Okay, so thanks for the invitation to give a talk in this wonderful conference. I'm actually, you should say I'm very impressed with the progress that has been made as evidenced by the talks on the localization ideas. I was not aware of many of these new developments, so it's very exciting. So the talk I'm going to be giving is based on the work I've been doing with the group here. Jefferson, Kim, and Omori, and it is in some sense in the old tradition of, you know, issues that arise in the context of black holes of various kinds, but also connecting to new ideas having to do with super conformal field theories. So these two areas which have been developing, one from the old days and 23 years now and with the other one more recently, the super conformal field theories somehow come together in some form, and this is the context that this talk is related to. So we know that Calabia manifolds, especially Calabia 3-folds, and their singularities are source of a lot of progress and understanding in the study of super conformal field theories, and there are two specific cases that have become important. One is elliptic Calabia 3-folds, and this is the case where we are studying six-dimensional super conformal field theories with 1,0 supersymmetry. So in the context that we use it is in the context of F theory on elliptic 3-folds, and the singularities could be singularity of the base or the elliptic vibration in the F theory sense. And so this one gives rise to 60 conformal theories. The second one for general Calabia 3-folds, and if you look at singularities involving shrinking four cycles inside the Calabia 3-folds, this gives you five of these super conformal field theories with any equals to one supersymmetry. So namely we consider M theory in this case on these three-folds. So these two cases lead to super conformal field theories, and morally we believe, morally, the space of super conformal field theories in six and five dimensions is morally the space of singularities of Calabia 3-folds, elliptic or non-elliptic in this form. So studying them we think is more or less equivalent to this statement, even though we don't have a proof, it's morally seems to be correct. At least it's based on all the models we have been able to construct or understand. Okay, so these are local properties of non-compact Calabias. Okay, non-compact Calabias, you look at where the singularities are, and from there we can find super conformal field theories. So in particular, methods have been devised to compute quantities of interest in these super conformal theories, and it turns out one of them specifically is related to computation of topological strings, so we can compute topological string amplitudes in these backgrounds, and it turns out studying them is equivalent, is needed ingredient for understanding things like super conformal index or their partition functional spheres. So understanding topological string in these backgrounds is a first step in understanding some aspects of these super conformal theories, in other words, some quantitative measure about operators or their partition functions can be understood from these topological strings, and this is in the context of non-compact Calabia. And the question is, can these methods be extended to compact case? The compact Calabia and non-compact ones seem to be rather different, and it turns out that for the compact case, it's very difficult to compute the topological strings. So in other words, even though we know quite a bit about non-compact Calabias for topological string computation, and we can essentially do it to all genus, for compact Calabia manifolds, the computation of topological string is still at a very elementary stage, despite the fact that, you know, about 25 years ago we already computed up to genus two for a quintic threefold, for example, and that has been pushed up further by claims to genus 51 or so, but there's no general computation, so this is still, I would say, not understood. We don't have a good method of understanding compact topological string amplitudes. Sorry? Well, basically it has to do with being able to do certain information about the properties of quintic. So you can take first few coefficients and fix it by one million or another, at the conifers singularity, at infinity, and this and that, so the collection of various tricks helps you to push it up, but you cannot push it up indefinitely. So, anyhow, the main point here is that the techniques are a bit strange and there's no general answer known, and this is despite the fact that people have tried. So compact versus non-compact Calabia in the physics language is gravity versus no gravity. Compact Calabia means you're interested in gravity, non-compact means you're interested in field theory. So this is the distinction and the field theory is easier. Localization techniques that we have been mostly hearing about relates to field theory statements and even the ones that involve gravity in some sense go back to field theory. That is in the sense that we go back to the boundary or something where there's a field theory active. Honest gravitational ones is very difficult and we don't have localization techniques, unfortunately, in those contexts that we need to compute, and in particular, we don't have yet methods to compute topological string amplitudes for arbitrary compact Calabia. Why is that? Well, part of the trick involved in the non-compact case are symmetries. For example, for Toric Calabia three-folds, there are circle actions and people use these to localize computations and get the exact answer. Non-compact ones do not have, sorry, compact ones like the compact quintic and so on, do not have these circle actions. So therefore, the story is much more complicated. Okay, but then there's a connection with black holes. So then there are two classes of theories I'm talking about, six-dimensional super conformal theories and five-dimensional super conformal field theories. And these two relate to one lower-dimensional black holes. Namely, the idea is that you take these theories in six and five, you put it on a circle and then there's a string around, strings wrapped around the circle with the momentum gives rise to a black hole. That's a basic general idea. In the 6D case and the 5D case, you get 5D and 4D black holes in this case, or if you wish, sorry, there are two different versions of it, but let me just stick to the 5D version in this case. You can use this to understand five-dimensional black holes from this construction, which is going to be the main thing I'm going to emphasize in the following way. So you take type 2B, let's start with a simple example. Take type 2B on T4 times S1, or K3 times S1. So this is type 2B compacted by from 10 to 5 dimensions. Or you can think about them as M theory on T6 or K3 cross T2. These are dual to each other. So these constructions are dual to one another. So this is, again, you can think about them, then M theory from 11 to 5 or type 2B from 10 to 5. So you end up with a five-dimensional story. And this is the context or setup for the original black holes that we studied with Strominger back in the 90s. And so these are relatively well studied by now. And the basic setup there, I remind you, was that we take type 2B, we take the three brains, at least one version of it, is that you take a D3 brain wrapped around the Riemann surface inside K3 or T4 times the circle.  And this is T-dual, sorry, not T-dual, S-dual, to the M theory picture where you have a Riemann surface inside T6 or K3 cross T2 and you're wrapping M2 brain around it. So some particular classes of the T6. The particular class will depend on the momentum and the classes you pick here. And they are dual to one another, as I just mentioned before. So this is the general statement that if you take type 2B on Y times S1, it's M theory on Y times T2. That's just the map between M theory and type 2B. So let us for concreteness focus on K3 and consider a genus G curve inside K3.  The marginalized space of the leftover theory is one dimensional. So you get the one dimensional effective theory, which is the signal model on symmetric products of G copies of K3 times R4. And this R4 is the center of mass of the string. And the duality works like this. So if you take, let's say you take K3 cross S1 for this guy. You take type 2B on K3 cross S1. From M theory, you take K3 cross T2. You pick a Riemann surface inside K3. You take a KK momentum around the circle N. This gets related to the same Riemann surface in K3. And the momentum N gets related to N copies of T2 attached to this Riemann surface. So the collection of N Riemann surfaces attached, sorry, N tori attached to this Riemann surface is dual to momentum N type 2B with the Riemann surface like this. So in other words, in the M theory set up, it's just the two dimensional surface, namely this two dimensional surface in this particular example is degenerated to a Riemann surface attached to handles or tori attached to it. Now the holographic statement of this is that ADS three times S3 times K3 is holographic dual to 2DCFT on the symmetric product of K3. So there's this holography statement that applies in this particular case.  