be something we can share forward but I agree with you I always give my students an opt out because I don't think everybody should have to share because I want them to understand they have their own copyright and I want them that's part of my hidden outcomes and some of my assessments. So I'll volunteer one that I do I teach a college success class and my students do something I call create an ad but basically they're making the intro material for core concepts in the class. So if one of our core concepts is not procrastinating we're learning about how not to procrastinate or think about procrastinating. I have students who then design for me something that's supposed to catch attention for the next group of students. So instead of my presentation we start with the students work and I've gotten some great things. I had one student draw a really really wonderful kind of storyboard for me showing somebody vanquishing procrastination in their life and it works really well so that then the student perspective lives in my class but she volunteered to let me share that work and put an open license on it I did not demand it. Dan that's a great point that students working in a group should choose their license. How do you facilitate that conversation? So I've had this tension point before I'm always happy to teach students about licensing and I feel like it's a valuable use of their class time but I have had the tension point of this class is about chemistry. We don't teach licensing and chemistry although I would argue that they're going to need intellectual property language at some point in their careers. Perfect. Yeah. So how do you cover that in your class? It looks like Dan's using a video but you're making the perennial point about the word pedagogy and I think it's just that thing where it took over the way we talk about teaching and learning. Yeah I was right that's a great point on the Year of Open Google Hangout. I didn't make it but I saw some of the amazing things that came out of it and I really like there was another term where instead of calling it pedagogy or androgogy they called it, I forget which, but it's the definition when I looked it up because I hadn't seen the word before was learners choosing their own path through a concept which I thought was a really neat idea. There it is. Karen put it in there. Self-directed learning. Let's talk about teaching and learning. Yes. If you're not following by the way the Year of Open this month is Open Pedagogy Month and there's some great stuff there and yes I'm using that word but it's the one that's taken over our conversation. Thanks Una. Okay I'm noting our time so I'm going to move us to another question here but we can come back to this one. That's a good point. Yes for folks out there I would also love an assignment to teach about licensing something simple. I have some slides that I use that I will happily share with people. I would go get them and post them in the chat right now but if I do you have to look at my messy email. We'll wait. So we've already seen some of the challenges but here's some that I have focused on so think about challenges or tension points in doing this kind of work and for me this one's really really close to my heart because I teach developmental ed but I think readiness in developmental education is a space where we really could be benefiting from this type of work and we do in my class but I think it's also something where when we talk about scaffolding it's a different kind of scaffolding in terms of building confidence. So what kind of readiness things have you run up against? Because I don't think it's just a developmental ed. I think there's a lot of readiness in education in general we have to address when we're asking students to take in the larger conversation of their discipline. This is one of the major things that Derosa and Robinson talk about in working in public lessons and challenges on the ground on page 121. Anybody had any experience and they address it as a we should change the nature of the web? So the assignments themselves are designed to build confidence that's a good point. Preston this question actually reminds me of your talk about the ethics of open and open meeting all students where they are because this is where I sometimes worry that the assignments outstrip the ambition of the assignment can outstrip the students' knowledge at the beginning of a course. Thank you, Quill. Community colleges in particular have such a wide variety of students and we have adult and returning students. We sometimes have senior citizens. We have high school dual enrollment students and every population in between and it's very difficult to try to meet all of those students where they are and try to provide some of the readiness or development or information literacy and all of those other types of things while also teaching on the specific subject matter of the course. And so these are all things that I think a lot of faculty wrestle with particularly in community colleges and meeting students where they are is not always easy but I think when you are talking about open pedagogy and then the design of assignments that allow students to benefit from interactions with one another, they can help each other along because if a faculty member has 30 students and a class, it's really hard to get everybody to the same playing field without having some of those other folks chipping in and creating this kind of collaborative learning environment. Okay. So in the interest of thought, I don't know that we have clear answers to this yet but I think that we have to just notice this. Yeah, I hear a good point there about helping students to recognize what they already know. And I think a big part of that is honoring that what they have experienced is something they know. I think a lot of students think that they're or have experience in other spaces in their lives that they don't know enough about anything to call themselves an expert.  Yep, also in what they think they know and then how to support what that is or how to support their experiences in an open space. It's a fascinating space. So I do think that there needs to be some transparency in the process. I found it fascinating to think about that concept of selling the web less as a place for finished products and more of a space for developing knowledge which is really fascinating because I think we tend to consume the web that way but we don't tend to publish to it that way. And I'm speaking in terms of the academic disciplines in general. So that call to be less complete on the web less polished really speaks to me because it's hard for me to release things that I don't feel done with yet. Which is why it's always hard for me to release things in general. I'm going to skip forward in the interest of time so this is more of that same question though. So what are the risks that we face as instructors when we treat our own work as works in progress instead of finished and completed work? And I just admitted it is so hard for me to publish something that I don't feel is correct. Or not correct, correct