Good morning everyone and a very, very warm welcome to our event today, Open Learning and Education Seminar, which has come about because, unsurprisingly because of COVID, and our provise Chancellor for research at the Open University gave us all some money to have a look at what's going on and to do some research around this very, very important happening. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to review and have a look at some of the work we've been doing during this time on the COVID research front. As there are a lot of projects and a lot of people who've contributed, we decided to have a firehouse event. And of course when there's a fire you've got to be quick and you've got to put the water to get the fire out. So our speakers are going to speak just for two minutes and there'll be time for one question. And then we're going to have a short break and we're going to move into a panel event. We've got some very good speakers with us today to discuss what's going on in HE and their international speakers. So I hope you will enjoy that. Please put your questions into the chat. We want to know what you're thinking and issues that we want to raise. And I know it's not quite the same as being together, but I'm going to hand over to Thea who's going to run this part of the event. I see we've got our first speaker who's really quick off the mark here. So over to your chats. Looking forward to it. Speak to you all soon. Thank you Denise. Good morning and welcome. Just to briefly that this is a firehouse session, which means that our presenters have only five minutes to talk about their work. Two minutes they present their work and then three minutes they get one or two questions from you from the audience. I would like to ask you to keep your microphones and cameras off unless you're presenting. Should you have any questions, please you're encouraged to use the chat functionality. Over to our first presenter Simon. Effective teacher professional development or TPD for short is considered essential for the improvement of teaching quality in low and medium income countries. So our project has promoted TPD in Assam, India by the development and delivery of three digital badges to secondary school teachers. These badges help build teach understanding of and practice in using technology for learning. It's a collaboration between three academics from IET in Wells and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences based in Mumbai. The project has three main aims. First to utilize and scale the affordances of open digital badges and the teaching and assessment tools behind them. Each baggage comprises two to four weeks of study and the task of putting this learning into practice. The latter is important and was intended to help address an often frequent shortcoming of TPD delivery. Course materials were offered in English and Assamese to ensure access for all and each featured peer assessment. Significant supports were also provided such as orientation events, a telegram group, forums and volunteer tutor trainers. Teachers from over 200 schools in Assam have completed and earned at least one digital badge so far. The second aim has been to continue our ongoing work promoting a conversation about digital badges at the policy and strategic level, in particular with a view to rethink and innovate how TPD is supported and recognized. Indian government policy recently set minimum expectations for TPD for every teacher. So how is this to be achieved? Last November, as part of a previous project, we held an event for highly placed government officials. In this project we have enjoyed state support and in April, Assam's principal secretary of education himself hosted and issued a TPD badge. Our final aim has been to undertake research into how new modes and processes of digital assessment at scale, such as digital badges, have implemented, perceived and been used. Early research data indicates strong support amongst teachers, so going forward there will be potential to further scale implementation, to share knowledge and to develop new research opportunities. Thank you Simon, over to James for some questions. Excellent Simon. Firstly, can I ask a context specific question? Have you seen any differences as to how the use of digital badges is perceived by students in different contexts, perhaps comparing India to the UK? Yes, and I think very much in respect to the reception that it gets from teachers, it is clearly informed by local existing cultures and use of things such as certification in teacher professional development. One of the things that I think is really important to understand is the fact that there are many opportunities in places such as India to really build and to develop the concept of digital badges into something which is useful for teachers themselves. I think while we may have a particular formulation of that, it is still very much in its embryonic stage over there. We are at a moment in time where we really have potential to help shape that conversation, as I said in my presentation, and to build on the previous understandings of how one recognises professional development and also to form new conceptions of that. That's great. Thank you very much Simon. We really appreciate that. We'd be happy to move on to the next presenter. Hi, I'm Joe Hanley. I'm a lecturer in social work. This research is about piloting free CPDs of continuous professional development resources to support social workers involved in disasters, including pandemics. So social workers have been essential key workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic response. However, as in previous disasters, social workers have experienced numerous challenges in responding to the pandemic, including a lack of contingency planning and training, difficulty being flexible within strict statutory context, and disproportionate impact on vulnerable people that they support. So prior to 2020, the start of the pandemic, I've been working alongside the British Association of Social Workers, some experts, government partners, social workers and people with lived experiences of disasters to develop and support knowledge around the role of social work during disasters. The expertise of this group was actually drawn on quite a bit during the pandemic, and I supported in developing a number of guides and supporting documents for social workers working during the pandemic, including in relation to ethics, self-care, the role of social workers within multidisciplinary teams. The project that I'm undertaking as part of this looks at piloting the use of free online continuous professional development resources to rapidly upskill social workers during disasters or working in disaster response, including during future disasters or pandemics. The online resources have been largely completed with the support of colleagues in the Institute for Educational Technology at the OU and an initiative that I should say that they were also based on an initial systematic literature review carried out by colleagues in the University of Sterling, who have been great partners as well, who identified key themes in research, building on the work of the working group. So we're just about ready to start the pilot now. Thanks, Joe. Sorry, I couldn't see you. James, over to you. Thank you, Joe. Really interesting. Can I ask how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed or influenced the specific need for these materials to be available? I guess we were previously always working with social workers who had a small group of social workers who had experience in disasters, because unlike a lot of places in the world, the UK has been relatively lucky in the fact that we don't deal with regular, we don't deal with regular hurricanes or tsunamis or earthquakes and things like that, whereas a lot of social workers in other parts of the world have a lot of development around this. So we were working with a lot of social workers who had been involved in, say, Grenfell Tower and the response and supporting people after that or the Manchester Arena bombings and then historical things like the Hillsborough disaster as well. But the pandemic has really given almost all social workers, if not all social workers in the country, the experience of working during a disaster. So suddenly we've gone from having a relatively small amount of social workers who had experience working in disasters to arguably every social worker in the country having an experience of working in a disaster situation. So I think that this has driven the point home about the need for specific training because social work, to a large degree, has become more narrow in its focus and quite focused in statutory specific tasks, meaning that social workers can be a bit uncomfortable stepping outside that context. And we really hope that these resources provide, you know, deep social workers the skills and also just the confidence to be able to step outside those specific statutory tasks and to more effectively respond to disasters and or pandemics in the future. Excellent. Thank you, Joe. And if you could give a rapid twenty second response, how will these materials and the pilot be evaluated? Twenty seconds, well, I'm going to be focusing on democratic evaluations. So the idea of thinking about these materials and the pilot within the wider public valuing. So not necessarily specifically just focusing on what people thought about these resources of the specific impact they have on one social worker or one team, but thinking about their wider, broader impact and potentially even things around developing more awareness about this topic. Excellent, Joe. Thank you very much for that. We'll be happy to hand over to our next speaker, Professor Teresa Kremen. Thank you, Joe. Sarah is going to start us off. Hello, good morning everybody. This work addresses increasing concerns about the well-being of primary aged children in the UK and in particular those most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Given that research has predicted that the impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable of children is likely to be profound, the aims of the project are to provide rich texts and conversational resources for teachers and parents as they seek to support children's well-being at this time through reading together. That's teacher to pupil or parent to child. Reading together supports young children's well-being by providing a relaxed space to explore issues in sensitive, subtle and respectful ways. From a list of over 150 picture fiction, the OU team selected 30 books that focus on social and emotional challenges such as bereavement or anxiety and reflect children's diverse lives and realities including disability, culture, sexuality. Diversity of course is significantly underrepresented in children's literature. Those books that are available are not well known in