Welcome everyone, it is the fifth session of our Tech Integration is Success series. We are so excited that you are joining us here today to get inspired, get some ideas, and try something with the teachers that you support. I'm Angela, you probably already know me. I taught kindergarten for 15 years, and I lead the community team here at CSAH. Make sure you find me on Twitter. Let me know how you are using some of the ideas that we are sharing. We would love to hear from you. What can you expect in this series if you are just joining us for the first time? We are really here to support you, inspire you, and provide you with connections, hopefully with others in a similar role that you have. We talk about a variety of topics, lots of ideas and resources, and again, hoping to build that community of people that you can reach out to and bounce some ideas off of. We have all of our sessions on our YouTube channel, so definitely check that out as well. And if you haven't formally registered or just watching this recording and think, how do I get in on this next one? This is where you will go to register. We meet the second Wednesday of each month. So make sure you join us next time. We'll have some more fun in December as well. And as a reminder, if you are viewing this session, you are able to get a certificate of completion. So what you'll need to do is just listen for a six-digit code that Matt will be giving you during the presentation, and then you use that to get your certificate. You will find a link to that in the description of the video or in the follow-up email as well.  You don't need to do anything. It will come via email to you in just a couple of days. Today we are really excited. Our topic is 27 Tips to Deliver Powerful PD, and we are really excited and thrilled to have with us today Matt Miller. Matt Miller taught in public schools for more than 10 years, teaching all levels of high school Spanish. In his career, he planned nearly 12,000 class lessons. He taught more than half a million instructional minutes, and he graded work for nearly 2,000 days of class. His book and blog, both titled Ditch That Textbook, have equipped and inspired tens of thousands of educators in more than 100 countries. He lives in West Central Indiana and says that he's living the dream, happily married with three kids, two dogs and a mortgage. And we are so excited to have Matt here with us today. I came upon this amazing blog post where he was sharing these 27 tips and ideas, and I knew our community could be inspired and get those little gems and nuggets to really share and put to use with all of the teachers that you work with. So Matt is going to turn on his webcam. I am going to give control over to Matt so he can share his presentation with us. And we are going to get cruising today. Welcome, Matt. All right, thank you so much. Hey, everyone, it's so good to be with you today. Coming to you here from from Indiana, where it is cold. It's like unseasonably cold. We just got about three inches of snow. So we had our first snow day of the year last yesterday. And so, yeah, I was super excited to get to chat with all of you today. As far as, you know, talking about this this topic. And I'm not sure. Sorry to do this, Angela. I'm not sure how to do the the slides. Is there any way you can take that back and advance the slides for me? Sure, I totally can do that. OK, cool. All right, she's got it. See, we're being we're being real here. We're just keeping it real. So this is the real deal, right? I love it. I love it. Yeah, absolutely. So so whenever I go go do professional development, sometimes I sneak in there and I say if I'm having some trouble like this, I say it doesn't make any of you feel any better that the guy who's presenting on technology is having trouble with his technology. A lot of times people are very happy. We're all right. Yes, yes, absolutely. So so yeah, I've been doing professional development probably for six or seven years or so, you know, starting with breakout sessions at conferences and after that doing some full day workshops with schools. A lot of times I bounce around to different schools and school districts and keynote speeches and all of that. And so I found that, you know, for me, there's there's been a lot of lessons that I've learned, a lot of things that I've had to learn the hard way. And a lot of things that I've learned from people who do really well at professional development. And so just not too long ago, I just sort of did a brain dump of all of the things that that I believe about professional development into this blog post. And it was called 27 Tips to Deliver Powerful Professional Development. And so the link that you've got on your screen at ditch that textbook dot com slash powerful PD, that's where you can find that blog post. And the sad part about what we've got today is that we've got a limited amount of time and 27 tips. So I'm I'm just certain that I'm not going to get to all of them. But if you want to read through all of them, you can certainly go check them out. And so let's dive right into the first one, which is to use the problem solution framework. And I know sometimes whenever we plan professional development, it's easy to think about, you know, what's the tool that I want to tell them about? What's the, you know, what's the strategy that I want to tell them about? But I think that it's important that we think about what, you know, instead of thinking about what we want them to do, if we start with the problem that it solves, I think that's kind of important, you know, to ask ourselves, what are the problems that these these teachers are facing? Or what's the problem that what I'm giving them solves? And then we get if we use that as a guide, then, you know, that sort of shows them how we're able to solve that problem for them. So if they walk into the room and we're handing them the things to try in their classroom, or we're saying, you should do this now, you should do this. And they're going, yeah, but how is that going to help me? You know, I've talked to so many teachers that have felt this way. And, you know, really when they say, how is that going to help me? The real question I think that they're asking is, what's the problem that this solves for me? And so if we if we keep that in mind from the beginning, then they're able to walk out of the room and know that they've got something that will help them. So that's the first one. And so if we move on to the next one, the next one is and this is something that I've heard of more in like a business setting. This is kind of like a sales thing. And I don't want to say sales. Some of you are like, I'm not a sales person, don't do that. But this is just like this is just human nature. So stick with me. OK, this one is enter the conversation that they're already having in their heads. You know, a lot of times teachers in professional development already have this narrative in their heads, kind of like an inner monologue, you know, about what they're what they're saying and what they're thinking. And so what we can do is I think we can use clues to figure out what the conversation is so that we can join that conversation. So there's a variety of ways that we can pick up on those clues to know what that narrative is, what's going on in their heads. You know, sometimes it's just simply body language and facial expressions that we can pick up on and, you know, try to respond to as we go. And then sometimes we can join that narrative just by simply asking them, you know, before we start, ask them some questions or maybe in the days leading up to it. Another way when in the days leading up to it, something that's interesting is sometimes we can pull on things through like social media or any discussions that we have with people. I know sometimes just keeping an eye on Twitter or even asking a question on Twitter, sometimes that'll pull out opinions or thoughts or preconceived notions that people have that I didn't expect. And sometimes if I do that, you know, that's that's really helpful to work with the teachers that I'm working with. And then, of course, you don't want it to stop there because that conversation that they've had in their heads all throughout we can make ourselves better afterwards. I think if we ask them about that, so if we get an opportunity to ask them some questions, either verbally face to face or through a survey afterwards, then we know what that conversation was and we're able to serve the other teachers that we work with in the future a little bit better. So that's that's another option there. So the next one is to customize professional development to their unique needs. And I'm guessing that there's probably lots of you that already are masters at this. I know some of the best professional development specialists, tech integration specialists that I know are the ones that really do this and do it well. So, you know, it's sometimes it's something just as simple as sending out a Google Forms survey ahead of time, just to see what they're interested in. You know, maybe we ask them about their struggles. Again, we're going back to that problem solution framework, given them the opportunity to pick from some of the topics that you're that you're good at facilitating or even if you're willing to stretch yourself, maybe picking topics that are not really in your wheelhouse, but, you know, doing the work ahead of time to try to improve on that before you before you present. And when they feel like they're they're part of the process, I think that they're a lot of times more invested. I know that I always am whenever I go into the presentation and I know that I've had a say in it, you know, I think that that's that's really powerful. So, yeah, any way that we can customize to teachers needs is a good way to go. So the next one, start with the pain point. And I have to stop real quick and say that the little icon here I thought was was hilarious. I use icons from the noun project, which you can find at the noun project dot com. I plug them into my presentations all the time. I actually have a noun pro account, so I'm actually a paid member of the noun project. And so I'm always pulling these icons into the things that I do. And I thought I typed in the word pain and I found this one. This is a person pricking their finger on a cactus.  And, you know, I like to use the term felt need here. It's not just a need that they need, but it's something that they that they feel. And so I think when we focus our solutions towards eliminating that pain, you know, before we were talking about what's the problem and then what's the solution in this case, you know, thinking about how can we eliminate that pain? And I know for me, whenever I've worked with teachers, a lot of times one of their biggest barriers is time. I don't know if you've ever noticed this before, but for me as a teacher and with a lot of the teachers I've worked with, they've told me that time is one of their biggest barriers. So a lot of times, whenever I do professional development, I try to gear my solutions towards that barrier, time. And so I'm looking for ways to help them to start to make a change right away that's going to help save them time or help save their students time so that they can use that time for what matters most. So that's that's yet another one. So Angela mentioned a code earlier. I want to make sure that I give you that code before I forget. And so this is the number. So get ready to write this down, OK, or type this in. Your code is 736-281 736-281. See, I even went all old school and I put it on a sticky note. Can you see it? 736-281. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. See, and I'm not all just digital. See, I'm all sorts of analog, too. So there we go. 736-281. I think I threw that trash can. No, it was really close. OK, anyway, here's another one that I found super, super useful. And a lot of times we talk about this one when it comes to teaching students. But I found that this is so important when working with teachers, too. And it's this quote. And there's a variety of different ways that this quote is shared. But on this slide, it says they might forget what you said, but they won't forget how you made them feel. And I know a lot of times I've gone in and I've done workshops and breakout sessions and even keynote speeches. And I know that the way that teachers felt through my message was one of the biggest things that they took away. And there's going to be a lot of it that they forget, especially if I do a full day workshop or if I do an after school PD or breakout session, there's a lot of it that they're going to forget. But the way that we make them feel is huge. So I know for me, a lot of times, I try to take every opportunity that I can to make teachers feel welcome. So as they're coming in, I'm giving them that smile at the dorm, saying hello, trying to greet them by name if I can. Because we know that there's lots of brain research that talks about how your mood and how your emotions play into your cognition. And so when we're wanting teachers to show up and to feel like they're ready to learn and that they're ready to know that they're ready to take on some new things for their classroom. We want them to be dialed in mentally and to do that, a lot of times we can help them to dial in emotionally too. In the book, The Happiness Advantage, which I actually have a copy of right here. Gonna look for one more second, going once, going twice. Yeah, it's over here somewhere. It's written by Sean Acor. And one of the big takeaways I had from that book was, he says that people are 31% more productive when their emotional state is at positive instead of at neutral or at negative. I like to use my hands like this because it's like a dial, like a fuel gauge. And so whenever we're at positive, we're way, way more productive according to his research. And so I'm looking for ways to turn that dial to positive. So if someone struggles, I like to help them feel like that that struggle is it's easy to fix. No big deal, that's okay, don't worry about it. We can get that fixed in no time. If they make a mistake, then I like to help them to feel like it's, it's nothing, it's not a big deal. Oh, that's okay, we can handle that. If something goes wrong and it's not their fault, I make sure that they know that it's not their fault. And so I think that's a super important part that sometimes when we think about what they need to learn, sometimes we forget about their emotional state. And teachers are just like students in many ways when it comes to that. So I think that one, that one's super important. Okay, here's where it's gonna start to get weird, okay? This is just me and my own unique personality coming out here. Meatloaf has been kind of like a staple in our house for a long time. I like meatloaf. Some people are kind of grossed out by meatloaf. I don't know if you've ever had it before, but basically what you've got is you've got ground beef and then there are some other kind of like filler things inside of it. Sometimes people will put breadcrumbs in it. Sometimes they'll actually like tear up pieces of bread. Sometimes, I mean just a variety of things that they'll put in their meatloaf. In fact, if you're typing in comments here into the chat, I would love to hear if you do meatloaf what your add-ins are to the meatloaf. Well, I think I know for our household, if we're serving meatloaf, my kids like it because they like the way that the meatloaf tastes. They like it for the taste. That's why they like a lot of things that they eat. But what my wife and I will do sometimes is we will grind up vegetables. Broccoli, cauliflower, whatever and mix it into the meatloaf to give it a little bit more nutritional value. And the great thing is is that the kids still have the same taste, but they've got a little bit more of that nutritional value in it because it's got that stuff ground up in it. And I've started to try to approach professional development in the same way. So what I like to do is I like to give the sizzle to the teachers that I'm working with. I like to look at what is it that they want. I've found this a lot in conferences by seeing which breakout sessions are the ones that are like packed to the gills. So I know for a fact that like 60 apps and 60 minutes, they all want to know about the apps. They want to know about a lot of times for me, Google things end up getting a lot of it. Student engagement things, fun things like escape rooms and breakouts and all of that. Teachers have been all about that kind of stuff. And so if I know that that's the kind of stuff that they want, that's great. That's the meatloaf. Again, if you're not a big fan of meatloaf, you can come up with another analogy. Let's assume at least that people like meatloaf for the case of my analogy, okay? So if that's that, then I'm gonna give them what they want, but what I also wanna do is provide some extra nutritional value for it too. So I'm going to grind up some pedagogical cauliflower and broccoli and all of that. Because I found that a lot of times teachers won't like show up for ways to infuse Webb's depth of knowledge into your classroom. They're like, oh, I have depth of knowledge, blooms taxonomy, oh, it just like it hurts them to try to talk about this. But I found that if I can infuse little bits of that into the things that they love, they will start to use it. So instead of going, here's the pedagogy, here's the best practice, here's the brain research, here's all of that nerdy stuff that makes learning happen that's not as much fun.  And surprisingly over time, all of that nourishment starts to add up. The meatloaf approach, there you go. We're a little bit hungry, I think right now, Matt. I hope so, assuming that you like meatloaf, I guess. Right, right, good point, good point. Yeah, exactly. Angela, how are we doing on time? We've got about 25 minutes till the end, so we're doing okay. Okay, good, all right, so we can keep plowing through. So, all right, so the next one, this is the next one about let them share. So I know when I started doing workshops and professional development, I felt like, my job is to come in and to provide value and to give the teacher something that they didn't have before, something that'll be useful to them. And the reality is that that's true, that is why you've come. But I know for me as a teacher, I don't wanna sit through professional development and just sit and get. I don't wanna just sit and listen. I wanna be involved in it, of course, right? And so after a while, I started giving more and more opportunities for my participants to share, how are you using this in the classroom yourself? Or if you've seen this idea now in this professional development, think about how could you potentially use this in class?  And for a while, I used to have this complex almost about turning that over to them because I felt like that's why I'm here. But the truth is is that that mixes up the voices. So now we've got some contrast. It's not all just me, it's also them.  And so now they start to see that and it kind of changes the dynamic and it makes that a little bit less monotone and monologue and all of that. So that's one of the things that I really like. Now, when it comes to that, and that's what this next slide is, I have just recently come across this book. I just started reading this like a week ago or so. And so it's this book called The Coaching Habit. Say less, ask more and change the way you lead forever. Really, really like this book. And so what it's all framed around, this whole book is framed around these seven essential questions for coaching. And I think that it's written specifically for people in the business world. But I think whenever we're doing professional development, these are so helpful. And so these are the seven essential questions. Now, as I was reading the book, they sort of like slowly released them out to me. So I almost feel like this is spoiler alert here. I'm giving you all of the questions. So if you get the book, you're gonna know what the questions are ahead of time. But yeah, I mean, some of these just as simple as what's on your mind and what else? Those two go together really well. If we wanna know how we can solve the problems, problem solution, this is an easy way to ask to get some information about what the problems are. And this is again, something that if you have a big room of people, maybe is best done ahead of time. Either through a back channel while they're getting ready to start, maybe a Google Form Survey ahead of time so that we know what's on their mind. Now, the interesting thing is when you ask somebody what's on their mind, they'll give you the first bit of it. And it's amazing to see how much more they will give you if prompted. So this question and what else can elicit a lot of responses.  That just seems to me counterintuitive. But the reality is that if you ask and what else, a lot of times people will give you more. What's the real challenge here for you? I love this question because whenever we start to peel back what's on their mind, what we wanna do is solve those problems. And so asking, what is the real challenge here for you? It's worded really well that it starts to help us figure out what we can do to help. What do you want? How can I help? I love this other one too. If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? And I know sometimes teachers don't have the ability to say no to certain things, but I think this is an important one for priorities. And then I like this last one too. What was most useful to you at the end? That's kind of like that metacognitive part. We want our students to think about their thinking and think about their learning. And sometimes we don't give the teachers that we're working with the same opportunity. So I thought those are really, really good questions. I've just kind of breezed over those. But if you like the idea of that, this is a really good book. I've really, really enjoyed it. So we'll keep moving. Make professional development about teaching and learning. This goes back to the Milofer approach a little bit. Because I know for a while, I used to do tool-centric professional development.   