the wrong word. That I don't feel is perfect. I have this sense of people will judge me if my work is not the best it possibly can be before I can release it and judge me negatively so then I don't ever want to release things. How many other people have had that feeling first of all? Yeah, it feels a lot safer to me to share things in a quiet space. And I often run into this situation with faculty who developed great and amazing things and they won't share them with people, other people because they're worried about judgment, but they will happily hand them to students forever because there's less risk in sharing with a group of students than there is in sharing with your own colleagues. And I think that's part of the culture we're trying to shift here. And Dan, I want to hear more about that. I felt like that before I said you're teaching third and fourth graders because I think I really think we need to find a way to feel like what we are releasing doesn't have to be perfect because the other part is when we're asking students to take that risk, we have to do that. And I think that's part of the culture we're trying to shift here. And Dan, I want to hear more about that. I want to demonstrate that we take risk, too, but I think our entire system is set up against that. Peer review is set up against that kind of space. So how do we do it? Actually, there was a great TED talk a while back about how this concept of open actually takes, and I teach science, so I keep going back to those examples, but takes us back to what science was supposed to be, which is we're all working together, we're all figuring it out. It's not like I have created an answer and here it is, which I think has become such an odd way to teach science from this tone of these are the answers, right? And so I really kind of use it as, no, this isn't finished. It may not be right in 10 years because that is what we're doing in science. I'm going to have to figure out how to save this chat because so many good things are coming through it. I like that. I need to find that TED talk because that's also, I think to an expert, that's what publishing in any field is supposed to be, but I think that we have, I know teaching information literacy five years ago, we were teaching students much more closely to, if you can find it in a journal, it is closer to fact than if you can't find it in a journal. And I think the point that you're making there is in the, in, depending on your discipline, that's less true. It's more like this is our current thinking in the space. True. The act of publishing is a part of an industry now. Maybe not considering the things we publish to the web. Which is different now. And we still use the word publish there rather than maybe iterate on the, on the web, which is one of the reasons why I love David Wiley's byline to his blog, which is iterating towards openness. I like that concept of constant change and constant growth. I'm going to ask another big question here. So I'm going to change our, change up our slides and this one is really about something that I don't know that open pedagogy has addressed yet, which is designing to scale. So if we determine that, that these types of assignments and class interactions are a valuable tool and really important in the scope of teaching and learning, how do we bring it to scale so that we're not recreating the same works over and over again, but also so that new teachers can embrace these ideas. I have no answers to this question. It just occurred to me yesterday that I have not seen this kind of lesson done to scale yet. Alexis, do you know of anybody? So Dan, I need to go to that website, but I can't because if I do, you'll have to go there with me. Alexis, do you have any samples of or experience with people who have taken a template kind of assignment and recreated it and for their own teaching? Definitely will contact you. Okay. So this might be a red herring of a question for right now, but it's one that I'm hoping that we can all start thinking about in our own practice as we develop these courses. Yeah, so that's great. That's a good point of sharing out your Google Drive. And that's another big thing here is that there has been a growing call even on our own listserv about repositories of open assessments. Yep, some kind of idea generator for open pet. I love that idea. Just even if it's walking around conferences saying this is one of the things I do. Can you clarify what you mean by it's difficult to do searching? Sure. So in this, I think kind of relates to both the examples of assignments and just kind of open in general. And this may just be my own personal opinion, but there's a lot of great places to go look, but it's almost a challenge of abundance. There's a lot of places to look, right? And so it becomes kind of hard to find. That is true. And that's one of the reasons why, actually, I'm going to make a plug for the webinars that Anna just mentioned. We've done a couple of webinars at CCC OER. And I've seen them in other places too, where people get a chance to present on the amazing thing they're doing in their class. And those always speak way more to me than going through kind of a more closed repository. Because I can hear from the teacher, like I have to hit on your biology class. Suzanne, I learned the coolest thing. Watching how you did that. And I thought, okay, when I do book creation, this is what I want to do. And so I've taken some of your lessons learned. So specific examples and template type materials would be important. Yeah. And then I also think that it's really important. I think, you know, we don't have to do all things at once in every one of our classes. So I also think that there needs to be a simple way to think about this and then bigger, more ambitious ways to think about it. Because some people are going to want to recreate, you know, create their own text materials and have the students do most of their writing. And then other people are going to want simpler, like I just want ancillaries. I just need them to help me make study guides. That's all I want my students doing. And that's not at all. That's actually quite a robust thing to do, but it's not as big as we're going to recreate the textbook. So I have a couple of more questions. And I think that they're more aspirational and we're coming up on the hour. So I'm just going to bring them up and then I want to turn. So I'm going to go through the next few slides fairly quickly. And then I'm going to turn it over to you folks to raise questions that may have come up for you. This one wasn't in the article, but it's important to me, which is we keep talking about the virtues of this kind of teaching. And I think from the instructor's perspective and from the institutional perspective, this kind of teaching and learning is really valuable. There is exactly one that I know of study that, and it's not even published yet, that examines the value of open assessment on student teaching and learning. So I would love to know if people are doing other things or if there's other things we can look for. Thanks Paige for