classrooms or in the home. We analyzed the books multi-modally and we've developed a framework to assist parents and teachers to select, discuss and share picture fiction. We're developing CPD and home resources to mediate that framework so that parents and teachers can deepen their engagement with picture books and these will guide open-ended book talk in which and foster conversations in which children's voices, concerns and issues lead the way. This will encourage understanding of others' worlds as well as the capacity to cope with uncertainty together. In this way our research and the accompanying resources will support children's social and emotional well-being. We'll be sharing the work through the OU Reading for Pleasure Network that's over 100 teacher reading groups across the UK, 34 initial teacher education institutions and I'll work with over 60 schools and of course our research informed website. Thank you. Thank you Sarah. Can I firstly ask as well as well-being support, is your work going to support teachers as they seek to achieve academic catch-up? Yes, thanks James. I'll pick up that. Certainly it is the case as international research evidence that shows that when parents or teachers have conversations with children around books, conversations count, conversations matter the quality of that conversation is partly based on the talk itself but partly based on the quality of the text and we've identified very high quality texts and so that conversation will feed in to a young child's comprehension, widening vocabulary subtly and unconsciously but over time, but more importantly perhaps it will feed into the child's motivation to read their desire to read for pleasure and we have much stronger evidence that shows the will to read influences the skill. The OECD data unequivocally shows us a clear trajectory between the two. They feed each other in a kind of bidirectional relationship. So if these young children are reading these fabulous books, talking about these fabulous books, they're going to be feeding into their wider comprehension and vocabulary but more importantly perhaps they're going to be feeding into their desire to read and when they become readers, habitual readers in childhood that will stand them in good stead for the rest of that journey because if young people read for pleasure they fly faster and further through the curriculum and into their future careers than those who don't. Thank you, Theresa and could I also ask how will you ensure that parents as well as teachers hear about this work in order to support reading together at home? Thanks, good point. Well we do have a very strong professional network of teachers but in recent years we've been working harder to develop connections with parents not only through teachers but also directly through parents. On one of our advisory board is the CEO of ParentKind which is the umbrella organisation for all parent teachers associations in the country and so we're working with them on blogging potentially a webinar haven't fully explored ways to do that yet but we will be and we'll be linking this in to the OU's booknick which is part of this Department for Education's summer of reading this summer to try and reach out to parents to have family reading picnics as it were and to begin to share it there too. Great, thank you very much for that. We'll be happy to move over to our next project presenter, Hilary Collins. Hi, thanks very much for the opportunity. Our project is actually about the impact of COVID-19 on continuing professional development requirements for organisational development in the UK. What we actually did was realise about October 2020 that people were being devastated, certain industries were devastated by COVID-19 as we all know. We reflected on industry reports from McKenzie and Deloitte which were highlighting certain skills laps and from that we developed a proposal to do some in-depth creative workshops with different organisations across organisational sectors and industries in four nations to try and establish what the job requirements were that were required. We did this using a design thinking technique looking at a collaborative approach, a creative approach with people to define their needs and we used the design thinking approach which looks at empathy first, understanding what the user requirements are and you can see here a couple of illustrations of personas. In order to kick this off we did a wide range of audio surveys with people who've been impacted by COVID asking them what they thought their work skill requirements were and we developed these six personas which we took out to industry and to other universities as a starting point for our discussions on requirements. We found out actually that the job skills that were required certainly things like emotional intelligence and creativity were really very much in line with the future of work field what they had denoted. We also found Sorry I have to stop you, time's up thanks for your presentation. Over to James for some questions. Thank you Hilary Can I first ask what was the most surprising data or aspect of the data that you collected in the project? I think the most surprising aspect of the data was that industry at that particular point didn't have much of an inkling of their job skills requirements and during the workshops we had to go back and actually work with them on what their business model was likely to be first and from there move forward to the job skills requirements that would come from that shift in the business model as we all know in industries like creative industries and hospitality are really looking at how they can operate in different ways now. Thank you Can I ask something slightly different have you got any early insights as to what they consider to be key skills needed for upskilling or re-skilling that would help people secure a job? I definitely think creative skills and emotional intelligence are the key skills and we've reflected that in the development of our new micro-credential which is being launched in June so that people who have been affected or furloughed or lost jobs during Covid can actually have free places on that micro-credential. Great Thank you very much Lynette We'll be happy to pass over to our next project presenter Lynette Thomas at the OU in Wales. Hi there, good morning Bordard. In 2019 I began conversations with Council around the potential for professional training for teachers. Originally this was to look at increasing teachers digital competencies for the new curriculum for Wales which is being introduced in September 22. This was exerted by the more pressing need to support teachers to pivot online as a result of the pandemic. Funded by HEFCU, a Cardiff commitment CPD pilot project was co-designed to support the professional development needs of teaching staff in their approach to blended teaching technology. Over a period of six months we delivered six workshops and six webinars to a range of teachers from 21 institutions across Cardiff from primary, secondary FE the music service and the regional consortium working with the OU's learner and discovery services, the Institute of Educational Technology and the School of Education. Webinars were recorded and made available by the Welsh Government Education Platform Hub to teachers across Wales and we also translated taking your teaching online and open-learn 24-hour course for our Welsh language teachers. The project was also an opportunity to raise the profile of the OU and the benefits of quality online distance learning in the education sector an area where we want to grow our activity in Wales. IET evaluated the project and we've been able to share this learning with our partners. Engagement levels did decrease for many participants due to the challenges faced by schools during the winter lockdown but those who were able to remain engaged felt the intended benefits. The findings have stimulated ongoing discussion within the steering group partners and we are currently in discussion with Welsh Government about future funded rollout across Wales and how we use the OU's curriculum and expertise for delivering blended learning for upskilling teachers to deliver the new curriculum for Wales. This project is a great example of OU collaboration with local partners and in Wales all this our civic mission. Thank you, Diolch. Thank you, that's great. Right on time. Over to James. Thank you Lynette and nice to hear that kind of sense of localisation. Can I first ask how has the project helped the confidence of teachers in their delivery of a blended pedagogy? I think the fact that we had mixed learning groups was really important so fellow teachers were able to engage with each other across all levels in primary, secondary, FE and of course in the music service and they were absolutely essential to the co-design ethos of this project and for example one of the first workshops delivered by OU experts was around online classroom management and came from the participants themselves so I think the fact that we were able to make them available afterwards also helped grow their confidence. Great. And could I secondly ask where do you envisage or hope this pilot's project will lead to in the future? So we have started discussions with Welsh Government about how we can really roll this out across Wales. So this was in a specific local authority area and actually what we'd like to do is to roll it out across education consortia across Wales. So it's something available for all teachers in Wales with the added impetus of course of the Welsh language that we need to do everything bilingually in Wales for all of our public facing work. So I think working on sort of that confidence of teachers and educators being able to deliver online through the OU's expertise but also for COVID but also for the new curriculum for Wales which is a really, really exciting period of change for our teachers and so how to get access to training across the board across Wales will be really essential so great partnership opportunities with Welsh Government and our educators across Wales. Excellent and I think we have time for just another quick rapid response to the question from Mary Jacob in the chat which is what lessons from your project might also be useful for HE lecturers. Well actually we're also working with Cardiff University at the moment around one of our micro credentials for adult learners so I think it's a very different approach in many ways for working with adults and working with young people so I'm more than happy to share our findings for you and send you the report the evaluation with our recommendations should you wish. Great, thank you Lynette really excellent. I'll be happy to pass over to our next presenter Nashua Ishmael. Good morning all I'm waiting for my slide okay, thank you good morning all again in June to August 2020 over 500 teachers and