If you know a bit about how the web works, you'll know that when you request a web page, you don't just get back a HTML file. You actually get back a response code. 200 means everything's OK. That's why most people don't know about these response codes, because you don't see the 200. You just see the web page show up. But sometimes you'll get a 404. And that's one code that most people know, because it's happened to them before. Maybe you'll get some other codes, 301, 307, 308, the page is moved. Maybe you'll get a 504, because you're getting a time out.  Maybe you'll get a 418 if you try to connect to a teapot. Yeah, true story. 418 is the response code if the server is actually a little teapot, which is a very odd thing. Why would they do this? Well, it makes more sense if we go and look at the date that the Hypertext Coffee Pop Protocol was published on April 1, 1998. It's an April Fool's Day joke. But in 2015, we have appliances like televisions, fridges, that can connect to the internet. So is it an April Fool's Day joke, or was it prophecy? So my name's Scott. I'm incredibly nervous right now. So please bear with me. I'm supposed to clap at the end. I'm a Canadian-Australian. I'm three-quarters Canadian, one-quarter Australian. You can do the math. I teach at Miller, which is part of Southwest Sydney Institute of TAFE. Anybody here from New South Wales TAFE? Go EBS, right? No, the New South Wales TAFE people love EBS. I'm a hacker, but I use that word kind of carefully. I'm not like a hack-into-government-systems type hacker. I'm kind of like hack things together quickly. And that's a lie. It's not quick. I need more duct tape type of hacker. I'm a, oh god, please don't make me show my code type hacker. It's three in the morning, and all my stuff doesn't work. And I've got to present this at 11. I'm that kind of hacker. I identify with the right side of the picture. I hacked together this presentation. I submitted for a 20-minute talk. And Michael sent me an email saying, hey, why don't you come down and be an invited speaker? And I thought he got the wrong email address, but I was going to go for it. I presented this talk at Moodle Mood Japan. And that's why I'm really glad that Dom was here today, because I met Dom in Japan. I really love Moodle Mood Japan. The good thing about presenting at Moodle Mood Japan, though, was they put me on at Sunday morning at 9 o'clock when there was all these other cool streams going on. So I had six or seven people in the room. So I figured I'd just recycle the presentation. That's recycling's good. I'm environmentally friendly. But yeah, so if this starts to go really bad, I'm just going to hide behind here for a while, just because I am nervous as heck. And you know what? It's already broken on me a few times today. So what's the internet of things? So the internet of things, if we check the dictionary, Huntley's consolidated dictionary, it's a noun. It's a thing connected to the internet. Very useless definition.   You're going to walk through the door of your house, and your fridge will tell you you have kidney stones, and it will order the right thing, all this sort of stuff. So it's all in the future, so nobody really cares, right? And that's what I think of when I think of that sort of idea of the future, this whole meme of, why don't we have flying cars yet? Well, the thing is it is the future. It's taken us a while. It crept up on us. We didn't realize that it's the future, and it's the future now. I say this because one day I was pumping gas, that's a North American expression. I was filling up my tank at the Bowser. And I'm there at Willie's Caltex, and I look around, and there's screens everywhere. There's television screens. And I'm like, when did this happen? That I look around, and there's not just one or two television screens. There's like a full two dozen television screens. If it was a cloudy day, and I did have a flying car, this is Blade Runner. It's the future. So I reject that idea that internet of things is something coming in the future. It's the future now. And anybody here have an internet of thing device on them? Yeah, a few people. You should all raise your hands.  You all have an internet of thing. Yesterday, Kimberly was showing me her Apple Watch, Smart Watch, I don't know what it's called. That's an internet of thing device. Over here, I've got a Fitbit tracker. That's an internet of thing device. You all have them. I know you do. You all have phones. You all have things that connect to the internet. So I went too fast. So I kind of define it as cool things that I could make right now using a microcontroller board. So what's a microcontroller board? I don't know. But the one that I work with is called Arduino. And Arduino, I think, is a really cool device. It's developed by some Italian guys. Actually, there's a really cool civil war going on in the Arduino world right now. So if you're into inside baseball, go read up