Hi everyone and welcome to today's session organized by the ALT Anti-Racism and Learning Technology CIG, Special Interest Group. My name is Matt, Matt Lingard and I'm facilitating today's session. It's great to see so many of you here. Please feel free to use the chat at any time during the session. If you've not found the chat then in the bottom right hand corner of your screen you'll see three white arrows that opens the side panel which is where you'll find chat and participants lists and also settings which you might want to look at if you're getting some annoying audio bings from your notifications you can turn them off there. It's great to have so many people here for today's session on achieving introduced education using AI. I didn't say what context I'm hearing actually so I'm one of the organizers or facilitators of the Special Interest Group and I'm just here to do the introduction and get the ball rolling for today's session. So just let me say a couple of words first then about the Special Interest Group before I pass over to Tunde for today's webinar topic. The first thing I wanted to do was just share the principles of the Special Interest Group. This is something that we do ahead of any event or meeting that we host. The group was formed in 2020 and one of the first things we did was come up with a set of principles and that's primarily because of the nature of the Special Interest Group and the topics that we touch on which can sometimes be both challenging and personal so we felt it was important to have a set of principles that we follow in meetings particularly the first one there. Number two is not relevant so much today. It's just around confidentiality in our smaller meetings and when people do share more personal experiences. But it's really important to us that people follow these principles when attending our events and being active members of the SIG as well. Just say a little bit more about the Special Interest Group for those of you who aren't familiar with either ALT, the Association for Learning Technology or the Special Interest Group itself. As I've just mentioned the group was formed in a more informal manner back in 2020 and then formally became a SIG at the start of 2022. And we've got a much more detailed remit on the website which you can get to through that short URL or that QR code. But we're essentially a community of practice bringing people together to talk around issues around anti-racism and learning technology and we're advocates and really seek to progress things through our activities which include events but other activities to projects that various people in the SIG have been involved in. So it's really great to have you here today. If you're not already a member of the Special Interest Group, being a member just means joining the mailing list and you can do that through the link on the page that's there. It's great to see so many of you as a SIG feel free to use the chat and it's now my pleasure to hand over to Tunde who I know will want to introduce himself a little bit more and you will have seen his bio on the event. Anyway, but Tunde's I should say is also the Vice-Chair, the recently elected Vice-Chair of the Special Interest Group. So it's great to have him here to give a presentation as one of his first activities on the group and I won't take up any more of his time and I'll hand over to Tunde. Thank you. Thank you very much Matt. Hello everyone. Thank you for making it to today's session. As Matt mentioned, yes I am the sort of current Vice-Chair but as opposed to this event has been in the making for quite some time because we started talking about it last year if I remember correctly. So it's a real pleasure to be here and I want to thank the Antiracism and Learning Technology Special Interest Group for sort of inviting me to talk on this I think very important topic. One that I think has not received the sort of attention it deserves which is achieving inclusive education and I suppose using the AI because AI is a current buzzword at the moment within higher education and it just makes sense to start to explore how we can use AI to enable that inclusive tendencies that we know that we can develop within higher education. So I'm here to really talk about some of my thoughts on this so I've organised some events around achieving inclusivity within AI and I've also organised some sort of round table discussions. One was organised two years ago at the Chatted Massaciation of Business School Learning, Teaching and Student Experience Conference that was held in Belfast I think. So what I'm going to be talking about really are just reflections from those discussions and from those events. Before I go any further I think it's very important to clarify how I perceive inclusivity or what I perceive to be inclusion and the picture you see right now is my own definition of inclusion and for me it's recognising a disadvantage and making adequate provisions to address that disadvantage, making sure that what we are measuring with regards to students is not what we call disadvantaged performance. So we want to be measuring the actual performance of students. So this picture is a very clear example of what it looks like.  I think that in higher education at the moment many of what we assess and how we measure student performance for me I think there's a lot of disadvantage within that which needs to be accounted for and I think AI will be a very powerful tool that we can use to eliminate those sort of disadvantages. So just to introduce myself a little further and I know you already have this information I'm an inclusivity scholar or that's how I like to describe myself. I'm also in terms of my title I'm also a senior lecturer in operations and quality management at the Liverpool Business School. I'm also the programme leader for the large collaborative programme, the largest actually in the business school and I'm also the associate for diversity and inclusion for the faculty of business and law at Liverpool Children's University. A bit about myself growing up you know I grew up in Nigeria and of course if you're familiar with western Nigerian culture usually deference is given to the father figure in the family. The elders have that sort of provincial treatment and of course in my house it was no different. So as a little boy I would look at my father's plate because when you're looking up in the pot of soup there are two sizes of meat in there. There's a small size and there's a big size or what I consider to be large to my small mind at that point. So I always looked at my dad's plate and be like oh my goodness look at the size of that meat. You know what when I grow up I'm just going to have bigger size of meat on my plate. You just wait and see. So that was my vision was formed at that point but then of course fast forward several years I moved to the UK, I got married, I got kids and you look in our curry pot right same size of meat and I'm thinking okay so where is the provincial treatment when do I get mine? And you know sometimes I come back from work very tired of course we've got just one snack left in the cupboard and I think you know what I deserve it I've been walking all day I go to grab that and I'm told no leave it for the kids so the kids get professional treatment when I was little my parents got professional treatment and it's just like I can't win I just can't win and of course as it is in higher education I think that's also a sort of symbolic of how we perceive inclusivity alright so there are parallels to that story to inclusivity and that we correctly find in higher education alright so when you look at it really alright I the one always looking longingly at that big plate of meat I represent like the ethnically diverse you know student groups my father was always given the preferential treatment represents the white students counterparts and then of course the big plate of food or the big plate of meat represents that desirable you know good grades you know to one and distinctions you know the desirable good jobs the desirable good pay alright so this basically so there are parallels and this is a big challenge we currently face in higher education and I'm sure that most of you are not you're very aware of the awarding gap and that is an issue that many universities at the moment are trying to address okay there's also that sort of disparity in experience for example the National Student Survey in their report they showed that you know the portion of ethnically diverse students who didn't think that their assessment and the marking or the grades was fair was around you know 70% compared to the white counterparts the awarding gap also is an issue that we currently face within higher education where the proportion of ethnically diverse students and getting to one and above is around you know 9% lower than the white counterparts and when you start to sort of break that data down and you start to look at individual groups you will find that it's even higher for black students at the moment it stands at 19% for black students so there is an issue here that we need to address again when you look at the number and the portion of these groups going into full-time employment again you will find that there's also a disparity there where ethnically diverse student groups typically are 70% less than their white counterparts so this is an issue that we are all well aware of but then the question is why aren't we talking a lot about them in the context of AI because at the moment AI has been seen as a very powerful levelling up tool because it's sort of addressing some of our limitations as individuals for example in the medical world it's been used to diagnose problems medical conditions in the physics world for example in the physical sciences it's been used to solve hard physics problems in the creative industry we're also using that to very good effect in trying to sort of augment creativity of artists but for some reason one of these big challenges that we face in higher education which is inclusivity we're not seeing products that are dedicated towards you know addressing that issue of course in higher education we've got several applications at the moment we've got chatbots we've got assessment grading systems we've got adaptive learning systems and also in analytics these are all the various places that we've been using AI but of course we still find that the experiences of students are not equal students are still reporting disparity in how they experience higher education or whether it's in the general student experience or whether it's with guards or awarding gap or the assessment performance there are still disparities and these issues of course they need to be addressed and of course here's my provocation I think one of the reasons why we're still having this same issue is that many of the learning technologies that we currently have and also many of the AI systems that we currently have the intrinsic design lends itself naturally to the benefit of certain