Good afternoon everybody. So I'm very pleased to be here. This is my first time in Spain and also there's really a great opportunity for me to introduce Apache Killing and some user cases. A little bit about myself. So I'm the co-founder and CEO of Kali Jinx. This is a startup behind of the open source project, Apache Killing. And also I'm co-correct and now is a PMC chair of Apache Killing, this project. Let me talk a little bit about this startup. So Kali Jinx means Killing and Intelligence. So we created this open source project. And for the startup, we wanted to bring more capability for the intelligence way to using AI, to using machine learning, and to augment the analytics stuff. We formed this company three years ago with Kali Jinx of Apache Killing. And we released the funding from Red Points and Cisco at the beginning. And we closed our series A last year and we just closed our series B from 8 Loads. Actually, it's a Fidelity International. So we're also very honored to get the CR and top 10 big data startups just a few months ago. But today I will cover more about Apache Killing, the open source project itself. So today I will introduce a little bit of the background and also the technical highlights. And later on I will introduce user cases. It's a very impressive one. It's like companies to using Apache Killing to get insight from training data, from like a Parabyte scale data. And in the last five minutes, I will let you know what our startups doing. So first, it's talking about this Apache Killing project. So we developed this project when we are still working for eBay about like five years ago. You know, eBay is the biggest user of tele-data. We have more than like 20 Parabytes data in the EDW. But at that time, we have more than like 200 Parabytes in Hadoop. It not makes sense to bring all the data from like Hadoop to the EDW and to like BI application and to something. So at that moment, like five years ago, we decided to seeking for some solution. Build something on top of Hadoop like to resolve that challenge for the very huge, massive data set. But the analysts, they wanted to like sub-second interactive latency. So that is the beginning of this project. And after one year of development inside eBay, we open sourced it in 2014. And later on, we joined the Apache Software Foundation as an incubator project. And after one year in 2015, we are gradated to the top level project. So now after this graduation, we have like more than 1,000 adoptions already all over the world. So I will introduce some great use cases later. And very pleased we got several like recognized from the industry. And yeah, there's a lot of, you know, bigger users all over the world. I will talk later. So let me talk about what's kind of a problem we try and want to resolve. When we are moving from a traditional EDW to the bigger data, the data lake, that's something missing.  And you like see high like Impala, like Sparsico, like drill, like blah, blah, blah. And you have to learn each of them. And from another angle is for all the like presentation layer. They only have like a secret interface. But they have to deal with that. That's something missing. So that is what the challenge we have inside the eBay.  So finally, we bring the OLAP concept back to the EDW, to the ecosystem. OLAP is actually the older term. It's about like more than 30 years already. But it is very good. You know, build the cubes on top of like a traditional data warehouse. See like tele-data, see like DB2 or something else. But when you are moving to the Hadoop world, there's nothing at that moment. So we decided that. And what kind of benefits we introduce to the world? The first one is semantic layer. You have a lot of technical stuff inside the data lake, right? Define the columns, the fields, the tables. But your business, the business users, they just wanted to have the dimensions and the measures and some filters and conditions, right? That gap, that gap we call it is a semantic layer, right? The mapping, the technical to the business. And so the another one is we call it the speed up, the SQL acceleration for big data. No matter like Hive or like even like Spark SQL, it's still very slow when you are having a very huge data set plus very huge concurrency, right? Your cluster is always like that, crushed, right? When you have like thousands or even like 10,000 concurrency. So that is we've introduced high performance and high concurrency using that technology. And another thing is we're still using the NCC code. So that means your analysts do not need to learn anything new about the technology. They only need to know it's using their, you know, favorite daily two, like Excel, like Power BI, like Tableau, to kind of access that billing status and get a very fast access. That is the key to introduce it to that. And how we do that? Let me give you some like technical highlights. So the fundamental concept behind Apache Keeling is OLAP Cube. So the cube, you know, we will build some of this aggregated result. We call this, and you can do the low app or like Joe Dunn or the slides and the dice. And that's why we call these OLAP cubes, right? This is very, it's about like maybe like 30 years old, right? And then you think about that, your analysts will always get insight from that data and that data is from different dimensions, which day, where, which kind of product, and how much is, how many you sold, right? That is, we call it OLAP. And what we introduce to do is, so then we think about that, there's like a lot of like tables sitting in your hives or even like bicycles. And then we're sitting, you present as like star schema or like snowflake or other like schema. And it makes sense is to pull the data and to do the manipulation and pull the result somewhere. And next time when the same query are coming, it can just get that result back from there without touch the original half table, right? Without to kick off another map reduce job. So that is what we call the balance space and time because it will require some additional space to store the result, the calculation result. But the benefits is it can speed up a lot for the queries, especially for the like queries run every day or even like every minutes for everybody. So that is architecture is particularly the self. So we can consume the data from hive at the beginning. Now it can consume from any like SQL or Hadoop. Even today we can, we have a plug-in can to a consume data from IDVMS. And also you can support from consuming from like Kafka or streaming. This is a very useful case can build some near real-time analytics. And also today you can consume from some like cloud source. And then inside the key, you just need to define the data model. Tell the system which is dimension, which is a measure and how to calculate it. And once the system has all the metadata, it will automatically talk to the cluster, your Hadoop cluster, using MapReduce or today you can use it like Spark as an engine to pull the data from source and to do the calculation and put the data to the edge base as a key value storage. And that is what we call the cube processing. And once that data down, any like BI tools, it can consume that interface. We have an ODBT driver, JDBT driver and a REST API. You just need to submit to the NC SQL to the system and the system will directly gather the data from edge base without any high touch, without any MapReduce job. So that is the concept and I'd like to talk more detail about that. So this is the SQL, right? We'll just select some from join two tables and have several like group by and order and something. And without any calculation or index, that will be like table index, table scan first, right? And then to the join, to the filter and then to the aggregation and get the result back to the kind. But if you have like one billion loads or even like a hundred billion loads, that will be very, very slow. And even if you can like distribute your data to like a very huge distributed system like Hadoop, when you have like thousands or even like hundreds of thousands of concurrency at the same second, the class will be very busy to shuffle in the data. So how we resolve that? We do the calculation. So pre-calculation, it will be read the data and to the join and to do something first and put over there, right? And the next time it will just get the result. That is we call it pre-calculation, okay? And we not only support like the star schema, we also support a very complicated data model like Snowflake, like even other like models, okay? And how to store it? So we're using EdgeVase as a storage. So EdgeVase is a key value storage. So the key actually is your dimensions combination. If you have like 10 dimensions, actually we will do some calculation for that. And the value is actually your metrics, the metrics result, right? So if you have some, you have count, even like have a distinct count, we will save that value over there. And we do a lot of hard work to resolve several very hard challenges. The first challenge is data expulsion, right? If we calculated as every combination together, that would be disaster, right? But we do a lot of, we call it partial cube and we do a lot of optimization for that, can reduce that. So from our best practice, most of the production deployment, it just cost like maybe 20 or 30 percentage of the source data. So think about that. If you have like 100 terabyte high of data, it is very slow. But today I asked you, hey, just give me like 20 terabyte as an additional storage, but I can guarantee you for like 19 percent, how the queries can return in one second. That was to do, right? So that is how we do that. So once the query is coming, it just gets the result. It just has the attributes table scan. And if you deploy this attributes as a dedicated for the killing, you can optimize it very much because that is a lead-only system, right? So you can like add value, how say, a bigger memory for the cache and like do other like stuffs. And so that is the result. The result is you could see compared to some like SQL and Hadoop. So the first diagram is you could see this is from the star schema benchmark. Okay, this is actually converted from TPCH. So you could see most of the killing queries, it can return in just one second, but others it will exceed very much. And the second chart here is we call X is actually the data scale. So that means you could see, no matter how many data is, like from like 1 million to like 1 billion, our performance is very consistency in like the second level. But with any like SQL and Hadoop, it will reduce a lot once the volume is bigger and bigger. And also we integrated with the BI tools very well. So yeah, today you can using like any like open source BI tools, like CQ, like Zeppelin, like Genuple, like even like a superset, like Interactive with killing services. And also if you are going to go with a commercial one, most of the commercial BI tools already be certified and be integrated. And I can tell you is just in last week, Microsoft released the Power BI, the latest version, it packaged our enterprise connector inside that. So like you can easily to use that. But that is for the commercial one. Okay, so now that is a very basic, right? And I think you still have a lot of question season. Can you do that really? How big are you the cases it can serve? I give you some examples. So we have a very, very huge, you know, thousands of users all over the world and it can fit the various scenarios from like behavior analysis, for log analysis to the financial assets management to advertising. There are some like things using DPM, DSP, using this technology, or even can serving for like real-time analysis or gaming or something else. Okay, that is a lot. We publish a lot of the user cases and if you have interesting, you can go to our website to see the Power BI page. There are a lot. And I'll give you some like detail. So first one I want to talk is Totiao. This is very interesting one. This is because most is a top one news application in China and I believe it's almost in the world. You could imagine that every Chinese people today are using this application to consume just the news, everything, okay? So they have a lot of a lot of user behaviors and they have one scenario is we want to have some video and once you are looking at it like video, they want to get some impression data, right? And