And there's an SO4 rotation symmetry, the rotation symmetry of this S3 and that gets related to SU2 left SU2 right symmetries of the four comma four supersymmetric theory in the 2D. Again, compute the central charge of the left movers and you find the 6G plus six and if you then take the compactify the theory on a circle and take the KK momentum, that's just computing the degeneracy is the same as computing the elliptic genus of that. And the momentum N is the level of that elliptic genus you're computing and the central charge is known. And so from that you get the usual kind of a formula for the black hole entropy, and which agrees with the prediction of Beggenstam Hawking for large N and large G. So this is the old stuff. And we can also extend this to five dbps black holes which are spinning and in that context the SU2 left quantum number captures the spinning part of the BPS black hole. So you can actually keep track in the elliptic genus not only of the level, but also of this SU2 spin. And that is to spin captures this BPS spinning black hole as well. And those are known to work. Okay, now I want to shift gear. Now, the first step is trying to constructs further more things that we can do. And this is in the context of F theory and the spinning black holes. And the idea is this K3 cross T2 that I've been talking about in the context of M theory is not as general as it could be for a black hole. More generally, you can replace that with a Columbia 3-fold. You can consider M theory, not on this, but on the more general thing, Columbia 3-fold. And the black hole will be just M2 brains wrapping around two cycles of the Columbia 3-fold. And for the general Columbia 3-fold, we just have to count these M2 brains and we do not know how to do it. Why is that? Well, the way we did it here was to push it up in one dimension, get a string and compute the elliptic genus of that string. For the general Columbia 3-fold, for example, for Quintic, there is no string around. There's nothing we can do. We need a string in one higher dimension and there is none. There's no apparent one and there's no natural way to do it. So for general Columbia 3-fold, we do not know how to compute the black hole entropy. This is embarrassing. After 27 years from those computation, we still don't have any idea.  We do not know how to count it. That's a bit embarrassing, I would say. It's a challenge for this community. We need to figure out how to compute this. But if we want to get a string in six dimension, there is a trick. There is a trick if the Columbia is not generic but special. If the Columbia is elliptic, then you can do something. So if the Columbia is roughly speaking the product of the elliptic curve times a four dimensional base or more precisely elliptic vibration over the four dimensional base, in this context, we know that if you take M theory on these manifolds and take the limit of this tiny, take the limit where this T2 becomes tiny, this is dual to F theory, which basically sees the base only. And the extra circle, if you add the extra circle, you get back the 5D theory again. So in other words, you can push the theory up one dimension to six dimensions on this base. In this context, then we can get off the ground because in the context of F theory, we can consider D3 brains wrapped around cycles, the Riemann surface inside the base, very much like the K3 story. So in the K3 case, we had K3 times something and we take a Riemann surface in it and then we got a string wrapping D3 brain around it and we take a momentum around the circle and that gave us RBPSA. The same thing is true here. So in other words, the elliptic vibration is good enough to do the same thing we did when it was strictly a product. We don't need a strict product. The idea works even if it's just elliptic vibration. And again, this gets mapped in the M theory language to M2 brains wrapped around the Riemann surface, which is glued to N copies of the elliptic fiber at N different points. So now, however, the amount of supersymmetry is reduced.  You get half as much. It's not surprising. Now, it is not difficult to compute the central charge of this string. So we can do the same game we played with K3. In that case, we had a symmetric part of K3. Here, we just need to count what's the central charge of it. It's easy to compute it, and you can compute the central charge of the left and the right movers. And using that, you can compute the prediction of the black hole entropy exactly the same way you did for K3 cross T2. And this was also done further in a paper with Haigat and Murthy and with Vandoren and myself a few years ago. And also, there are some related works which suggest that we can actually talk about this as a holography, a more general holography, in the sense of ADS3 times S3 times a base being dual to some conformal field theory with 0,4 supersymmetry. Now, this base that people have mostly studied is T4 and K3. But now, it could be any base of the Kalavia 3-fold. So it's much more general. And the price we pay is the lower reduced supersymmetry for the conformal theory, which is dual to it. So there's a general statement of this form. And of course, it doesn't mean we know what the CFD is. There's got to be a CFD. But how practical, how simple do we know it? Is it as simple as the symmetric product of sigma and the symmetric product of K3's? The answer is no. It's not that easy. And in general, we do not know exactly what the CFD is. If we know exactly what the CFD is, it's equivalent to doing black hole computations exactly. Nevertheless, what we learn is that if you take the elliptic genus for these corresponding conformal field theories, namely, these conformal field theories associated with these strings, that is, if you take their elliptic genus, then that's the same thing as computing the topological string amplitude on that Kalavia 3-fold. They're computing. So from the elliptic genus perspective, it's like the type 2B side, the K3 cross S1 and all that. So if you compute that, we know that's the same thing by duality as M2 grains wrapped around the cycle, which gives you the topological string amplitude, which is in turn captures the black hole partition function. So there is this relation of three things here. There is a string, 0 comma 4 string. There is topological string on Kalavia 3-fold.  And they're all related. Well, knowing one gives you any other one. So they're equivalent statements. So it doesn't mean any of them is easy. They're equally hard. But at least there's some reformulation here. Z5. So again, thank you, Atish, for making that URL on board. So this is five-dimensional black hole we're talking about. Z of 5D black holes, more precisely, 5D spinning black holes. So the 5D spinning black holes has two things. One has a charge, and one has a spin. The charge gets dualized to scalar classes for the Kalavia topological string partition function. The spin gets related to the coupling constant of topological string. So you have the full parameters to capture the degeneracies of the black hole in terms of topological string. And this is related to the elliptic genus calculation. OK, so we are reduced to the question, how can we come up with this 0 comma 4 to DCFD? How can we practically have a concrete realization of it? Now here it is that I'm going to fall back to the discussion I had for super conformal field theories. For super conformal field theories, in sixth dimension with 1 comma 0, which are the ones which are local singularities of Kalavia three-folds, we do know quite a bit about the conformal field theories that live on the corresponding strings.  And very often, or at least in many cases, we know how to describe these strings in terms of some quiver 0 comma 4 quiver theory. So for some classes, we know exactly how to describe these conformal theories. However, the problem is here we are not just dealing with local singularities. They are glued together using a compact geometry. So that's what's the new challenge. How do you use this local ingredient and piece it together to get the full string that could appear for wrapping not just one cycle near one singularity, but mixing different cycles and different singularities together and describe it as a 2D CFD with the 0 comma 4 super symmetry? So you can take examples of the form T2 times C times C moded by Zn times Zm. So if you take some Zn times Zm symmetry where the Zn and Zm act on the symmetries in some determinant of 1 equals to 4, determinant being equal to 1, where, of course, n and m cannot be arbitrary because you have to have symmetries of T2. So if you do this, so first of all, I have to explain. Why are we putting T2 here? Well, because we are talking about F theory. We're doing 60. So this C times C is the base of the F theory. And T2 is the electric fiber. And so if we want to describe a class of simple super conformal field theories in sixth dimension, you can take the products of this type. And you get, depending on their intersection, various kinds of conformal field theories that have been studied a while back by various people. But simplest ones, for example, if you take Z2 times Z2 singularity, you get, so these are some examples of what we call the conformal matter in a collaboration with Michaela and Company, where we had some kind of a simple description of how these singularities can be related to a blown-up geometries of the F theory. For example, if you take Z2 times Z2 version, you get, first of all, low psi, where there are singularities in the base, their curves. Where there is a curve, you get a gate symmetry, or more precisely, a global symmetry, which becomes gauged if you actually compactified the corresponding D7 brain. So these will be intersecting D7 brains carrying SOA times SOA. At their intersection, you get a conformal theory. In the Z3 times Z3 case, for example, you get E6 seven brains, two E6 seven brains intersecting. And at their intersection, you get a conformal theory, which can be blown up in the base to give you three P1s. And these numbers denote the normal bundle with a minus sign in the geometry of the normal bundle of the corresponding P1 inside the base of the F theory. So these are some examples. Z2, Z3, Z4, et cetera, depending on which one you get, you can get a 4, G2, E8, E7, SO7, et cetera. This is the geometry of local singularities under global symmetry. So in other words, for example, this thing, Z2 times Z3 is a conformal theory.  