about what's happening to Arduino. It's open source hardware. We all like open source, or at least we should, because we're here for an open source product, Moodle. But the idea behind that is anybody can make Arduino compatible devices. And they're often used in DIY devices or projects. I thought, this is really cool. I want to play with this. I'm a web teacher, though, so I shouldn't really be getting involved in this. And then last October, I said, ah, screw it. I'm going to burn something down. Why not have some fun? So I found out that I've got a new hobby, and that's collecting Arduino and clones. And here's five of mine that I took just the other day. In reality, I probably have 10 times as many. But I like this picture because it's kind of like the spectrum. I almost have the full color spectrum. But they all vary in authenticity. And this one here on the far side, that's a Spark fun red board, $25 about. This one came from China. It's about $5, but it was really hard to get working because I had to go find all this weird drivers and stuff. And all the web pages were written in Chinese. So that was an interesting one. But the right price? That's a real Arduino made by the real Arduino people. And this one next to it is a knockoff. It's a fake. They actually make it to make it look like the real ones. So you'll buy that one. I knew, though, I only paid $15 or so for it. I knew that can't be real. And this really cool one here is a Metro by Adafruit. I'm a big fan of Adafruit. So what kind of things can you do with an Arduino? All kinds of cool things. So let's build a countdown timer using cool retro Nixie tubes. And I'm actually going to try to do this today here for us. But I got some Nixie tubes in the mail the other day. And I only got them a week ago. And I was like, I've got to build this for Moodle Mood. And I left them back in the hotel. Anyway, I was going to just realize that now. Yeah, it's a really cool thing. I love this stuff because it looks like something out of Chernobyl, like this old Russian sort of stuff. I'm really disappointed. I paid a lot for that. I can't believe I left that in the hotel. Doesn't matter. Moving on. So some other cool things you can make with your microcontroller board. Now the problem with that is it wasn't actually connected to the internet. So let's take a look at something that actually is connected to the internet. And somebody asked me a question. Does this come in purple? Because I had all the color spectrum. But I don't have purple. Well, it does come in purple. But purple is kind of a reserved color. And it's not like one of those boards. So this one here is a lily pad Arduino. And it's designed for e-textiles. And you see how the holes are kind of bigger? That's because we can actually use conductive thread to sew our electronics. And I never thought sewing would be an electronic skill, but it totally is. And I totally love sewing electronic stuff. So I'm scared to admit that. Anyway, I want to show you something I built. And usually I actually put up the pretext of actually putting it on and everything. But today it was sort of already playing up. So I was like, ah, I'm not going to do that. Let me try to turn on my camera here. Fantastic. So on the front of it, that's the tie. And it's kind of not really showing up. So I'm just going to open it up here. Now I actually put it all in with Velcro because I figured I knew I wanted to actually tear it apart and demonstrate.  But I've got two sides to it. And I've got some stuff lighted up here. Now this is actually telling us, let's try to move the light away, because maybe that's playing up a little bit, but it's actually telling us the temperature. This one's not supposed to be on. But we have two green ones here. I don't think we can see the color quite right. We have two green ones. So that's telling us it's 20 something. And then we have, oh here, it's checking the temperature again. And how many is that? It's saying it's 25, and it kind of feels like 25 up here. So it's kind of maybe right. So this was all stuff that I sewed together. And I just want to show you, it's probably easier from the PowerPoint. Oh, I've lost my spot. So this was my first sort of IoT device that I built together.  