they build this impression and insight based on our technology and think about it and guess how big that table is. One cube contains more than three Chinese blows data and 90% of the queries are still written in one second. That is really amazing. This is very, very huge, just for one cube, one table, okay? And also they have like hundreds of cubes serving more than like thousands of analysts in National Wild, okay? And today this data is from last year. I believe most of them has already changed it. And the benefit here is you could see the last one, this is the second one. It can saving for the cluster resources. So think about that. If you have like 1,000 analysts and they will supplement the queries and then the queries will be generated like the MapReduce jobs. And think about that. How busy your hardware cluster is, right? You cannot manage that. And today we just calculated once and actually can serve in any time, right? Because that result is already there. And from our practice, more than like 80 or even 90 data, it can just be used in the batch model to get it or even just using like the near real time data, right? It can serve in for that. So that saves the cluster resources very much. Okay. The second one is we call this Maitreya. It's still in China, but this one is really healthy. This is the biggest O2O services now. I have to say, without such like application, we cannot survive in China now because what kind of application we are using? So when we are going to the office, we're using something like Uber. They have some services for that. When we wanted to... During the lunchtime, we want to order something they can deliver that in just like in half hour. And if we wanted to see a movie, we can buy ticket from this online. So you can think about that. That is a really, really huge one. And today, their application on top of Apache Keeling is already counting more than Parabyte data. This is just the cube data. So you could guess how big the source data is, right? And you could see the latency. The 19% latency is less than 1.2 seconds. That's really, really a great result. But yeah, they do a lot of optimization behind that. They're using lots of technology, even like using some SSD to speed up for the hardware side. And also, that concurrency is very huge. They have like 3.8 million square meters per day. Most of them are just in the daytime. So this is another case. And another one I would like to introduce is Yahoo! Japan. So you know, Yahoo! Japan is most visited website in Japan. And actually, this is e-commerce website. So there are a lot of machines selling through that website. So this is very big, like Amazon or eBay in Japan. And they have that data. And previously, they wanted to open that data through that machine, machine vendor, right? Because everyone wanted to know how about the GNV, how about how many customers with the customer and how many sold it every day, right? Previously, they are using like Hadoop and that one is really, really slow and cannot extend to a huge group. So later, they come into us and build an application. And today, you could see, they just published their blog in two weeks ago. Sorry, that version is still in Japanese, but we are asking them to translate it to the English version. I think it will be published very soon from their engineering blog. They talked a lot of detail about that. And you could see that the diagram, that is query latency. So you could see most of them actually is less than 800 million second. That's really faster. And the interesting way, the best, you know, practice from this case is not about that. It's about, we call it, computing and read separation. So with some reason, that data is sitting in California data center for the data, every over there. But they are consumer, that user is in Japan, right? But if they build some application and deploy in California data center, because that is a distance, so that the performance is really bad. From our experience when we are working eBay, it will take one report, it will take more than like 10 seconds to get the result. So how they do that? Very interesting thing is, they are huge, Hadoop cluster is just taking the responsibility to do the calculation. That means to read the data from Hive and build the cube and store it in the temporary. And then using this copy to another cluster deployed in Toyota. And then the application is just, you know, built on top of that, the Japanese cluster. And in that case, everybody in Japan are happy for the performance, for the latency, because they can get the report result just in one second. That is really, really great. And more beyond that, you can imagine that you can use this capability to calculate the data inside your data center and just ship your result, maybe just like say, the aggregated result to a cloud or to another area, to another place and build something over there. This is doable and we have a lot of practice already. And even from our cloud version, it's very easy to deploy all over the world. So this is very interesting. And another one is for Xiaomi. You know, Xiaomi is a smartphone vendor and they're processing a lot of smartphones and other smart devices. And people told me that there are like nine boats, like for this, since it's very popular in Spain. This is very interesting. And they have like more than 80 business lines today relying on our technology. They build something they call a data factory. That's a very interesting name, right? And to get the data and the calculation and serving for different users' networks. They have different, you know, services, so the killing stuff is more focusing on the batch of stuff. They also have another branch, you can see that, either using Kudu and like, yes, for the streaming stuff. And then it can serve for different, you know, queries now. They will also publish a user case later. That's very interesting. Oh, by the way, most of the smartphone vendors are already our users already. I do not confirm the app yet, but I can tell you, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, like Vivo, most of the top smartphone vendors, they are using our technology to help to do that, to get insight from that, right? And then the user case is for Structury. I think that maybe someone already knows that. They are housing web application, you know, for everyone, right? Everyone can go to their website to just with a click, without any technology, can build your own website. There's something like Taylor Swift or some other like, you know, big stuff. They are using that technology to build their own website. So once you have your own website, what do you want to do? What do you want to know? You definitely want to know. Well, everybody has that one, right? I want to know that. Maybe in the night, I want to check how many people waited in my website, right? Any comments, or anything else, right? So everybody needed that. So they build this one on top of AWS. And previous, actually, they are using Redshift and they switched from Redshift to this one. This is because, you know, we are a pretty calculation technology. So it can help you to just calculate and store on S3. And the next time when the query is coming, it just gets the result without any like computing, right? So that is a very good one. And they have millions of users of the water and that application supports them very well, okay? So next, I will talk about this, this is still, it is OLAP technology and there is still a lot of Halsey. It's a limited limitation or maybe some obstacle, so we want to try to conquer that. So we have a lot, we have discussed a lot in the community and we are trying to want to bring the approach to the next generation. So next generation, there are some ideas we actually already have that happen in the community. Some of them we are already under the developing, some is still under the discussion. So first is for the like, we call it a new storage. So the open source killing is using HBIS as a storage. It is not the best storage yet for that one. For example, HBIS do not have the secondary index. They do not put a very complicated query on top of that. So think about that, if you have some like, high cardinality dimensions, then you want to get a very fast result from using that well, right? So think about that, you want to query something from a filter with like, your phone number, with like a page ID or like some other like, high cardinality. It cannot perform very well. It only can perform for one high cardinality dimension today. So we discussed a lot and we are trying to remove the HBIS dependency and to move to another real columnar storage. We call it, the package is one target and this is already on the way and you could check our email list to see what will happen. But I can tell you is our enterprise version is already replaced with this. So that is our company will contribute this back to the community, okay? Our enterprise version and the cloud version actually already know any edge base for that. The second thing is for a real-time support. So today we can consume data from Kafka. So it can serving for the near real-time analytics. It can serving for, we have some use cases, can serving just like, say one minute latency, you can get the data back. But from the community, they want to have more to reduce the time to market. And so even with another discussion, wanted to support the real-time support. So this is, we are talking now and what should be happen very soon. And another thing is, containerized, right? So yeah, talk a lot, Kubernetes, right? Everybody are moving to Kubernetes. The deployment for the Hadoop, because Hadoop depends on the Hadoop line. In that case, the deployment is still very complicated. So we just published one blog. We can now submit the open source, the Spark jobs, the Killing Spark jobs to the Kubernetes cluster. It already works in that. And we try and want to make it more easy for use. And this is already happened. And most of them, we are targeting to package as maybe release as like an Apache Killing 3.0. I think it should be having in the next half year. So this is talking about for the Apache Killing. And now I will talk a little bit about the company itself. So see what kind of add value we add on top of the open source project. So let's talk about that. I think everybody know this diagram very well. We put a lot of efforts to do the data manipulation, to clean up the data, to transform that, to aggregate them, to store somewhere. I put a lot of efforts over there. For example, one of our biggest customers in China, they have one team, 500 people. That job is to just get the data, clean up it, and store somewhere, and make some reports for the business. This is just for that, right? But that does not make sense. And it will take a long, long time to implement some project. But you can think about that. The world changes so fast, right? You cannot just see it over there and let things go. You have to find something new to handle that. So our philosophy is people, the human beings, is very good at for decision making, give you some information, and you will say yes or no. That is very easy for you to do that. But you are not good at to do some writing work, right? You will get crazy, right? If you do the job day-in, day-in, every day do the same way, right? But the machine is very good at for the writing work. So the way is how we can train the machine to do that dirty work. So that is what, and yeah, the benefit from the recent, you know, technological emulation, so the machine learning, like deep learning, we actually can leverage that. So, our idea here is we can use machine learning to do that. So, for example, when you are, you know, to visit different websites and show some interest, and then next, when you go to like Amazon, I will go to like eBay, it will recommend something to you. Hey, here is something you're interested in. Do you want to buy? In Amazon, you can just one click buy, and the money is gone, right? But, what, why, you know, the most technological stuff, in the data warehouse side, the data analytics side, still need a lot of, you know, human work. It doesn't make sense, why? Yeah, think about that. You're driving a Tesla from home to office. Well, it's autopilot, right? You are very satisfied for the high technology, very exciting.  Oh my God, right? A lot of the secrets, right? And pull some data, right?  