groups alright while it's sort of disadvantage in others and the real reason is because when we design we mostly design for the majority so every time we consider for example inclusion it's usually an afterthought after a technology has been designed to cater to a particular challenge and then we then use inclusion or inclusivity as an addon to say yeah it does this but then yeah it can also achieve inclusion if you think about it properly or if you handle it correctly so inclusion really has not been the primary reason for design of course that's not to say that at the moment the DEI industry technology industry is worth around 100 million pounds and of course there are technologies in place addressing specific DEI issues but when we come to higher education we still find that we're still lagging behind in the adoption of such technologies and that is a problem that we need to address so what you find is that like I said it's usually an afterthought and a very good example would be the AI systems that we currently have we all know that there's a wide application in assessment design for example but the question then is AI of course will always replicate whatever bias that is found within the AI the training sets which is used to train so the question is what are we doing at the moment to ensure that we eliminate racial bias because most of the time what designers do is they use those training sets maybe scripts that have been marked and they feed that into the AI system which then sort of learns and then replicates the same sort of behaviour and we sort of address that because the training set is one very clear example where we need to start looking at so if I was to sort of then talk about what's our potential solution is so we've established that there is a problem inclusivity is a huge challenge alright we need to think about it more closely so how do we go about addressing this problem and what we need to do is we need to understand our context now at LGMU we were worried that the attainment gap or the awarding gap was very very high and therefore we thought we needed to sort of address this issue so myself and two other colleagues led an LGMU wide project on bridging the attainment gap and so we did a number of surveys and we also did a number of interviews even with staff members and it was very very clear where disparity or disparities in experiences in terms of how students felt with regards to assessment, the feedback that they received and also we also did some statistical analysis of the performance of our students with regards to the different types of assessment for instance so we looked at exam time assessment, we looked at report type of assessment we looked at oral presentation type of assessment and different other types of assessment we looked at nine different types of assessment and we again very quickly found that our context in LGMU context for example exam was one assessment type where both student groups, ethically diverse students and also white students performed the least but when you start to then break that down we then found that there was a huge disparity between the performance of white students with regards to exam compared to ethnically diverse students so that level that level of inquiry into our data is required so we need to understand that context explain what that means very quickly and then of course we need to be able to respond so in terms of understanding your context we need to be able to collect and analyse our data what is our demographic data what does it look like, what does it look like in terms of gender split, what does it look like in terms of ethnicity, in terms of disability religion, sexual orientation area of deprivation as well and of course a very important intersectionality so what do we look like, what is our make up as a body because the the idea of I treat everybody equally or I don't see colour we all know that I think an irresponsible way of thinking, if I'm in the very bold so it's important for us to start to look at issues understand where those disadvantages are coming from and then we need to actively work at addressing those disadvantages also performance data how are our students performing student experience data is very important of course we don't wait until the national student survey to understand what our students are going through but then when you look at most universities the only time that we collect information from our students is at the end of the module so module evaluation so we need to think a bit more about how we collect that information and how we utilise those information so that's very very important moving on to the next bit which is how do we respond now there are two areas that I can sort of think of one is the operational response or the operational considerations and then the other one is the design response or the design considerations so when we think about operational considerations so things around how do we decolonise the curriculum or how do we decolonise the pedagogy in other words how do we ensure there isn't any disadvantage in what we teach and how we teach them and that's very very important and of course there are currently AI systems that can help us to bridge that gap for example GPT is one of the most popular one but of course there are other AI technologies out there that we can start to introduce into the classroom the second one of course is regards to the awarding gap because I believe that this also has a direct implication to finding good jobs because we know that many employers of course always look for good grades not necessarily the subject of study but whether because good honours degrees always an indication that the students might be intellectually capable to do the job so if the awarding gap is always going to be there then one can expect that there will always be a disparity in the number or the proportion of ethnically diverse students finding paid employment so that's very very important for us to address also in terms of engaging with students and one of the things we found during that inquiry at LGMU was that students tend not to go to detutors for you know any questions that they have what we found was that of all the five areas that the students can potentially go to for information their peers is where they go to mostly surprisingly followed by their family members so we have this idea within HE whereby we build this system we provide support services and then we find that students tend not to use those support services and you start to ask yourself why I mean for some people then it's a case of I put it up there's only so much I can do but we need to do better in terms of understanding why are students not coming to us and then instead of asking students to come to us is there a way we can take all this information to the students and I think chatbots is a very good way of doing that now it's not a silver bullet solution to the problem but it's something that we need to try and we need to be strategic about how we use how we use that and I'll give you a very good example during the induction we've got a lot of students coming into the university what we typically find especially for international students they are always late incoming but what we then do during the induction is that we provide all that information to the students but we don't make much provision for those late students incoming and I think that the chatbot would be a very good interactive way of getting that information to students so those are potential solutions now just put some examples in here and I know some of you are already doing it but for those who are not already doing it then it might be something that is what I'm talking about so for example you can use AI in the area of pedagogy for example you could be using the flipped classroom and this is also very good because you allow the students to understand the topic do some research on the topic and then come into the class and then discuss so you can use it in that sort of setting by topics to the students ask them to generate content using chatGPT for example before coming to class so what you then do is you then ask them to take that content from chatGPT and then compare it to established textbooks or leading textbooks on that particular topic and then you see where maybe differences are again it's just looking at things from different lenses also you can also use it in the inquiry based setting where you provide students with a problem scenario and then you ask them to produce maybe three different solutions to that problem using AI so these are some of the ways that we can potentially start to sort of close that sort of disadvantage gap because AI is hopefully available to most people also in terms of curriculum to develop and some people have even proposed that you can actually use chatGPT as part of the reading test or the reading list so for example you can ask students to maybe produce different reading lists from different countries for example Argentina but of course care needs to be taken to ensure that and they're able to access those texts using the available university resources of course we can also ask chatGPT to generate multiple perspectives on a topic and I'll try this several times for example I say explain inventory management in public procurement for example and then I can say can you look at it from the marketing perspective and you can start to see different angles or different lenses at looking at the same issue or the same topic and that again will enrich students' understanding of that subject so these are some of these very simple ways that I think that we can help our students again in terms of responding we talked about the operational considerations we also need to talk about the design considerations so we need to focus on how we design these technologies okay or how we sort of deliver these technologies so for example we need to think about those that are designing these technologies what is the diversity there how well are how well is that group representative of the community that they are serving and that's very very important to have that sort of diversity of thoughts also ensuring that the training set that we're using it's not just populated by the audiences or for example maybe white students or white staff members and I know some people have used the acronym weird which is western educated industrialized western educated industrialized are the democratized rich democratized okay so we need to ensure how we get a balance right in in the training set that we're using and of course when we're designing we also need to limit what I call the overt otherness in our design and this is what it looks like I've just used this as an illustrative piece so for example if you think of the escalator we always say okay anyone who's on a wheelchair you cannot go on the escalator you have to go you have to use a left all right and when we start to separate things like that they say you go there you go there we start to create that sense of disassociation