Here are all of the features that it has. Amazing. I know your minds are blown. Drop the mic. Walk away. And I used to make the assumption that teachers were able to draw the lines between the dots. You know, it connects the dots between, here's this neat tool and here's how you can use it in the class. But the reality is that between those two things, here's the tool and here's how you can use it in the classroom. Between these two things, there is this huge chasm. This is like this great big canyon between those two things. And it's our job to help build a bridge between those two things so that they can see it. So for instance, you know, a lot of times, if we're gonna make professional development about teaching and learning, you know, some of the things that you might learn in a teacher prep program about pedagogy. For me, I've learned a lot recently. That's not, I'm not saying that I know a lot, but I've picked up a lot about things like web step of knowledge, revised blooms taxonomy, which by the way, if you haven't seen revised blooms taxonomy or if you haven't picked it up since your teacher prep program, this thing is amazing.  Universal design for learning, understanding by design, you know, some of those things are the, that's like the stuff that makes up great lessons. But sometimes we skip over that because we wanna get to the tools and because we wanna think about how am I gonna get this lesson plan done? And I think if we can start to infuse those things, make that kind of like your broccoli and your cauliflower inside of your meatloaf, at that point, it becomes more about the teaching and learning, how can we use this? How is this better than what we were doing before for learning? And then that way it's more about teaching and learning and it's less about the tools. So that's one that I've found to be super, super helpful. Be your own unique self. I did a little bit of this earlier when I talked about meatloaf and I was, see, I was very vulnerable with you and I was like, meatloaf is for me, maybe it's not for you, but hey, that's who I am, you know?  If you are goofy, for heaven's sake, be goofy. If you're a little bit more serious, hey, that's totally fine. If you have a skill or a talent, maybe look for ways that that can play into your professional development, you know? I'm gonna go as far as saying, if you can sing or play an instrument, a musical instrument, that's gonna be memorable. So maybe be vulnerable and take a risk and pull in some of those talents, whatever your talents are, whatever your unique personality is. If you can draw or at least you're willing to try, then maybe sketching, you know, sometimes I'll have a whiteboard behind me. I did this at one conference in particular. I was in a group of like three or four people and we were all bouncing ideas around and bouncing ideas off of the participants. And while we were all talking, I was up at the whiteboard and I was sketching because I liked to sketch note. I've just done a lot of it. I'm not great at it, but I like to sketch note. And so I turned the whiteboard into this great big sketch note. And you know what? That was a whole different dynamic than what they would have gotten otherwise. And I was shocked to see that when we were done, people were up there taking pictures of it. And the reason that it worked out was because I was willing to take my own unique self, my own skills and talents and show them off. And it's not because I'm highly skilled in it at all. I'm not, but I was willing to go out on a limb and give it a shot anyway. So you might just kind of take inventory of what are those unique skills, talents, those unique things about your personality. And you know what? You just be you because people love to see who others are uniquely and truly, this one. Remember how important this work is. Because I think sometimes we get into professional development and it's easy to think about, I need to teach them about this. I need to show them this. Oh, I've been doing professional development with this group for a while and oh man, some of them just like rolled their eyes at me and some of them are just totally checked out and it's easy to get into that stuff. But you know what? Let me just remind you a couple of things. The impact of what you do in professional development as a tech integration specialist or whatever your role is is so important. And just try to remember that because it's exponential. See, I do professional development full-time now and it kills me sometimes to realize that I don't have a class of kids. And I'll bet that you're probably like that to some extent. But what we have to remind ourselves is the ripple effect that we get to have because it starts with us and we work with teachers. We have stuff that teachers can use. And whenever teachers start to use it, you think about all those teachers that you worked with. Each one of those teachers represents dozens of kids, at least dozens of kids. And so if that idea spreads out to the teachers and if they use it in their classroom, now all of a sudden we're impacting hundreds of kids, depending on the size of your reach in your school district, maybe that's thousands of kids. And if that impacts their learning, now we're creating all of these little citizens that go out into the world that start to impact the community and that ripple effect gets even bigger. And if you start to scale all of that back, you realize that that community impact, which eventually becomes world impact, all starts to happen on the community level because that happened to the kids because it happened with the teachers because you planned something helpful that was gonna impact those kids. And so I know I'm starting to get a little touchy-feely on you here. I know that this is not on the practical level so much, but this is just so important, I think, what we do in professional development is that we get to be the beginning of that ripple. We are a pebble in a very still, flat, quiet pond and those ripples start to reach out and they reach out to the teachers, they reach out to the kids and whenever we get to have impact on kids, oh my goodness, we are changing communities. We're changing eventually the state and the country and the world. So please don't forget that. I hope that through all of this, at least you will remember that and even if you've got some tough nuts to crack in your group, it's getting through to somebody. And so when it does get through to somebody and then it passes through them to the kids and then it gets to start changing our communities. And so it's such important work that we do. So I hope that you will remember that. So this is the stuff that comes from this blog post that I wrote. You can find it again at ditchthattextbook.com slash powerfulpd. So you can go check out all 27 of them. I don't think we got, we got to what? Two, four, six, eight, 10, maybe a dozen of them or something. So there's a bunch of other stuff there. Some of it will probably be more useful to you than others but hopefully there's some nuggets there that could help. I kind of hate the fact that you guys are all just listening to me because I know that we've got dozens on the live call and we will have even more than that that are watching the video afterwards that could share their own stuff. And so I hope that even if you don't get a chance to share it on a video like this that you'll share it through whatever communities you have because your perspective is important too. And you've got things to share also. I did want to mention this one last thing. I have a great free resource that you might want to check out. It's called, it's a free ebook called 101 Practical Ways to Ditch That Textbook. I'm always looking for ways to bring in technology, creativity, innovation, stuff like that into the classroom. This ebook has 101 practical things that you or the teachers you serve could plug in your classes right away. There's another free ebook that goes with it. And so if you go to that link, ditch that textbook.com slash 101. If you go there, you can get that free ebook, actually those free ebooks delivered right into your inbox and what it will also do is it'll sign you up for my email newsletter where I'm sharing practical things to help teachers out in their instruction to be able to do cool things in the classroom. Just new ideas every single week. And I know lots of tech integration specialists have told me this is the kind of thing that they like to be able to either forward onto their teachers or to pull little snippets out of the email newsletter or to pull blog posts so that they can share them with their teachers. So if you're looking for great content that you can pass along to the teachers that you serve, then I would be honored if you would check it out. And if you found stuff that you wanted to pass along that would be great. So hope this has been useful. It's been fun to be able to share a couple of ideas with you. And so I'm so thankful that Angela that you invited me to come in. Oh yeah, it's been great. So I'm gonna show a couple of slides here but all of you that are live, I really want you to think about what do you wanna ask Matt? What do you wanna pick his brain about since we have about 10 minutes to go. Feel free to type in the question box. What would you like to ask him? What would you like him to elaborate on? Share a story about, go ahead and type that in and I will pass that on to him. Of course, what do you add to your meatloaf too? Remember I wanted to know. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Joni already said tomato paste breadcrumbs and I forgot Joni what your third one was. But there have been some chatter about that. But as a reminder, we do offer free professional development for teachers in our PD and PJs program. So make sure if you haven't ever joined us for that opportunity to do so. And as Matt was just sharing, how can you share your ideas within a community? This is a great spot to go to our CISA tech integrationist group on Facebook. You don't have to use CISA to be there if you're a tech integrationist or even know other tech integrationists. This is a really great place where people are asking questions, they're sharing successes, they're bouncing ideas off of each other. So this would be a great spot to share as well. And if you're not yet connected with our CISA community, you have all sorts of spaces for that from Twitter to Instagram to Facebook. And of course our help center is at help.cisa.me. So we are gonna jump into some questions here live. I'm actually just gonna go back to Matt's intro slide here to kind of rest on that. Maybe that's weird because you're right next to your picture, your live video is right next to that, but we'll go with it, right? Maybe I'll rest on here or so if they're looking for the link to the full blog post about these PD tips, I highly encourage you to check that out. So one of the things that I was thinking as you were talking and sharing that was really, I almost feel like this is one of those sessions that you could have on a playlist as you're planning a PD and just take a quick listen and try to maybe integrate one or two ideas if you're going into a session and think about how you can even focus on that aspect. I think this would be a good one to kind of keep revisiting and just rejuvenate yourself every now and then as well. So I'm gonna jump, I'm gonna look at some questions coming in. Let's see, Hope says really you should be asking about what everyone puts in their sauce. The sauce is most important, says Hope. Hope is exactly right on that. The sauce on the top of the meatloaf is key.  