And you will see a lot of other people, they are doing the same way you are doing. They're not really, really ridiculous. That is what we think we can change. So what we want to do is we can get the SQL history from your application, if you already have that one. And we can learn from the data schema. We can know the data profile and our patent machine learning engine can recommend the data models to you. And for example, you just need to bring, like, say, 1,000 SQLs to our engine. And the engine will tell you, hey, here's like, say, 5, or maybe 6 data models can help you to speed up those queries. Do you want it to go? You just need to click. Everything is done. So that is what will happen over there. We put a lot of, a lot of efforts on top of that. And this is already introduced to our latest release. And then we can serve for the BI scenario, say, reporting for dashboard. And also can see, like, the real-time analytics. And it got a benefit from the high performance and high concurrency. Many of our customers, they are using us as a data as a services. For example, we just co-presented cases from a China construction bank, the top two bank in China.  And when they type, like, say, generally, it will pop up like the result for that. The back end service is relying on us. This is because we can serve in the high concurrency and high performance because they have more than 400,000 users in China. And the entire platform can run from on-premise to a cloud or a container. So here is the way we call this machine learning augmented analytics. I explained just. And this is already available from our latest release. It can help you to reduce a lot of our efforts and get home earlier. And the next thing is for the cloud. I will not introduce too much about that. So that capability can run on cloud very easily. And we can already run on Azure, can run on AWS or like Google Cloud and other vendors. And just the one thing I wanted to tell you is when you are moving to the cloud, what kind of things do you want to avoid? We call it resources. You can see 1,000 notes over there, but just for one hour to calculation. That means you will waste a lot of money over there. So we introduced one feature we call it auto scaling. So when your data picker is coming and our system will monitor that the usage and the resources and they will help you auto scale and to help you to get the job done. And once the resource is getting down, we will also recalculate the cluster itself. This automatically can do that. And I give you two user cases. So this is for the commercial one and I think a lot of people are interested. China Unipain is something like a visa. There are transaction numbers already over visa. The amount is not. But the transaction number is already huge now. So they built an analytics system like 10 years ago using IBM Cognos and serving every analytics application for their needs. But they have thousands of IBM Cognos cubes and that management and maintenance is really, really a disaster. And the Cognos cannot serve for the distributed system. So they cannot serve for that. So we are a very hard worker between these two teams. We already have this down and I can give you just one number. We are just using one cubes replaced more than 800 IBM Cognos cubes and the performance is better there. So previous, they need like, say, 10 minutes to get that report. Now they just get it in like, say, seconds. And the previous is that it took a time to market in like, four days. Now the analytics, that benefits you, they can get data just in half day. It's very, very fast for them. And another thing is for retail. This is actually for the Japanese you know, Coase vendor for the Unico, right, actually. So in China, there are many different channels to selling their product. They have like local stocks. They have their own like they also have a lot of e-commerce you know, channels. Say like Alibaba, say like JD.com other like WeChat. There are a lot of things. So there you know, manager, there are business owner. They definitely need to know the performance of different channels and the performance of the different like products. So that is something we build to build that. And they just using like one, about just less than like one month, they get these things done. It's run on Azure and using the HD inside and the Qlidgen and also Power BI. Okay. So last, I would like to see we have a very great you know, partnership with all of the world. We certified with all of the you know, Hadoop distributors. We also certified with all the like BI vendors. We also are kind of run on all the like cloud you know, privateers and really, really, you know, exciting is we have local partners mobile solution in Spain and we have others also we are talking now and really, really exciting. Yeah, here is. Okay. So this here is my presentation. I'm not sure if we have a still have time or one minutes. Maybe I can like for one question. Any question? Thank you very great. If you were in a situation that you have a team manager and that ask you which is the added value that killing has instead of which will be your answer. Well, I'm more focused in streaming applications. Yeah, I know. So build is a really a great project and does a very good at for the real-time OLAP stuff and people can leverage it for like alerting or like the advertising automation or something else. Really, really good. They have some limitation is that is what killing is very good at because from my you know view is designed for machine.  Joe is the best choice for you. And the killing is designed for analyst for people. So that is why we are introduced like the multi-dimensional model. So in jail, there's only like one table. So you have to normalize the data to get one table. And the secret support is not very good. You cannot join the different tables. But killing is something different is you can use that to join like even like hundreds tables. Even like very big one. That's the difference. I would like to say we are good at for different segment. Yeah. And we have more detail discussion about that in our mailing list. If you have interesting, you can check that out. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you.


I got some snacky snacks. Oh. These are ones I got a while ago, but. Nifty. Let me plug it in. Oh, I got. Over here. Mango bars. Mango bars, mango bars. Eat them, you'll feel good. By prawn.  What am I supposed to do? Mango bar. Wow. Gelatinous. That's not the color of a mango. It might be though. Actually, it would be if it was a really, really ripe. Do you normally eat fruit bars like this? Like that they're like. No. Kind of. Wow, you're really falling apart in many respects. Oh good, now we'll have dog hair on it. Excellent. Oh, wow. Oh, that's all right. You used to put hairy things in your mouth. Oh my god. Oh, I was looking for the rim shot. Where is it? What? I think it's mine. No, no, no, it's mine. That's awesome. Yeah. No, I did as a kid, I just think. I don't normally eat this style of. They're just too condensed sugary sweet. I just eat fruit. Yeah, here we go. Oh, I did not expect it to be that firm. I thought it would be a little bit softer. It's almost raisiny. Yeah, or fig. Yeah, which I don't actually like either. It doesn't particularly taste like mango. Yeah. It doesn't particularly taste like mango. Shout mango. Mango, especially not Indian mango. No, no. Indian mango makes you want to have sex. Well, let us know if you eat those and if you like them. And what other snacks we should try?   I'm Rick. You follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more juicy content. That's almost gummy bear thick. Gummy bears, if they're fresh or a little chewier. Well, if you go to Lollie and Pops, you could. Today, we got a new trailer by Vidyott Jamwal. It's called Crack. I love movie titles like that. Crack. Cank. Crack. And then that. Jitiga to Jiega. This is an official teaser. That is all I know. Vidyott Jamwal, excellent actor. Even better martial artist. Yep. But other than that, I don't know. If you haven't seen our Commando Watch Along, please go watch that. Yeah, it's we're both Commando doing the Watch Along. True. I go under, there's a lot of guys that just do that. I don't get it. My dad doesn't anymore, thank God. Well, my dad was very proud that he went Commando. Gross. Life plays with everyone. But the real player is the same. No, dang. The one who plays with life. One, two, three. A little bit of heart and a little bit of right. I'll play, I'll play, I'll play, I'll play, I'll play. My existence has become all crazy. Whether it's my day or my night. No. I wonder if he actually did it. I know he did. Jitiga. Is that triptych? Jitiga. Oh, God. I play with a little bit of daring. Looks like a big, fun action film. One of the most fun things about watching him is just kind of like people do with Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise. Very different, because he is, his are, even though like, Tom's are like, oh, I can't believe he did that. He's, his are more impressive because it's like a martial artist. Tom Cruise is a daredevil. Yes. But there's just no comparison to, I don't know anybody in cinema at all who's attempting the things that he does in terms of acrobatics, martial arts, and. Jackie Chan, I guess. He would be, he's not doing it anymore, obviously, but that's a great comparison. Yeah, I think this is something that like, Jackie Chan would say, good job. Yeah. Yeah, but that's the level Jackie used to be at. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, everything you watch, you, there's only two thoughts you have while you're watching it. The first one is, is it him? Which it is. And then, any wires, anything? Because he, he typically, he typically just does what he does. And if. So that's a. The, the, the cool thing is if you want an action trailer to make you want to see the film, that, that trailer, I wanted that trailer to keep going. I wanted to see more. Yeah. And it was just a teaser. So we didn't really get like what the vibe of the, the story would be. No. And. Well put together teaser. Yeah. I, I, I would be like, I want to see that fun action film based off that. Yeah. The little that we've seen of him, I've, I've enjoyed so far. Me too. Obviously all the fight scenes. Really enjoyed. Commando, I thought was a, a very entertaining action film. I bet, do you think there's an argument because I can hear the Tiger fans? I don't think they. Imperatively. Do you think there's, there's a competition there between those two? Maybe between the diehards, but they also, I feel like do different things, even though. I do too. I think Tiger does a lot of his stunt, but not in his way, I feel. Or maybe he does. Maybe I'm wrong. But from the vibe I've get of people like, even though Tiger, I think. Maybe a bigger star, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not there to judge the stardom of people, but Invidiot is not, I don't, I don't believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe he's a nepo baby either. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe. Obviously we know Tiger is, but so what? Yeah. And I think Vidiot might be a better actor than Tiger as well. No, no, neither are like amazing, but from what I've seen. No, but what we've seen, I would rank, that's why I said that. I would rank Vidiot as an actor. And obviously as a martial artist, but I don't think that's saying much. No, but the other thing I know I don't haven't seen enough with Vidiot that I know about Tiger is that Tiger's one hell of a dancer. He is a dancer as well, but Tiger I think does have the edge on him in dance. But is that like back in the, Mike, when I was a kid, before we had fire, the competition was between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. And it was for the fan base and it was also between the two of them. They hated each other. They're their best friends now, but boy did they hate each other. I just wanted to hit a button. Why does that one have a click with it? Why isn't it just a clear at the end of doing it? There's a mother, why is there a click with it song? The song. Oh, why didn't we just get a clean, like Noa's mother should probably do that. Yeah. No, well, what are you going to do? Anyways, let us know. Pick up your lung. Let us know what you thought about the teaser down below. Juice.