from the very community that we're trying to build and thankfully I think in Japan I saw this technology whereby people using wheelchair can actually go on an escalator because they've sort of designed the escalator to allow people on a wheelchair to use it all right so in that case I see that as inclusive in that sort of sense so whatever it is we're designing all right we need to ensure that we are limiting that sort of overt otherness and that's imperative I'm nearly there question now is why do we need to bother why do we need to do all of this ensure that we're providing an inclusive environment for our students I believe that specifically as this group because this is a select number of people so as a special interest group I think it's our responsibility to champion the creation of AI and digital technologies that is designed specifically to address some of these inclusivity challenges that we're facing because they are there, they are challenges and we need to start to think about that normally I would play I would play this video of Shimaman Aditya she's a well-known Nigerian author and she talked about the danger of a single story and that effectively saying that as individuals we cannot just rely on our own lenses we have to consider the lenses of others and I think that's very fitting for what we need in our education as designers of technologies we need to have that multiple lenses and not just use our own lenses because inclusivity cannot be an afterthought it must be part of the grand design it must be part of that grand design so we need to adopt that multi-lens approach finally these are some of the practical ways that we can develop that multiple lenses one is engage with the equality and inclusion and belonging strategy within your organisation within your institutions also get involved with the various staff networks that you've got in there also if you can if there's a programme try and get yourself on that reciprocal mentoring okay I think that would also help build the empathy that I think that we all need and of course there are a lot of research that has been done in this area so please get those research articles and read a bit more and then finally of course there are existing toolkits many institutions have what they call the anti-racism toolkits and these are some of the things that we can sort of start using I think I'm going to stop there thank you very much for listening and I know some of you might have questions or even comments things that you've experienced that will be helpful for everyone to know that is also welcome in this setting so thank you very much for listening thank you for your patience and I think I'll hand over now to Matt Matt yes yes thanks Sunday for your talk this morning I encourage people to thank you in the digital way which is never quite the same as a round of applause in the room but thank you very much I'm just going to stop sharing the slide so you can see Tunde and anybody else who puts their camera on and we'll move to questions now I've got three lined up in the chat if you would like to ask a question using the mic and or video then feel free to put your hand up as well but I'll just go through the three in the chat there's also some comments in the chat so if you've not had a chance to look at those I'd encourage you to do so too and those who've made comments if you want to voice them further then feel free to raise your hand as well so the first question we had came from from Lillian Joy who's at the University of York and she was asking is there any data on what kinds of assessments are more equitable for disadvantaged students so I'll start with you Tunde but obviously others can come into I mean yeah that's why I said your context is very very important now when we did these data was because we couldn't find any sort of data anywhere on the performance of students with regards to specific assessment times but then we quickly realised that hang on a minute we have this data so we thought okay we will do a statistical analysis to look at the historical performance based on the different assessment times and we're also very careful to also understand also the differences in sort of an instant assessment for example exams or sort of deferred assessment for example when you ask students to maybe write a report and you give the assessment brief to them well in advance so we also looked at the also issues around group assessment and also individual assessment and we also asked the students how do you feel so we asked them about the level of anxiety that they had towards group assessment and also individual assessment and there were very clear differences between the perception of all the various student groups and also you will find and I think this is something that has been going on right now even in our education a conversation that has been going on and that conversation is around how we disaggregate to those data so it's not enough to just say ethnically diverse and group them all so we have different groups within that we have several groups within that and all also have different perceptions and that also needs to be taken into consideration so I would say that your institution is the first place I think you need to go for that sort of data alright and I think there's a need for us to also start to aggregate those sort of data across universities but I suppose that's a project that can be undertaken going forward but I don't know if anybody else has got information on that thank you Thanks Sunday please feel free to raise your hand if you want to come back on any of the questions as well although I'm directing them to Sunday we very much encourage abscess from anybody I'm going to move on to a question now from Mike and actually Mike's put a few comments in the chat during this as well so then Mike if you want to help on the mic feel free to do so but Mike's initial question to Sunday was if chat GPT has been trained on biased data how does it decolonize anything? Yeah absolutely and I think what we need to think about is what we talk about decolonization and I know it's a concept that it's far reaching than just in there the mere sort of looking for textbook from different countries or from different cultures but when we're looking at different texts in that sort of context I think so what I did once was I asked chat GPT to give me one of the leading texts for example from Chile alright and what it did was it returned an abstract of the book of course in I don't know what this is speaking in Chile whether it's Spanish or the Chilean language but it also gave me not interpretation a translation of that abstract and that helped me to then look at that text and say okay does it have the sort of information that I'm looking for so my next step then was to say okay where can I find this text book alright hopefully freely or if you've got library resources then hopefully it should be freely available in your library I suppose that's where we are at the moment with chat GPT and I did because sometimes when you register they give you a form and they say are there any sort of topics you would like us to sort of look into and this was one of the things that I mentioned in their decolonization this is something that we really need to sort of think through and you're right yes at the moment we don't have the right solution but there are little things that we can do using chat GPT in the spirit of decolonization of the text that's okay thanks Tunde, you've got your hand up did you want to jump on the mic if you're able to thanks Tunde I think there's a misunderstanding often by how chat GPT works it doesn't give you sections of anything but in generative AI it's using statistical learning to present stuff from lots of information I don't think with the present version I'm sure with future versions you might be able to do it but you can't say give me an abstract of this book it won't do it it'll generate and it will hallucinate just like it does if you ask it for references so I think it's very dangerous and because it's biased it's more likely to give you biased information you're absolutely right I think we cannot at the moment get away from the bias and we know that yes your right sort of pulls information from the huge database and the question then is how do we even trust the database social media for example is filled with so much on truth for example and we've seen instances of where people put in questions in chat GPT but then it returns something else and people are even clever now whereby they can fool chat GPT to respond in a certain way so it's not a silver bullet solution to give an example of what we see and withdraw my history because what I did was I asked it for a text for a particular country and it did give me the textbook and that textbook is verified and I did ask it for an abstract actually I just said find me one of the leading texts in this particular topic from this country and it gave me a textbook it included the abstract and also included the translation of that abstract and I did my investigation and it did so now but you are right I think we still need to be absolutely careful when we're doing this to verify things ourselves because like I said I don't think chat GPT can help us address that decolonisation in the truest sense at the moment but in terms of looking for text from different countries I think we can use it with caution is what I would say Thanks Sunday just maybe as an aside but one of the other things that's been occurring to me is for obvious reasons a lot of the conversation has been around chat GPT specifically at this stage but there are obviously a lot of other AI tools out there doing more specific things so for example I was looking at one called elicit recently which summarises research papers for you so it's trained on a much different data set so I think it can definitely be an interesting area of tools for that as well okay let me shut up and carry on with the question so the next question came in from and it's phrased as a question I suspect it's more of a comment really but I will read it out comparing sources and using chat GPT to inform understanding suggests that everyone will have equal access to technology but is that the case? Yeah well yeah that's another challenge I'm looking at chat GPT for example from the perspective that it is a tool that everyone can use it's a conversational AI technology so you can have a conversation with it and you can stare that conversation to where you want it to go yes we've got disparity in terms of access to digital technologies of course when you look at it from that sort of ethical point of view and I give you another example when Covid hit it was then that we realised that many of our international students for example didn't have access they didn't have access to laptops so many of them were doing the assessment on their phones and that was a huge problem at the university and it also happened at a time where yes normally provide laptops for students they can use and