So for example, this one has E7 times E7 global symmetry, which corresponds to the gauge freedom living on the seven brain. Of course, this is a non-compact seven brain, it's a global symmetry. Okay, so this is the nature of the local singularities. Now, however, this is the local one, but now we are interested in compactifying it to a fully compact model. So for example, a Calabiah like this. Can we describe this one? For each pair of fixed points, we get the same kind of story before. But now the global symmetries get gauged. In other words, these lines that I had here, instead of being non-compact, previously they were part of the C, instead of they being either this C or this C, they're two C's, and each one of them, each one of them is in one of the two C's. But now we are modding that out, first of all it's on a torus and we are modding it out. So each one of them becomes actually a sphere, T2 mod Z2 or T2 mod Z3, et cetera, and it's finite area. That means the gauge coupling on the corresponding seven brain is not zero, but actually finite, therefore we are gauging the corresponding symmetries. So it's like super conformal field theories with global symmetries that we are gauging. So in particular, let's just take a simple example, take T6 mod Z2 times Z2. So if you think about this T6 as T2 times C times C, each one of them remember I told you has a conformal theory which is O minus one over P1, this is what's also known as the E string conformal theory, we heard about it yesterday. There are 16 fixed points on T2 times T2 mod Z2 times Z2. Each one of those fixed points gives you a conformal theory. So it gets 16 conformal field theories like this. Each one of them is at the intersection of two of these singularities, which has an SO8 symmetry. It turns out that every four of them are in the same SO8 global symmetry, but this SO8 symmetry that is common to each one of them is now gauged because the corresponding space is finite in volume. So it looks like you're taking all of these and you're gauging horizontal SO8 in this particular form for each group of this and the same with the corresponding vertical one. So you have horizontal and vertical SO8s that you gauge. Each gauging turns out to correspond to an O-4 geometry because you have a T2 mod Z2s that you're modding out and the corresponding T2 has four fixed points and the normal geometry for it would have an O-4. And therefore, you would have a geometry which is fours gluing every four of these. So if you look at these four, it's gauged by an SO8 and that's one of these horizontal or vertical ones. So you see there are eight fours here in this picture and these eight fours corresponds to vertical and horizontal directions on my previous graph. So you get the quiver which is like this and everything is glued together in this way. So you're taking these local ingredients and gauging it in this particular way. So this is giving you the full non-gravitational sector of this theory. How do we know we're not missing anything? Could it be that we are missing something? Well, we can check for example that the gravitational anomaly cancels. So we are not missing any ingredients. If you compute the anomalies for the number of hypers minus the vectors plus 29 times a tensor minus 273 it better be zero and you can check. You can put these numbers and you check that the corresponding things that we think there are actually canceled. So we have actually gravitational anomalies and so on cancel as they should. And one can also check the mixed anomalies, gravitational and gauging anomalies, cancel, et cetera. So we seem to have a perfectly complete model. Similarly for T6 mod out by Z3 times Z3, in that case each one of these fixed points is the conformal theory which we call the E6 times E6 conformal matter.   Again you compute the conformal anomaly cancels, sorry, gravitational anomaly cancels as it should. These are highly non-trivial checks that we are not missing any ingredient. That the full non-gravitational sector is just given by these conformal theories whose global symmetries have been gauged in a particular way. So we have a nice compact description of a quiver of a full non-gravitational theory. This doesn't happen very often for us in the context of string theory. We always have there's a gauge theory here, there's something there. We don't have such a simple description of them but now here it looks like some simple gauge theory in some form. And you can do similarly for Z6 times Z6, Z2 times Z2, the same kind of games but here for example in the Z6 times Z6 case you get these conformal theories which are gauged by G2 or F4 or E8 and so on depending on which ones they are. So you get more interesting patterns of which conformal matter with which gauge symmetries and again each one of them you check the conformal, the gravitational anomalies and the mixed anomalies all work out beautifully. So this tells us that we have got the non-gravitational sector of it correctly. At least it's strong that's correct. For the Z2 times Z2 we have a concrete candidate for what the corresponding string is.  It turns out you get the product of SPN and OK gauge theories and so there's a concrete proposal about what is the corresponding string living on the D3 brain wrapped around our pre Riemann surface inside this geometry which is exactly what we needed to do to get the elliptic genus of the compact kalabia or the partition function of the black holes. So the description will be something like the potential duality would have been something like ADS3 times S3 times the base which in this case is T4 mod out by Z2 times Z2 being dual to some kind of a quiver in terms of O k's and n's where k's and n's depend on the cycle inside T4 mod Z2 times Z2 which you are wrapping. You know the information about the black hole fluxes which is going to be the fluxes given through S3 is encoded in terms of these particular n's and k's. Now one check is that we can compute the anomalies for this quiver theory. The 2D quiver theory we can compute the central charge of the left and the right and we can recover exactly the prediction based on the geometry. So the thing that we expected based on geometry that you should get the correct central charge C left and C right. You can recover them directly from this quiver theory so that's reassuring that we have a quiver which gives you the right central charges so at least the leading growth of the black hole should work. Without actually computing it we know the leading one should work. So we would be saying that the topological string on T6 mod out by Z2 times Z2 which is a partition function of black hole should be the electric genus of this quiver. It would be interesting to check whether this is just beyond it's just a leading behavior or it's actually exactly correct. There are hints that this cannot be exactly right and part of the reason it cannot be exactly right is that the quiver theory we write has more symmetries than the corresponding D3 brains. We have extra SU2 so we have we should have only an SU2 times SU2 but we have an SU2 times SU2 times an extra SU2 which is strange. So from the viewpoint of the holography you should have only SU2 times SU2 but we have one extra SU2. So that means there's some ingredient which is not quite right in this picture and so there's something that we need to understand better but seems like we are very close to some kind of a compact description and it'd be interesting to check the details of that. Anyhow you get expressions that you know we heard about yesterday in talks about what kind of expressions we get when we try to compute these. Elliptic genus for these quiver theories but I don't bother going over it. Needless to say it's not easy enough, well it's not easy enough to check it because the topological string on these has not been computed and it's not completely trivial to compute these either but anyhow so it'd be good to do some checks but anyhow let me move on. So for the next thing I want to take the following challenge. But here the story was for the elliptic Calabias of what the idea was. To try to basically stitch together conformal field theories using gauging of global symmetry so that's a summary of the 6D story I told you. How about 5D? Well if you take a generic Calabia the shrinking four cycles gives you 5D super conformal field theories they also have global symmetries and it might be that when you stitch them together similarly you can get the description of a compact Calabia based on these conformal theories in 5D. So in other words is there a similar story in that context? So let's talk about it turns out that the simplest one to talk about in this case is not the Quintic three fold but the mirror to the Quintic three fold. So you take the Quintic three fold and you take its mirror which means you take the Quintic itself and mod out by Z5 cubed. So as some of you may not know this so you take Cp4 a degree five equation in it and that's called the Quintic. And if you mod out all the coordinates by fifth root of unity subject to the determinant being one and up to projectivization gives you Z5 cubed and that's what's called the mirror Quintic. So if you take that geometry what is interesting about this has a lot of singularities. So typically the mirror Quintic people don't study it as much other than in the context of mirror symmetry is that it has many