Well I have the top of the hour so let's begin. Let me welcome everyone. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a terrific group of guests on a great topic and a lot to talk about. Let me take a step back. Ever since our beginning in 2016, the Future Trends Forum has examined how to improve teaching and learning and we've hit that from any number of angles and you can go back into our archive and see a whole bunch of sessions about that. But since 2020, for the past really two and a half years, two things have happened to change that conversation. First, there's been the COVID-19 pandemic and this has forced among other things higher education massively online for a time, but also brought instructional design and instructional designers to the forefront for the first time. And we have a lot of questions about how best to teach not just digitally but also in general. And the second thing, we've had a kind of recommitment to social justice and this has occurred on numerous axes including gender, including race, including disability, and that's what making educators rethink everything from tenure, permission, hiring and review the names of buildings and especially teaching and learning. So those two combined social justice and the pandemic have made us rethink and reimagine what does it mean to teach and learn in the 21st century. Now, this week's guests have worked on, written and edited two great new books. If you haven't seen them, just click on the bottom left of your screen. You'll see a button, the cleverly labeled the two books and this will bring you up to them. And to their credit, you can download those books in three different ways. You can actually have a print one sent to your home. You can download a Kindle version or you can click right on the web and read the entire thing for free, which is wonderful. Now, I have a whole bunch of questions, I have a whole bunch to say, but what I'd rather do instead of doing that is to bring these folks up on stage so that you can talk to them. And I'd like to start off by bringing the person I think is a lead cat herder for this whole event, a wonderful, wonderful thinker, instructional designer, and a terrific person, Martha Burtis. So let me hit a button and bring her up on stage. Hello, Martha. Hi, Brian. It's so good to see you. It's great to be here. Where are you today? I am in my office at the open learning and teaching collaborative at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Fantastic. And is fall just starting to be felt there? It is. We actually are getting down into the 40s, I think, tonight or tomorrow night and I'm so excited. Well, the leaves must be turning already. That's starting. Oh, good time living in New Hampshire. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, wonderful. Enjoy. But listen, Martha, we have a tradition on the forum when we ask people to introduce themselves. We don't ask them to look at the past. We ask them to think about the future. So let me ask, what are you going to be working on for the next year or so? What are the big projects or tasks and what are the big ideas that are top of your mind? Great question. So here in the CoLab, as we call it, at PSU, I work with my colleagues, Robin DeRosa, Matthew Cheney, and Hannah Hounsell. And we've got a big new faculty development program that we launched this past spring that is in many ways premised on the idea of critical instructional design called Design Forward. We spent about a year sort of designing it, working with small groups here at PSU to really hone in on what we wanted it to be. Working on these volumes has been hugely beneficial to me as we've been putting together that program. So we're doing different modules, essentially every semester. We're going to start an intro to pedagogy one in about a week. And then we've got one in October, November on teaching online called Formats and Modalities. And here I'm going to show and one of my favorite pieces of it is this, which is backwards on your screen. It's kind of a workbook that we've put together of exercises and activities that go along with the critical instructional design approach that we're trying to really infuse into Design Forward. And I'm hoping this year to really get that workbook digitized and available for other people to use. Oh, excellent. Excellent. Well, I envy your faculty for this opportunity, and envy the students for the results. That's terrific. Well, welcome. Welcome. Let me bring on stage your colleagues and let's just go after these folks one by one and bring them all up. So let me bring up Andrew David King. Let's see where he is. All right. Good afternoon, sir. Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having me. Or I should say good morning if you're on the West Coast. I am on the West Coast. Yeah. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. And are you on Berkeley's campus right now? I'm not. I am a little ways away where I live in the suburbs. Yes. Well, I would ask you weather questions, but there's a limit to my masochism. But I'm delighted that you can join us. Tell us, as you heard me just tell Martha, we would like to introduce in a forward-facing way. What are you going to be working on for the next year? What are the big topics and the big projects? Yeah. So I'm I'm in a moment of major life transition. I just began a doctoral program at Berkeley in English. My primary research interests are American poetry, the long 20th century studies. I have a background in philosophy to just completed a master's at Central European University working on an issue with the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of disability, which Jared has heard some things about because it was a reason why I was sort of waylaid. But anyway, so that's all that's all in the bag. So I'm trying to to reorient myself to think about my academic future. And at the same time, I've become involved in disability advocacy at UC Berkeley, which is something that I did at a couple of prior institutions, CEU, and then also UC Davis, where I was very briefly. So I'm currently the project director for some of the disabled students at UC Project, led by the Graduate Assembly at Berkeley. And I work with graduate students across departments to liaise and try to form partnerships and allyships to advocate for the needs of disabled students and sort of broadly construed. And it's a group of which I remember. So I'm trying to think about ways to to be effective in that role and then also to how to have that practical pursuit sort of live beside my academic aspirations. So a nice bit of practice there, very good. Well, that's terrific work, Andrew. And good luck and congratulations on this new graduate program for you. As an English PhD myself, I can only commiserate. But now, Andrew, let me put let me welcome you to the stage, but also we have two more folks. So let me bring up on the stage, Jess O'Reilly. And let's see if we've got Jess here drum roll please. Hello, Jess. Hello. So good to see you. So good to see you. Where are you today? I'm in Swakamok. So that is Anishinaabe Mohan Ojibwe for where the three roads meet. Also known as Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. So about four hours north of Toronto. Excellent. Excellent. So if I were to ask you about the weather, you probably say the leaves are turning and you're starting to look to the long winter ahead. Well, I was in the lake yesterday and it was almost freezing overnight. So yeah, it's happening. That's it. Well, you and Martha, you are in the North Country. You know about how this works. Jess, what are you working on for the next year? What are you looking forward to? So I'm looking forward to finally finishing my doctorate. I'm your sixth of a five year doctorate in distance education program through Athabasca University, which is an online university in Canada. So I've been working on my dissertation project for some time now and I'm working toward the final stages. I'm not quite in the final stage. That takes a bit of time and committee liaison, but I'm through data collection. I'm into the analysis and the write up piece. So I'm confident and hopeful that I'll be finishing that project up this. Let's call it this academic year. Very good. Keep going. Keep going. We're behind you and we want to see the result. Dissertation on educational technology is upper alley, so we'd love to see that. Good luck, Jess. Good luck and welcome. Welcome to the forum. Well, three is not enough. We have to have even more and so let me bring up the fourth member or esteemed crew and let me see if I can find him here. And here is the man with the best background item on the panel today. Hello, Rock and Roll Jared. Good to see you. I labored over which guitar to hang because you can't have one guitar. That's not nearly enough, so you have to have like eight.  Which one is this? And what is it? This is the Epiphone 399. If you've seen the big hollow bodies like the Gibson 335, this is the version for short people like me, so you don't feel like you're playing dad's guitar. Well, I'm glad to see you playing your guitar metaphorically and literally. Well, what are you going to be working on, Jared, for the next year? What's ahead for you? Yeah, I've got two big projects. The one most interesting to this audience is probably that I will be building my second acoustic guitar out of Osage Orange and Red Spruce. So I finished my first one this past January and I'm moving on to number two because, again, one's never enough. And the other one is in the Tour de Critical Instructional Design book. I've got a chapter on quality course rubrics and reviews and it is not flattering to those rubrics. So my next year I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and I'm designing and testing and piloting what I would consider a better way, a more effective way to do online course quality that focuses on faculty student connections, inclusion, and a little bit of course structure and really emphasizes the autonomy and the experience of the instructors. Well, I'm glad to see you building. Your chapter is ferocious and very thoughtful takedown. But then to show what we can do instead is terrific. Good luck and welcome, Jared.  Here on the Featured Transform, this is a venue for group conversation. I want to kick things off by asking you a couple of just basic questions. And again for everybody, especially if you're just joining us, look in the bottom left of the screen for the button that says the two bucks and that'll take you to the two bucks directly. Which ever format you like. Let me ask just if each of you could reply to this question. What does humanitarian design for education look like now after two and a half years of COVID and social justice mobilization? What is some of the key themes that you want us to bear in mind is we all work in higher education. Now there's four of you so you're going to have to I'm fine. I'm happy to get us kicked off. I would, I like this question because it kind of helps me think a little bit about how I ended up where I am working on these volumes and in this conversation today because in January of I guess 2021 after you know we had all survived, well I should say, not everybody did. But as we had gotten through the first full semester of living with COVID among us, I kind of looked around and thought wow in my entire career working in you know educational technology, digital pedagogy, faculty development, instructional design, I've never witnessed so much activity and conversation and innovation around pedagogy, right? And it happened out of necessity but it still happened and it was exhausting and awful at times. But it was also sort of revelatory at times and I thought I wonder where this is going to go from here because there are a lot of different places it could go. And I was worried about A, the thread getting lost but I was also maybe even more worried about some of the trends that I was witnessing that I felt like were working against what I thought was most important in this moment which was focusing on people. So I really started