then return but all those laptops were used up very quickly so we had this group of students who didn't have access to all the digital technologies that we have that is a valid and a big problem that we need to address how do we ensure that students have access to this technology but I'm also looking at it from this perspective whereby if I was in the class and I just said go on for example many of them having a phone they can access it in that way so yes it's still a big issue in terms of the digital divide but I think at the moment using AI as a conversational piece to get information although flawed at the moment and that is an area that we need to look into or continue to look into at least there's still some sort of access in that way, thank you thanks I don't know if anybody else wants to comment on that particular topic but I'll move on now Rob's just put his hand up and I was just coming to Rob's questions in the chat so I'll hand over to you Rob I don't know if you're going to comment but you can also ask your questions from the chat Hi Rob, thanks Matt I thought it would give you a bit of a break actually good to see you Tunday you're so kind Tunday and I presented actually back in February actually on AI and it's amazing actually in the months that followed that how quickly things have actually moved on you've obviously done a lot of work on the attainment gap at your institution do you feel that you've actually made a lot of progress now essentially so have you seen that gap dropping as a result of all of this work that you've actually done so essentially for those of us that have still got this gap very much at the moment you know obviously we can look at chat bots and that's great and obviously we've had that discussion about training data and stuff as well have you made the impact that you wanted essentially or is it still you're on a long road and we're somewhere at least on the road now yeah I mean for us so this project was just started three years ago but it concluded about two one and a half years ago it concluded so we're still in very early stages so where we are at the moment is we've identified some of the gaps problem areas where the moments just introduce you know different solutions to it right so there are different things going on in different parts of the university one of them is this sort of mentorship program that we're rolling out across all faculties for you know peer entering of you know students maybe in their final year or maybe in their second year mentoring you know level one I mean level three level four students first year students so that is currently being rolled out so at the moment we've not implemented the solution and we've not done it long enough to be able to say that okay it's having this impact so I think maybe we need to at our institution at least we need to give it maybe one year more at least before we start to see if there's any sort of shift in the but at the moment noise what I would say yeah so the key message really is to get on the road start doing things because it's going to take a few years to actually start having some impact exactly exactly and then you discussed about assignments as well are there particular assignments that you feel are you know are ones that we maybe should start avoiding you know in the future you've broken it down by different assignment types by different you know ethnic groups and so on so are there some that are really bad you know based on what you've seen? Yes exam is one of them exam is one of them because like I said both student groups white and both expressed a level of anxiety with regards to exams but when we started to look at when we looked at the performance data it was very clear that for all the sorry I can't show you the graph at the moment for all the different assessment types you know the average performance for the exam was around I hope I'm not giving out to you know LGM music right here but was very low compared to the others and when you then look at the two different groups you can also see that there was a huge disparity in there so exam was one area that was that had the biggest gap is what I would say and of course for obvious reasons you can tell because you know in the exam you don't know the questions beforehand you're given a limited period of time and for example non native English speakers you know that's always also very challenging you're trying to interpret what's been required of you and then writing what you think the answers are you always think in your language before you sort of translated but so of course there were anecdotal evidence to suggest that you know exam would be the problem for through that inquiry or inquiry we were able to confirm that this was actually the case with regards to our students I was doing a chat on I was doing a chat on AI yesterday to a big subject group and because of the you know concerns I think from the academics around AI they're saying do we need to move back to exams you know rather than some of these changes because I think they're worried about students overusing some of the AI tools and how do they you know generate or how do we assess authentic you know student grades and so on and there was this discussion do we need to move back to exams but based on what you've said that will also have its own problems and it's not a solution yeah exactly I think we also had this conversation during the meeting we had in February and the reality is you just have to look at your historical performance data for your students for us it was very clear that exam was the biggest disparity induce us if I could use that word within assessment performance and I think the issue of chat GPT also I think it's just laid to bear our reliance on written text and I think that's one of the problems that we have and we really need to start moving away from from that and I think there are two lenses that we can use here the first lens is one there people have been talking about you know how we sort of diversify assessments all right and it's important for us to think about that the second bit is and the older lens that looks at you know what exactly are we measuring so is it just you know really vegetation of knowledge that we're interested in or is it more skill based so there are different streams you know that are you know advocating for less use of exam I'm not saying that we should completely take exam out of the picture what I'm saying is that we cannot over rely on exams so the first question I would ask you or any person in academia is when you look at the life of a student the journey throughout the university what is the percentage of exams that they've written all right as what is the proportion of the credits of the exams as a percentage of the total assessment study is a 50% of the assessment is so how much of this assessment is written requires some form of written work all right and then we can start to build a picture and then see whether are we relying on one kind of assessment compared to the others and I think that's absolutely necessary going forward thank you thanks Tunde and thanks Rob I'm going to got some feedback not sure whether that's coming in from is that me maybe it was you Tunde now I've lost you Tunde actually or have I lost anyway AI is taking over the sound Rob I don't know who can hear me if somebody could just let me know if you can hear me but I thanks Nadia so many thanks to Tunde for taking the time to present to us today many thanks to everybody for attending and for your contributions as well I've just put in the chat the link to both the website in terms of events and the SIG group I encourage you to join the mailing list for the SIG if you haven't already and the recording if you came in late and want to watch the whole thing or revisit will be available on Altsy YouTube channel at some point but let's leave it there for now everybody can stretch their legs because I know everybody will be jumping to other things at 12 o'clock thank you very much and once again thanks Tunde bye everyone


It is the biggest mood in the country, not only in international law, but generally. I don't think there is any other mood which has brought as many as 60 teams participating in this business. Even if people hear that he did not, he said that it is a fact. Specifically, the problem expects you to argue in the context of the ICC Statute. However, in oral argumentation that is sometimes insufficient. So what a lot of judges, especially in the semifinal and final round, they expect you to know the broad contours of international law and I think linking that back to the statute and the facts at hand, it was something that there was a unique skill that we'd managed to learn by the finals I think. So there were certain parts of the problem that we found hard and some things are hard from the prosecution, some things were hard from the defense side. So I think the mood itself was a question of balancing the issues themselves and playing to your strengths finally. So for instance, the charge on conscripting children for instance was something that is extremely prosecution heavy and the charge on destruction of cultural property was something extremely defense heavy. So it's about prioritizing arguments and making sure that your strengths are something that you communicate well to your judges and you show your knowledge of the area of law itself to them and make it evident that you do in fact know even in spots where you are in fact in a difficult position, so to say. Given in today's time when IHL is usually neglected and not given due importance, however, there are so many great breaches of justice and so many serious crimes being committed in the world. So I think that it is important that we don't turn a blind eye towards IHL and give it a due regard, it really needs. Being it's one of those big league moods for competition so there's a lot of research that goes into a lot of preparations. I think it's a good incentive for any team that comes up and participates here not only for the prestige that this competition holds but also the subject area that they deal with. I'm practicing in court also, in the Esildari court, but I come here every year for this court practices because I am interested about international law and we want that everybody should know about international law. I'm mooting for the first time so this is really interesting for us and regarding preparations we were really fortunate because they have been past seniors who had attempted this or we got some really good mentorship even though there were some constraints of time but at least we're here now, we got to submit our memorials. A lot of people don't even realize it is something apart from human rights laws that deals with just specific war crimes or something related to humanitarian aid. So I think this is the time that you need to have awareness and the fact that law students themselves do not really know that there's a separate area of law dealing with this I think that's something to be taught about.