educators from Africa took part in the pathways for learning project through open learning courses to support this shift to remote teaching and respond to the pandemic. Survey data in this project suggested that E-assessment is a challenging area for our colleagues in Africa and more understanding about this topic is needed. This current new project is a follow up from the previous summer project and it is a collaborative approach between the OU and colleagues in Africa. This project goes through four steps step one which is ready done identifying the needs by a poll that has been released with a participant from pathways projects to end up with three to four key issues and in the as a response to their needs to give them priority in the research. Step two developing resources to respond to the needs and step one by experts from the OU. Step three is a dissemination of these resources to facilitate experiencing these resources by their beneficiaries in Africa with the help of the ACDE African Council of Distance Education in Africa. Step four co-evaluation of these resources in real time interactive webinar attended by assessment experts from the OU and from our colleagues in Africa and colleagues who have already experienced these resources. We aim by the end of this project to help colleagues in Africa to customers and tailor these resources to respond to their local and contextual needs and that will inform higher education in Africa to respond to the shift to remote teaching and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you. Thank you, Nadja. You finished before the time end. I'm trying to make it. Thank you. Very prompt. Can I first ask what are the most challenging topics in E-assessment for HEE or higher education academics in Africa? The first hot topic with our colleagues is integrity, malpractice and cheating for assessment. That is one of the hot topics. The second one is E-assessment for large class number and we'll ask about this it's like over 200 students in the class how to assist these students. The third topic it's about E-assessment for hands-on experienced subjects like nursing physical education. Educators asking how can I assess the student who needs to for example take the blood pressure for a student. The fourth one which actually we founded with a team that cross-referenced the other three which is innovation, innovation of technology in E-assessment and of course we consider this the limited broadband affordance and the limited technology accessibility in some areas. These are the four topics that are the result of the surveys. Thanks, Nashville. We have a comment from David in the chat who thanks you for highlighting these challenges that have been experienced across HG in Africa. Can I ask secondly how do you see this project informing research as well as scholarship in the OU? Well we found I think it's a win-win agreement for the OU side where I think that can develop, we can develop learning resources that for our colleagues and maybe other similar contexts with the same approach because as a feedback from this project and also from the previous project we found that there are other similar areas that maybe they need resources to be developed like real-time teaching, non-real-time teaching, technology, developing technology which was limited affordance so similar resources can be developed the same way. Also knowledge exchange events I think that can open pipelines for different initiatives with knowledge exchange between ourselves, the OU and other African countries and other countries who have similar contexts and I think that also may open other opportunities for bidding in the same area. Excellent, thank you Nersha. We really appreciate those responses and we're happy to pass over to our next project presenter. We will have Sylvia Warnick and Maryam Hawke. Hello, thank you very much for having us. The OU's Open Centre for Languages and Cultures launched in 2020 carries significant political relevance. Within the context of a declining languages sector in UK higher education this important investment recognises that languages are strategically vital for recovery and the future of the UK. Therefore this development is designed as a test for alternative learning products alongside traditional accredited modules with for example new delivery models assessment approaches like professional body endorsement and types of curriculum. Our objectives are equipping learners with highly relevant communication skills also in times of crisis addressing disparities and access to languages provision and to fulfil the OU's social justice mission this week. Our principles of working in the centre are co-creation with partners like charities and research informed provision. Here are some examples of our COVID related or resulting in COVID short courses. One is the languages of disaster course exploring ways in which COVID-19 has been narrated across the world in 11 languages equipping learners with a toolkit for critically evaluating global crisis. Another one is spoken English for health and social care workers which is applied learning and use of English when environmental and non-verbal cues are missing due to face masks and PPE. We also do a lot of work in Indigenous and community languages for example our development of British Sign Language for Deaf people curriculum together with a charity and this is informed by collaborative research with the Deaf community to remove their barriers to participation in society. It features a novel pedagogy and means for digital communication. Sorry I cut you. It's fully online. Thank you. That's it. Thank you very much. Firstly ask now that Britain has left the EU is there really a need for more and new language courses? Thanks for the question. Well there is a report from August 2020 almost hot off the press by the British Academy the Arts and Humanities Research Council the Association of School and College Leaders the British Council and Universities UK. It states very clearly what Sylvia has already mentioned that languages are strategically vital for the future of the UK post Brexit and post pandemic. Last week there was a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages and there was a report presented that illustrated that language capabilities are a key driver for the success of small and medium enterprises in the UK. For the first time that report provided statistic proof that language capabilities add 30% in value to expertise and this is really good news for modern language teaching and our short courses in the open centre for languages and cultures are ideal for the employees of these enterprises. Thank you very much for that and frankly so. Can I secondly ask what are the challenges that come with teaching British Sign Language in an online medium and particularly perhaps a more advanced level what are you going to do to overcome these challenges? That's a very good question, thank you. British Sign Language is obviously a spoken language that it's why online delivery needs to allow us to capture all subtleties of signing and related body language so that we can recreate the immersive experience of face-to-face communication with sign language through the online medium and to achieve this we are working with the development team of our conferencing software provider to create a solution that is accessible for deaf and speaking learners and that for example incorporates features like mirroring and we are also undertaking research into effective multimodal transcription of recorded communication using the same tool, same conferencing tool and we are working on the development of a dedicated teaching approach for distance learning of British Sign Language we are going to trial a combination of synchronous modes especially at higher levels of British Sign Language where the courses need to cover a significant amount of content in the relatively short period of time and we are also developing students British Sign Language study skills as well as their language positions. Thank you very much William and thank you both for that presentation I'd now like to kindly pass over to Maria Aristaidu Nashwa, good morning all so the aim of this IT study was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on OU students so during November 2020 we interviewed 30 students who were studying with us during the pandemic the selection of students was made based on survey responses they gave in a previous study on COVID-19 so in that way we made sure that with our selection we captured experiences across genders, faculties, age groups ethnicities but also the experiences both of those who reported high or low impact on their learning activities our studies main findings indicate that our students learning activities and habits overall were not that much affected and even some of them mainly older students had more time to study during the pandemic students also expressed their appreciation for the OU support and in particular their tutor support however they also highlighted some areas that need improvement these areas were mainly related to their personal circumstances during the pandemic like employment constraints with students expressing their need to have them heard and accommodated to a greater extent. Another important area was the OU communication about changes to the modules with students suggesting improvements and they need to receive more information about the availability of tutors during these times. So our findings made us consider ways that the opinion university could better support the students during the pandemic or other similar disruptions and some suggestions involved reconsideration of the university teaching which is mainly focusing on the computer screen and instead using a greater range of technologies, learning activities and interaction types. Another suggestion is the better signposting of relevant support and available resources and even a space for sharing positive stories for student support. I'm done. Thank you. James. Thank you very much. Could I firstly ask the impact of COVID-19 on the study progress as well as the completion of students? Well, hello again. So actually the impact here some of the students reported that it is negative where they found that's really they are kind of cases of anxiety and feeling under pressure or maybe some of these that then they already lost their jobs. This is a negative aspect but it's not all of them. Other they found it as actually it puts them because they have more time when they to pay to their to their study and it motivated them to the study completion and the progress. One of the interesting themes that came across the impact on the study completion and progress it's the quality of study completion. So what quality the students really go ahead? So some of the students they really for them they said actually we are very satisfied because we got X mark