talking at that point with friends and colleagues. It's why we kicked off the Design Forward program here at Plymouth State. It's why when Sean Michael Morris originally reached out to me and asked if I wanted to be a co-editor of this volume, I happily agreed and it also led to a couple of other pieces that Jesse Stomm on I wrote that spring and summer and now it's been hard to believe another year and a half later we're still in the midst of all of this and I would say it's even more terrifying in some ways because I feel like we are losing the thread in a lot of places. At my institution we definitely have this sort of and I should say that I'm very incredibly grateful to what my institution did to support me and my colleagues during the last I mean truly truly they went above and beyond over the last two years. But I think we are we're hearing the same thing lots of people are hearing which is oh things are getting back to normal and it's better to be face to face that's what we need that's what our students need we need to go back to the way things were and A I don't think that's possible I don't think we can erase the last two and a half years of experience and how it's imprinted on all of us as educators and teachers and learners but B I think we're losing an opportunity to take those lessons that we learned out of necessity and figure out how to take them forward with us and to use them to to create a more just university and it so I think this is a really really important conversation for us to be having right now. Well thank you more just universities are very very great phrase for this. Thank you Martha. Jess, Jared, Andrew what would you add to this? I would I would see I've seen the same thing at my own university I'm Wake Forest University is where I work where there was this this explosion this of oh man we have to change and we did things differently and we and we did things differently yes and and now there's the what do you call it the I'm in the Midwest so forgive me if I'm using this expression on a bit of a riptide to pull back sure I don't know what oceans are sorry pull back to the way things were and we can't go back I mean for Pete's sake I'm sitting on my desk at my home still within reach of a COVID-19 at home test sure we're not going back but I also see not just the universities and folks people saying no no see exactly but we see professional organizations and our conference is saying oh man we we went online for the last couple of years out of necessity and learned that there's many of our our members in our population who because they're taking care of their parents because they've got kids because of all kinds of reasons can't up and leave for a week and fly across the country to go for professional development and so again having to do something different our professional organizations are also in a space would say oh why don't we do both why don't we do both and why does why does it have to be either or and so it's still just like in in the university it's still attention between wanting to wanting to do both and wanting to just pretend things are I'm sorry that's rude I don't care just to pretend things are over and but I see it spreading well we definitely see that attitude in in the US inside high red Josh Kim had a good piece about the the desire for a snapback to try and return to fall 2019 and I think that would lose a lot of the lessons that you just too described thank you Jared just Andrew would you like to add any more go ahead Andrew you need to unmute yourself yeah thanks Brian that's one lesson you know despite three years of same teaching it still gets me everyone what I was saying was I don't have too much new I don't have too much new content to add to what Martha and Jared have already said besides echoing and affirming it I'm I in particular took myself to be saying one part of the my chapter in designing for care something very like very much a like to like what Martha just said about in meeting need to think about the the possibilities for these new technologies the ways they can be liberatory can make the university more just and we're a sort of at a risk of a feeling to really fully learn and take these lessons and bring them into the future I mean I think there was a point at which this conversation was about what are we going to do post pandemic now that the pandemic seems to be endemic conversations what do we do just period right yeah the threat of losing yeah the losing of these things of these lessons seems to be something that's happening very very quickly and in ways that are disappointing and surprising and I've seen this at all the institutions that I've had the opportunity to to be involved with disability related advocacy to some extent right now to speak about the current situation in UC Berkeley there is really no institutional academic cultural conversation going on about a potential switch back to hybrid hybrid teaching might be useful for it's all been an ad-hoc basis and the rhetoric is again reverted back to we want and you know virtual instruction is not ideal virtual instructions you know it's effectively denigrated and I'm not I'd be a first to register a number of complaints with or or possible drawback to for you to act like this isn't a huge well first of all a huge potential to be able to know students or people who are at high risk from covid and then the act is if it's being asked to do it as being asked to move heaven and earth seem to me I haven't you know after have had several years of in fact doing it and gaining institutional and professional fluency with it seems to me ludicrous so that's one of the things I'm currently trying to work on is to build coalitions of graduate students and faculty who want to develop some even if it's not enshrined in policy something some kind of consensus around what we think is the equitable equitable approach that just you know to teaching where students might not be able to come into the classroom because of their particular needs or you know just because they're sick and don't want to spread their fellow students and don't and shouldn't be punished for that and that was actually a conversation I shouldn't share too much here but that had to happen recently in a clinic which I was a member it's like it was sort of remarkable to me how quickly that that that that sense of courtesy to others is lost and so my my take I should just say you know as as a disabled person as someone who works with folks you know in all the sort of other issues where they face institutional ableism my take may be a little bit more cynical but I think I'm not less hopeful for that I mean I'm cynical about the attitude to the institutions maybe Andrew I found your chapter not cynical but very thoughtful very critical and very moving so thank you thanks Brian and thank you for these comments we just had a couple of one comment in the chat I just wanted to hoist up there from Sarah Thompson who says focus within higher education must include the well-being of faculty and staff in addition to students when thinking about the pandemic so thank you Sarah Jess what would you like to add what is this I think Sarah's comment kind of echoes the thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain as my panelists have shared we were thrown in there at my context we had a weekend to figure it out remember that fun word pivot and there there wasn't really a whole lot of care or attention given to the fact that we were all in a state of crisis and and for me I think it just underscores how our systems generally are structured such that we have maybe one very clearly defined on ramp tends to happen during the admission cycle and then so many off ramps and students can take those off ramps at any time really commodifies their experience down to a dollars and cents bottom line and for me as a student as well as a faculty member I felt back directly last year my father passed from cancer and on the day that he died I got an email from my institution asking me to pay my program fees and give them an update about my progress on my dissertation and it's moments like that that really underscore how broken and flawed and lacking humanity so much of higher ed is kind of mired in but I do believe there can be a different way and I think that focusing on the people that we're in relationship with can for me at least help sustain me as I'm implicit in this colonial system for which I work and also learn I think it's I'm trying to be optimistic that change can come with from within and through the people who are involved for example something that didn't come up yet was the uncritical adoption of these very deeply problematic education technologies they've been around but I think their usage massively increased during the pandemic take for example those you know exam proctoring software tools that for so many reasons are unethical and we've seen the fights that have had to happen subsequently to ask institutions to adopt a level of criticality and care before the ubiquitous usage of such problematic ed tech so there's one example I think of I believe there is an evolution of thought and rather than the trite solutionism that we've seen in instructional design context in the past we might be moving to a place that is a little bit more nuanced and critical and person-centered or at least I hope so I do battle cynicism on a daily basis I am a unionist I represent my faculty union and I definitely see a problem with work-life balance when we're asked to do all the things all the time so you're face to face you're online you're asynchronous there's all these words that are being invented to basically call a thing which used to be teaching a new name which is teach three different ways all at the same time and and that for me is something that I think we need to keep a close close eye on because that will lead to huge consequences for faculty well-being and student well-being as well when you're sick you should be able to be sick and stay home and rest and this understanding that well you can learn anywhere anytime can become problematic if we don't set limits and those limits are our own bodies and cognition and needs to have holistic wellness and balance in our lives well that's really really well said thank you Jess and I commend everyone to Jess's wonderful chapter very personal very thoughtful and again very very engaging and moving in the in the second book click click connect friends I want to step out of the way and stop asking questions I would love to hear from you all everyone all nearly 100 of you I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions and I actually don't have to ask you that because they're already coming in so let me just begin by grabbing a question from who is this this is Alex and Carly a man with a fantastic beard by the way and Alex asks how might we involve as broad a diversity of people in our work as possible instead of limiting ourselves to like-minded people very question and who wants to try that well you know as as a classroom I'll pull on you if you don't I know right I think we're all just trying to be polite um I'll take that one I think it's a great question a very um tricky one I think at all of our institutions um we probably and within higher ed just more generally we have all kinds of sort of hidden codes I would say that we use to signal sort of who we are and and to connect with other people who maybe share those same that same language those same codes the same background and sometimes we don't acknowledge what those are we don't really ask ourselves we don't really unpack that I guess is the way I would say and so I think the way we start this work is by spending some time trying to identify what it is in our practices that may be um maybe not creating space for people who are coming at this from different perspectives with different contexts different experiences and different backgrounds I mean a really gross and obvious example of this that you hear is um you know on search committees when when you'll come down to a couple of candidates and and