And when I first got that circle to turn around and change colors, I was so excited. It took me a while, but I was dancing for joy just watching this thing turn all these colors. Is it internet of things, though? Because it's not even connected to the internet. So I selected another board other than this Lulipab one called Flora Board. And I sewed it into the back. And so I've got two sides to my tie. I've cut the back end and the front end. And it's kind of like a pun for web designers. Anybody kind of get it? The front is the display, and the back is the logic. Don't clap that. So the back end was kind of working kind of, it made sense. And the idea was that it used this part here, which is actually Bluetooth. And I was going to actually connect to some RSS feeds. And Moodle spits out RSS feeds. So I thought, hey, this is very cool. I could tie this together. The problem is it didn't quite work that way because of unknown reason X. And I can't figure out really what unknown reason X is. I suspect those lights are taking up too much current. And that means the Bluetooth keeps turning off. So I made it so it's easily, you can take it apart. Oh, I'm showing you on the camera. You don't have the camera up. You can easily take it apart so it's modular. So I was really smart to do that because I just decided if that back end wasn't working, why don't I just put in a new back end. And that's what I actually took to Japan. Now I was a little bit nervous because I didn't actually have it connected to the internet. But I thought maybe it would be all fancy and dazzle people anyway. And then just before I went, I'll go through this really quick, but I had a real tragedy like three days before I flew out because my board actually broke. And that day was a really awful day. Last night was pretty awful too. Yeah. So I managed to sew one together in one night's time. And I had it working again. And that was a happy day. And it turned out I actually had the answer that I was looking for sitting in my toolbox all along. This board that I had purchased off of a Kickstarter or something like that actually has Bluetooth built in. It's got a thermometer built in, or a temperature sensor, I mean, built in. It's got all these wonderful things built into it. And I had it sitting there. And I was trying to hack all these things together. So what I did was when I came back to Sydney, I had another meetup I wanted to demonstrate it. So I quickly swapped out. And the current back end that we have now is, oh, wait. Oh, yeah. So the current back end that I have now, you can see it's actually that board. And I'm actually powering it through another board. But it all works together. So these are actually wires that snapped together here. And this one, I was getting, like I couldn't get the wire to work, so I actually made a wire. I sewed it together using an aida cloth on the thread on the aida cloth. Let me show you what it, oh, look, see? It's actually going around there. And it's calculating the temperature. So it's saying it's 23. It's cooled down a bit. Let me show you the actual programming side of it. So I've got a couple of different programs running. And it's a language very close to C. So for instance, this one turns the tie off. This one does the weather. I've got another one here. No, not that. I'm not going to find it in time. This one. This one is going to, in theory, blink according to that Moodle input, so forth. So to actually upload it, it's pretty easy. I just press this Upload button. Now in this case, because it's a bean thing, I have to look for my tie using Bluetooth. There it is. I'm actually going to connect to my tie. And I'm actually going to upload to the tie. So I'm going to program it. And this shouldn't take too long. In the meantime, I wasn't going to show you this. I don't know any Python, but I've been able to hack together enough Python that I could run a program. So I'm going to run a program. And it's actually going to keep checking an RSS feed. Now I'm going to go to my Moodle account. What is this thing beeping for? Failed. Go away. We'll try that again. In the meantime, I'm going to go to my Moodle feed, which is somewhere in here. Yes. And I've got a form. And I've just got a little post here. And I actually can connect to another post or create another post and everything. So I'm going to, do I want to delete this? No, cancel. Don't tell me it failed. Oh, I'm nervous. All right, let me just try this. Close that. Open up vModer. Yeah, demos, that's a great idea, isn't it? OK, let me refresh. OK, so this time we're going to, again, upload the program, upload it to the tie. So my Moodle here, I'm going to, oh, that's why I'm timed out. I'm going to log in. I'll probably get the password wrong, but that's OK. No. So I'm going to reply to one of my replies. You can see I'm very creative with my replies. I just, yes, so we are testing tests. Yes, OK, that's fine. Post that to my form. Successful, yes. I'm running the Python script. Yes, can I? Python? So what should be happening is the Python script will actually check the RSS feed, and it should come up with, oh, it's not going to unless I do this. Serial device, yes. So what it should be doing is it should be checking the feed to see if there's any new posts. And if there's a new one, it's going to flash it up. I think that just because I'm conscious of the time, I might actually fake it. If you see it, well, you can't see it, because it's not on the screen. Serial monitor. All right, so I'm just going to fake it. And I'm going to bring up the serial monitor here. And if I just type in a letter like R, it's going to flash up