singularities. Z5 cubed these has a lot of fixed points and so on and these fixed points are quote unquote headache. You don't want singularities. Well actually not so for us. For us the more the singularities the better. Singularities are the bread and butter of super conformal field theories. So therefore we like singular manifolds. We like to singularize manifold as much as possible to pieces which are just singular because we understand singularities. They're conformal theories. So we want singular things as much as possible and that's why mirror Quintic is better than Quintic for us. Quintic is smooth, nice, there's no singularity whatsoever. So we can't have a handle. Singularities give us handles on Calabias. So we want to singularize as much as possible and this is as much as we can do. We mod out by Z5 cubed. It turns out for every three coordinates vanishing any triple of coordinates vanishing we get the conformal theory and so there are basically five choose three which is 10 conformal theories labeled by i, j and k and for every pair vanishing you get the curve of singularities with an A4 singularity. So for every pair you get an A4 singularity but in M theory that means SU5 gate symmetry. So you have SU5 gate symmetry for every double of these guys, pairs of these guys and for every triple you get the conformal theory. So what happens is like this. So for example look at this triangle here. This is one, two, five. One, two, five means Z1, Z2 and Z5 equals zero. That's a singularity which is a conformal theory. Z1 and Z2 equals zero gives you a curve off of it which has SU5 global symmetry which is global symmetry of this conformal theory but actually becomes gauged later on. So there's a one, two line, there's a five, two line and there's a five, one line. So in other words this conformal theory has SU5 cubed global symmetry. And similarly for all these triangles. So each one of these triangles gives you a conformal theory which is attached which has global symmetries which now again get gauged because it's compact. Just like the previous example. So you take each of these triangles which are well known conformal theories in 5D with global symmetries but now you gauge their global symmetries in a very particular way and this is I think the most accurate picture of, you have seen these fancy pictures of Calabria and so on. This is a real picture of the Meruquintic. I mean this is literally what it is and I like this because it's simple and nice. You can see where the ingredient is. You have conformal theories and they're gauged in this particular way. Okay so given this what is it good for? So we have put it into pieces. First of all are we sure this is the right picture? Well let's do some first count. So each one of these ingredients like this one to five is dual to web diagrams, PQ fiber and web diagrams which looks like this. With parallel lines going like this which give you SU5 global symmetries living on this and these are the three global symmetries I was telling you about. And every triple of them, so for example this SU5 you can think maybe of this one too is connecting three different conformal theories together. So one conformal theory from here let's say with the other one here, the other one here. Each one has SU5 global symmetry and you're gauging them. So some SU5 gauging of these global symmetries. And you're doing this for every pair in this particular way. We want to compute topological strengths for these amplitudes. First of all do we have the right degrees of freedom? Well there are 10 conformal theories because there are 10 of these triangles. Five choose three. Each one of them has six holes as you can see. And each hole gives you a degree of freedom the breathing mode. So there are six times 10 degrees of freedom corresponding to these conformal theories. Each SU5 has four relative cartons. But there are 10 SU5, five choose two. Four times 10. And each one of these SU5 has a coupling constant which we have to take to be identical. And that's an extra one giving us the 101 scalar parameters of the mirror quintic. So the older degrees of freedom of quintic, the scalar parameters are now captured by properties of gauge theories and conformal theories. We understand one has a coupling, one has the SU5 cartons, and the other one is the breathing mode of these conformal theories. They are actually meaning in terms of objects we understand. So it's divestifies the 101. But now we have to understand what the SU5 gauging is. There is a notion of U1 gauging that was studied a while back. And this involves, for these kind of diagrams, we use what's known as the topological vertex formalism to compute topological strings. But for gaugings, we don't have a similar formalism. Except for the U1 case, there was a proposed version of the topological vertex which you take the usual topological vertex and take it mirror. And it turns out to be the analog of the U1 gauging. The standard topological vertex will give you some expressions like this in terms of shore functions and so forth. And the mirror one for the U1 case was studied a while back by mathematicians and also by some physicists. And the question is, what is the SU5 gauging similarly to that? So you want some kind of an SU5 gauging in the story. And following work that Hayashi and Omori did, one can extend the U1 version to an SU5 version by some methodology, giving you some proposed formalism of what SU5 gauging is. We cannot be sure. It's kind of like a guesswork of what this gauging means. So you can try to generalize it kind of by hand what this could have meant. And this would be one natural proposal. So you can check if it works. Namely, let's take a case where all of these cycles are equal given by the scalar parameter gamma. And let's say that the size of this P1 corresponding to the SU5 is given by L. So we take all of these little sizes equal to gamma and all of these sizes equal to L and count how many curves do we get. If you count this for, if you just have Ls with no gammas, you can compute the various genus corrections and you can compute these would-be topological string invariance or more precisely the BPS invariance for any given genus. Or for the L and gamma, these are the same L and gamma we're talking about here. You can compute the degeneracy for the low degrees just by just taking the topological string computations using this SU5 gauging means to come up with this answer. Well, is this correct or not? Well, we asked our mathematician friends, Dave Morrison and Sheldon Katz to check for us. Surprisingly or not, this was not done before because there's too many parameters, 101 and nobody tried to do this. But thanks to our friends, they actually helped us. In fact, they did the computation after laborious work and they found the answers. This is what they got. Okay, well, yes and no. So you see the first row matches perfectly well, but that's not a surprise because that part is the same as the conformal field theory that I said we understand. So this was the easy part. It better have worked than it does work. The second line, you see some similarities. The order of magnitude is correct. The signs are correct, but not exactly right. Okay, so that's slightly embarrassing. What happened? Well, first of all, we didn't have to work because we were just guessing what SU5 gauging means. You can go back and try to think what SU5 gauging is and geometrically you can actually realize what SU5 gauging means in terms of delpetsos and their blown-ups. And so you can remodify what this rule means in this language and then armed with more understanding of what geometry is, do the computations again, refine it and get their answer. So you can understand how you correct your computation to get their answer, at least for the low degrees. We can reproduce it using this hodge part of localization, geometry, this and that. We do not know the full version of how you correct it to get the full answer for all of them, but this is a strong hint that it should be possible. So I think we are epsilon away, I hope, from an answer for what the compact collabia topological string is. We still have not gotten it there, but 25 years after the work with BCOV, I think we're almost in a place where we can say we can compute it. So we have to understand this SU5 gauging a little more clearly. So let me conclude. So we have seen that we can stitch together super conformal field theories in five and six dimensions and try to get a complete description of the non-gravitational sector of collabials. And we can do these for two purposes, for concrete holography, perhaps, and also all genus computation for topological strings and collabia threefolds. Leading growth works, but there are some hints that this is not the full answer. And there's one thing one should perhaps say is that these techniques should somehow be, of course, understood in terms of some kind of localization at the end of the day, which is the topic of this workshop, exactly what is not clear. It sounds like it might be the same sense as SYZ. There's a torus vibration, but not necessarily torus action. And so those kind of ideas might be some kind of a some kind of a suggestion of how it could be. Okay, I'll stop. Thank you.