and this is a high mark I didn't expect and that is a quality for them. Other students they say actually we are in this course because it's our interest in the topic and we are really happy because we learned something and other they say no actually because of the pandemic I didn't learn what I'm looking for and that's actually open a pipeline for future opportunities for this project to study what are the motivations for the OU students to get enrolled the course and maybe that we can build up a standardized study to know the motivation at the beginning of the course and during the course and by the end of the course and that will help us to build up a better understanding about the background of our students. Thank you Nashua Could I secondly ask how have students found the communication between themselves and their tutors during the lockdown period? Well this communication is one of the I would say emerging theme across different main topics so it's sometimes it's really down to the students themselves because they are not really willing to communicate so they say actually it's okay it went alright because already I would like to like make it a standard law and study and I'm not really interested to just I would like to do my work other they are on the other hand that they found this one they are dissatisfied because they would like the tutor all the time that to communicate with them and they are really interested that the tutor initiate the communication and other communication for them it's learning behavior so it is behavior that how they manage their learning so it's really what not one size fits all and it's down to the students themselves Thank you very much Nashua and thank you Maria I would like to now kindly pass on to our closing project and closing presentation but certainly not least here's Sas Amoa Marvellous, thank you very much okay so just a bit of context first of all we're going to do this project and we're going to put on the Open Learn Wasting Ethnicity Hub and for those of you who don't know the hub was created in the wake of Black Lives Matter movement last year following course for Global Justice so we thought it would be a great place to have these resources have a hub that pulls all these resources through that show historical perspectives, current day challenges on wasting ethnicity and somewhere that you can have articles videos, audios, timelines and courses that explore themes of race, racism ethnicity across the faculty or the faculties within the Open University yes so the hub was conceived really and developed with the support of the Open University but also the Black and Minority Ethnic Network through which I'm one of the co-chairs so specifically we realized not too long into this pandemic that the research even though it's still happening that a lot of the data seems to suggest that certain groups have been disproportionately impacted by Covid over others and I thought it would be a really good example to actually do a short film to start looking at some of the reasons that the coronavirus has really negatively impacted certain groups of people particularly people of colour in the beginning but as well it would be really good to use the short film to just dispel a lot of the myths the problematic myths that arise in relation to ideas of race and biology and genetics but we thought it would also be a really good opportunity to use it as kind of like an opening ambit for a film that starts to explore the inequalities that exist anyway that have been brought to the public's attention recently. It would be a really good opportunity to see that a lot of these inequalities haven't just started during the pandemic but exist and we've got lots of research as well about all of that stuff in the past and it would be really good to use this as just the opening ambit to really explore some of these themes within a short 10-15 minute film so yeah, our project is going to be a film really exploring the disproportionate impact of Covid on certain communities. Thanks Sass, that's great James. Yeah, thank you Sass and such a poignant topic. Can I firstly ask how do you put together a documentary such as this? How do you script it and choose selectively what you want to put in such a short time frame? Yes, so I suppose I mean it really helps to have something that resembles the structure so you've got some idea of the key points and themes that you really want to raise and things you think are really important to cover but you really also don't want to be too prescriptive as well like you might do with a drama where you can really second guess where the story might take you you have to be really kind of open to the kind of answers you might get from the people you're interviewing and you have to be really open to the kind of case studies that you might get as well so on the one hand you have a kind of a vague structure and you really want to touch upon the key themes but actually try not to be too prescriptive as well so the story itself has an opportunity to surprise you and you can learn something new that you had and secondly can I ask is there much video content on the race and ethnicity hub? Increasingly so we officially I think launched the hub after Black History Month last year but during the course of Black History Month we managed to capture a lot of those events which was fantastic not only because we got quite a bit of content but all of the videos were quite specific to OU, the situation of the OU as well in relation to degree awarding after the experience of staff so we've got I think about 10 to 15 videos that exists exclusively based on the content that was produced on Black History Month which is great, really fantastic to have those there and kind of the accompanying articles as well but I think this is the first thing that we would have commissioned specifically for the hub and relates to kind of such an important issue which is so current so we've got I think 10 to 15 existing presentations but in terms of new fresh video content this would be one of the first things we've produced Great, thank you Sir Lynette has also just commented to say that there is also further work being done regionally in Wales. To finally ask is this exclusively a project that involves Open University academics? No, but we are starting off whenever you would be aware of Dr Jenny Douglas and she's a senior lecturer in Wales who's done a huge amount of work on inequalities in race in the past so she'll be kind of reading on this work and it's fantastic to have her on board but we've touched base of Dr Winston Morgan who's a reader in toxicology and clinical biochemistry from the University of East London he's done lots of stuff for the garden as well and he's very keen to be involved so we had those two signed up and a few others we'll wait to hear back from Great, thank you Sass for the project presentation that we've had during this session happy to hand over to Thea to summarize Thanks James Well I would like first to thank all of the presenters for the very interesting presentations and the very interesting question and answer session I put together a summary of the presentations we hear about today so they covered a range of topics and audiences with a special and I would say expected focus on teachers and professional development across different contexts as we have seen the research activity in response to COVID-19 was not restricted to the UK but also expanded in context such as India and Africa activities presented had two objectives one to capture the impact of COVID-19 such as the impact of COVID on OU students their assessment and study practices that means to improve the OU provision and secondly they sought to implement interventions that have the potential to support those experiencing negative COVID effects in particular they produced resources to support teachers and the transition to online teaching parents and their children's well-being the BAME community most by COVID and enable upskilling or re-skilling for various groups such as social workers, the deaf and BSL communities what is remarkable is the fact that many of these projects did not happen in isolation they were the result of significant partnerships or collaborations with external to the OU organizations such as charities and government bodies showcasing the value and direct impact that research can have when it's happening alongside those organizations heading forward these projects could be seen as areas we should focus our attention and put our research efforts on in particular the development of certain skills to cope with post-COVID changes in society and has the quality and access to online teaching and learning promote social justice and reduce inequalities across communities hit by COVID and support the well-being of parents and children this is the end of the first part of this event and this will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by professor Denise Whitelock and some exceptional guests. Thank you


public interest birds of a feather session with a SPI board or a subset of the SPI board. We have Badele Garby, who's the president. We have Michael Schulteis, who's the treasurer. Jonathan McDowell, who is the secretary. And Jimmy Kaplowitz, who is the director. So everybody, welcome to the board here. And I'm not sure, Michael, are you starting off? Thanks for coming to the SPI BOF. Our brief agenda is an introduction of the board members and officers we have here, which has already occurred. Then we have a brief overview and history of SPI, a slide showing our associated projects, a slide about our financial status, and then a question and answer section. At DEPCOMP 10, we have half of the board of directors of SPI present, Badele, Jonathan McDowell, myself, and Jimmy Kaplowitz. Joshua Drake, who is involved in the Postgres project, was originally scheduled to attend DEPCOMP 10, but due to scheduling difficulties, he was unable to make it. We also recently had board elections. For the past several years, we have had a nine-member board of directors, but we had five open seats this time and four people running for their seats. So we shrank down to our minimum size of eight people on the board of directors. SPI is software in the public interest. It's a nonprofit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. It's an organization that holds Debian funds in the United States. It also has assets such as the Debian trademark, local domain names for Debian projects, as well as the copyright to the Debian logo. I was just going to amplify slightly. One of the things that's interesting about having DEPCOMP not only in the United States but in New York is that we're actually incorporated in the state of New York as a New York corporation. So even I guess Jimmy's the only person who's on the board who's currently a resident of this fine state. For legal reasons, this is where the corporate headquarters are. So just an interesting little factoid here. This is a brief history of SPI. As B. Dale mentioned, we were incorporated in the state of New York. That happened on June 16th in 1997. In 1999, the United States Internal Revenue Service granted SPI 501C3 tax exempt status. That means contributions from donors within the United States may be tax-aductible. SPI was originally started to serve the needs of Debian, but it's ground to serve many other additional free software projects. This slide lists the associated projects of SPI. We have OSUNIX, which is an open-source version of Solaris. There's PATH64, which is a high-performance compiler. CITIX is a Debian-based distribution, which is based on the SID or unstable version of Debian. Of course, there's Debian itself. The OFTC IRC network, open office.org, free desktop.org, Provoxy, mad Wi-Fi, Fresco, Postgres, Yaffare, OpenVas, Tux for Kids, Gallery, the Helios Project, Open Voting Foundation, OpenWRT, and Drupal. And I apologize if I missed anything. Oh, GNU Tux Max. That was joined SPI several years ago and hasn't been very actively involved in SPI, but they still do have a non-zero financial balance with SPI, so I assume they're still somewhat associated. This is the financial status of SPI as of June 30th. As you can see, Debian has a fairly significant balance. Most of those, or a good portion of those, Debian funds will be spent paying for the DEF CONF-10 conference. But there are several other projects that have non-zero balances. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask me about that since I'm the SPI Treasurer. SPI membership is open to anyone who is interested in applying for membership. There are two different types of SPI memberships. There's what's called non-contributing, which doesn't give you voting rights in SPI. Then there are contributing membership. You can find out more about the membership at the URL at the bottom of this slide. As of yesterday, there were 847 current members, including 405 non-contributing and 442 contributing members. And all of our SPI board meetings are held in the SPI channel on OFTC. We also have several mailing lists. You can go to list.spi-inc.org to find out more about our mailing list. You can also talk to half of the board here at DEF CONF-10. And that's all we have in our slide deck, so we'll open it up to questions. Any questions? Well, I have a question for the people who aren't asking questions. Since you don't have questions, why are you here? What made you interested in coming to this talk? What's your interest in SPI? I'll answer, but it's really not a bad, it's not a good answer. It's just way overcrowded. I'll comment. It's very interesting because a number of years ago, we had some serious process problems in SPI. There's the sort of infamous issue of a box of materials that were in the hands of our then-treasurer going missing and a lot of checks not getting deposited and having to go back to donors and apologize either for losing their checks or whatever. One of the things that I think is something I think that all of us on the board are particularly proud of is that it's been years now since we've had any of that kind of unpleasantness going on. Things, for the most part, are just working pretty well, and we've been gradually accreting more projects. If you think about it, back in 1997, when we were first incorporated, the whole motivation was that there needed to be some legal entity in the US to hold various assets on behalf of the Debian project. One of the wonderful things about Debian, after all, is that it's an organization of volunteers who've made common cause, but there's no particular company behind it. It's one of the things that really substantially differentiates us from many other Linux distribution activities. And at the same time, in order to be able to accept donations of hardware from certain companies who wanted the tax benefits of making a donation in order to be able to accept financial donations from individuals and have them able to get the tax benefits that you can have of donating to a recognized non-profit corporation in the US and things like this on whole domain names and trademark paperwork and all these sorts of things, we needed to have a legal entity somewhere. And thanks to the folks who were motivated to do the work, we got one in the US. It's actually kind of cool now, if you pay attention to such things, there are a number of organizations in other parts of the world. You know, we've got FFIS, I guess, in Germany. There's the Association Software Lever in Brazil and various other organizations around the world that are holding assets on behalf of the Debian project. And so SPI is now just one of a set of organizations holding legal assets and financial contributions in different parts of the world when you look at this from a Debian perspective. But simultaneously, SPI has gone broad. The original charter was written sort of expansively with this notion that if we're going to go to the trouble of incorporating and getting 501c3 tax exemption status, which is non-trivial, no matter how good your lawyers are, it takes a year or so to get through all that paperwork. If we were going to do that, we might as well take a more expansive view of the world. And as you can see from our associated projects list, there are a lot of interesting projects now that are taking advantage of our services. Some of them are a little higher overhead to deal with than others, but all in all, I'm just tickled that this mechanism we built has been able to survive that test of time and that we've seen both this expansion of other organizations holding assets in other countries for Debian so we aren't always getting nailed with international funds transfer and asset transfer legal constraints. And at the same time that we've been able to expand the role of SPI to provide that same set of services to a lot of other really worthwhile projects. Anyway, you know. So I guess kind of two things that I was just going to say, I thought of is that I mean I have to agree, I think you guys have been doing a great job lately. I mean I've actually followed the mailing list, I do pay attention to the SPI traffic in part because I'm also involved in a great deal with Postgres. And I was really happy to see that project start working with you guys and I know Josh Drake's now a member on the board and I think that's all great. I guess the only thing I was wondering is I know there was a point at which and I don't know if this was really in confidence or whatnot but it was expressed to me some concern about using SPI for Postgres and for that project. I don't know if you guys know anything, I mean is everything going kind of well in that? Oh, yeah, okay. I think things are actually going really well. There was a point in time where we had some turnover in the membership of the board and for some folks that was an enabler where all of a sudden they said, okay well people we didn't necessarily want to deal with aren't there anymore. In other cases it's like oh well the people we like to deal with aren't there anymore. So there were a few sort of transitional things over who the people were on the SPI board. That was a few years ago and since then things have in that regard been very calm I think because it's all maybe we've had fewer strong personalities duking it out with each other in board meetings. Maybe it's something else I don't know but the sense I have today is that the only sort of lingering problem if you want to call it that is that such a high percentage of the people on the board would list Debian as their primary project affiliation. You know on some level I would love to see people running for the board to get board seats who would list some other project as their primary affiliation. Having Josh on there from the Postgres QL community is wonderful but you know it'd be great to see folks from other places. On the other hand you know I was talking to Keith about the Keith Packard about this before the last election sort of pointing out that you know by the way poke poke this is the time of year where if you wanted to bring somebody forward from the free desktop world or something and his reply was why would I you guys are doing fine. And so there's this sort of funny trade-off if you look at it you know there's a bunch of Debian folks on the board and doing things for SPI you know we originally created the corporation because Debian had a need and so I'm not too bothered by that correlation it's we're not there because we're trying to push a Debian agenda it's just you know this is a set of services the project needs and we're happy to provide those to other people too but I know that sometimes people who don't know us very well look in from the outside and go ah it's just a bunch of Debian guys. I also want to use a VDL term amplify a couple of the things VDL has said in his answers you know I don't think there was anything quite like SPI back when we started in 1997 and now as he's mentioned there is the Software Freedom Conservancy Association Software Libre FFIS and I I mean there are some other organizations as well that serve one project like Python Software Foundation Free Software FreeBSD Foundation that's all great as well but no foundation good example which they started their own foundation after formally being SPI affiliated. I just think it's you know another form of SPI going broad and serving many different needs is people adopting aspects of SPI's model that they like for their own organizations in other countries or in the US when they want to do things a little differently and I think that's great similar to how organizations in the cooperative movement are not competitors with other cooperatives I think it's great that we've sort of helped cooperate into a whole system of umbrella organizations which was a great innovation back in the 90s and still is. My name is Jack Farahur. The question is as a 503C are you allowed to lobby political organizations and institutions and do you? No we do not and we're not legally allowed to do so there are certain exceptions where you can make limited lobbying but it's best not to perform any lobbying at all so you don't get in trouble with the IRS. If we wanted to do any more political activities or lobbying or legislative that would be best done with the creation of an additional legal entity or more than one and if we wanted to do that it would take sufficient interest and manpower. The only other thing I'd add to that is people have asked us at various times well what else can we do what else would SPI like to do and my answer has always been that if SPI contributing members have things that they would like to do in the name of the corporation they should come and have a conversation with the board about it and if it falls within our charter and the boundaries of our legal permissions