somebody will be rejected because it's not a good fit right and like if you unpack that word there's a lot going on there and almost always it's something that we should be examining and asking ourselves what we mean by it um so I think really the you know it's it's it's easy to say oh well you know I tried to reach out to people and they they weren't interested or I couldn't you know when I put out a call for interests I didn't get a diverse group of people asking to be engaged or asking to be a part of something that I'm working on or something I want to collaborate on and I think always maybe what we need to start with is looking at ourselves and saying is there something about the way that I am presenting this work or the way or the the communities I'm reaching out to the people who I'm asking for input what can I be doing to kind of break down some of those barriers that maybe I haven't acknowledged um about how I work and how I present my work to bring more people into the fold um those are my first thoughts about that I would love to hear what my collaborators think as well great thoughts great thoughts chair just I'd I'd tack on that too um as far as approach for making space um I've I've been doing this work for 15 years I've been online for a long time I've been in higher ed since I was an undergrad a lifetime ago and one of the things I have to do intentionally myself is I got I got vision and ideas for days but that doesn't mean I have to drive every car you know where are my colleagues where are my co-workers have their ideas and how can I support them instead of trying to say oh let's do my thing again all the time I mean I got great things I'm not gonna lie but it's like instead of trying to ask why aren't people coming along with me why can't I bring a diverse population with me it's like oh maybe maybe I maybe I should go along with someone else and help bring what I my skills and my thoughts and my experience to support their vision I might be able to jump in with a story that kind of picks up on this thread if you haven't read my chapter I understand the world very much through story and um something that uh came up last spring so first time I was invited back on campus was to honor our students who were convocating last year in the year prior we invited those graduates back as well and so I was invited to participate in an indigenous drumming circle that was going to open and close the ceremonies through honor songs the nishinaabe megeze the eagle song and then the traveling song and so our purpose was to sing these songs in honor of our graduates and that drove all kinds of people together into a room and I remember taking a moment and stepping back and thinking wow look at this there's faculty students management graduates community members like if this was an official committee we would have hit all those like necessary markers that they look for in terms of representation but nobody made a thing out of it we sang our songs we told our jokes we we you know um ate together of course because that's like essential um and I thought maybe that's what it's about it's about shared purpose so if you're asking the right question or focusing on the proper goal maybe that brings um the people to the room who are meant to be there and I mean room metaphorically could have been zoom as well but to me it just underscored how sometimes these like more contrived um you know we need to get a certain type of representation happening and it's part of our um official operating procedures that's a very colonial way of doing what the first peoples have always been so good at which is bringing many to the fire all as equals all as welcome voices and I think that comes from a sense of humility big time but also a shared purpose and goal um so I think that picks up on what Jared is saying like maybe it's not just about pushing through my own agenda or an institutional agenda but rather um jumping into projects and ideas that are focused on these big problems that that people truly care about because if students care about it they'll show up if they're not showing up they're also speaking in that way too brilliant brilliant thank you thank you great question um Alex and uh in in the chat uh Karen Bellener gives us a terrific prompt she recommends us to invite our enemies early and with open arms extending a listening ear can work wonders sometimes um I love that that sense of gathering around the fire chest great great answers thank you and thank you for the question we have more questions coming in and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to uh to run at them uh we have uh our our longtime friend uh Tom Hames who has a question uh how does humane education deal with the inhumane systems of industrial education that we've designed explicitly or implicitly over the last century plus Jared just looked like he was about to grab the microphone so I think you have something to say why don't you give it a run yeah um uh I know Jess mentioned cynicism early so apologies in advance if this comes through I think I think what we're seeing a lot in the last three years especially is people giving up I'm going corporate I've seen so many of my colleagues who have done really great work for the last 10 years or more just get worn to the bone and like I don't know if the grass is greener on the other side but it's time to try and so I see that that's one way so we're losing passionate knowledgeable spirited people because we're just beat down um so unfortunately that's one way I see um yeah as far as as far as systems you know I'm always thinking about like all right my department is all of four people for a whole university what can I actually do like for reals what what can I actually do and just trying to do our piece as a whole really really well because I can't I can't I've got a I forgot where I said it but I had a line where I can't instructional design somebody out of food insecurity what can I do um so I'm going to try to focus on what I can do really well to help students to help the faculty so they don't get burned out and go corporate um because we've got a lot of great faculty here doing the same thing nothing against going to work for another outside of higher ed but it's that's unfortunately that's what I've seen mostly in the last few years is we're just getting run out Melody Buckner in the chat says if you're gonna get burned out at least you can get paid for it yep man I've heard that so many times in the last three years well this is a darker answer to tom's question yeah but the rest of you think thoughts about how to humanize a system that was designed to be inhumane yeah I have so many thoughts and absolutely none of them are like absolutely none of them are like things anybody should write down and be like okay no I know how to do that um because there's just there obviously is no simple answer to this question but I will say a couple things that come to mind for me and one of which is and actually I was already thinking about this because you had mentioned somebody in the chat talking about inviting your enemy space and I was thinking about that and how how that makes a lot of sense but also how we aren't all positioned to be able to um deal with um um asking vulnerable people to invite their enemy into the space is not necessarily a great is not necessarily the best practice so but we do but in keeping with whoever made that comment we do want to we do want to find some sort of way forward right so how do we do that and this gets back to the question at hand I think so much of this has to do with coalition right so much of this has to do with us finding out how we work collectively um and not alone and and that means so in the question of inviting your enemies it means that you need to be part of a coalition where if if you're not capable if you're if you're in a vulnerable spot where you really can't engage with your enemy that way you've got somebody who can help with that you've got somebody you can turn to you've got somebody you can rely on um when it comes to humanizing education in the face of the increasing commercialization and corporatization and solutionism as just alluded to earlier talk about a word that like keeps me up at night that's plaguing higher education none of us as individuals can it's just you can you can make difference in your classroom right to a certain extent although as Jared has just said you can't instructional design away hunger right but in coalition we can do a lot we can do a lot more I'm not saying we can you know fix everything but we can always achieve more in collective than we can individually it's hard it's hard to do collective work um one of the things that's that I've been mulling over for the last year or so in part because of COVID is the concept of mutual aid in education and the the the meta mutual aid is a metaphor essentially within education and partly this is because when this may have happened in many of your communities but in my community when in march of 2020 when art 29 yeah 2020 when things got locked down a mutual several mutual aid um um movements popped up in my local community and it was really um it was it was amazing to watch it was hard to watch it was important to watch and see that unfold and as it was happening I was thinking there's something here about learning there's something here about teaching there's something here about how we work collectively towards something together that's bigger than any one of us and I and I keep coming back to that and thinking we need to figure out how to build mutual aid network into the work we do um in our institutions across our institutions across the faculty and student divide this is another thing I keep coming back to one of the things I love about Andy's piece in the book is that it's all about what it means to be a a body right like what it means to be embodied and and and trying to be part of this work and in when we're thinking about human infusing humanity into our work one of the things that happened during COVID is we all realized that like we all have bodies right like every one of us was vulnerable in all the same ways and so these weird power divides of administration and faculty and faculty and students and staff and faculty meant nothing because we all have bodies that are vulnerable and if there's one thing I want us to take forward out of this it's remembering what that was like to realize for a student to realize oh my professor is suffering right like something we would have hidden before something we wouldn't have shared but we couldn't not share it you know and and I want us to remember what it was like when we had first realized oh my students can't find food like they my students living in a tent because they can't go home to be with their parents because they're afraid of them getting sick one of the pieces from our colleagues at middlebury talked about a student going through that in the spring of 2020 that's what I think we need to be taking forward is that sense sense of collectivism and of coalition that's the only way that we fight against these systems thank you thank you martha we have we have more questions coming in and tom as always thank you for a very very deep question we have one from jessica who asks have you used universal design principles practices in your work I'd be happy to speak to that the answer is yes udl is something that I actually thought I would be writing my dissertation on so years ago my application into the program was about studying student perceptions of udl universal design for learning but over time I evolved in my uh my focus area now I'm more looking at open educational practices but udl is very much embedded in the way that I teach and I'm not here to suggest that I have all the answers like how to humanize education but I can tell you that certain um principles of universal design get some of my colleagues really riled up and they've sort of made it their mission to convince me how wrong I am to for example allow for flexible uh due dates so in my courses due dates are suggestions