once again returning guest, Biff Bifert all the way in the UK. What's going on Biff? Yeah, good. Good to be there with you on Zoom. Every 19th Silver Lightning Music release of Hellfire and Damnation, 24th album. Yeah. Where does the time go? Some months to this album as well. Yeah, I'm loving it. Me and Alan Hearnett it is and we'll give our review as we go along with this. For me personally, I think it's another consistently strong Saxon album. All right, for a headline, how would you review this album or what would you state about this album in one sentence as a headline? Biff Bifert says, this album is a monster. I mean lyrically, you cover everything on this. There's, you know, Marie Antoinette, the battle of Hastings, Aliens. What got you so inspired lyrically? Just thinking of stores that are interesting really that pop into my crazy head. You know, just things that interest me and obviously interest millions of other people as well. You know, history is interesting and it's forever renewing itself, isn't it? History.  How much credence do you put into that? I mean, I like a good conspiracy theory. You know, they're great, aren't they? They're great because you get your thinking and you look at all the facts and you shouldn't make up your own mind, don't you? It's like the grassy knoll. I mean, I'd like to think that there was something in Roswell. I'm more of a believer than a disbeliever, but I'm not totally sold on it, you know what I mean? But I think the interview in America, they interviewed a lot of people on their survey and I think 95% of people thought there was something in Roswell. So, you know, that's where the song comes from. I mean, Congress is opening in the United States. They have Congress questioning, like we want information. Do you have spaceships? Do you have aliens? So, you know, there's something in Roswell, it might be more than just Roswell. So it could be. I mean, Roswell's Ground Zero, isn't it? For most UFO, you know, people that like to talk about it and sort of study it. It all sort of started in Roswell. I think that was the first big moment that people sort of heard about flying saucers and, you know, trashes and aliens and, you know, there's been a lot since. But that's Ground Zero. So I think it's an interesting song, you know. Describe. Me too. Me too. I love that song. Describe the musical direction on this album compared to the last. Well, the musical direction is we're just, we just want to write the perfect rock song. That's our goal, you know, to write the perfect metal song and the perfect album. So that's always our goal. So we're always, we're always trying to write better songs and better sounds. I think this album is probably the best sounding Saxon album ever, hi-fi wise. So, you know, we're just, we're getting closer to perfection every album. Back in August, there was talk about Paul Quinn participating on the album, did that come to fruition? Sorry? Back in August, there was a mention that maybe Paul Quinn would play on this album, but was that, did that come to fruition? Yeah, Paul plays a couple of songs on the album, yeah. Plays solo on a few songs, yeah. So it just, we were making the album so fast and, you know, so, so sort of, you know, inspired by making the album. We did it on the road in Europe on our festival tour. And, you know, Paul wasn't with us because he stopped touring.  So, yeah, we were very lucky. I even noticed, like, at the beginning of Fire and Dunn Nation, it could have been a, the intro could have actually been a Diamondhead song, you know, it just has that vibe and it's, it's cool. Oh, yeah. It's his riff, so, yeah. I mean, he wrote the guitar riff, so yeah. I don't know why he didn't use it with Diamondhead. Maybe, maybe, I don't know, maybe they didn't like it. I don't know the reason why they didn't put it on the album. What's your history, Brian, and how did it come to be the past that he joined Saxon? How did he come to join Saxon? Yeah, what's your history, your past history with him as well? Well, we don't have a massive history with him. I mean, he was around in the, in 1980 when all the bands started getting signed and things, you know, but I think Diamondhead got signed a bit late, like 1982. So I think they probably missed the boat a little bit.  So that gave them some sort of, you know, kudos in the business to carry on, really, I suppose. But yeah, Brian learnt some songs. Paul was ill with COVID and we had a very special festival coming up. We couldn't really cancel. And so Brian sort of learnt the Saxon songs. This was a couple of years ago and Brian learnt the Saxon songs for that set. So he already, he already had a foot in the door really. So yeah, I mean, Brian's been to Paul's a few times and zoomed with Paul. So Paul showed him all his licks and things and, you know, how to play the songs and, you know, so he's been, he's been quite, quite close with Paul learning the Saxon stuff. How's Paul's health? Is it okay? Is it stable? Yeah, I think it's okay. It just, it just got a little bit of, then you've got a bit of rumours in his fingers when he plays a lot. And it just wanted to rest, I think, onto the quiet life. You know, being in a sort of touring, touring rock band is not really a quiet life.  How do you able to do it all these years, Biff? How's what, sorry? You're here the last man standing. How have you been able to do it all these years and continue to do it? I don't know, really.  So I just suppose you have to just, you know, try and stay as, you know, as multiverse as you can, really, and keep getting, you know, keep writing albums and touring and getting the juice flowing, really. That's what it's all about, you know. You know, it's amazing your voice. You know, you just, I don't know if you keep getting better. I think he's getting better, like over the years.  When you hit the stage, you know, I can't prove it, but it just feels authentic. Like that is the core value of Saxon being authentic. Yeah, it's very authentic. You know, I don't do anything with my voice. It's just, I've learned how to sing over the years and, you know, I just keep it, keep it straight and just, just go for it, really. That's the secret.  We play live. We don't use click tracks or anything. Everything you get is live. We might have a few noises on Nims' bass pedals, you know, like sirens and jet planes and things, but just a little effect something, but most what you get and what you hear is live. So what do you say to the new bands who are starting off that are already lip syncing, you know, using laptops? I mean, is that the wrong way to start a new band? Well, lip syncing is miming, really, but I think, you know, there's a lot of software you can use now to enhance the sounds and enhance yourself. We don't really bother with that to tell you the truth. I mean, it's a bit, you know, we're a live band, always have been known as a live band, and our albums are an extension of that, really. That's how we work, you know. Yeah, and seeing you guys live, you're an impossible act to follow, just the power, and you've been doing it so long, the professionalism. I mean, I'd hate to follow you guys at any kind of festival, so. Well, you know, we're known to be good live. I mean, obviously, you know, a lot of it depends on the audience being good live, you know, you need a good audience to be able to, you know, capture the energy and turn it into something special. But yeah, we're a pretty good live band, and you know, I mean, as far as bands following us, you know, that's up to them. Salem Witch Trials, getting back to the album. Do you find that topic is kind of similar to today's culture, you know, of sort of shutting people down and cancelling people?  Is there any reaction? Well, a lot of it's based on revenge and paranoia.    So she said she was a witch and, you know, strange looking people that lived on their own, you know, just general paranoia. And I think it's, I think, basically, it got to be a form of entertainment at one point, you know, filling witches or what they thought were witches. But a lot of it's based on, you know, religious beliefs really. And, you know, people were playing on that. And just the paranoia comes along, you know. Pirates are the airwaves. I mean, you know, a lot of your generation in Britain were influenced by the pirate radio station like Radio Caroline. Can you tell us a little bit about the impact of having those pirate radios for yourself? I was about 12 years old in the in the 60s, very early 60s and 12, 13 years old. And there was no, there was no pop or rock music played on radio. You know, you might have got like maybe the Beatles now and again, but you didn't have things like Rolling Stones and pinks and some of the more American bands, you know, they weren't on, they weren't on daytime radio in England. And at night it was mostly orchestras and comedy things. And it used to stop at, you know, 10 o'clock at night, the radio used to stop like the television did. So, you know, we all had to go to bed at 10 o'clock. And, you know, when I was a teenager, you know, we used to listen to these stations that came in at night on these pirate stations and they played all the big songs of the day, you know, all the early Rolling Stones and all those bands from the 60s, they were all on there. And it caused a revolution in the UK. The BBC and the government had to open a station for teenagers. And that's how it all started. The swinging, as they called it. Kubla Khan and the merchants of Venice. All right. This, this is Marco Polo, I'm assuming, right? The merchant of Venice. Yeah, it is Marco Polo. And when he met Kubla Khan in the east in Mongolia, I guess. Yeah, well, China actually was there for China then. Grandfather Genghis Khan was the, was a Mongolian chief. But no, he went there and wrote about China. And nobody had ever gunpowder before. Nobody had ever, nobody had ever known silk and ceramics that they used to make. So yeah, you wrote about it. And it was the first guy to to write about it. It's an interesting story. And the word Kubla Khan is a great word to sing, you know, good story. That's a first. We've ever heard Kubla Khan in a song maybe. I heard Zana doing there too. You know, a little, a nod to Russian Olivia Newton-John. Well, Zanadu was one of the cities that he built, actually. So that was, you know, in the poem, you know, Rush used it into the poem, but he mentions it as a hidden, hidden city of Utopia. But Zanadu was one of his cities. I mean, you listened to the intro of the prophecy. I hear Brian bless his voice. It takes you right back to that first Black Adder series. How'd you get him on board? Well, he's a friend of ours. We've known him for some time. He's introduced us on stage a couple of times. Yeah, he's a big fan. He's from York, you know, out part of the world. And he loves the band. And yeah, I just asked him if he did the talking for me. And he said, yeah.  