that we're very likely to have a conversation with the board about it and I think the key benefit of it is that my focus and that of I think most of the current board members has been on getting the small set of things that we've absolutely committed to our associated projects we would handle on their behalf so they didn't have to think about it didn't have to worry about it and that would be our problem not theirs and get those right and you know if we run the clock back to that period of time it's all of that right so everyone trusted that we knew how to do those things and so forth I'm very pleased that that's all sort of history now and everything's good and everybody's seems to be quite satisfied with the services we're providing but when given the choice I'd rather you know stay focused on a small set of core services and get those absolutely perfectly right than to you know add more activities that may very well have some other possible home that would be just as reasonable place as a another one of those none of us are paid to do any of the things that we do so if other volunteers who are part of our contributing member base would like to you know propose other activities that they would like to do on behalf of and in the name of SPI the board is always willing to hear proposals like that. I have usually quite some concerns with people willing to take over open source project usually and SPI is probably a good target for them what kind of protection those SPI has in constitution or other parts to protect from being taken over and has there been some sort of maybe duplicating organization in smaller so I actually the whole notion of sort of being subverted or taken over by bad actors you know who don't have our best interest at heart is something that we have been talking about a lot I personally think it's an over stated risk in a lot of places and watching certain other organizations that I've tried to provide some advice and guidance to navigate this whole space I've been disappointed how timid people are sometimes but in the SPI case I think that our current structure has two very significant protections against that kind of activity one is that in order to have a vote in the election process you have to be aware that the committee is reasonably generous with granting contributing membership but there is you know a real litmus test there around the notion of are you an active participant in the free software process are you making contributions to some project are you a member of one of our associated projects that sort of thing so there would be no straightforward easy mechanism for you know a bunch of barbarians that show up at the gate and magically have voting and the second piece is that under our current bylaws and current set of behavioral processes we don't reelect all of the board every year it staggered over a three year term and so as a consequence it was a strange situation this year that we actually had five board seats open that would not normally be the case and it just has to do with links of service and when people filled gaps and all of this sort of thing there is a lot of debate about the merits of having this kind of a rolling board versus just reelecting everybody every year and I'm not of hugely strong opinion on this but many other successful 501 C3s that I've been a part of or have observed in the past have used this sort of rolling board thing and has the potential both to provide some continuity across you know an annual election process but also I think it does provide some protection against you know being deeply gamed. I feel free to add this if it's not what I'm going to say but given that we are a 501 C3 we can't be taken over into a for profit entity all of SPI's assets are permanently dedicated to charitable non-profit public purposes we could transfer assets as a project's request to say the Software Freedom Conservancy or probably FFIS or other groups but we can't transfer them to say Microsoft for their general use even if Microsoft wanted us to and paid us a lot of money. Perfectly said. I'm Karen Sandler I'm with the Software Freedom Law Center so as a lawyer sitting here I just wanted to say oh there's one more question. So beyond just transferring assets if software in the public interest were to conduct its activities in a way that didn't support Freedom Conservancy or software as per its non-profit mission the IRS when it looked at the annual reports would probably have a big problem with it so just the 501 C3 status is some assurance about it being gamed. No thanks that's great and you know this is part of what I was saying earlier that the process of acquiring that status is that we have as board members is to make sure that all of our activities remain in compliance with relevant laws. It's one of the reasons we've been so pleased to see certain projects Debian included taking advantage of similar services being offered by other organizations in other geographies and other legal systems around the world is that's another interesting sort of protection in this particular case you know not all of Debian's assets are in SPI's hand some of them with FFIS some of them are in Brazil which is on one of the lists recently from the Debian auditor I guess is the title of that role now and it was really quite interesting to me I had not been paying enough attention to realize that as significant a percentage of Debian's assets are sprinkled around in various places as they are and I think that's very healthy for the project so it also means when we're trying to do things like reimburse expenses for people in Europe or in South America or something we aren't constantly being burned by international money transfer fees which we all know how to deal with it but it's not cheap what do contributing members do what's the range of volunteers you're looking for yeah we would really really like to throw out our current website infrastructure and replace it all if I end up doing it I'll end up being you know icky wicky and get but yeah we have this sort of problem it's a classic problem every volunteer organization has somebody has a great idea they implement a bunch of infrastructure it works fine as long as they're there to massage it and care for it and when they're gone other people are gonna go what is this and how does it work and so you know it's not a big deal but we sort of would love to fix that at some point that's probably the biggest thing that we as a board care about right now you know there are various tasks that come up from time to time we've committed to scrubbing the contributing membership list I guess around the time of annual elections to make sure that we aren't accumulating no longer active participants and messing with quorum numbers over time and that sort of thing and I suspect that someone were interested in helping massage the database that something could happen at some point but no on a day-to-day basis there are not a whole lot of tasks that are just sitting around lacking attention I would encourage people when the board elections come around next year if this is something you're at all interested in or have friends that you'd like to poke with sharp sticks to have them stand I would much rather have more candidates than seats than the other way around so I guess two questions just popped in my head from that is which database are you using it's Postgres backed it's the websites currently blown running on top of Postgres okay and then the other question I was wondering about is how are you going to how is the scrubbing of the membership list going to work I'm just curious about the you know like notify people we're going to take you off for I'm also on the SPI membership committee in our current bylaws we have the means to basically inspire people several years ago there was actually an automated process to you basically set the expiration date and then some system would automatically email someone saying hey do you still want to be a contributing member unfortunately we don't seem to know how to make that work anymore so in addition to the main website we also need assistance in updating the membership website because we have quite a few issues with that not functioning the way that we would want it to for 100% functionality so in the current board resolution that was made some months ago we agreed that after the board election we'd send people who didn't vote now in this case no one voted but we'll we'll send people who are contributing members of status ping saying hey are you still involved in the community do you still want to be a contributing member and if they respond great they'll stay if they don't then they'll be reversibly not permanently downgraded to non-contributing and if they want to be re-upgraded and still meet the criteria which any member of a associated project like Debian or Postgres automatically does then they can certainly be getting contributing status this will mainly just the motivation for this is partly just to ensure the contributing membership means something but also BDL alluded to quorum requirements there are some major improvements that we could make in our bylaws but we have to get a certain percentage of our contributing members so quorum requirements do actually matter yeah I forgot I've been saying for years that would be wonderful if someone just like sit down and fix our bylaws and we have conflicting opinions about the right fixes we have no conflict at all about the fact that what we currently have is self-contradictory and impedes progress the language and the bylaws around when we are supposed to hold meetings and what we have to do to hold a meeting for example is did not comprehend monthly board meetings on IRC and so nobody's likely to call us on it and the bylaws have a set of requirements which we do our best to meet in the context of wanting to operate in a more responsive and more modern way so I guess regarding that do we have reporting obligations to the IRS or other folks yes and we actually do file IRS reports every year you can check websites like guysdar.org you can see our 990s okay so but we don't have to principally we have to report to the IRS so we don't have to report to the federal trade folks or anything like that okay nothing with the federal trade commission or FCC or anything like that we also actually do more reporting than we have to for example in our meeting agendas and I think our meeting minutes as well and also on the contributing member SPI private mailing list the first two locations that I mentioned are public we give monthly treasure reports similar to what Michael showed plus incoming expenses and we're generally a lot more open than we're required to be so there's a lot of ways to see what we do that's also led to the interesting situation that the last three or four years we've briefly had a conversation about do we need to generate an annual report to our contributing members and we always sort of lean back and go back to the report on that isn't already where they can click and get it and the reality is it would probably be a nice thing for us to do to create some kind of you know at least a token object that had links to the right places or something but it is quite interesting that unlike some other 501c3s serving the free software world we do have all of our board meetings on a completely open channel and things like this so there's just very little at any given moment that you know our contributing members don't already have access to that would you know lend meaning to the process of generating something like an annual report to members so if somebody really wants to draft an annual report for us we volunteer as always welcome any other questions well thank you very much for your time and your attention now you know what we look like we'll be around the rest of the week if you have questions or thoughts or ideas for us feel free to let us know please tell your projects about us have them get more involved pay attention to us