R. So do I have them both on the same screen? Probably not. Ah, this was really clever of you, wasn't it, school? Oh, oh, it doesn't matter. It's all falling apart on me. Let me just go back to the presentation. You can come see me later on in the day. Maybe I'll have it working by then. The point of this isn't the tie. It isn't these toys. And I can bring out all kinds of toys and show you all the things. I'm still doing fine for time. I'll bring out some of the toys. But the point of what I wanted to do today was to sort of get us thinking in terms of how can we use these devices and how can we change the way we do e-learning with them. So I want to show you something that I think is a really cool idea that I have no idea how to put into Moodle. And I've come today not for you guys to ask me questions. I almost want to ask you questions. How do I do these things? And what are we going to do? How are we going to build this together? How are we going to incorporate internet things into the way we teach e-learning that teach our classes? So anyway, I want to show you these things. These are my beacons here. So these are iBeacons. And what I think is really cool about these is their location-aware devices. They're going to spit out a location. So on my phone, I have an app here. And let me just see if I can bring in this. It's actually saying it's sensing three beacons. So it's actually saying it can sense these beacons are here. And I can prove that because I'll get rare one. So now it's going to say, is everything breaking on me today? Yes. Don't let it shake you. OK, so the idea, though, was that these beacons are supposed to be location-aware. And I think this is a really cool idea. We could put these inside museums and actually put it underneath the display and build a smartphone app so that when we come up, we can actually get information on what we're looking at. That's really cool just on its own. I can't believe it's still showing that. That's really cool on its own. But this is essentially a e-learning sort of thing. So is there a way that we can actually incorporate this sort of technology into Moodle? And that's kind of where I'm going to head in my next direction, I think, with experimentation. I have an idea of how to do this, build a smart tour based around iBeacons with another CMS. But I really think that essentially this is a learning opportunity. So if you think about all the different places where you can actually incorporate a lesson and actually being in front of a physical object or at a certain location, I'm thinking of at the University of Wollongong, they actually have a tree walk on campus. So as you walk around, you can see the different types of trees. You could actually build lessons inside Moodle based on that. As you get close to this tree, different activities are going to show up inside Moodle. I think that's a really cool idea, which is one that I want to explore in the future. And I put that on the wishing tree, like you guys told me to earlier. Now, I know what a lot of people are thinking. All this electronic stuff, apparently it's really buggy because it's totally screwed up my presentation today. How do I actually do this? I can't do that. I wanted to show you this thing. So this is a little bit's cloud starter kit. And this is like you can actually build internet of things just using this almost, it's almost like a LEGO system. So I only have a few pieces in here today. But that's the actual control for the power for it. But I don't know if I'll plug it in. But that's the power module. And then we can just take other modules and snap them in. So this one's just a button. And when I press the button, something can happen. And this is a cloud module here. So that's going to connect to Wi-Fi if I get it the right way around. And this one is actually like an output. So in this case, it's going to display a light. And it all snaps together. You might have noticed that it's magnetic and it actually pulled itself together. So it's a really cool thing. And I'm just conscious of the time. I don't think I'm going to have time to turn it on. But what I love about this is it actually connects to another idea. They actually have an ift recipe. So ift, I think, is kind of one of the missing pieces in the internet of things in that it actually ties together all these sort of little devices and stuff that you buy online. And some of you probably already have some of these channels. You just don't know it. So inside this, there's all these ways that we can actually take our Android phones or iPhones and actually connect them up to things. And the way it works, I'll build a recipe. I'll show you the little bits one here. They have actually pre-built into it a bunch of recipes. Connect, hello? So you can actually do something like, if you press the button, it will send an email. It will send a tweet. It can do all these sort of things. Or you can actually use it for input as