Gordon is delighted with all that sort of thing. What a voice. What a voice. So I wanted to bring a bit of it just to the album. So I thought it might be cool to, you know, to have him tell people what the song is about, you know, Hell, Fire and Damnation, the prophecy and the Bible. Yeah. Yeah.  It's it's got that Saxon stamp, but you guys are going out of the box a little bit. And I love that. And the sound, like you mentioned, the sound is excellent. The production is really good on this one. And the energy. Yeah, it's done a great job. Andy Sneep is, you know, he worked, he worked really hard and fast on this. I think he did it in just over a week, which is quite, which is quite fast these days. You know, I mean, people are really, a lot of bands are really fastidious about the attention to detail, you know, going back in and listening, changing and fiddling. Well, we just basically, you know, did this, like I say, very quick, a lot of passion involved with it. You know, we had a deadline to keep. So yeah. Any tours planned? What's what's next for Saxon? Well, we're going out with you to spend your I keep in March in Europe. And then we come to America in April. I think the first show in America is the 23rd of April in Fort Lauderdale. You know, don't don't hold me on that. But I think that's 23rd of April, Fort Lauderdale. Then it goes up the East Coast and across across into the Midwest. So yeah, we are coming to America. Then we'll go back to some festivals in Europe.  I think all year we'll be touring on this album. Pardon? No Canadian dates so far. Not so far. No, no. But that doesn't mean to say we won't do any. We're going to do part one and part two. You know what I mean? So I don't know. I haven't seen any Canadian dates on this tour, but that doesn't mean to say they're on 10. What are your favorite favorite songs on this album? We'll just kind of go around the room here. Favorite tracks off the new album? Me first. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You first. I think the moment, Madam Gillettine.  I have to say, Biff, that is the one where that's a song that kind of goes off into outside of the box of typical Saxon. And you're right. That is very melodic and it's very different. Still metal, but different. Yeah, definitely. Alan? No, great.  It goes with the Saxon tradition for those eponymous titled songs. Just a great album, Battle of Hastings. And hey, I learned something new. That's always fun. You hear music, you learn about history. So for me, I take away, not only have Nigel's great drumming as usual, but the guitar solos are so tasteful and just, you know, just so well placed and not complicated. You can really feel the emotion in the guitar solos. That's what I took away from this album. Yeah, definitely. The Brian and Duke have done a great job on the guitars. Definitely. And I love 1066, which we didn't talk about. I think that's one of my favorite songs. I don't know, 20,000 feet, 747, 1066. I just love the way you put it together. Yeah, it's a good song. It's like poetry. I wrote the lyrics as poetry without the music first. So it's always good when it fits together with a great guitar riff. Yeah. All right. And I think that's pretty much it. You know what? Everybody goes, you know what? I'm really excited that cover is this perfect tone for the music on the album. So everybody out there who's going to be watching this, pick up the album, pre-order it. It's a great Christmas gift. And the tour is going to be announced, I think, the complete tour in January. It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which is good. But it's nice to know that maybe there's a possibility or come to Canada. So that's cool. Maybe there's a possibility. We like coming to Canada. You know, we've been many times before. So, you know, we'll just keep our fingers crossed. I've told the manager, you know, I want to go everywhere, Canada. You know, we've done South America just so there's no reason why we shouldn't do Canada. But Merry Christmas to you and your family and all the best for 2024. Yeah, we'll see you in maybe the new year. That would be great. Okay. That would be great. All right, Beth, thank you for your time. Thank you. See you there, guys. Bye.


Hi, everybody. Thanks very much for coming along to our session today. I'm a learning technologist from DCU, and I'm here with my colleague Suzanne as well, also from DCU. And we're going to kind of treat this as one whole session, if that's okay. So we will speak at the beginning about our EDTL project, and then in the latter half we're going to be looking for your input and assistance with a particular task.  So I hope you can all see our slides now on the screen. The slides can be accessed at the bit.ly link there afterwards if you want to take a look back over it. But let's kick off. So what we hope to do in this session is give you a bit of a background to our EDTL project, which stands for Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning. Speak about the structure, speak about the community that's built up around it, talk about how we piloted this project in our own university, and how we focused on the topic of technology enhanced assessment. And then we'll also share with you some of the preliminary findings of our evaluation, and then some refinements and adaptations that we are making going forward. So just to give you a bit of a background, and I won't labour this point, but I suppose there's been a general shift or consensus or conversation happening at various levels in the last few years around the need to equip our graduates with the necessary digital skills and competencies so that they can succeed in the workforce. And this is spoken about in the new school for Europe, where they talk about making sure European citizens are adequately skilled for the ever changing economy. We have our EU digital education action plan, which many of you will be familiar with, which I suppose aligns very much with the skills agenda and puts forward a number of concrete and distinct actions to enable digital education. Here at a national level in Ireland, we have our own national skills strategy, which again is very much aligned to the European skills agenda and really calls on higher education institutions to make sure that our graduates coming out of our Irish institutions are suitably equipped for the ever working world. We have a national strategy for higher education, which calls on institutions to adopt greater levels of e-learning in their provision of programs. At a sectoral level, the seven public universities in Ireland are part of an organisation called the Irish University Association, or IUA, which is a representative body. And that body, the IUA, launched a charter in 2018, which seeks to make sure that the Irish University system is as good as it can be and that it can offer a very robust digital learning experience for all of our students. And then of course, like many other institutions, we have strategic plan in DCU with many, many ambitions in it, one of which is to increase the number of digital learning experiences that we offer our students. What we can see is really at various different levels, a number of policies, a number of strategies really coming together to provide opportunity for something to be done about this whole area of improving the digital experience of students, improving the digital skills and competencies of them. So the IUA applied for some funding from the Higher Education Authority in Ireland to develop what they initially proposed as a digital learning programme. So a programme where academic staff in the universities could upscale around their own digital skills and competencies with the view to improving their courses and their modules so that students own digital learning experiences could be improved. So thus was born the Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning Project, or EDTL, so it's a three-year project and the aims are of course to enhance the digital attributes and digital experiences of the Irish University students and more specifically to roll out a staff development programme to enhance the digital confidence skills and competencies of all those who teach in Irish universities. So we're not targeting just professors or lecturers or just full-time teaching staff, but we have a very broad conception of people who teach and people who support teaching in our universities. And the approach is to mainstream digital in teaching and learning. We're all very familiar over the years with the concept of champions. We've all had champions in our departments in universities who are great at digital teaching and learning, and they're the go-to people, but this project aims to kind of mainstream that and get away from this idea of the champion and the pedestal, but rather lift up the skills of everyone who's involved in