That is solid point. Oh, so Joanie has a question, Matt. She's wondering if you're doing the ditch summit this year. Oh, Joanie! Maybe talk about that a little bit for those people that are live that have never heard about that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Absolutely, thank you so much for asking about that. Yes, I'm doing the ditch summit again. So let me give you the rundown on this real quick because this may be something you wanna share with the teachers that you serve. It is a free online conference for teachers. And so what I do is it starts, in fact, I'll give you exact dates even though those haven't been announced yet. Look at me looking for my notebooks because I still do things in paper notebooks sometimes. If that makes any of you feel a little bit better that I'm kind of like analog and digital. It is gonna start on December 21st and it'll run through January 8th. Very intentionally during the winter break time. And so what we do is we've got video presentations from all of these amazing speakers. It's a lot of the authors that you've read, the people that you've bumped into on Twitter. We've got national board certified teachers. We've got former teachers of the year. We've got national teachers of the year. I mean, just all of these cool folks from previous presentations and then we'll have nine brand new ones. A lot of the videos are 45 minutes plus or minus 15. And I just interview people about, we'll get somebody on and talk to them about a topic that they're kind of an expert on and we'll pull out all of these practical nuggets that you can start using right away. So from the 21st to the 8th those videos are available. We'll have nine brand new ones, probably more than 50 altogether that you can watch. And the best part about it is that when you watch one of these videos, once you're done, you can generate a certificate of completion for professional development credit. So each one of those videos counts for one hour of professional development credit if your school or district accepts it. So I know lots and lots of teachers like to go to this because they can get that professional development credit for free. If you go to ditchsummit.com, ditchsummit.com, there's a place where you can sign up to get an email reminder when it starts and to get emails during the summit so that you can go get the videos. So you can go sign up for that. Feel free to pass any of that information on the website along to the teachers that you serve to. Awesome, love that Matt. So Colleen is just thanking you. This was amazing. She loved your pebble in a quiet pond reference. A couple of other questions coming in. Joni is wondering Matt, if you can talk a little bit about what's the best approach for differentiating in tech PD. So you have some teachers that might be in a session with really high ability and really low ability. Yep, yep. I think that's a great point. I think for me, what I like to do a lot of times, there's a couple of different ways to do this. One comes down to that personalized type thing where if we know ahead of time, if we can ask them questions about their skills. Now, sometimes that's tough because it's hard for people to self report their skills or sometimes people will undervalue themselves or overvalue themselves a little bit. But if we ask that, sometimes that's kind of useful. But what I also like to do is I like to start if I'm in different segments of my professional development, especially if I've got everybody as a whole group, I like to start with my beginner stuff at the beginning of a segment. So I'll give you an example. I talk about Google Maps Street View during my workshop sometimes, where you can drop the little yellow pegman down and you can see the world in three dimensions. So what I like to do is I like to give the basic stuff to everybody at the beginning because that way your sort of your lower techie people get something easy that they can go do that's a quick win. And while they're working on that, then sometimes I'll say, what you can also do is this and then I start to build a little bit more. And then if you really want something nerdy and see when I'm talking about something nerdy, really the only people that are hearing me are the ones who are looking for something nerdy because the other ones are still focused on their computers trying to figure out how to drop the little yellow pegman.  The beginners, their head space is just on doing that basic stuff you showed them at the beginning. But the advanced ones are like, I got this. So that's why when you continue to go up like that then I think you're providing just what their head space needs to be able to add something new. I hope that was helpful. Yeah, that was great. We have a couple more questions we're gonna squeeze in. So Jeff is asking what do you do when admin puts tech on the back burner? Oh yeah, the admin question. That's a great question. Cause I think that comes in a couple of different versions. If they're putting it on the back burner as far as hardware and infrastructure there's like not a lot that we can do with that. That's hard. I mean, that becomes changing minds of leadership. And I think that when we have a vision for what we can do with technology, instead of just saying, hey, we need to get Chromebooks. We need to get iPads. We need to get something. It's like, what can we do with it? And they start to see that. Maybe that's where that changes. As far as like when admin isn't pushing tech integration as much. I think that's our opportunity to get granular to get individual with it. Sometimes when we don't get everybody together in the same room, maybe what we can do is we can get to one. I like to go to like the tech superstars or maybe even better than the tech superstars, the teaching superstars, you know, the ones who have really effective instruction and try to help them solve a problem or help them to improve on something. And whenever one person gets it, it's like then you start to get a grassroots thing. So even if you can't get it from the top down, sometimes you can start things out on the grassroots level and the teachers will spread it instead of the admin. Great ideas. We have about 30 seconds. So we have a couple of quick questions. Leslie wants to know if you're gonna be at FETC this year. Yes, I will, I'll just be here there. Awesome, yeah, she'll see you there. And just a shout out to Amos who is here from Ghana with Nayan. So thanks for making time to visit us here live today. We love it, we love it. And a special thank you to Matt for being here and sharing all of your ideas and inspiration. We hope you'll all join us next time for another session in about a month. So we encourage you in the meantime to hop into our Facebook group and share ideas and ask questions with other tech integrationists or coaches or admins that are doing a lot of the same stuff that you are doing. So Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure, thanks so much.


Okay, and we do. Hi, hello everyone, and welcome to another SysSexVision talk. As usual, I would like to remind you that this talk is part of the WorldWrite NOIR Initiative. It's a global platform created already one year ago, and it has allowed us to continue exchanging or work and ideas during the pandemic. There are many live talks and podcasts on various topics. So just take the time to go on the website, check the different folks, and make sure you will find something of interest for you. Today, we would like to offer you something a bit different than usual, and something that will not only solely cover vision research. Today, instead of presenting data or sharing our newest results, we would like to engage our audience with the topics that we hold dear. It's a topic that we consider necessary for the good development of research and science in general. It's a topic which is known by many, but still underappreciated. So if you click on this video to join us, you know that today we're going to talk about open-source hardware. And to do so, I am very glad to be able to receive my friend and colleague, André Mayas-Chagas. So André studied biology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He then moved to Germany, where he obtained his neuroscience master, and then more recently his PhD, which combined neuroscience and open-source hardware. It was mostly based on open-source hardware, to be honest. For years, he's been volunteering at Trend in Africa, an NGO charity, which supports scientific capacity building across Africa, where he operates as an open-science coordinator. He is now a research bioengineer at the University of Sussex, where he provides support to research labs in the neuroscience department by developing various research equipment. Also on his spare time, he offers consistency services around open-science hardware through the platform, Prometheus Science, is also an editor at PLOS for the open-source toolkit. And to finish, he started Open Neuroscience, a network of collaborators trying to keep track and create interesting open-source projects relating to neurosciences. And these we're going to discuss a little bit later. So, hello André, how are you doing? And first question, where do you find the time to sleep? Hi, Max, hi everyone. First of all, thanks for making the time and the space for me to talk about something that is mentioned I hold quite dear, which is open-source tools and open-source hardware for research. I guess leaping is for everybody overrated. And I mean, all of these, like I started and I work on, but these are all collaborative efforts, right? So it's not just me, but a bunch of wonderful people all around the world who are actually pushing these agendas forward, right? Very well. So, let's start. So, André, we keep hearing about open-source, open access, open science, et cetera. Can you give us a definition? Can you describe us what is open-source and in all case, what is open-source hardware? Yeah, absolutely. So, open-source, there is a very formal definition for it. It started with software back in the 60s, but how I like to describe it that it's easy to understand is basically something that we've always been doing, right?  