By Mark 21.00, 0.00, it could be considered a safe statement that many of the survivors of Calth had resigned themselves to death under the light of the Viridian star. It should not be taken as a surrender to Meldonkale, indeed far from it. Histarities of the 13th Legion, ultramarines, continued to comport themselves with the utmost discipline and dedication, relentlessly applying themselves to the immediate practicalities of their situations, but for many their fates now seemed clear. Whatever recompense they were to earn would be bought from the enemy in blood and destruction, and they would count it good. All, however, was not lost. The battle was not yet won by the traitorous 17th Legion and their allies. As one has elucidated upon previously, the word-bearers, despite being in a position of near-total tactical and strategic superiority from the very moment of their betrayal, had, at least in base military terms, squandered this position in favor of their pursuit of matters altogether more esoteric. While the full extent of these eldritch machinations were yet to birth, it had allowed the 13th Legion an iota of room to regroup, reinforce, and begin to plan. The ultramarines, of course, were led by one of the greatest planners in imperial history, and Robert Gulliman, recovered now from his imprisonment in the thin atmospheric shells surrounding his flagship, was striving to develop the situation into something that would deliver his Legion from annihilation. The key to victory, or perhaps more accurately, the key to survival past the next several hours, lay in the usurped planetary defense grid. The thousands of weapons and placements, both on the planet's surface and in orbit, had been captured by the word-bearers earlier in the battle, and turned by the traitor mechanical to the command of Core Phaeron. Since then, the first captain of the 17th Legion had wielded the grid not only to punish ultramarine orbital and ground forces, but to murder the entire Viridian system. While slaved to traitor control, no significant muster of force could be managed by the ultramarines, as Core Phaeron would immediately retask the grid to punish and annihilate. Thanks to Marius Gage's recapture of the McCraggs Honour's secondary bridge, Gulliman was able to coordinate planning with the largest loyalist force that had established contact from the surface, that of 4th company captain Remus Ventanus. Ventanus had, during the course of the battle, linked up with mere Edved Toren, who was believed to be the most senior surviving Mechanicum adept on Calth. From Toren, the captain, and laterally his Primark, had learned that a data engine, potentially the only one on Calth not infected by pernicious scrap code, lay within the Landshear Guild Hall. This engine would allow loyalist Mechanicum to re-establish the newsphere, and thus control over Calth's networked weapons and placements. But this would only be possible if control was also taken from the data Overseer engine, currently being used by the word-bearers to command the grid. This engine locus was currently in Zetsunvered Yard, the last surviving orbital shipyard, and the base of operations for Core Phaeron. The attack on Zetsunvered would be led by Gulliman himself. While the Primark acknowledged that his role was as a general, not a warrior, he nevertheless stated to Marius Gage that he would not allow any of his sons to deny him the satisfaction of killing the first captain of the word-bearers with his own hands. Ventanus' attack began with a rapid advance in force into the ruins of Landshear City. The formations he possessed were heterogeneous, a diverse mix of imperial military elements. The majority was of the captain's own fourth company survivors, supported by Solar Auxilia, Exertus Regiments, and Mechanicum Tagmata elements under Majos Toren, and Skitariai Marshal Aruk Serutit. It was a motley assortment of survivors to be sure, swept up into Ventanus' mission by sheer luck and fate. The remnants of the Neride Tenth marched alongside Mechanicum Tag priests under the massive bulk of Shadow Sword super-heavy tanks, while at the vanguard Ventanus led a wing of Thirteenth Legion Land Raiders. Their first detected opposition was also their first kill, a sole warhound scout titan of the Legio Mortis. The engine was alone and unsupported. Its princess had clearly been granted leave to indulge their darkest destructive fantasies on Landshear City, and for this they would pay. Despite pushing its voyage shields to maximum, the warhounds' force bubble popped under a hurricane of fire from predator, whirlwind, and Sikaran tanks, before a pinpoint strike from a Shadow Sword ended its wretched existence. The portentous engine kill marked the start of the engagement. Ventanus' forces fell upon the Wordbearer defenders of the Guildhall with the fury of the betrayed. Ultramarine discipline and cohesion kept barely in check in the face of a fury most righteous. Wordbearer Gal Vorbach reaped a fearsome tally from the attackers, but the rage of Ultramar would not be denied. Ventanus' forces captured the Guildhall and delivered the Mechanicum to their work. Their success was buoyed by the arrival of new allies. The 111th and 112th companies, bereft of their command cadres, had been led to the Guildhall by a single sergeant named Anshiz, while Captain Aethon of the 19th company, so called the Honored, also arrived. A whole mortal host soon too made their presence known, led by Ultramarine tetrarch Eikos Lamiad, as well as the Honored Dreadmark Telemacrus. The reprieve, welcome as it was, would be short-lived. Allspecs' feeds registered a massive inbound enemy force, led by Hall Belloth. Despite the Mechanicum's possession of the Data Engine, the corresponding Overseer Engine in Zetsunvered had yet to be freed from Wordbearer control. Unless it was, the efforts of Ventanus' companies would be for nothing, and Hall Belloth's Wordbearers would annihilate them within the hour. Yet in orbit, the second half of the 13th Legion's desperate gambit was now underway. Gilliman himself led a teleport assault from the McCraggs honor to the Zetsunvered orbital. The flagship could in no way risk movement for fear of alerting the weapon's grid, so dangerous a maneuver was now the only one left at the Primark's disposal. The sheer range of the teleport would draw so much power from the ship, and shunt so much of it through the ancient systems that they would surely overload, rendering extraction by this method impossible. It was a final gambit, and was understood as such. Failure would see the Primark dead, Calth lost, and the Legion nigh exterminated. The risk was the only course possible for Gilliman. Without control of the weapon's grid, his Legion would simply die regardless. It was only a matter of time. The battle between the Primark and the Master of the Faith was unlike anything hitherto seen in the Age of Darkness. Corfeiron had ascended to becoming a debased Magister of the Powers of the Warp. He had drunk deep from the cups of sorcerous might, and the full scale of his present abilities were unleashed upon Gilliman as soon as the Ultramarines attacked the Command Center. Invested with the responsibility by Lorgar himself for the Calth operation, Corfeiron withheld nothing, blasting Astartes to ash with Warp spawned maledictions before turning upon Gilliman himself. Even the Primark was rendered near helpless before the sorcery of the Master of the Faith.  This cursed dagger was one of the eight shards of the anathemae blade, forged by the Xenos Kinnebrack and stolen by Wordbearer's first chaplain Erobus at the outset of the Inter-X Crisis. The self-same blade had been used to mortally wound Horace Lupercal upon the moons of Davin, delivering the Primark to that world's sinister lodge priests for care. Its new blasphemous children had been wielded by several individuals throughout the Battle of Calth, and one was now poised to reap the life of a Primark. However, at the exact moment when the killing blow could have been struck, Corfeiron stayed his hand, instead choosing to whisper into Gilliman's ear an offer he had no authority to make, yet did so regardless. Theron promised Gilliman a place within the works of primordial annihilation, a place of great honor amongst the ranks of the Dark Pantheon's followers. All the 13th Primark had to do was pledge himself to the worship and devotion of chaos. But for his word, the Master of the Faith offered him a place within a new universal order, and all the power that came with it. Gilliman said nothing. His armoured fist canoned into Corfeiron's torso. The 13th Primark's response to the cillibent offer was to tear Corfeiron's still beating heart from his body, and cast its ruin upon the cold, metal deck. At the Lanshire Guildhall, salvation began to reign from the heavens. In blinding columns, Lance Beams seared Planet Word, but they did not impact the beleaguered defenders. The might of the Calth defense grid was turned instead upon the traitor host, and in an instant extinction had been turned to retribution. An immediate, planet-wide counter-attack was mounted on every major word-bearer force currently operational. Orbital strikes reigned hell upon the traitor hosts, punishing each and every one in extremis. Still reeling from the wrath of the defense grid, these forces were now set upon by vengeful loyalists. Astartes, Mechanicum, Exertus units rising up against their attackers in near unison. This was not just merely upon the surface. In orbit, word-bearer ships that had ruled Calth nearspace unchallenged now had the weapons grid turned against them. The platforms had been designed to fend off a threat approximate to a full battle fleet in proper standing order. The scattered word-bearer ships, which for a near full day had been gleefully hunting helpless targets of opportunity, were now annihilated in kind. Vessels of the 17th Legion that had centuries of service perished in instance, torn