teaching. These are the kind of four pillars that underpin the project. We recognise that each of the seven universities have a lot of professional development opportunities already, so this project doesn't seek to undermine existing CPD approaches, but really build on them. We focus very much on pedagogy first, not technology first, so we speak a lot in our development with academic staff. We talk a lot about what it is they want to achieve and what learning outcomes they want their students to achieve, and then they explore ways in which technology can embed that. We treat things on a discipline level, so we work with teams in programmes or teams in schools and departments rather than working with individuals or rather than working with the mishmash of academics from different disciplines in the university. We also value quite a lot. We have a number of student interns involved in the project, interns who lend to all of our activities. There's the structure. We have, as I mentioned, a project manager in the Irish University Association. We have different project leads in the seven universities, and myself and Suzanne are the leads in DCU. We have student interns and we have a steering group made up of senior management from the different institutions, and that senior management buy-in we found is really, really very important. We utilise the, your use this framework to engage with the academics and have them explore what's their current level. Do they want to explore? So that is quite a that is useful framework. I'm seeing some messages about my internet connection, so I do apologise. What I might do is, Suzanne, if you can hear me, can you take over from here? Yeah, sure. Rob, I was just texting you there. Apologies for that, guys. So, as Rob said, one pilot with seven different flavours. I guess, can you just make sure that you can hear me, okay, so that we don't have continuing issues with audio? Brilliant, excellent. One pilot, seven different flavours. You'll see a little bit of information on the slides. I popped the bitly into the chat box a couple of minutes ago. Obviously, we're more, we're going to speak more about the experience at DCU today, just to give you an idea of, of the experience at DCU. Brilliant. But before I do that, I just want to highlight one of the successes at national level of the project, self-proclaimed success, but it has been very successful, particularly after the pivot to online learning, because people were reaching out and looking for a kind of a learning community to engage in. And that's our community, our learning community, which we kind of, we facilitate through a webinar series, which allows practitioners to come together, share their experience. We do kind of have a semi-formal structure in that. We have one or two very short presentations at the start. And the idea is to focus on the session afterwards. And we'd like to invite you along to join that community. More information on the blog. You can see the information, the blog URL here. There is a session happening today, as we speak. It's clashing with our session. Please don't leave us and go to that one. But you might check out that session afterwards. The recording will be available on our Vimeo channel and also from the EDTL blog. There is one that you may, some of you who are working or supporting people who work in lab-based subjects, does an upcoming webinar. Thank you Fiona for popping that in. That's brilliant. Coming up on the 7th of September with some guest speakers, Andrew Gard and Michael Seary. So we'd invite you to engage with that learning community. It has been very active and very lively. Some of you may have attended already, but we'd love you to see some of you at one or more of those events in the future. At DCU, then, our focus is on technology enhanced assessment. And why did we choose assessment as our focus? Well, assessment, as we know from the literature, influences all teaching and learning or all aspects of teaching and learning, which is why we decided to take that approach. We have four distinct but interconnected work packages which centres around a staff development program, but also involves the development and maintenance or revision of online resources. We've also committed to ongoing technical enhancements for our VALE, which is Moodle. That's obviously in discussion with participants and the broader university community, and then our communications and dissemination package. The staff professional learning program is based around a suite of 10 workshops which drew on established professional learning opportunities and staff expertise within the teaching and enhancement team and beyond the team. So as Rob outlined earlier, one of the pillars is that you're not starting from scratch with this project that we're building on work that's already been done in the past. The pilot phase, the development of the project worked a little bit like this. So we developed the suite of assessment workshops. We discussed those workshops with our potential participants from the Faculty of Education and a School of Psychology. We customised those workshops based on discipline-specific needs. We developed pre-work workshop learning activities, more about those later, not so successful, unfortunately. We delivered three pedagogy-focused workshops to participants, followed that up with individual and group consultation to support the planning of their technology enhanced assessments. We offered ongoing support in the implementation of those assessments and then we reviewed and refined that pilot phase and what we learned from that pilot phase. Essentially, we applied in phase two of the project which happened from February to April this year in the middle of all the madness. But I guess the first learning for us that, and we'll be discussing this later on in part two of this session, is the need for staff to conceptualise digital assessments. A lot of the staff or the participants that we were working with had a little difficulty imagining alternative assessments. I know that things have slightly changed and people have been pushed to imagine alternative assessments with the COVID crisis, but we're talking about September to December last year. The idea came about to develop a set of exemplars of digital assessments. We found that while a lot of people in our immediate circle had some excellent examples of digital assessment, we wanted to build on that and those grew the idea to develop an open education resource and to crowdsource exemplars through a broader community. We're going to ask for your help with that in part two of this session. Another learning from the pilot was that flexibility was needed for delivering the professional development. That's an old lesson, but even before COVID, we had already begun to deliver some of the sessions online. A very interesting finding was that originally we had structured the workshops so that we would incorporate a piece of practical work, and the idea was that we felt if participants left the workshops having discussed the why of digital assessment and a little bit of the how to and had something tangible to leave the sessions with, we felt that would be a great achievement, but actually we found as we delivered the workshops that the discussion around the pedagogy, the why to of introducing technology into assessment was much more important for them. And also because they were working together in schools or maybe programme teams, that discussion space was really, really valuable for them, particularly because a lot of the time the amount of times or the space that they have to have such discussions can be very limited in a busy schedule. We also found that the pedagogy focused workshops where they were excellent and there was good space for discussion there. They also needed to be followed up by almost separate technology or how to workshops, so we built that into the programme. And in a lot of cases we have actually delivered those online because they lend themselves more to an online space as well. The pre-workshop task as I mentioned in the last slide, two-time consuming people didn't really engage with them so we simply removed them and thought again about our structure. One of our pre-workshop tasks was involved asking participants to engage with the digital comp edu framework so that we would have an idea of their digital competence before engaging with the project and subsequent to engaging with the project. While we found that the framework was very useful and it's quite dense in the way it's laid out and participants needed some scaffolding to engage with that. We attended a really excellent JISC workshop last, I think it was just before Christmas last year in Edinburgh when we were all able to fly and meet each other in person. And there was an excellent presentation or workshop around gamifying engagement with those types of frameworks. Now that one was the JISC framework, digital capabilities framework, but we've adapted that approach to develop a gamified or digital pursuit board game approach to engage in participants with that framework. And now obviously we had tried it out in a face-to-face environment before Covid, worked really well, participants responded really well to it, there was a bit of fun involved and it also, because we were working together in a group, people encouraged each other, they remembered things that their colleagues had engaged in in terms of digital capabilities and that discussion piece was really really useful and well received. We have tried that on an online version of that as well and again works works really well. Last finding then in terms of development, we had kind of focused very