well. So there's two parts to if. There's a trigger. And there's an action. So a trigger can direct an action to do something. So again, if we look at Moodle, we know that Moodle has a RSS feed. And up here at the top, if we search, we can actually take a look at the RSS feed. So we can actually say, if we receive inside the triggers, if there's a new feed item, then we can make it do something. So we can make it send a tweet. We can put a file into Dropbox. We can make it show up. We can make it actually blink this light if there's a message on our Moodle RSS feed. So I really like this site because I think it ties everything together. In fact, I was talking about this earlier with Rochelle from Core Learning. And I said, you guys should use this to actually do some of your archiving of tweets and stuff. Because I know she's a big time Twitter, Twitter, whatever that is. And inside here, there's actually a Twitter feed, a Twitter channel, if I can find it. So you can actually take your tweets and you can actually back them up to something. And currently, Moodle, really the only way we can interact with it is just using the RSS feed on the out. But I know that Moodle actually has an API. And I think that in the future, maybe this is another direction we could go where we could actually trigger something to happen based upon an if recipe. There's probably a few problems with that. This is another little thing here.  You're not supposed to do that. But the cool thing about it is it will actually do the temperature and everything like that, too. So I think this one's going to be a quick one to set up. So let me just plug it in. Because the thing is, I know that it's really cool that you can build all these things, but sometimes it's easier just to buy them for some people. So inside my tags here, where is it? Wireless tag. So this is actually telling me, I've got two tags, and it's telling me what the temperature is. I can do all kinds of stuff. I can make them beep 30 times. Yeah, we'll stop the beeping, because that's. But you can also do things like the stats of also the temperature, for instance. Yeah, both the stats. And there's probably going to be a big gap, because I changed and moved and everything. Yeah, see, it's all kind of weird stuff. The wonderful thing about this is actually you can go into share, and you actually can create this into an iFrame. So in one of my noodles here, in my test class. So inside here, I actually have under topic two, I just put in a dummy topic, but I've actually been able to take the sensor data from the tag and actually display it inside Moodle. Why would this be useful? I have no idea. I'm not really coming up with the ideas. I'm more coming up with the hows. But I think that there's probably a lot of ideas in there for, depending upon what you teach, that you could actually start to incorporate these things. And as the APIs get better, and as the integration gets better, it's going to be a better and better sort of thing. Weather is a really easy one. There's all kinds of weather stations. I'll show you another one if I get a chance. But I want to show you this one as well, because this is a really specialized one. This one I bought just before I went away. And I tested it on a tree at my house. So this thing here is actually, it senses the plants sunlight. It senses the temperature. It senses the plants moisture level of the soil. Because it's actually, see, it's got these prongs in there. So it can sense all this stuff from the actual soil. And again, it's got an if channel. So we can actually go into our if channels here. And what does it call flower power? So we can see inside here, the flower power, we can make it do all kinds of things. So I could say, if there's a temperature problem, if there's a moisture alert, I could make it do any of the outputs. So I can make it tweet me if I need to water my plant. And I think that's a really cool thing. That was off the shelf $70, and I'm all set. So I think that you could almost, if you're teaching like horticulture or agriculture or floristry, you could potentially incorporate that into your class. I've got so much stuff, and I'm looking at the time there. We're already at four minutes left. Is there anything else quick I can show? No. I brought way too much stuff, and I didn't have the time. But I think that this is a really exciting field. And I really think I'm up here speaking about it. I only started in October. This is something that I'm not a very clever guy. I'm not a very good at this hardware stuff.  