But as you share the steps to make a recipe, a cooking recipe and you're sharing this in a way that you tell people you can do whatever you want with this, you can cook it yourself, you can give it to another friend, you can actually bake cakes and sell or you can make this recipe and sell it for a little bit of money, you can alter the recipe. This is basically open-source, right? So open-source is this idea of take the blueprint of something, it could be code, it could be equipment, it could be a cooking recipe and shared with others using the certain guidelines that like you showed the screen. And then of course hardware has its specific guidelines and software has its specific guidelines and so on. But the point is we share an exchange knowledge by sharing the ways we've done things. Yeah, I think this is my definition of open-source. So it's technically an exchange of resources and knowledge about a particular topic. And exactly, right? And if you think about academia, this is super fitting to academia, right? Because we have like all of these public-funded institutions and all of this money that's poured in from taxpayers' money. And we should basically freely share this back to the public because they paid for this in the first place anyways, right? And there were a lot of, there is a lot of proof that sharing things freely in this way, be open access or be open-source actually speeds up the pace of innovation and increases the replicability of science and makes things actually better. Yeah, okay, that I fully agree with. But here we're mostly talking about open science, let's say. In our case, why should we care as scientists, as a researcher about open-source hardware? Why should we put such an interest and investment onto it? So I mean, there are a lot of reasons why and a couple of them are basically A makes you a better researcher in the sense that if you understand your tools, if I have something that it's open-source, I can read the design files, I can learn everything in there, how it works to minimal details, right? And if I know these, I know exactly what my machines are able to do because nowadays it's impossible to do science without equipment. And so if I know what they're able to do, I know exactly what kind of data is coming out of them and I know if they're out of calibration, I know if they're not behaving the way they should, right? And so this is the first thing. So you can nicely know when your devices are properly working. This is one, but then two is if I know exactly how something works and I have a different question that I want to ask, I can easily change this device to actually make it record the data that I needed to record for my new question. So in a way, you as a researcher, you become able to ask questions and adjust your equipment around it and not the way around where we have nowadays oh, I have this two photomicroscope that is only able to do let's say four hertz per as a recording speed, right? And so if I know, if I have an open source version of my microscope and I can actually change the frame rate or put faster Galvo mirrors or something like that, I can actually then say, okay, I can now record from this cows, like this new indicators that are faster except of being stuck with my four hertz black box to photomicroscope that I bought off a company that doesn't share with me the inner workings and the design files. Yeah, but in your example, you're taking something which is high tech, which is something very specific that not everybody will be able to access. Will you have an example of, I don't know, some things that in common lab you will be limited by and invest time in as a reproduce or develop? Absolutely. We have, I think, two very good examples of two things that are used a lot in research labs and they're namely, so one, micro pipettes. And as we know, these needs micro pipettes are super used in cell biology, in molecular biology. And recently as you're showing, there is a paper that describes an open source hardware model of a pipette that actually fits or complies with accuracy standards, with ISO accuracy standards. So basically what this says is that this pipette that has syringes and 3D printed parts is basically able to perform as well as the commercially available ones within this ISO standard. And so the nice thing about this, which the benefit that this brings is as I mentioned, you could in principle calibrate this pipette every day before start your daily routine in the lab, which is not something people do when they have a commercially available one because either they don't have access to a calibration service or it's too expensive or they don't have the time because the pipettes need to go out, be calibrated and come back and then they lose time with this move back and forth of the pipettes. And so this already by itself is a good thing because they are like orders of magnitude cheaper than commercially available ones and you could build many of them. So for instance, if you think about education, you could have together with other tools that we're gonna talk about, you could have a molecular biology lab for education where each group of students get a small kids and they're actually able to do the experiments and amplify DNA and actually do all the normal steps inside a molecular biology lab or a neuroscience lab. So you think that if we invest into open source hardware for example, is it devices that just reproduce what we have in our labs? Like a pipette for example. They're very common, but very expensive and have a more expensive mind at the end of the time. If we have the capacity to produce them to reproduce them and convert them ourselves we can bring those kind of tools earlier in a biological education so we can go further with our own education. And- Absolutely, yeah. So I mean, we gave the example of the pipette and then a lot of people are gonna say, oh, pipettes are not that expensive from the point of view of a research lab but then I can give you another example which are microscopes. So if you take a fluorescent microscope it costs you at least $5,000 to $10,000 to set up a fluorescence microscope. And so of course you wouldn't put these in a bachelor classroom until 60 students at a time to go and have a crack at the fluorescent microscopes. What we have in the literature are several open source microscopes that actually can do fluorescence for under $100, right? And so you could actually build these microscopes and have 10 of them and still be saving money as compared to a commercially available microscope which means, again, education, yes. And then you can have all these people testing and doing experiments even in a classroom in high school but also, and this plugs to another point of open source hardware you can have a massive parallelization of experiments, right? So if I have only one fluorescent microscope and 10 people in the lab I'm gonna have this booking system where somebody's gonna end up coming late evenings, the weekends and so on. If I have 10 fluorescent microscopes on the other hand then basically each person in the lab can have their own and do experiments in their own time or you could think about experiments that require much more data and you just have them running in parallel. And you can have read in and see in your data to support more accurately. Exactly, and you can even replicate experiments much easier. And so this goes, again, in line with the philosophy of science that for something to be true it needs to be replicable. You need to get the same results over and over again. Doesn't matter where you are, right? So this also increases how you can make your data trustworthy in a way. So it's not like a one-off, oh, I found this and maybe it's an artifact but because it's so time-consuming to reproduce this we just have to take it for granted the way it is. I mean, I fully agree with that. Once again, I consider that open science and open access replicability of data should be more common. But in all case, I mean, let's say I have a lab why should I bother, let's say, investing time into developing or into reproducing such devices? Do we have, I don't know, for example, here in the department of Sussex, you recently fixed a perfusion pump. Yeah. Was this an example? Yeah, so this is actually a very funny example and I've been talking about this for a while now because it really still boggles my mind. So we have this little perfusion pump, yeah, that one that is being shown and this thing broke in the lab and although it's a simple piece of equipment it's a vital piece of equipment inside of the photomicroscope because this basically removes solution that is perfusing a certain biological tissue. Without this, the whole experiment and the whole microscope is stopped because you cannot remove the solutions and you cannot perfuse your tissue. And so this thing broke and it took me, basically you're seeing here a quote for getting a new one and it took me two days and three emails to get this quote. And this already kind of upsets me because this is not online and everything in the world is the prices are online except for our scientific equipment. We're not going to go into the discussion of scientific company's business models but this is already a little bit irritating and wasting my time. And so the other thing is these two days and now as you can see the lead times to get this was for this pump specifically was about 12 weeks. So if I would be only relying on this company to send me this and the company is actually not in international companies here actually very close by Sussex. It would take me 12 weeks of a microscope without being able to do experiments. And if you consider that a PhD project is about three years this is a significant amount of time for being stopped. And here we're only considering the good case that these only broke once. Right. And talking about the city device that it does. And so, and then because my position here is about fixing devices and getting them up and running and producing new ones. I said, you know what? Let me take a look at this closely.  And as you can see, I mean, you cannot see on this image but as you come closer to the little black box which is the pump. I hope you can read where it says acquiring equipment, which is now highlighted. And so basically what this company did was they put an aquarium pump in a very nice casing with dysplexic glass sheets, right? They put some tubings, an early mire, a pressure gouge and now they're charging me 750 pounds for this with 12 weeks lead time. This must be said that this was way before the pandemic started, right? So it's not about like the pandemic is making this lower or anything like this is when best case scenario the word is working properly. And so what I did was, you know what? If this is an apartment pump, I'm pretty sure I can find something online to replace it. And this is what I did. And this is what you can see here how much it costs for an aquarium pump to do the same job out of eBay by today, get it tomorrow if you pay a little bit extra for shipping. And so this is why we should care or this is one of the reasons why we should care about how our tools are working, where we're getting them from, how is the supply chain working and so on. Yeah, that's a silly example. I mean, I'm intrigued by that but see here for example, that's accurate where you're describing. You're just describing a do-it-yourself practice when you're not afraid of taking the seal out of the box and see what's inside. And if you consider why do they have a pressure gauche for that, I mean, that doesn't make sense but it's not really the open source fields of you talked about earlier. Do you have something which is maybe a little more state of the art or something which is more reliable in the lab? Yeah, absolutely. So, and this is not work for me, which must be said this is there is a device that was built in Tom Badden's laboratory in collaboration with a lab in South Africa which is called open spritzer. And this is basically a device that delivers little air puffs and the air puffs are really so tiny that you can put them in a tube. And if the other end of your tube, you have a capillary with liquid you can deliver picoliter injections. And so this is used all the time to inject intracellularly solutions into cells. And so here you can see the repository where this is described and all the steps needed to build one of these are stored. And also the data, this was published as a paper but then on the repository you also put figures from the paper and it's showing how it performs against the market known brand which is a picol spritzer. And what they show in this paper is that it performs as well or even better sometimes than a picol spritzer. And so this is a little bit more high tech, so to say but it's again showing that you can be much faster with development of experiments and much more affordable which means you can have several of these open spritzers in place of just having one picol spritzer. So you could have in all of your rigs you could have one as a default. Yeah, okay, so picol spritzer is about 25,000, 3,000. 