much in our work package on the development of online resources that were tech-focused, but we did find that people were looking for non-tech-focused resources as well and one example would be how to facilitate or scaffold group work. So that was interesting as well. There's an evaluation under way as per our pillars, the student voices is key to that. We have conducted focus groups back in April online of course, very very interesting findings. I'm going to speak a little bit about those in a moment and also we've gathered participants' anonymous reflections on the project. We're using Bambur's framework to evaluate impact just to take us beyond quantitative data, you know, figures of participants etc towards an evidence of impact on practice in the longer term and then we're working with the Irish National Forum for Teaching and Learning to develop a badge for participants based on their participation in that in the project. Is there an online version of the game? I see a question coming in there. We have an online version of the game that we're very happy to share with you. Mel will pop that into the chat box towards the end of the session. Okay, so the evaluation, the academic reflections then. Rob, I don't know if you can come in on this and give it a go. I'm not sure how is my internet, is my audio still poor? Perfect, no, it's really good at the moment. I won't keep you long then. So as, as Zan said, we have done an evaluation with academic staff. It is preliminary, we haven't collected all of the all of the anonymous reflections from the staff but from the reflections that we have gotten in so far, there's some nice themes emerging so the academics are placing them in around the same level on the DigCom PDU framework or perhaps one level above us, which is good. You know, we weren't expecting staff to suddenly be revolutionized overnight with their digital competencies. They speak a lot about confidence in using technology, which is here. And there's a really nice quote here about building community as well. So I think that's one of the great benefits of working with colleagues who are focused around a discipline is that they can kind of build this community and they can continue these decisions after they finish our professional learning program. They've made lots of plans for future practice, things like e-portfolios, a formative assessment using technology, adding flexibility to their assessment formats using technology, so maybe offering students a chance to do video assessments instead of text assessments. A lot of the people involved were teacher educators and they had a particularly interesting insight in that they felt it was important for them to model good digital pedagogy for their own student teachers who they're teaching. By no means was it all rosy, they do recognize there are challenges involved in ongoing development of the digital competence and again will be no surprise to the people here in the room, the lack of time for innovation and time for redevelopment, the kind of sense that it's easier to maintain current practice and assessments and of course the ever present danger of technical hiccups as indeed I myself am experiencing now in real time. So I'll hand you back over to Suzanne. Great thanks Rob, it just struck me that you had done that piece of work so I didn't really know what I was talking about for that slide. Okay so the initial analysis of the student focus group data then, we did focus groups with four separate groups, no three separate groups of four in each group and the findings were just really rich, we couldn't, we were really excited by the findings but we're at the early stages of analysis so we've just pulled out five findings to date. I thought this was very interesting, a suggestion from the group around digital feedback for exams which seemed to resonate with the rest of the group and to be explored in more detail later but the idea was that you know you often get feedback around continuous assessment but you don't really get it around exams beyond your grade and they were suggesting that maybe that might be of benefit. They were very positive about digital feedback in general and I thought this point was really interesting and it related to the difference between feedback for those who have done well in a piece of work and those who had not done so well so I mean obviously there is a long conversation to be had if people are struggling with a piece of assessment but the point was made that for those who have done actually quite well in their assessment digital feedback is really useful because it can be short and sweet and give guidance around how to make improvements and avoid the long conversation that that may be needed if they had been struggling a little bit more so I thought that was interesting. There was a suggestion to tie alternative assessments or technology enhanced assessments more closely to career needs and one example that was offered was the need to use like basic you know software pieces of software such as Excel and that students feel they don't get enough practice on basic stuff that they are almost definitely required to use in their postgraduate career. We often focus on the via Lee kind of related you know a quiz or indeed the portfolio which they were very positive about as well but the need to kind of expand that a little bit well came through in the focus groups very very positive about the portfolio and would encourage more use of the portfolio again interesting and the last finding that we just wanted to present to you was that students were suggesting more and more collaborative learning assessments so they feel they're really valuable and authentic in terms of assessment. So in terms of the project response to COVID then obviously everything was turned on its head somewhat in March at national level the project refocused to support blended and online delivery obviously for 2020 and into 2021 so the approach that we took was there were an abundance of resources out there to support staff to get online from total novices to those who have been teaching online for years but the approach we took was then to curate the resources and offer a framework for people to engage with those resources rather than reinventing the wheel and those resources are available on the EDTL website which we popped into the chat earlier and we very much looked at okay there was a lot of panic at the start and it's been really really busy and a number of months but we're looking at the crisis as an opportunity and certainly in terms of alternative assessment and the availability of the OERs which we're going to speak about in the second half of the session really supported people to imagine alternative assessments and you know they had to it was something that they had to do last term given the crisis. The impact of the pilot then EDTL participants just I suppose this is outside of the formal evaluation but it's coming through in some of the reflections that EDTL participants felt better prepared for the crisis particularly in respect of designing alternative assessments anecdotal at the moment but it will come through in the reflections as well. Okay so in summary the project driven by you know discipline specific and needs identified at various levels tailored to participants needs scaffolded support and ongoing support is a very important aspect of the project the student voice central to to the project again one of the four pillars and very much informing our skills development for staff moving into the future. Mixture of types of engagement some at surface level some really strongly engaged with every aspect of the project but you know we've just kind of adapted to to suit people's individual needs and the adaptation to resulting from the COVID crisis we're seeing as a real opportunity we're like glass half full people at the moment so guys thanks very much for your attention there we're going to move into the second part of this session but I might just take a pause and see if if you've got any questions at the moment feel free to come on the mic or pop them into the chat box. I think there's one question there Suzanne from Mel asking how much engagement did we get from employers if any from a discipline perspective and that's actually really quite interesting we we didn't engage with employers directly because the the disciplines that we worked with don't necessarily have a very clear cut relationship with a particular industry or or indeed particular employers so we were I suppose more conscious about general digital skills and digital competencies rather than specific skills and competencies related to specific industries however I do know one of our partner universities in the project Manuthi University they have been doing some interesting work with their careers service and trying to in from employers what are the kind of specific skills that they are looking for from graduates and that is something that that that we plan to turn our attention to in DCU as well and does anyone else have any other um questions um I see some of you are are leaving you probably have another another session you you want to get to uh oh thank you so nice comments coming in the chat thank you Natalie and Ute. Thanks very much guys I might just um keep moving then um Rob you jump in when you can and um I'll keep going if that's okay is that okay yeah perfect yeah keep going okay so the next uh the game link uh Don I'm going to pop that into the the slides um so it'll be available on the slides after this session I I just wasn't able to put my hands on it there quickly so um the the game the link to the game or our version of the game um with