And in fact, there's a guy in the audience, Darcy. And he really shook my confidence yesterday, because he was like, oh, you're doing the IoT stuff. I brew beer, and I want to know how I can hook it up online. And he started to talk to me about his Arduino setup. And I'm just like, oh, you should be up there speaking. So when I was at Japan, on the side of the university, I saw this poster. And I had to take a picture and incorporate it. Keep innovating. And I thought, yeah, that's it. That's what we all have to do. And I'm sure that message was for the students, but I felt that as one of the Moodle moot goers, we have to keep innovating. And the good news is, if you're here today, you're one of the innovators. We're here. We're using Moodle. We're using this open source software. We're looking at this, and we're saying, there's got to be a different way to teach. And we're doing that. We're innovating. But I also like this idea, too. Together, we grow Moodle. And I'm going to take advantage of the hacker day, and really, because I've got a whole lot of stuff that didn't work. So I'm going to go, and I'm going to be like, hey, guys, help me make it work. And I really think that that's the beauty of this community. That together, we are growing the software. And I think it's a fantastic thing. So that's pretty much all I get to say.


Dioxins are highly toxic pollutants that accumulate in tissue fat. Almost all dioxins found in humans that aren't working at a toxic waste dump or something are believed to come from food, especially meat, milk, and fish, which account for probably about 95% of human exposure. We tend to only hear about it in the news, though, when there's some mass poisoning. In 1957, for example, millions of chickens began dying, blamed on toxic components in certain feed fats. Factory farming was taking off, and the industry needed cheap feed to fatten up the birds, and ended up using a toxic fleshing grease from hide-stripping operations in the leather industry that were using dioxin-containing preservatives. A subsequent outbreak in 1969 resulted from a pipe mix-up at a refinery that was producing both pesticides and animal feed. In the 1990s, a supermarket survey found the highest concentrations of dioxins in farm-raised catfish. The source of dioxins was determined to be the feed, but that's surprising, since catfish aren't fed a lot of animal fat. In fact, that's one of the reasons people eat catfish, they're so low on the food chain. Turns out, it was dioxin-contaminated clay added to the feed as an anti-caking agent, which may have originally come from sewage sludge. The same contaminated feed was fed to chickens, so what may have started out in sewage sludge ended up on the plates of consumers in the form of farm-raised catfish and chicken. How widespread of a problem did it become? 5% of U.S. poultry production. That's people eating hundreds of millions of contaminated chickens. And if it's in the chickens, it's in the eggs. Elevated dioxin levels in chicken eggs, too. When the source of the feed contamination was identified, the USDA estimated that less than 1% of animal feed was contaminated, but 1% of egg production means over a million eggs a day. But the catfish were the worst. More than a third of all U.S. farm-raised catfish were found contaminated with dioxins thanks to that ball clay. So the FDA requested that ball clay not be used in animal feeds. They even asked NICE. Dear producer or user of K-Plot products in animal feeds continued exposure to elevated dioxin levels in animal feed increases the risk of adverse health effects in those consuming animal-derived food products, chicken eggs, and fish. So we are recommending that the use of ball clay in animal feeds be discontinued. They look forward to the industry's cooperation. So how cooperative did the industry end up being? Half a billion pounds of catfish continued to be churned out of U.S. fish farms every year. But only recently did the government go back in check. Published in 2013, samples of catfish were collected from all over the country. Dioxins were found in 96% of samples tested. Yeah, but just because catfish are bought in the U.S. doesn't mean they come from the U.S., and indeed some of the catfish were imported from China or Taiwan, but they were found to be 10 times less contaminated than the U.S. catfish. And indeed, when they checked the feed, fed to U.S. catfish, more than half the feed sampled were contaminated. And so it seems that mined clay products are still being used in U.S. catfish feeds. Even just small amounts of mineral clays added to fish feeds, together with the fact that catfish can be bottom feeders, may lead to higher than acceptable dioxin residues in the final catfish products. Maybe the government should ask nicely again and wait another 16 years to retest. The Institute of Medicine suggests strategies to reduce dioxin intake exposure, such as trimming fat from meat, poultry, and fish, and avoiding the recycling of animal fat into gravy. But if almost all dioxin intake comes from animal fat, then eating a more plant-based diet could wipe out about 98% of exposure. Thus, a vegetarian diet, or even just eating more plants, might have previously unsuspected health advantages, along with the more commonly recognized cardiovascular benefits and decreased cancer risk.