news update. Good afternoon folks. This is Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of Delray Beach, Florida. This is your 1pm update and currently a slightly mixed bag out here. That mix is coming from the semizer down 32 points about nine tenths of a percent. Otherwise we get all the other U.S. indices trading to the upside. That was up 704. It wants higher price. The S&P wants is up 62 at 4600. It too wants higher price. Up 113. It too wants higher price. We'll go take a look at those short term time frame charts here momentarily just to show you what we're looking at out there. You've got gold is back $2. Silver's off 14 pennies. Lights recruit up $2.58. Let's go take a quick peek here. We'll go to our nine panel charts here momentarily. But first we're going to go take a look at those short term time frames. That way you can see what we're looking at. What we're looking at here are TD9 counts. The ESMini in the upper left has formed a TD9 count that was confirmed at 11.30 this morning. And as we were coming on the air price had taken that level out. That suggests that price should continue to move higher. The same thing we take a look at the NQ. The NQ took out the TD9 count top. It did it as we're coming on there at one o'clock. That suggests higher price. Same signal down here for the Dow Equity Future contract. So all three of those. Now the Russell is going to go ahead and form bar number nine of a TD9 count pattern. It will do that by 130. So between 130 and two we could see the Russell 2000 pull back out there. But that's what's going on on the ultra short term time frames. Let's go take a look at our nine panel market update chart. And as we do that we're going to get back to the black background. Let's go ahead and change screens here. The upper left you see the ESMini. The ESMini brand new profile that did form on Friday. The bottom of that profile is at 45.37. Last week we know the bottom of the weekly at 45.04 held. This suggests to move up to 46.49. As long as the spot follow continues to move lower that is a likely outcome. It's still above the 50 day exponential moving average. It says any surprises would be to the downside out there. The NQ trying to form an A to B equal CD pattern. You can see that it's already done the one to one. But we're waiting to see if it can generate a bullish reversal candle. The US dollar index is just consolidating with inside his daily profile between 95.66 and 96.94. Lights recruit is also formed a new profile 17.67.90 is the bottom of its profile or support in 18.02.20 is resistance. Silver also forming a new profile with support of 22.27. Resistance at 23.93. Lights recruit just consolidating inside his profile out here. It's right now at a key level of resistance up at the 69.15 level. Folks stay tuned for the trader's edge. If you ought to start your Monday have a magnificent one. Thanks for being here. Look forward to seeing you soon.


Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. So now is the turn of Ali Hassan Ali from ICDB The title of the talk is understanding fluctuations in water in a molecular perspective so Ali, please. Yeah, I'm just waiting to okay. Let me I Screen Okay, do you see my screen? Yes. Okay Let me Thank you Uriel for The kind introduction and where's my screen there we go. So I'm sorry I changed the title of my talk last minute But the message is going to be the same and basically what I want to tell you about today is on the many faces of water basically on the computer and So I want to start with a bit of popular culture Which is if you're looking for inspiration on the many faces of water This is really nice TV series that ended last year unfortunately called the game of thrones and in the game of thrones is this guy called the white knight Who's made up of ice? And it's a it's a really interesting series, but if you're looking for it Sorry, what what is that our white knight? Is it the king of a knight or a knight king? No white knight king. Thanks No, it is it's very important and So if you're looking for inspiration on on different phases of water, that's a good place to start So the question I want to ask today is basically is water a silent spectator in many of the the processes that we are interested in as chemists physicists or biologists or even as engineers and What I've been interested in for for a while now is trying to understand Molecular fluctuations in liquid water So I know that we have a rather diverse audience here and so I just wanted to give you a bit of context so If you are interested in any type of chemical reaction in water Or any chemical reaction in sort of solution chemistry all those chemical reactions happen in a solvent environment and if you open up any textbook in basically general chemistry or physical chemistry The the role of the solvent in chemical reactions in physical processes is is sort of a rather mysterious object That's sort of put under the rug On the other side if you if you come from the soft matter Community you're obviously well aware that you know processes like protein folding The development of lipid bilayers you've some of the things you've heard in today's talks All these processes happen in the water and so what I'm interested in doing along with my collaborators is combining Both atomistic simulations as well as smart data mining to learn new physics and chemistry essentially And so What I want to do in in my talk today is not getting to any specific results Or not too many specifically just to give you an overview and a context of Maybe some of the things that you'll hear about in the talks to follow So, you know water is a is an extremely interesting and weird and also a very controversial Liquid in the literature So, you know, you've all sort of seen these types of plots most liquids Well, you know when you increase temperature the density decreases Liquid water is this anomaly which is that is a density maximum at 40 degrees Celsius You can also look at other thermodynamic properties like the compressibility and the heat capacity and when you look at the compressibility of water It has this interesting minimum at 319 Kelvin and then as you undergo cooling the compressibility increases And so a lot of these anomalies in water have been attributed to it's the hydrogen bond network So, you know liquid water is is on average a tetrahedral Structure so it accepts and donates two hydrogen bonds on average and they've been numerous debates in the literature on What is really the origin of these anomalies and also more importantly, what is the molecular structure? Of what and I'm just sort of giving showing you here Some of these papers that have been published Both experimental and theoretical work. So this is an interesting review Couple of years ago Discussing that liquid water and room temperature Exists as two co-existing liquids There's this very recent very interesting work by Pablo de Benedetti and Francesco Schortino and published in science just last month Where they did a very long molecular dynamic simulation So microseconds and microseconds of several water models and where they claim or they find from their simulations a second critical point In in now a realistic water model And these are two at the bottom here are the interesting Titles This is a paper published last year by Bill Goddard's group Claiming that liquid water is a dynamic polydispersed branched polymer Which was very quickly Rebuddled by Francesco Presani and Teresa had Gordon Saying water is not a dynamically poorly dispersed branched polymer. So that you know the You'd think that water being one of these the most ubiquitous liquid been studied for Centuries essentially that we would have figured all of it out But it continues to pose a lot of interesting puzzles and I want to If there's one thing I want you to take away from my presentation is is is basically in this slide and and that is the role and importance of non-local chemistry and So if you're if you're a physicist You might be more inclined to thinking about the role of collective fluctuations. Okay, and So this is related to a problem where where I actually got interested in this and that is the ionization of water So in in textbook chemistry They'll you will maybe teach this or you'll write the ionization of water as this chemical reaction here And so basically it's two H2O get gives you the hydronium ion and the hydroxide ion and Chemistry textbooks are full of these types of Chemical reactions Where the solvent bath is sort of ignored or not thought to play an important role in the process Or it's it's assumed that it's it's important, but it's not really understood how and why so I want to play this movie for you which is a a movie of the time-reversed process of the Ionization of water, which is the recombination and I'll start to play it now and what you're going to see here is so this is on the left side is the positive charge Which is the hydronium ion so this guy here and then on the right side is the negative charge Which is the hydroxide and I'm only showing Those ions with some water molecules sandwiched in between and the rest of the bath is blurred out Which are going to see something very interesting happen So you just saw that the single proton tried to jump across a hydrogen bond and Then there's some fluctuations in the liquid and eventually There's a Collective breathing mode in the liquid along this sort of wire that leads to these three protons hopping along the wire and Leading to neutral water And so this was really the the starting point for me in thinking about the types of Collective fluctuations in water and why this is interesting and challenges that challenging is that you've got three different components that need to be Integrated into each other one is the role of density fluctuations