3,000, 2,500 you mean? That's what I mean, sorry. And so and I think if I remember correctly the open spritzer is about 350 pounds or something like this. Yeah, something like that, yeah. So it's again, like an order of magnitude cheaper than the other one. Okay. Yeah. Oh, sorry, keep going. No, I was going to say, and this is just one example, another example which is, and again, like here we're still in the realm of reproducing things that are already existing. If we think about what I mentioned before, design your experiments and then thinking about, think about making the tools, we have this other stimulator and this is totally fitting to the vision series. We recently, this was already 2019, we published in collaboration with Thomas Euler's lab in Germany, the open visual stimulator. And this is a projector. It's similar to a regular projector that you could buy from Amazon. And what is different is that we made it in a way that you can actually put pretty much any type of LEDs in it. And what you're seeing here in pictures is a system like, can you stop there? Yeah, please. What you're seeing here is basically the system where we have two projectors working together at the same time, which allows us here, it's only depicted for LEDs. So for zebrafish specifically where you have RGB and UV, but you could do up to six different LEDs. So basically you have a multi-spectral spatial stimulator that can do up to independently six different LEDs. And what needs to be said here is that this is a new thing. So there weren't any, as far as I know, there weren't any special stimulators that were able to take any type of LEDs and easily make them match the spectral distribution of cones in a specific species. So you have a lot of dedicated spatial stimulators for primates, but if you compare them to zebrafish, they have three cones, while zebrafish have four different types, and they don't have UV. And so if you use a primate stimulator to do zebrafish research, you are coming short in terms of what types of questions you can do, how well you're stimulating the organism that you're trying to study, and so on. So this is another point for open hardware in terms of that we can bring research forward by doing things that were not possible before. Okay, but excuse me to interrupt you here. So what you're showing here, it's technically a part of the science process where you have to develop your own tool and into your part of the R&D process. But what is the openness in that? I mean, you created that, but that's not there. What is the point of making that open? That would be my main question. Let's say that I'm another visual neuroscientist, and I need to adapt that to, I don't know here for example, is that for zebrafish? Yeah. Apparently according to you, I can modulate it to whatever I can, but what is the point of making it open? What will be the point of our colleague in vision research to invest time reproducing it? So what we did, what we tried to do was to put the documentation online in a way that everybody can reproduce it. So there is the paper that already described and this was published in eLife. Big shout out to the eLife guys because right now it's a super cool way to publish papers there. And we published all the step by step on how to build it, what parts are needed. There is a view of materials, how you can calibrate it, how you can make sure that it's really, really properly working. And so in the lab, we're using this for zebrafish, but as well for chick redness, right? And so this already shows one of the points is that initially we started with zebrafish and then already got picked up in the lab for chick redness, we have a different spectra, wavelength spectra for the avian coles, right? And the point is that as we published the paper, we're hoping that the community is gonna pick this up and derive it to other species. It's already been used for mice in tubing it, where it actually initially started its development. And we're hoping as more people contact us and getting touch, we can help them and guide them through, okay, maybe, let's say I wanna do this super cool experiment with the mantis shrimp, which also has like crazy spectra for their vision system. And we could help them with six different LEDs to stimulate, this is of course like me talking on hypothetical at this moment, but this is what we hope for, that we said like a landmark and a starting point for the community to build upon. And so this brings another point of open source, which is we took the initial effort of developing this, hopefully somebody's gonna come up and profit from this in the sense that they will derive it, make it better and share it back to the community. So they profit it because they didn't need to start from zero and we profit it because whatever they developed better in you, we didn't need to develop ourselves. So we get two for the price of one, so to say. So if I transfer what you're saying, it means that wherever and whenever you have a lab that is developing a new tool, that they own research, most of the time it will appear in their methods, in the papers that says, okay, we developed whatever tool to accomplish for the study, but the thing is that most of the time they don't share the blueprint or the approach or the successes and failures in terms of developing the equipment. So what we're claiming here is that on top of just sharing our data or results, we should also so share our methodology protocol to have been actually been able to reproduce it and speed up the innovation cycle that we're currently in. Yeah. So sorry to interrupt you, but I think this is, yeah, this is very fitting with this. I think it's a historical reason why our methods got shorter and shorter, right? And this is like a whole different discussion and I don't wanna go into details about that, but what we know is that big impact journals have very little space for methods and you have then this online methods, supplementary material and so on, which kind of encourage this practice of putting very, very short methods and very short descriptions, which is detrimental. And so luckily for us, what is happening is that now technology is evolving to a point where you have more space and internet bandwidth and so on. So you can actually share things by yourself in a repository and be super detailed. And so you can have texts, you can have photos, you can have videos, you can have really a step-by-step guide and even if the high impact journal that you're sending these to doesn't have the space for that. You can still share your repository as a link and then people can go there and say, look, this is how we did it. This is the step-by-step and you can like really, really follow on it. And yeah, one little flow in there. I mean, I read a lot of papers and I try to reproduce most of them. You and I will review some open source paper and most of the time we fail to reproduce it because sometimes a code will be missing or they didn't forget because they upload the first draft and correct it. But to put simply, claiming that something is open source doesn't make it complete. So how can you compel people to actually follow a guideline? Because there's plenty of repositories. I can't keep back the amount of repositories but they're not always the same. Absolutely. So this is the beauty and the curse, a little bit of open source. The diversity of it. Because you have people that are building tools all over the world and they have the preferred platforms. You have GitHub, you have Instructables, you have Hackaday and so on. And so to cover this problem, this very nice group of people got together for a number of years now, got together and made the open source hardware association as you're showing. And what they developed was a certification program for open source hardware. And this is a very low entry certification process. I mean low barrier entry certification process where you basically put all your things in a repository. And because they have a definition online, they're already telling you what they expect. And they have a definition of what is open source hardware. And so they tell you what do they expect in terms of what files are you sharing for people to be able to reproduce your design. And so once you go in there and you say, okay, I need to share, these are just examples, share files that are editable, right? So this would be similar to instead of sharing a PDF or something, you would share the word doc of that, right? Of course you can modify a PDF and actually translate it back into something editable, but that's hard work. So what you want to do is share the editable file from the get go. So not going on that much longer, but the point is if journals and academia in general would, for instance, pick up the open source hardware association certification process, we would have a very nice starting point, a very nice standard for open source hardware and academia where if the hardware that has been described in the paper is certified, I already know what to expect. But I know that the files are gonna be properly there and so on because the certification process of the open source hardware association, make sure that all of the files are there and are present and are in a certain format. And the benefit for researchers here would be there are already many companies and many people who are building their own tools outside of academia certifying their projects. And so this would get academia closer to let's say the general public and to companies and to people who are interested in hardware, but not necessarily in this very small space that is academia. And then again, this is again the idea of like this is public money. It needs to be brought back to the public. This would be a nice way of actually getting attention that we've public money, we're building these cool tools that then the public could reproduce them. And that can benefit the public. Actually, we have recent examples of good practice in open hardware. We have the kind of ventilators that we developed during the COVID time. So this is actually a fantastic example. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, we've learned a lot of things that showed us that our supply chains are not super reliable the way we like to think they are. So we had this problem, the pandemic started in China, a lot of lockdowns there, a lot of things got delayed. There was a shortage of personal protection equipment and so on. And so what a lot of people did was actually started building these things locally. And here you're seeing a paper that we published in the beginning of 2020. This was together with Tombadan, Lucia, Pietro, Lugodino, and Jenny Molloy. This is again, trying to make, and this was very fast. We had to write it in a very short amount of time. At that moment in time during the pandemic, there were all these groups popping up, building things as complex as ventilators. So these are life-saving machines that are really needed and really shortage in a lot of places and really expensive. And so all of these groups started building these ventilators and some of them are actually already in use or in testing in hospitals. And the benefit of them is that, I mean, you can see here that you have all of these different models, but like I think the biggest benefit of them is that because they are showing how to build them and they're open source, you can actually see the list of materials and easily source them locally because it's much easier to get locally these small components and small electronic components that might already be stocked in certain shops even before the pandemic started, then it is to get a complete built ventilator shipped from somewhere across the world. And so this again goes in line with, and this going back to the idea of equipment in academia, if you think about, I'm originally, as you mentioned, like I did my bachelor's in Brazil, this is where I'm from. And I remember back then that even when you had the grand money to buy something, you would get stopped in customs and then there was a big delay and then the prices for custom taxes would be super high and then the equipment would be more expensive. And then when you finally got it, it worked for a number of years, but then if it eventually broke, or if you needed an upgrade, you wouldn't have a local customer service to fix it. And so you would have either to ship it all the way back and then super expensive a lot of time, same problem with customs and so on, or you would have to put it to the side and buy a new one. And just throw it away what it can be fixed for. Yeah, exactly. That's a common problem. And it's a common problem and it's a common problem for, if you think about electronics in the world in general, right? How many times have we seen like a broken phone with a broken screen and then you toss it and you buy a new one? And the reason for this is that these things are normally made hard to repair and so on and luckily for us, and this is I think tangently related to this is that Europe has just passed this right to repair law where companies supplying electronics and making electro electronics for home, they need to make tools or equipment that is now easy to repair or the spare parts to repair them are available for at least 10 years. And so this helps with electronic waste, also helps with being able to not throw away a big gigantic tool just because like a little tiny resistor or a little fuse broke inside it and so on. And again, it's much faster to replace a part inside than it is to get a new one. So you fight companies against program obsolescence and they can be applied to scientific equipment. Equipment as well. In principle, you should be able to apply that to scientific equipment as well. Well, I completely agree with you. And what we can say now is that with the democratization of electronics, the exploration of most patents, the fact that we have access to multiple repository online, technically we can say that innovation cycle just go back to researchers. But the thing is that we still, it's still underappreciated. So I do you encourage all years of fellow researchers, I do you implement in order to research this kind of practice. I think it's always easier to convince people or to show people the benefit of something if you can solve a problem or if they can solve a problem that they have. So what I normally suggest is that if somebody is interested in starting to learn how to build tools and they see the benefit, they just don't know where to start, right? I tell them, look, find a small problem that you have. There are all these tutorials online. There are all these electronic kits. You can buy a little kit for 50 bucks and you can put things together, let's say a temperature sensor that when you put it together with all the electronics, it's gonna send you a message, an SMS or an email whenever the temperature in a room goes below a certain value or above. And so with this, you could create a, let's say a protection system for lasers in a two-photo microscope. If your room temperature goes above a certain level, you get a notification saying, look, that room is above a certain level. You might as well go there and turn off the laser, otherwise it's gonna damage things. And so by building this little device for, let's say 10 bucks, you're gonna save a very expensive laser from being damaged. Yeah, but the time I will, let's say I have PhD students is naive about most of the things. The time it will spend trying to understand how that works. Would that be worth it instead of just buying a 50-term sensor? Yeah, so I mean, I think it is worth it because when you learn these things, you're not just learning how to put a temperature sensor together. And so of course it needs to be weighed, how much time you need to build these things and so on. But my point here is, biologists will need more and more to know how to program. And a lot of what we do with hardware and electronics is based or it has a big programming component. So learning these, you could use a tool to learn how to program and then these are gonna use for the rest of your life, data analysis, automation of certain pipelines and so on and so on. So you start low, but you implement it more and more along user research and then you can innovate because you know it's accessible. It's an incremental process, right? I studied biology and I didn't start building visual stimulators. I started with little tools and little things that then got, because then you learn these things and you get packaged, then you can improve and do things differently. So it's not really that much time consuming to start. You need maybe like an hour a day with a little electronic skill to get started. But another way that this would be entirely very much helped is if there was top down investment, right? If universities and institutes and departments would say, okay, we need to come up with let's say an open science module for our PhD students or for grad students, where you teach them all of these little aspects of open science, open access, open data, reproducibility, how do you put code together and share with others, best practices in keeping your data for a long time and so on and so on, electronics and all of these things. These will make them better researchers. These will make the results of research better and more replicable. Yeah, it's definitely good. It's easy, good scientific practice. And yeah, absolutely. And there is a very big return of investment here because as you are more independent from needing to get something that it's already made, research can be faster and you can test different things and you can go in different directions. And the other thing is that these are normally life skills in the sense of if you know how to program Python, there is a huge market for Python programmers outside of academia. And as we know, we are putting out more PhDs or people are graduating with PhDs in a higher pace than we have permanent positions in universities to absorb them. So we know that people are gonna leave academia anyways, not everybody's gonna stay. And so if they have skills that are desirable by the market, then they are better off as well. Yeah, right. But back to academia. So you consider that maybe it's a duty of universities to propose or to suggest some kind of more technical courses, interdisciplinary modules? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So in a way, the idea of a university campus was that made that you would be the biology closest engineering department and then it would be like a short walk so that you could talk to an engineer and actually build something together to do your experiments. And right, unfortunately not. This could be revisited maybe. And the other point is that, of course, I don't think necessarily you need the universities to take care of this. Even students could start with little clubs as we had here in Sussex, where we had the coding club and all the Zork shops. Again, like a big, big, big entry barrier would be lowered if there was a space from top to bottom to say, look, this is a space where you can come and create and so on. And we do know of places that are starting with this. So you do have interdisciplinary labs. There are places in Paris that are like this. Like this is something that we're trying to create here in Sussex as well, where you have a lab and a space for people to come and learn things as part of their studies. And this could be seen as, let's say, interdisciplinary, let's say PhD. Part of your PhD is actually developing the tools that are gonna guide the question that you had. And so there is a component of engineering could partner up with an engineering lab. And then part of it is actually collecting the data. And so you could make this to fit quite nicely with the PhD track in a way. Yeah, I agree. But I mean, what I meant to say is you cannot invest time on something that you ignore exists. So at first you have to make clear to, let's say those new scientists, those PhDs, master that, I mean, how many times do we see people following old laboratory practice that date from two decades ago? You cannot improve on a protocol where you don't know that you need to improve on it and the solution is actually active. What I mean by that is right now starting a new position at the University of Sussex where you develop different kind of tools. And actually right now you're trying to create a new lab, an open science lab. We want to share with us, I mean, are you trying to alleviate locally? I mean, I guess you'll be the best example to show how you convince those people that we need to invest time and effort. All right, I mean, this is so far still like a moonshot project, right? Because I'm still like trying to put things together and know exactly how it's gonna work. But the idea is what I meant. So we need to create a space where there will be knowledge and expertise for people to learn about all these different aspects of open science, including hardware. And so of course people don't know what they don't know, but if you come to a place where there is, when you first come for a PhD, there is every semester, let's say a course that is maybe mandatory or not, but there is a course dedicated to telling people, look, this is