into by the unbridled fury of the weapons grid. Still choked with the carcasses of the Ultramarine's grand fleet, those perished loyalists in orbit were joined by the wreckage of their attackers. The sheer volume of debris the 13th Legion counter-attack now added to would create an artificial set of rings for Calth, the planet becoming encircled with the corpses of those ships that had fallen in the Great Betrayal forever more. On the bridge of the Infidus Imperator, it is known that Corpheron manifested shortly into the counter-attack. Still somehow alive in the aftermath of having his heart torn from his chest, it is believed the master of the fate survived through sheer mastery of Warpcraft. He was, however, apparently in no fit state to issue commands. It was the shipmaster of the 17th Legion craft, Antonius Antwark, that ordered the vessel's disengagement from the battle, reasoning that their contributions to the Betrayal and its arcane significance had been accomplished within reasonable parameters. The Infidus Imperator came about and made full burn for the nearest Mandeville Point. Bored the McCrags honor, its flight was immediately spotted by the Sensorium adepts and reported to Marius Gage, who in turn raised his victorious Primark on Zetsun Verid. Absolutely unwilling to allow the ship and presumably Corpheron to escape, Gilliman ordered Gage to mount an immediate pursuit aboard the honor. Both vessels vanished into an unknown Warp disturbance at the edge of the system. Their fates would remain unknown for years to come. Gilliman himself would not learn of the fate of his flagship, his first chapter master, or his loathsome enemy for quite some time, and indeed the full tale of this insane clash must be reserved for another record. Although the Ultramarines had mounted a stunning last-minute reversal of fortune, this was not victory by any means. The delegation of counselors, led by a group of Mechanicum adepts surviving fleet navigators and clearly traumatized astropaths, petitioned Gilliman for time, for dire portents had emerged that required the Primark's immediate attention. The Veridian star had, during the hours of the weapons grid being in word-bearer hands, been explicitly targeted by the 17th Legion, along with the remaining stellar bodies in the system that they had murdered. Likely through the use of specialized ammunition, the traitors had inflicted horrific damage to the star's fusion reaction. Whatever they had ceded into its mass, it had caused Veridia to begin outputting increasingly lethal levels of radiation. The poisoned solar winds were now beginning to pummel Calte's atmosphere, which had already been grievously wounded by almost a full Terran day of continual weapons bombardment and atomic attacks. Not only were its tectonics irreversibly impacted, the sheer amount of smoke unleashed by firestorms that still raged across its continents were choking the skies. The combined effects of the Mechanicum avowed would, within days, render the planet's surface utterly inviolable for human life. With full evacuation from the planet impossible due to the sheer lack of Legion vessels still operational, not to mention the time involved, the only recourse was the withdrawal of all the whalists still alive upon Calte to the subterranean arcologies. The planet was rich with a network of tunnels through its porous crust. During its development, many of these had been turned into arcologies, underground cities connected and linked with future expansions already planned. While far from ideal, they were well suited to immediately absorb all surviving civilians, astartes, and other humans, and could provide at least some shelter from the fury of the now poisoned Veridian Star. Captain Ventanus volunteered to lead this operation without hesitation. His fate now seemingly irrevocably bound to the planet, the Master of the Fourth Company announced over every open vox channel that this was a Primarch's directive. The fleet, or what remained of it, would embark to what craft they could, the remaining surface armor units, as well as what god engines of the Calesia Titanica were still operational. Even as this was being conducted, the navigators and astropaths of the Legion brought the Primarch yet more dire news, pleas for aid from across the entirety of Ultramar. Calth, it appeared, was the beginning of a much larger conflict. The 500 worlds were being assailed by, according to reports, not merely the wordbearers, but the 12th Legion world eaters, and their Primarch, and Gron. Dozens of systems and Ultramarine's forces were reporting the same dire situation. This was no less than a full-scale invasion. Calth, Gilliman grimly surmised, had merely been an opportunity to exterminate the bulk of the Ultramarine's Legion, allowing the traitors to then conquer and reave Nye unopposed through the jewels of the Eastern Fringe. In this, they had essentially failed. The Legion and its Lige were very much alive, and could be rallied, but the price they would pay, and had paid, was undoubtedly dire. Almost 120,000 Ultramarines lay dead, with a further 20,000 crippled and in dire need of Medicaid care. In many ways, the wordbearers had succeeded. It could hardly be argued that they had not. The final piece of information for Gilliman was altogether more difficult to comprehend in scope, but no less pressing for it. The navigators were reporting that the currents of the warp were becoming extremely restive, the tides of the Imaterium in significant flux. For whatever reason, these disturbances were centered around Calth and the Viridian system. At best estimate, the fleet's navigators surmised that the system would become cut off from the wider galaxy by an oncoming storm of unprecedented power, and that the storm may in fact be spreading outwards. Already capricious this past year, the rising warp instability sealed Gilliman's course for him. Once the final units could be embarked from the surface, those warp-capable ships would flee the system. At Calth Mark, 23.43.00, Remus Ventanus glimpsed to the surface of the world that he suspected would be his very last time. Loyalist Mechanicum elements, mostly the remnants of Arch Majos Karn Barberell's Tagmata, took the brunt of the final phases of the retreat, far more resilient as they were to the effects of increasingly debilitating radiation. Unfortunately for the Loyalists, the traitor forces still alive upon Calth had read the signs, and had heard Ventanus' proclamation. Where possible, significant elements of word-bearers likewise retreated to the Archaeologies. This marks the beginning of the Underground War, a near decade of conflict that would only conclude with the defeat of the traitors on Terra at the end of the Horus Heresy. The betrayal at Calth did not conclude in the manner of other battles in the Age of Darkness. Not only was the Underground War its dreadful successor, continuing the battles on the planet years after the initial shock of perfidy, the unfolding shadow crusade saw Gilliman immediately engaged as soon as the evacuation force made wake. Calth's tale is the tale of the heresy itself. The last of the 17th Legion was not purged from its tunnels until the fall of the Warmaster. The mark of Calth itself was kept running by the 13th Legion until approximately mark 219,479.25.03 during the scouring. When Captain Ventanus, hero of the Underground War, led the Ultramarines to Colchis, the homeworld of the word-bearers and Lorgar. With them, they brought death. A planet for a planet was scant recompense. Like the continued running of the mark, it was a thing of symbolism and little else. Of course, the purging of a warp tainted population was a matter of significance in the years of the scouring, but the real heft of the matter lay in the base revenge of the act. Symbols, as the Imperium had learned during the Horus heresy, carried significant weight. Crimes of Lorgar and his Legion could not be repaid in the simple death of one world, but Colchis' destruction yet mattered. For the word-bearers themselves, some scholars have speculated that the mark of Calth may yet still run, in the depths of the Great Eye or the Maelstrom, the countless pockets of blackest treachery to which their craven kind ran. The mark, too, was not merely that of Ultramarines' battle records or the obsession of the word-bearers while the Legion still lives. Colloquially, the mark of Calth was the name ascribed to severe radiation burns, suffered by the survivors of the Betrayal, and was caused by the poisoned light of the Viridian Star. The scarring was distinct and in many cases quite serious, but veterans of the battle would often forego skin grafts and Medicaid procedures, wearing them as a grim badge of honor. The mark, too, also refers to psychological damage endured by those who had survived the treachery of the word-bearers. The trauma of the attack was significant enough to brand itself onto even the psychoconditioned minds of the Ligiones Estartes. Survivors of the massacres formed groups apart from fellow legionaries who had, by virtue of chance, simply not been present at the conjunction. In the broader context, Calth presaged the wars of the Age of Darkness in ways that would only become evident in dread retrospect. While it was perhaps the last grand, full-scale display of the sheer surprise of concealed treachery, the utter devastation of civil war between Imperial military forces was now writ large upon the scarred, rent surface of an entire, fully populated Imperial world. A star system had been murdered in the space of a day. Billions lay dead in less than twenty-four hours. This was one system, one world. The battlefield to come was galactic in scale, until such a time as one may relate further tales of this benighted epoch. Ave Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra. Any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter, at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.