they are not fixed I do not penalize I don't want to see your positive COVID test or your doctor's note or any other personal information and to me that's that comes down to respect that is an act of respect for me um but it also is embedded in the udl principles another assessment strategy that I've been enacting for several years pre-pandemic would be multiple means of representation so in courses that are not English courses um where maybe it is embedded in the outcomes that students should produce a certain piece of writing for example I teach a course on truth and reconciliation students are grappling with colonial trauma and settler colonial harm and they communicate their understanding in myriad ways it's up to them to decide their best strategy so I've had students podcast their entire course experience powerpoints and video and writing if that's what they've choose to do and um for me it's led to such a refreshing perspective on assessment as conversation and community rather than a punitive working your way through a checklist that is arbitrary and often completely disconnected from the subject but my colleagues really really take issue with this some of them it challenges the status quo in a way that they feel I think cheapens the education experience it's like no to be a college graduate you must APA you must essay you must do things in this way and I'm thinking but it my experience has proven out that actually no that's not true and because I was adopting this pre-pandemic once COVID came around I found my course structure was quite well equipped to deal with all of this trauma that we were all going through but there are still these institutional limits right so for me why can't the deadline extend beyond the end of the semester why are we putting these arbitrary time stamps on education that's a banking model hangover that has to go and I'm not saying I know how to replace it in a way that won't completely sink me in in marking from years and years past but there's got to be a way to do it and I think that UDL is a wonderful place to start because it opens your eyes to different possibilities beyond what you've experienced in teaching and learning which tends to be that very rigid way so I'm so glad that came up I think for me it's led to wonderful changes to teaching and learning thank you Jess thank you any other UDL fans in the panel or should we move on with that moment of pause that moment of reflective silence thank you for the great question Jessica and thank you Jess for the for the wonderful answer we have more questions coming up and by the way if you want to join us on stage just please click the raised hand button we have a question coming in from someone with a fantastically perfectly spelled first name I've got to say I just really admire that Brian Maschio says when students have long and regularly encountered subpar metagogy no one concluded in person instruction doesn't work how do we counter the analogous response to poorly designed online courses good question well-named Brian good question well what do you think how do we respond do we do we say that online and face-to-face are both just you know domains within the overall realm of instruction so I will say I shot my mouth off in a big shot meeting once where that's what I said and said I'm sorry what's our four-year graduation rate so that's 60% that's working I don't work there anymore but depending on the crowd you can sometimes get away with saying well let's just stop for a second see was this really working I think that's a really important point what Jared is just saying there which is that we have to point that stuff out when it happens too often we just let it go by and we have to like tag these just these these um disconnects and and shine a light on them and get people to really ask themselves why am I thinking about this differently than the other what is different here I've always I've said for years that I feel like there's an otherness to online education there's like a same way we other people right and and people who are different than us because they don't share the same markers as us we it allows us to think of them differently I think we do that in a way with online education versus traditional education we other it and and it creates a distance and in that distance we think we have space then to evaluate it differently and assess it differently and design it differently I mentioned earlier in this program we're doing a design forward for a PSU we're doing a program this fall on formats and modalities that I have a lot of work to do to get it ready but what I'm what I really want to do what I really want to get out there is sort of blow apart a lot of our traditionary that understandings of formats and modalities which tends to be very binary or if not binary just very siloed right our understandings of what those those different modalities are and if there's one thing I think COVID has taught us it's that modality is really complicated it's really really complicated far more than I think we ever realized and so rather than shying away from that and going back to how we used to do it I think we need to continue to kind of dig it up and figure out why is it different and is it really different or is it really different in the ways we thought it was different I guess that's the question I want to ask that's a great great question and I love your point about othering um we are almost the end of our hour and we have we have some questions coming in and one of them actually Jared it's it's it's it's aimed at you but I think I think this can also go a bit more broadly and this is one from J.M. and J.M. says in your chapter quality theater you suggest an over-reliance and rubrics is going on how can we know how to meet minimum compliance well I think the first step is having um a really honest conversation about what is minimum compliance because if we're talking about federal regulations the bar is I'm going to say pathetically low the instructor has to show up once or twice that's the federal regulations now you could have um area or university things about compliance but so I think really nailing down exactly what we need and so when I think of compliance it's it's rarely in a positive light it's like okay let me step back well let's make sure everything we've got is compliant with again we want to keep accreditation we want to keep our students degrees having meaning to job prospects and we want all of that but what else we want our students to connect the faculty so when I maybe reframing that like so when I think about compliance what does it mean to know your instructor your online instructor how can that look and there's a million ways it can look um but I think the first step is really just no no what do we for real what do we actually need to you know keep keep the lights on keep the accreditation because I would I would push to say that bar is actually really low but there's a lot of urban myth about what we're supposed to be doing good question and Jared thank you for that answer thank you I'm conscious of how close we are and I'd kind of like to wrap things up a bit the problem is we've been covering a wide range of ground you know at the macro political to the micro political we've been talking about pedagogy about technology and economics and the chat box is just on fire people are just all over the map of that which is great a lot of really really good ideas including just now a big burst of the Yvonne Illich fandom I guess let me let me just ask the four of you as we all plunge ahead into the 2022 2023 academic year when a certain dissertation will no doubt be completed and a certain PhD program will be accelerated I'm wondering what what kind of advice would you leave for all of us as we look ahead to this really challenging year as we try to humanize try to make our education more caring more responsive to students as human beings and accounting for faculty and staff as human beings what are what are some of the final parting advice you'd like to give us as we go and I I do in the interest of time I do want to pick on people and I'm going to pick on Andrew um but where would where would you start sir um this is a great question I think I would just my chapter is kind of about this a little bit I would remind folks as I'm constantly reminding myself that I do not know the first thing about what is really going on in my students lives right very easy for all of us to be preoccupied but their own concerns were often overburdened with doing the emotional labor of the university sort of too poor anyway right but you really do have the power to situate yourself as an empathic humane person in your classroom in relation to your students I don't want to pretend that that comes at no cost to you again I think it is involves again shoring up this this burden that the university in part or in whole more often than whole fails to do but but drawing that lesson I think from from pandemic teaching especially that people's lives are complicated they've been made more complicated by the massive micro and macro scale harms that we've all experienced socially at the level personally um sort of being conscious of um maybe the limitations of our knowing and how those might figure into our students presentations or or or absences in the classroom keeping that in mind as as as we move forward it's really really just a basic thing but um I find myself in the position again of having to remind myself of it a lot and seeing my colleagues forget it and my instructors forget it too so thank you thank you very much and if you if you haven't read that Andrew has a great chapter about among other things legibility and the problems inherent in seeing people and people disclosing things I don't want to I can't summarize it without enough justice thank you Andrew um just do you want to do you want to jump in where sure um there is something in in my mind right now so I can't remember if I included this in my vignettes or not but there's an elder on campus elder Nokomis Martina Oswalmyk she's a Kuemkong First Nation and she works at Cambrian and other institutions and she said to me one time um creator gave us three years so she was talking about these and then a third being in your heart she said there are three years and only one mouth for a reason you should do at least three times as much listening as you do talking and if you can adopt that way you're far more likely to to move in a good way and so that's a teaching that I felt compelled to share I think that that speaks to what Andrew was was talking about as well and um I don't always live up to it but I think it's a good one to remember and try to aspire toward it thank you thank you I won't say anything more um yeah maybe bad advice on a webinar Jared what would you where would you point us where where should we um um despite my slant toward cynicism I think what I would say is you know look around this space our space is my absolute 100 for favorite percent thing about these collections and working with them is I got to see what a lot of people are doing around the world really amazing work they're not doing everything but they're doing something and it's pretty spectacular and so I would just say keep that in mind you don't have to do everything you don't have to fix our higher education system but you can do something in your space with your co-workers with your learners with your administrators you can do something and there's like Martha was saying we're a coalition we can do something together too well thank you thank you and that's a fend that's a perfect bridge to Martha both because she for me is the editor here as well as a writer but also coalition she helped assemble a big coalition of all of you for these two great books Martha what would you tell us um well I was gonna say that's a perfect ending but I'll I'll have a go at it I um I guess the one thing that I would say because I agree with everything that my co-panelists have said is um just give yourself a break um I feel like that's something I say to people a lot these days