what we can do nowadays with the open source technologies that are available. This definitely then opens up the mind to say, okay, I can actually do this and there is a supporting space here that is gonna guide me through it, which is already what's happening here in Sussex. Because there are already a lot of projects that are getting started where we're building new things for the labs that are things that are not, that were either very expensive or things that were not existing before. Yeah, fully agree. And like I said, it's the beginning of the talk. You created some kind of repository of repositories. Yeah, so open neuroscience, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, so open neuroscience was something that started many years ago and it was a way for me to keep track of all the point source projects that are there, but I think we have somebody here especially to talk about this who has been collaborating with open neuroscience. Hi, Ceci. Hi, everyone. How are you? Thank you for having me. Yes, I've been collaborating for over a year now. I am Ceciah Herbert. I'm a PhD student at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. And please excuse the noise or some construction being going on here. So I hope you can hear me well. Let me just share my slides. I should do it. So today I wanted to tell you a bit about open neuroscience. This is an initiative that creates open source projects related to neuroscience on openneuroscience.com. Projects are not only hardware that we might be discussing just now, but also software, data and educational resources and others. The database is user driven by the community. So while we are on the team and we are on the lookout for projects all the time, anyone can contribute to the site. And of course, you can browse all of these projects freely. What we do is basically we check each submission to make sure it is at least barely related to neuroscience, but more importantly that it really is open, meaning that the source is ready to be available. And Sandra was just explaining. Then we publish it on the site and announce it on Twitter. So at this point, especially after the talk we just had, you're probably thinking, okay, this is great. It's so relevant and it can be so useful. So how can I help? So let me just make an aside here. I was telling you, yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think we can see that your authors notes, your presenters notes. Yeah, that's fine. Excuse me. That's absolutely fine. Okay. Well, that was my script for today. What I was saying is that a year ago, I was maybe sitting where you are just now, right? Listening to under talk and saying, this is great, I wanna jump in. So what you can do to help open neuroscience, you can, first of all, submit a project if you have one or if you know of any project that fit the bill. This is our upload form. It only takes a few minutes. You can also spread the word about the site as well as use it. You can follow us on Twitter. That's where I just said that we announce all the projects and you can collaborate over on GitHub by solving issues that there are always some issues, right? Another thing you can do is contact us over at Open Neuroscience at gmail.com. If you'd like to collaborate further and maybe work on some organizational aspects. And you can also give a talk. So give or attend a talk. This is our new seminar series that starts this week. It's going to be every Friday at 15 GMT on the Worldwide Science Platform. So we're both on the Neurotrack and on the newly opened open source track of the seminars over at Worldwide. And please join us. This is the schedule for April. We're starting this Friday, as I'd say with Antonia Farel about giving him talk about a platform for automation of cell biology experiments. And we have a few other speakers lined up for the next few months and you might be the next one. So this is the form to schedule the talks and we hope to see you there. I really want to apologize about the noise. They just started when I had to speak. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks for that, Ceci. You will find all the necessary links in the description of this video. So you will find all that we shared, all the necessary links and also links for open neuroscience repositories. And yeah, of course, we will share networks and programs, upcoming talks. So I hope to see most of you during those talks. Yes, please. So do we have questions?  You're muted. Hey, Andre, my boss won't buy a printer. What can I do? Well, that's a tough one. A lot of the times I say, and please don't quote me. I mean, this is going to be recorded. So people are going to quote me on this. Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. And printers nowadays are at the rate of $200 on eBay.  They're actually okayish printers. You can actually print stuff with them. And at this, at this level of cost, you could get together with other people and everybody pitches in a little bit and buy a printer for the department. And the benefit of it is that the return on the investment of the printer comes really after you print it for as little as five hours, right? Because you can print things that are way more expensive to buy than it is to print them. And so really quickly, you can get your money's worth for the printer and the filament robots. And there are papers actually showing this return of investment into open investing on open source hardware and in financing open source hardware. And so I think all of these links are in the description of the video. And so people can take a look at them. But yeah, so my recommendation would be maybe get together with friends, either buy a printer or you can find a local maker space. There are a lot of fab labs around you. There are a lot of fab labs around and maker spaces and in a lot of places of the world. And so you can actually go there, print things, get help, meet the community. And then you can bring those to the lab to actually try to make the point. We printed all of these. This is much better and much faster than what we had. Therefore, here's the evidence to buy a printer. We have Eric from Newcastle with us. So he asked, do you know the source site that is mainly dedicated for use of open hardware in higher education teaching? Ideally with neuroscience-related hardware, for example, EMG, ECG, which can dismantle, there's a B missing, which can be dismantled after the practicals. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, open neuroscience has a lot of educational projects. But I think for what he mentions, backyard brains would be a very good candidate. They are actually a company that is using neuroscience tools for education. And all of their tools are open source. And so you have an EMG amplifier, which is this big. And it's powered by batteries. And they have a lot of cool experiments and tutorials online. And so people can build stuff directly. And they don't need to disassemble them because they're small and you can put them in a backpack and then take them all, basically. Actually, backyard brain is a very good example. I can only encourage you to see a great gauge talk on that. He made a couple of talks. He's mostly focused on what is the opposite of higher education, lower education. High school, I would say. So yeah, so not education in universities. But you can find all kinds of education tools that can be used at different levels. So that would be a good start, yes. Yeah, although we also use their tools in training courses for people who had never had experience with electrophysiology. And so you can actually do their experiments in a higher education setting as well. Just want to emphasize that what you refer to is trend in Africa. So when you organize workshop in Africa, those are useful for regular resources. Yeah, no, but I mean, this could also do anywhere, right? Because let's think about the bachelors here in neuroscience. So you can take people into the labs. I mean, normally you would take people into the labs and show them the big behavioral rig and so on, but then they don't get to actually like do the measurements and put things and so on. So you could build a little electrophysiology rig, let's say maybe 10 of them have people in groups of three people and get actually get them to record the data and analyze and do like little experiments with electrophysiological data. So you don't really need to be just in Africa. I think this is a very important point. Like this stuff is not just where you don't have access, but really can we change the way we teach things by having more hands-on because we have access to equipment or more equipment? I agree. That's something we haven't talked about, but the philosophy behind open source hardware actually allows universities labs in lower income countries to actually have an equal access to science and protocol and they can actually produce a same level of data that has the same... Absolutely. So there is a democratization and increasing accessibility for research equipment. Well, thank you for that. I don't see any other questions. I guess we covered most of it. I can only recommend the audience to keep track on the Open Neuroscience series that will start this Friday. I guess you will definitely find an episode project that will fit your need or will find of interest. So take a look at the website. Take a look at the upcoming series. We will advertise it and we hope to see you there. Yes, please. A final word? Well, thank you everybody for their time. Thank you for everybody who's been collaborating and picking up on this until not long ago seemed crazy and hippy ideas. And I think it's important to say that this is gaining a lot of momentum. So there is more and more open source hardware coming out. There are two dedicated journals now for open source hardware. There is Hardware X and the Journal of Open Hardware. Plus already also does a lot of open hardware publications. And there is a wonderful community online called the GOSH community where people should have a look. I don't know if you're going to have links on the description of the... I will add it. Yeah, okay. And so the GOSH community is really a global community talking about open science hardware. And the last thing that I would like to say is together with Julieta Arancio and Alex Cuchera, I'm creating or we're creating a mentoring program. We're not going to be mentoring people, but we are organizing a 14-week online course on best practices of open hardware where there are going to be mentors who are specialists in the field of open source hardware to guide people through what are the best practices in open hardware, how to foster a community, and what are the best ways to build tools and to interact with this community. So we are right now revamping our curriculum, but we hope to launch this soon. So please have a look at the website, which Maxime is showing now, openhardware.space. I think we're going to have a link on the description as well. We have. Yeah. And so this is a wonderful place for starting projects, for mature projects, for all types of open source hardware projects. All right. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. See you soon. Thank you.