All right, I guess we can just get started. So, hi again. It's me again. When I'm not working on, so I like to work on pretty technical stuff, but every now and then I need some lighter work to do. So, one of the things that one of my pet projects to work on when my brain is hurting, is to look into trying to get the Mesa website, make it a little bit better than what it is now. So, this is not meant to be a talk, this is meant to be just a discussion, but I have a little bit of a presentation to begin with, to present my view of things and what can be done better, and have some proposals and stuff like that. So, for the first thing to talk about is what's wrong with Mesa3D.org right now, it's a pretty old website. It was written 15 years ago, kind of the current version of the web part of it, not necessarily the content. It's like written in HTML4.401, it's mobile phones didn't have browsers back then, if you ever tried to go to Mesa3D.org on your phone to read some documentation, maybe while you're on the train, it's not fun. This is what started my it share, I wanted to check some stuff while I was on the bus, and yeah, it wasn't very fun. So, now we're 15 years later, and the world has changed quite a bit. We have HTML5 now, and translating the Mesa website to that is a little bit of a pain. We have better markup languages and tools for dealing with this. Maybe some of this was already around back then, but not quite as popular and adopted. We have static site generators and GitLab pages, and GitLab CI and stuff like that, and on free desktop.org that we can use. I think the thing that whenever I digs into this, bothers me the most is that we're thrown all of the web presence stuff on Mesa into one bucket and started around, and we're getting like a website that's a jack of all trades master of none. It's not a great home page, like if you want to read about Mesa, it's like off-putting. You have to dig for the right information. This documentation is bad because if you're reading the entry stuff, you have to open it in a browser to read it in a reasonable way. The raw HTML isn't fun to read. We keep updating it with the broken HTML stuff, because HTML is hard. Then the releases are just in a sub-folder on the same site there. You don't get any good CDN or distributions around the world for the releases either. So it's not great at either of the things. So my proposal is to split it into three different sites. One is the home page that would be Mesa3D.org. This is where you go to read about the project. It should be built, I think, using a static site generator like Jackal or Hugo or it's not really important. Just the important bit is that it's easy I think to read and edit and work on. It should probably live in a separate repository from the website, because I think the home page shouldn't really contain things that pertain to the source code. That's for the documentation and for what you get once you download the source code. It should contain stuff like where do you download it? Where do you go for filing issues? Where do you read the documentation? Yeah, all of these things. Then the documentation I suggest having as a separate site, something like docs.mesa3d.org. We should build this using from CI, from the master branch or release branch of Mesa, using Sphinx or Gitbook or one of those more modern documentation tools. This means that we can actually read the entry sources in a reasonable way on a human readable market format. Yeah, releases. I don't really have a great answer to. It's a little bit of a pain. So GitLab pages which we ideally, I think, want to move the websites into being hosted at, doesn't deal great with a large set of static binary files. You have to upload them for every build of the site. You have to copy them into the sets of stuff. Yeah. So I'm wondering if we should have just keep a separate web server instance running and use some reverse proxy to put it in the right space, or we stop uploading where we upload and move to somewhere else. The problem with moving is that we don't want to break links. We don't want to break current build scripts. So I think we need at least for some time, live with a reverse proxy on top to get the links just to keep working. Yeah. So the benefits here are that we can now, once we split it like this, we can build a flashy marketing site for the home page, where you can read about the project stuff like that, and you can have a practical and clean documentation side. So you separate between what's attention grabbing and what's pushing the information first and foremost. Yeah, and then we get away from the whole jack-of-all-trades most of non-genonians that I think we currently do. We can edit the documents in some same markup language instead of for HTML. Right now, we have the same HTML boilerplate repeated in every document. So if you ever want to change a detail about that boilerplate right now, yeah, it's not great. It's super painful. I think the last point here is like, I think we can move to something that's a little bit less opaque because right now, it's not really obvious to figure out how to change the website. Like, yes, there's documentation. It's all in the tree there. You can submit the patches, but it's not really documented on the website. You don't know. Like, if you go to messathreader.org, you have no idea that this is actually the docs folder of the website. So we could put like an edit this page, for instance. There's more, I think we can work more on this process there. So here's my proposal for a new homepage. So I've built this site. This is what it looks like. It's not a fantastic website, but it's what I was able to clubber together. It's built using Jekyll and Bootstrap, and I made a custom, like so it's not using any of the built-in themes because I wanted to have a little bit of familiarity with the old website. So you recognize a little bit that you're at the messa website. So the little gears in the corner there and like a dark header with a white background. It's mobile friendly. I don't show this here, but it reads like works really nicely on phones. It builds HTML on the CI using GitLab pages. Yeah, it contains only the static parts about messa, so stuff that it doesn't change with every release. Yeah, and it also provides the news are actually, if you go to messathreader.org right now, you'll get all news since the beginning of time in one long page. This actually gives you just like the latest ones. There's a link here to reading all of the news, and that's a page-nated page. So you get like 10 news entries at the time and you don't have to load stuff from the mid 90s and stuff there. The gears turn. The gears turn if you hover them. So yeah, so this is my proposal for the website. Here's my proposals for the doc site. This builds the documentation. So this converts the documentation to Sphinx and the link is actually the wrong one. I'm sorry, we should just remove intro.html. I changed that since I wrote the slides. This effort was started by Laura Abbott. She wrote some scripts to automatically convert. I've updated them a bit and fixed up some things. When she worked on it, she was trying to replace the whole messathreader website with this Sphinx site. I wasn't a big fan of that particular because of the news. So there's two things. One is that branding of the website was kind of important when it's the website. So there was some debate back and forth about making a proper messa logo and stuff like that. And I kind of, this gets very opinionated and people have different ideas. And Sphinx doesn't handle pagination at all. So the news page was still like miles long. Scroll forever kind of thing. So and as far as I could see, I tried for a while to find something for Sphinx for this. It doesn't really seem to exist. I guess I could have patched it, but I thought just, hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. My bad. Yes? Yes, yes, you're right. My fault, my apologies to both of them for getting the wrong person there. Yeah, so yeah, this also does like the CI dance to convert stuff. As a kind of nice added benefit, we could move it to host the stuff on the readthedocs.org infrastructure. They have some nice bells and whistles where you can have multiple versions of the docs. So you can actually check the version of the docs that matches the version of messa you have. This is interesting kind of because you sometimes change the environment variables. And if you're stuck on like an LTS release of something, it's kind of annoying if the wrong information is there. Yeah. And then finally for releases, yeah, that's the current situation is that we're hosting these releases in three different URLs, one over HTTPS. So the nice thing is that it seems we have almost forever advertised the top link and the top two ones only. So none of these are under or none of the first two ones are under the main repo. So maybe we're lucky and no one actually has a script where it downloads it from that unadvertised messa3d.org-archive link, which is what requires the reverse proxy thing I talked about before. This needs some, I think, we need to do some logging and stuff to figure out if that is the case or not. Yeah. And changing it, as I said before, we'll break these URLs if we move it. So my best proposal, I think right now, is just to kind of keep it there but reverse proxy this URL and have that hosted separately from the GitLab pages. So we keep the old websites but kind of delete the page and do some redirects there and it's easy. We could also use a proper CDN but I'm not really sure if we care about that because I think most people use distro packages for messa3d so we don't really have a huge load, I think. But both the kernel and GNOME has proper CDN so we could also maybe piggyback on those. Kind of just start going there. I'm getting a signal that is 15 minutes left. I don't think that's true. All right. Yeah, so this is pretty much all I have. Now I want to hear if anyone has any ideas or suggestions on how we can improve this. Yeah, sure. The problem to me is not so much the HTML4 or whatever page. The problem is more the content. So the content is really not geared toward people who are unfamiliar with the topic. And that's really the more urgent thing to really make it that people can contribute or start contributing to messa3d. Because currently I think the wrap-up is huge. Right, so what is saying if someone didn't hear is that the problem right now for many people or at least were for you when you got introduced to messa3d was not so much the packaging but more of the content. And I agree that the content isn't great, but I hope that making this into a easier to edit format will make it a little bit less painful and kind of will incentivize people to keep things more up to date. But that remains to be seen, I think. I think it's hard to say that that's definitely going to happen, but I hope so. This is not the first time we see such a forward or such a try. And definitely I think it's not the last. How exactly are we going to pursue to get forward this time to make this happen? Well, so yeah, so if someone, I think everyone heard that. Yeah, so how we get this to happen, I think. I'm not, so I'm the only one, like I'm working on this kind of alone, but I'm kind of a little bit talking with some of the free desktop admins and stuff on the side. So I think there's more people who want this. And I think we just, at some point, need to make a community decision and kind of move