getting us through the notes that we've done so far. That's great. And then the other part is, is there a process we can use for designing open assessments? Okay, so don't forget the year of open. And then I'd want to open this up to hear what other people are thinking about. And I realized that we're down to two minutes. So what other comments might folks want to make before we close for today? This is Buddy and he is from Montgomery College. I'll just say a few words. I'll be quick, unlike me. I think a lot of us in higher ed are still struggling with open education resources. A lot of our faculty are not on board. And this is a very valuable discussion we're having today. But I think if it's not really yet formed well, what open pedagogy is, the faculty who are just trying to come to grips with what OERs are, they may be hesitant to get into this. They may think, oh my God, this is a real big world, a universe of things that I must subscribe to. So it's great. But I think right now for many of us, the priority is on open education resources to try to bring in these faculty who need encouragement to get on this. And this will develop, of course, and it should. But it's just so many of us are fighting the OER battle. That's the primary one, at least for me right now. Thank you. This is Alexis. I'd love to agree with that and also sort of disagree. So I've worked with a lot of faculty at this point.  I need to focus on the text aspect. But then I think there's another maybe quarter or so of the population that open pedagogy is what actually lights the fire and actually brings them into the conversation in a way that just talking about open textbooks doesn't. So it's really hard to strike the right balance, but there's so many exciting things about the world of OER generally that it's nice to kind of mention all the possibilities to see where people's eyes light up. Preston, I want to give you a little bit of time if you have it to talk about why open ped doesn't require the 5Rs. Okay. So this is something that I've been wrestling with a little bit because I'm very much a proponent of open licensing. But at the same time, I certainly recognize that there are ways to use materials and resources that may not be openly licensed, but effectively incorporate them into open pedagogy in a way where folks are able to use material and allow that to benefit particular assignments or works that they're creating to reinforce learning in creative ways. There are a lot of materials that we can access. And when I think about what students, particularly like the millennial and younger students that we see, the things that are important to them really aren't necessarily about retaining material so much as being able to access it, refer to it, and then use it to inform things that they're able to create. And those are things that I think we need to not lose sight of because there's tendency to sometimes devalue things if they don't have a particular license attached to them. And I think that really can reduce the amount of valuable materials and resources out there at our disposal and those of our students. Yeah, J-PACs are J-PACs and they're the size of the art, but most graphic designers will use a vector graphic, which would be like a P and G file so that you could use sizes without losing. Yeah, I think so too, but that's okay. All right, I'll see what I can do. Thanks. Are you there, Quill? I think somebody was on their phone. I was talking. Yeah, I'm here. Sorry. I muted myself. I'm sorry. So yes, and I think if I follow your point, I think that you're, I always, every time I think about this licensing issue, as I worry that we're, there's the thing that you do in production. And then there's the thing you do for learning in the classroom. And I do worry that we limit ourselves. For example, you know, the library, and I really like to use library resources, but I also think there's something to teaching students about incorporating sources that doesn't mean that you can't ethically cite them, but you're not editing the original source because it's not licensed so that you can. So I run that tension too, and I worry about it. Because I do think we need to teach students that copyrighted materials have as much to have value and that they can be used in ethical and appropriate ways. Right, and there are openly, you know, there's open access material that may be copyrighted or may have a more restrictive license that folks can use and sort of create a response to something as an assignment that then, you know, is built on this idea of openness, but is utilizing materials that are a combination of openly licensed and openly accessible, but not necessarily openly licensed materials. And I think that if we try to limit ourselves to an ideal, we can end up having some unintended consequences. And that's the thing that I wrestle with on a personal level, wanting to really support and encourage open licensing, but also understanding and appreciating the things that people are making available for use, oftentimes for free, but are retaining copyright for creative or other reasons that are valid in their case. And it doesn't mean that the material is less worthy of our incorporating it into our teaching strategies. Yeah, that tension that you're talking about and attention might be the wrong word, but that space we need to build for learning off of resources just is a really important one in terms of also students being responsible citizens and using copyrighted and not copyrighted and openly licensed and public domain and every other kind of information resource that they'll run into in their lives as citizens of the web and citizens of our communities. So I think that it's really important. And I think that's why I, if I had my way at least once a year, students would run into some kind of conversation about intellectual property and what it means in their lives because that's part of what we're trying to do as in teaching them. And I think that that would be a... And I think it would be valuable for us to continue to have those conversations. So I have now just passed our time here. These slides for today's conversation are openly licensed, of course, here by the way are applications for the slide deck that we used and for the article that we talked about. My own questions are openly licensed and I will put an open license on this and I'll share it via the list. We are recording this conversation and we'll make it available to folks. And I think we should have more conversations. I really, really like the idea of doing discussions and if it worked for people, I think we should continue to do them on a variety of topics. But I... Oh, and yes, please don't forget that we will be doing our May 10th webinar. I am so excited to hear our speakers on the 10th, not including myself, although I'm excited about being able to talk to you about vetting licenses and teaching people how to do that. So I am going to quit talking and let people make any other closing comments that you would like to ask. Well, thank you all for coming today. It was great to have your voice...