when I'm talking to faculty and students is um cut yourself some slack um I know that's not always easy and I don't want to make it sound easy but um these are these are tough times for everybody and holding yourself to an unrealistic standard doesn't help you or anyone else so be extend grace to yourself first and then share it with others and then share it yeah Martha thank you Martha Andrew Jared Jess I can't believe an hour has come and gone you've been so generous and so thoughtful everybody grab these two books now there's a big button left to the screen so snag them whichever format you want um what's the uh um a three of you at least are on twitter I guess that's a good way to keep up with you um if if you want if you can throw in the chat any other ways of of keeping up with you as each of you progress and your important work let me just thank you all one more time this has been a terrific conversation I admire all of you um please keep up the great work and thank you again thank you so much Brian thank you thank you this is all my pleasure but friends don't go just yet um we need to point out where things are getting next and I do want to thank all of you for the great questions uh because that's what makes uh the forum work uh if you'd like to keep talking about these issues everything from pedagogy to technology to how to extend grace and build coalitions we can keep talking about this on twitter some of those have been already just use the hashtag ftte or tweet at me brian alexander at shindig events or take a look at my blog brian alexander.org where we talk about these issues uh if you'd like to look back into the past into our archive where we've hosted some of these topics many times before just go to tinyurl.com slash ftfr archive and you can find more uh if you'd like to look ahead to the next few weeks we're covering a wide range of topics as I mentioned before just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more and if you want to share any of your work any that you are especially proud of just shoot me a note and I'd be glad to share with everybody here until then thank you all for a terrific hour thank you for the great thinking together and a great conversation I hope you're all well as the fall semester chugs long please take care of yourselves and be safe we'll see you next time online bye bye


The Lotus Pond, undoubtedly one of the many astonishing advanced ruins that can be found around our planet. Who built this pond? Or indeed, Polinarua, the incredible ancient ruin it is found amongst. Were the ancient religions merely reused? Maybe due to an attempt to claim such structures as their own. Or indeed, these ancient buildings and their exquisite features provide an illusion of power as effortlessly as they seem to have been constructed. Any explanation or the knowledge they were built with evades us all. Polinarua, within Sri Lanka, served as the country's capital city for nearly two centuries, between the 11th and 13th centuries AD. Just like the many other sites all over Earth, Polinarua is indicative of advanced lost knowledge, dating back to a time far before modern civilization even existed. We believe merely serving as ready-built sanctuaries, perfect for re-inhabitation, protecting their future guests from foes, and allowing them a head start in architectural and agricultural development. The three kings conveniently dominate the history of this site within academia. It should be clear to any astute individual that any group capable of creating such everlasting, perfectly precise sites would have undoubtedly dominated the surrounding lands for many years. However, as the truth is, as we would suspect, the reign of these three kings, and indeed our more modern ancestors' inhabitants, lasted a mere century before being invaded and the ruins severely damaged. We believe that these structures were once built by the dominating, most knowledgeable force upon our Earth, a civilization which clearly attained a greater understanding of architecture than us, the modern man. We believe the evidence strongly suggests this, while there is no evidence to suggest what academia expects you to believe, that these currently unexplained, unimaginably advanced ancient ruins were somehow built by our copper-wielding ancestors. However, the choice in what you believe, of course, is entirely yours to make. We've covered many ancient, perplexing, unexplained sites which can be found all over the world, astonishing achievements located far within Earth's history, many still baffling those who study them even to this day. Possible ancient kings with unimaginable wealth and power, using as yet unknown technologies to create ancient sanctuaries, capable of sustaining their once-fluorishing civilization. Perched upon precarious ledges, even upon the tops of mountains, it is not only the construction techniques which evade modern explanation, but on many occasions how these ancient people built such structures. But such hostile locations is equally challenging to the brain. Located within the northern metallic district near the town of Dambulane in Sri Lanka, is a stone monolithic settlement perched high above the jungle. Its stone ruins in ancient sculptures displaying the weathering of countless millennia, an ancient rock fort which is undoubtedly a testament to these ancient people's miraculous capabilities. One is Sagiria, or the Lion's Rock. It is an astonishing structure built atop an enormous rock formation, towering some 200 meters into the sky. According to academia, Lion's Rock was constructed within the last 2,000 years. However, future, yet little discussed archaeological exploration, realized many remains in artifacts which date back far before this initial hasty dating, strongly suggesting an original origin far earlier in history. About halfway up the side of the rock is also the astonishing gateway in the form of enormous lion's feet.  The question is, who were the first inhabitants of this gigantic rock fort? Who or what were they hiding from so far up in the sky? And most importantly, how did they build it? Interestingly, many sites around the world display extremely ancient and extremely amazing stoneworking. Some of these remnants appearing to have been formed through some sort of melting, rather than having been carved, and Lion's Rock indeed possesses some of the same astonishing traces. An astonishing fort, one which still displays the enigmatic ledge gardens, also still visible within ancient Peru, and even a constructed man-made lake atop the rock. The site is rarely visited by the 1.8 million tourists to Sri Lanka, or even the native population. However, as the evidence mounts to suggest the existence of this highly advanced group of builders, such sites are becoming more and more of interest every day. Thanks for watching guys, and until next time, take care. Throughout the last few years, the speculation regarding an engraving, now commonly known as the Stargate of Ranmasu Uyana, has been circling within certain fields. Known locally as Bawa Chakraya, or the Sakwala Chakraya, it is hidden upon a boulder at the Royal Goldfish Park, sandwiched between Tissa Weewa and the Isu Ramanaya rock temples at the World Heritage Site of Anuradapura, Sri Lanka. It is not only a unique artifact, but as mentioned, a symbol believed by many to be a key to a portal. Sakwala Chakraya, which translates to Universe Cycle in Sinhalese, is a large circle comprised of seven concentric rings. Lines are drawn vertically and horizontally, cutting the chakra into quadrants. Parallel lines divide the circle vertically into 10 strips, varying in width from 3 inches to 9 inches thick. Many have interpreted the patterns as figures, resembling umbrellas, bows and arrows, kites, wavy lines, and cylindrical shapes, with the outer ring depicting marine animals such as fish, turtles, and seahorses. When compared to the other carvings from the same period, they nearly always depict vines, swans, and the lotus, all of which typical of Buddhist iconography. The chart itself, however, is without religious context, making it an anomaly, and leaving it without any obvious explanation as to why it should exist, or indeed its real age, said Professor Raj Samadiva, senior professor of archaeology at the University of Kalaniya, Sri Lanka. The first academic notation of the chart's archaeological importance was by H.C.P Bell, a British civil servant appointed as the first commissioner of archaeology for ancient Sri Lanka or Selan. Bell made a description of the chart in 1911, where he concluded that, quote, this ancient map of the world is perhaps the oldest in existence and is of quite extraordinary interest, its presence testament to the antiquity's astronomical lore, end quote. Although the chart does not resemble modern maps, Bell wrote that it depicts, quote, an old-time cosmographical chart illustrating in simplicity the notions of the universe, end quote. According to the BBC World, quote, eagle-eyed tourists have remarked on parallels between the chart and Nura Dapura in similar sites in other countries that are believed by some to be stargates, ancient gateways through which humans could enter the universe. Their theory goes that the chart holds the secret code for unlocking the portal, end quote. We find the Sri Lankan stargate highly compelling. Regardless of continent, we even suspect Antarctica. You will find remnants left by an as yet unexplored ancient yet clearly highly advanced civilization. Due to their immense age and the enormity of time which has passed since their mysterious disappearance, only stone megaliths remain. These remarkable block structures still allowing us to peer back and, with a bit of imagination, get a peek at just what this golden age could have possibly been like. Many of these ancient sites, seemingly abandoned suddenly, with no damage appearing to have befallen any of these sites at the time of their vanishing act, leaving buildings half-built, stones half-cut, still resting in the quarries, including the notoriously remote Easter Island all abruptly and mysteriously abandoned. The question is, where did they go? Did they reach a point of spiritual or technological ability that they experienced a type of rapture, ascending, or perhaps descending into another place entirely? Perhaps through the use of some type of portal. Sakwala Chakraya, or Ramsu Uyana, is an ancient incredible petrograph. Beneath a large boulder, among the ruins of a once majestic city known as Anura Dapura, located within Sri Lanka, is what some experts have concluded is an inscription left by someone well over 5,000 years ago. There are two theories concerning the meaning of the petroglyph, and rather humorously, they both make the ancient drawing an upart. Firstly, that is somehow an ancient map of the Earth, a chart, illustrating a complex knowledge of the Earth. And secondly, and undoubtedly the most compelling, and supported by considerably more study, is the petroglyph is a key to some sort of portal, which many suspect to be a stargate. There are no other known images similar to Sakwala Chakraya, known to any ancient cultures.  In 1996, researcher and historian Mihindu Kula Saraya Susantha Fernando realized something amazing regarding surrounding ancient temples. Fernando described his discovery within his 1997 book, Alien Mysteries in Sri Lanka and Egypt. Just like the Great Pyramids of Giza, there exists a perfect alignment of three major stupas, Mary Savatia, Ruvanweli, and Jetavana, all perfectly aligning with three stars within the constellation of Orion, namely Rigel, Alnatak, and Bellatrix. It seems such compelling and precisely arranged features cannot just be a mere coincidence. The center of the key is filled by a large circle, comprising seven concentric rings, which has been translated in regard to the key theory to represent acoustic radiation. Who made the key of Sakwala Chakraya? Is it really a key to a stargate, like so many now believe? Is this where the builders of these ancient sites went? We find the research to suggest such highly compelling.