The other thing is that water is a directed network, so it has some interesting topological properties so you have to understand the coupling of both topology and density and Finally a very important aspect that plays into role, especially in processes like this is the role of charge Transfer, okay And so this is an example of a of a really basic chemical reaction in water Which determines the pH of water so the number of the concentration of protons in solution But who's underlying thermodynamics and kinetics and mechanisms is still actually not completely understood So I want to give you just one example of Recent problem that we've been interested in and that is related to density fluctuations and it's possible implications Sorry Ali, can I ask a question from you? Yeah What is the underlying interactions Concluded in the simulation that you show the film of it What is the what is the underlying principles in the simulation? So basically this this actually relates to something that Ali Najee had in one of the slides which is essentially, this is the distance where At the Buram length Where the where the electrostatic energy gets much larger than thermal energy? And so when you get to this to this Critical distance you've got, you know the very strong charge charge interactions that drive these proton transfer Processes, so it is not any kind of quantum interactions included in this in this simulation You mean practically, okay, so yes, these are ab initio DFT molecular dynamics All right. I see. Thank you. Thanks Okay, so I want to say a bit about density fluctuations and possibly With some crazy implications on the origin of life And so what I've been interested in for a while is inserting Hydrophobic solutes in water and so one way to think about hydrophobic salvation is if you have a box of waters Essentially, if you want to create or put a hydrophobic solute in it, you have to wait for Sometime before an empty space Gets available. Okay, so you sit yourself in your water network You study the density fluctuations and you wait until, you know, you create an an empty space Where you can then insert a hydrophobic solute in so they've been Decades and decades of work done on this but mostly people focusing on The salvation of spherical cavities Okay, so you can ask questions like what is the thermodynamics associated with the creation of spherical cavities? of different sizes and this is related to the free energy of Putting a hydrophobic solute inside and so We started to to revisit this and I'll just essentially tell you the result Which is we've been using a lot of classical MD along with a technique a technique known as a veranoid void tessellation and What I'm showing you here are distributions of the normalized volumes of voids empty spaces found in liquid water and in liquid methane and What you find is that there's a Both liquids are dominated by Objects that look like like spherical cavities, but then you have this long tail of Cavities here that look like all these exotic Shapes that you find here and if you stare hard enough you might find a guy shooting a basketball net and Also a small dinosaur But the the take-home message here is that then the spontaneous fluctuations in These two liquids water and methane lead to these transient dry spots that are quite delocalized and with rather exotic dendritic shapes and If you start staring at these long enough You might begin to think and ask well Some of these look like possibly small polymers and so Could there be some interesting Relationship between the thermodynamics of the creation of these shapes and the thermodynamics of solvating small hydrophobic polymers And and the answer is yes, and so I don't have time to to go into the details. This is a work done by a brilliant postdoc in our group who left Nargis Ansari and so what we discovered by doing Simulations of lots of different small polymers. So for me a polymer is you know an object that looks like this So it has six to ten membered chains and what you can find is that there are shapes that Naturally occur in the liquid through density fluctuations Without the polymer that are consistent with the shapes that the polymer takes and You can also do the thermodynamics. You can ask what is the free energy to solvate a Polymer like the one on the on the left and the one on the right Versus the thermodynamics of the creation of these empty spaces and the two are are essentially consistent And so what this is sort of suggesting is that you know that they are these spontaneous fluctuations of the liquid This is true for both actually liquid water and liquid methane that Sorry, we have a question from now on Yes, hi Ali. So yes questions like that. There are zillions of these shapes Are always you can find some particular it could be a shape of my face or anything else because of the fluctuation so how can means Say about like the you can find Mostly or maybe like cat like or dinosaur like or what? Yeah right, right so So basically You can because we have you have statistics, right? So, you know in an ensemble you have a million voids Okay, then you can ask out of those a million voids. How many of them are In just for the sake of argument branch shaped like the one I'm showing you Okay, so then then you then you know what the free energy is to create a branch shape void and Then you you can compare that to the free energy That you get from like thermodynamic integration of Solvating a branch shape like how you get filter for these branch shapes means is there some criteria like some particular shape Leap for long or I don't know means have three energies Much lower compared to other that you filter them out and then you have to study them later Or what what is the criteria to filter out the? so so in the case of For example in the case of the the the branch shaped We have a we have a way to to ask what is the or to quantify? What is the overlap in the? The ensemble of the branch shape polymer when the polymer is there to When the polymer is not there So we have we have a way to match it Basically, yeah, okay. Thank you Ali. Thanks So So it's okay without going into details what one can then do is and sort of ask how does this change as a function of the phase diagram of water and I don't have time to get into this but what's interesting is if you undergo super cooling Whether a lot of these interesting anomalies you get the clustering of these large voids informing large connected regions of empty space Okay Okay, so in the last couple of minutes of my talk I want to just Go ahead Riza Okay, and just I'm wondering that's if the if some kind of the polymers can fill this Voids maybe if you look at the solubility of the different Polymers we can we should find something very a Peak when the size of the polymers or shape of the polymer are the size of the boys that you have here Fantastic point. Yes. That's a great question So we we only measured the solubility for these class of polymers Six to ten my my guess is that Anything above 14 Would have a big drop in the solubility because It becomes much rarer and rarer to find those things through spontaneous fluctuations I'm just wondering if in the experiments people have seen such kind of the The point the point is the Well, you would have to yes So one would have to design a polymer like the ones that I have like wire versus branch for example And try to see as a function of increasing the size In a wire versus branch. Do you see a peak in the solubility? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Yes That's a I don't think anyone's done it. No, but yeah Okay, so In the last couple of minutes that I have I just want to let's say get some perspectives on Where I think the real interesting stuff is happening in the field of it's a physical chemistry of water There's a lot of interesting problems in interfaces So whether you're looking at a glass of water or you're sitting on the sand Looking at silica water interfaces or you're dealing with proteins all of these substances involved some boundary between one surface and another and The question the basic question is the following How does the structure and dynamics and electronic properties of water change? near these interfaces Okay, and so there's lots and lots of experiments and also simulations Showing and suggesting and again full of controversies on the extent of these perturbations that changes And so I just want to motivate one of the examples. You'll hear about this more from Ricardo Either tomorrow and Friday and that's related to soap bubbles so we've been a part of a project here that's related to artificial photosynthesis which sort of Has this idea that one can use soap bubbles To emulate what a leaf does and so a leaf Takes light and converts that into chemical energy, right? And so the idea is can one synthesize artificially a Membrane or a series of membranes and proteins like you'd have in a leaf in a soap bubble morphology And so I will not get into the details since Ricardo will show some of these results, but there's some very interesting Questions and this is one of my last slides that that come up from these types of synergies So this is a snapshot of the simulation of this water with a surfactant so like the one that Edgar was talking about and so some of the questions that One can ask in what experimentalists are interested in are for example, what is the thickness of the interface? How much water penetrates into the surfactant? What is the role of orientation of electronic polarization at the interface? To what extent and by how much does water slow down in these regions? Can one measure a local viscosity for example That can Be used in you know continuum type models like the ones that Ali Najee was talking about as well as Ali Rajapur And finally if you've got solutes like water or gases that are moving through the interface How do they diffuse through and are they traps that affect the diffusion? So this is a problem that we're Interdisciplinary a joint collaboration with the the people That I've listed in the bottom and I'd be interested to hear some of your thoughts on addressing these types of questions I'll end with this slide here. So Going back to this where I started So I'm a firm believer in the use of atomistic simulations I've sort of been Slightly yes, we're a little bit over time Fine, fine. I stop I stop I stop I stop So unfortunately, we don't have time for more questions in fact Is a will kind of will lose the Loose at the time of the break because the break was supposed to be until five and it's 504 so I Succeeds to continue with the next talk Just to respect the program is scheduled because Everyone's just just a five minute breaks. I think we anyway If everyone will be able to do that, maybe they have other commitments or I don't know if everyone is okay We can take five minutes, but if someone is not okay, just say it and we can continue