forward. And I think I hope that this is, like what I'm presenting here, is enough to move forward. But I want to, of course, have everyone able to see what they think, say what they think about it first. I don't want to break anything for anyone. So I've been following that for a bit as well. And I think everybody agrees on the idea of doing that. Basically, the only thing that was preventing it was the technical issue of the archive and how to actually keep providing the problems without breaking the rule for everyone. That was pretty much the last issue. Once we figure out the good solution for that, I think everybody agrees on how to actually do the rest. Yeah. And just to fill in on that, the free desktop admins that I'm talking to, mostly Daniel Stone, is really not happy about the idea of having to maintain a reverse proxy for a long time. I totally understand that. But I think right now, the situation is kind of similar anyway, because there's already a reverse proxy for this. I think it's mostly a matter of reconfiguring what we have and kind of turn on some logging and make sure that we know if someone keeps using these old URLs, and maybe we can turn it off a couple of years down the line. The kernel moved all their releases with, I think, six months notice and just removed the old URLs. And the world survived. We could also just say it's not that important. Like, people have some time for themselves. I don't know. Since you use GitLab now, couldn't you use the pipeline to generate the files and just drop it there at the current location? We could, yes. So no reverse proxy extra needed, and just have it built when master commits come in, maybe every day? So the goal is kind of to find a way to avoid having to deal with this. But yes, we could untangle all these things and solve one problem at a time. I think this is a good excuse for trying to solve both, though. But maybe not. So I was going to say something similar to what you were saying about the beginner getting started. And you showed us sort of your home page, which did seem to fall into the same trap that I've found a lot of websites do, like, for example, when Rust changed their home page, one of the major criticisms was before it was like, you got there, and the first thing you saw was a piece of Rust code showing exactly what it did or the advantages were. And then now that they've changed it, it's basically become almost for managers saying just like, it's better, it's faster, use it. But it doesn't actually say anything about it itself. And yours as well, there, had basic introduction and latest news.  Yeah, so yeah, so I show kind of like which APIs are there and stuff like that. I'm not entirely solved of whether or they should be collapsed or not by default. But for mobile, it's actually much nicer to not get a wall of stuff before you get the news. Maybe we could reorder it to do that or something like that. But I think it's nice to have the intro bit first. The Read More Stuff takes you to the documentation site, to the introduction article there, which is the old, well, yeah, the old website takes you directly to the news. That's the only thing you see to begin with. So I think, so I'm going to, oh, this is not great, but OK. All right, so this isn't my desktop system being high DPI here. Yeah, so kind of like this is more of what I kind of envision. It's looking like on desktop at least. So you kind of like get here and you immediately see kind of what it provides of APIs. Yes, I know. Like this is a mock-up. If we remove stuff, we remove stuff. I don't mean for any of the content here to be final. I'm totally open for, you know. Yeah, so I don't think. So I don't think these things says that we're conforming for all drivers. I don't think we violate the Kronos kind of trademark rule, sir. But I think we should ask Kronos what they think. Kronos is pretty friendly to the Mesa project. So I'm not too worried if there's a logo we need to remove. Some of these things don't really have logos. For OpenCL, I really didn't want to use their horrible logo anyway, because it looks so different than it's kind of, yeah. Yeah, I mean, could we just write under the feature APIs there, like note, some of these are not implemented for all hardware and stuff like that. Maybe something that would be a good idea to kind of lower expectations a bit. Yeah, so there's like a list of drivers here also. This is not all of the drivers. I'm not sure if we, I don't know. I don't love this. This is like one thing that I don't love about this is it kind of forces us to order all the drivers. So I kind of like, instead of having to choose an order, I just like these are sorted alphabetically. The order, we get it out of the file system like when we iterate over the data set in Jekyll. I don't know. Also, I think these strings are probably wrong for a bunch of them. And like I think all of the driver maintainers should go through each of the strings here and verify that they're reasonably correct. Could be X. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that was, this would be a good place to put the mesometrics as long as we can find a way of reasonably integrating it into the build pipeline. But I'm sure we can. So I had a question kind of to your audience here. And some of the people mentioned things like having a code on the website to show you how to use it and everything. That means that it's just an implementation of a bunch of standards. We don't really, we're not very sure you have to use GL of open. We're kind of just providing a lift that allows you to do that. So yeah. That was just an example from the REST website. They used to have code. Yeah, but what is the kind of thing that you would want to see on the website? Well, you could look at getting started, I think. But you started on what? Because to me, MISO is kind of just the lift that you compile and install on your system and that's it. Then you use your app normally. Or you write an app, but then that's what API you want to use for your app. So I don't really understand what it is that you want to see. So that's my question. This might be a bit tangential to MISO itself. But using cases, for example, that are uncommon, like using EGL in the context of KMS and DRM, which doesn't really exist, you have to hunt down that information. Whereas using EGL GLX in the context of X is easy to find piles. That's just not there, for example. That would be one thing, I think, these introductions to that. For people who want to get started hacking on MISO itself, introductions to its structure, how it works, bits of code you could possibly hack on and modify to see how it affects MISO's implementation so people can look at and see how it wobbles kind of safely. So what if I mess with, I don't know, the Shader Compiler? Let me make it do something. That kind of thing. Because really, that's the implementation. Mostly, that's what you want people to start learning and figuring out. I think you need separate introductions for users and developers. Like, have it split.  These are the drivers you are looking for. And you can install it through your distro.  Start here. Yeah, so from a kind of perspective of what I've shown here, I think a lot of these things are kind of about which articles to have in the documentation, which I think is great to have more articles about more stuff. And we need to put that somewhere. I don't know if the website or the docs are best for every kind of article. Guessing probably the docs is going to be where you want most of this technical stuff. So I think for that stuff, maybe we just want some kind of visible link for the most important stuff on the website to where we can put stuff like that. I'm not really myself looking into writing a whole lot of content because it's not something I'm good at. I'm sorry. But yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff we could have better content at. And I think there's probably not enough people out there who's willing to contribute some of their knowledge if they know how and where. So it could be that making the barrier lower here might get us some more documentation. So I could mention something else. There's one thing that I'm not very happy about with the current implementation there. I used Jekyll to build the whole thing. And I pretty quickly stumbled into problems of performance with Jekyll. So I've been considering rewriting it using something like Kuba or a faster one. Yeah, the site generator. I think about 30 seconds on my laptop, which it's not horrible, but it's not great to kind of change one little detail and wait 30 seconds until. And it's also like. You can run live mode with Jekyll and that's fast. Because then it's just incremental builds. Yeah, but incremental builds. Like if you change the template, then it builds all of the pages. And it kind of just serves the old content until the build is done, which I think is not fantastic. So I think it's much better to work on than the current solution, but it's still not perfect. But I also think that maybe the websites don't need as much work on it as the documentation sites in terms of content. So maybe it's OK. I think it's for now I'm happier with this than the current solution. So I would be happy to move on with this and then look into performance later, for instance. Yeah, I think that that would be my next thing to try. I've used Hugo a little bit. I get very confused by Hugo.  But maybe I should give it another try. I've seen people rebuild Jekyll sites in Hugo with kind of getting the exact same sites. So yeah, I think the only thing is that Hugo is a little bit more insistent on having all of your content being like a tree. Yeah, it's like everything is like directories or nodes kind of, whereas in Jekyll it's all just pages and you kind of insert the links yourself. Like the relationship between the articles are up to the content and in Hugo it's kind of like part of the structure.  I feel like I'm a little bit too dumb for it. So maybe there's something that I just don't get. So I got the message that we're 15 minutes left here. So yeah, and probably the next speaker wants to connect soon. So yeah. But if anyone has any more questions or ideas. Yeah, seems like the discussion is over. Yeah. All right, cool. Thanks a lot.


The VHS track and field teams up and running in the last part of their regular season. But before they get ready for the post season, a pair of lumberjack runners put pen to paper this afternoon. Isaac Berg and Cody Roder are teammates for the next month, but will be rivals in the same conference next season. Berg hopes to run cross-country and long distance for North Dakota State while Roder will continue his track career at North Dakota at the mid-distance level. An exciting afternoon for both athletes, but for one in particular, it's following and familiar footsteps. I wanted somewhere kind of close and had my major which is some engineering and they have a great program and I guess it's kind of been influencing me on a little bit. My dad went there back in the 80s and I guess one of the few things that hasn't changed since he went there. It's the same head coach, Don Larson, could be my coach next year and he was my dad's also. The biggest thing was is that they kind of reached out to me a little bit more than I reached out to them and it really showed that they wanted me and then I went into it there and I just kind of knew that it was the right fit. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.