Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and it will be posted to our show archives for you to watch later at your convenience and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. This would be similar to your state library, so we provide services and resources and training and grants to all types of libraries in the state, so you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types, public, academic, K-12 corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything really are only criteria. Is it something to do with libraries? We have book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of service and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations for us, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have today. Today with us is Justin, who's our world traveling librarian. Who has done lots and lots of things in his career is going to tell us about how we can use creativity to grow and develop ourselves. So, Justin, I'll hand it over to you to give a full introduction to yourself and tell us all about what you have for us today. Cool. Krista, thank you so much for having me here. I was in Nebraska in 2018, and what a cool state you have. I want to put in a plug for RUNZA, and all the cool librarians that are there in Nebraska.  Come and try RUNZA. It's a wonderful, yummy experience. It's a RUNZA. Home, fast food, it's interesting. It's little both, yeah. It's pretty good. Don't be scared of it being fast food. Just go with a RUNZA, trust me. But I'm coming to you from Maine today. I'm coming to you from my kid's room because they have computers, and I don't. That's what happens when you have children. You give up things, and that's okay. I'm here to talk to you about how to use your creativity to grow and develop. I'm going to share my story because that's the story that I know, and hopefully I'm hoping you can scrape some ideas, inspiration, positivity, good vibes from this, and apply that to your life, and go ahead and move ahead in your community and rock on. So before I start this, I just want to give a lot of love to Jane Dysart, who encouraged me to... She was the one. She said, Justin, get off your butt and start presenting again. And she was the one who said, talk about your creativity. I really like that about you. And if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be doing this. So here I am. Hello, Nebraska. So before we start, my first slide. Wait, where am I? Okay. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Justin. I live in Maine with my partner Hailey and our two kids, Fin and Arrow. I do not work in a library right now. I'm taking a break. I was in a library for 17 years, and I hit a point, and I just decided I need to stop. So I'm doing something else now, and it's really cool and fun, and I'm growing in many different ways. I have a dog named Darby. He's a Kotan de Tuliar dog, and he's a adorable. The Kotan de Tuliar is from Madagascar. I have a monthly column. Oh, you'll have to check it out. I have a monthly column called A Day in the Life in Information Today magazine. I talk to librarians from all over the world about how they work, why they work, what they're doing, and all sorts of things. Krista, you're coming up next in I think next month's issue. So Nebraska and the world stay tuned. What do I like to do? I like to listen to and make music all the time. I want you to smile and laugh and learn as much as you can today while I'm here, because if we're not smiling, laughing, and learning, we're probably doing something wrong. So let's have fun with this. And what do I want you to take from this? I asked that sometime this week you head out into your community and do one thing for someone else. Just do anything for someone else. That's what I want you to take from this and do. And if you want to talk to me, there's my email address. I really love emailing. That's Darby. I got to slide that in here. It's a very fluffy dog, very cuddly. Looks very soft. Very, very soft dog. He would be here, but he'd be barking. So I am a creative person. I knew from when I was a kid, I used to fill up drawing books full of character design sketches for Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 knockoff video games.  And then as I became a teenager, I got really into music. And I developed that other side of me creatively. But I never chose a creative path in my career. I kind of just worked retail jobs until somebody, my mother-in-law gave me the nudge and said, go work with teenagers in a library. So that's what I did on the left side of these pictures. That's me hanging out with teenagers in libraries. We did wonderful creative things. We built phone booths, not phone booths, photo booths out of iPads. That's where that first photo was taken with me wearing the UPS thing. We played video games. We had video game tournaments. We built board games. We turned the library into like Minecraft in real life. It was fun. It was creative. And then at some point, I hit a wall and I said, I'm tired of being creative. I want to help others be creative. So I became Mr. Manager. And for about seven or eight years, I was a library director in public libraries in America and New Zealand. I'm going to go to this next slide. I moved into leadership because in 2010, I always remembered this quote, Francis Heselbein. That's how I'm going to pronounce her name. The leader's job is not to provide energy, but to release it from others. That was told to me by a wonderful library named Peter Bromberg. Does everybody know Peter Bromberg? He is a truly wonderful human being. We'll You mentioned Jane Dysart. This is if people know the computers and libraries conference and internet librarian. That's something that a lot of us have been to and I have been at and presented at many times over the years. Highly recommend. He's been there as well. Highly recommend. Very great people. A great learning environment and a great fun community environment. So this Francis quote Peter Bromberg told me this in 2010 and it stuck with me as a creative person because I had never had anybody in my life pushing me. Instead of saying I didn't have anybody saying to me, yes, Justin, go do that creativity.  So I stuck that in the back of my mind and I said, maybe someday I'm going to come across somebody who is a great manager and pushes me that way. I'm going to talk about a great manager who did that for me very shortly. And then someday maybe I can be that person. I have to remember as a creative person that there are other creative people out there and that I could be somebody for them to unlock their true potential. So I came up with this idea that I wanted to be the creative leader and moving ahead, how could my goal to be to keep this library afloat, to keep it managing, to keep it moving ahead, but also be somebody who recognized what my staff needed and wanted to do and how to let them explore those options. So I came up with these bullet points that really guided me as a manager moving from a youth services role where I could be creative all the time to being a manager where it was a lot of budgets and boring stuff, but you also have that very important role of helping others. The first thing that I learned is let go. If you're moving into a management role from being a creative role, it's great to just be aware of where you're at and what's going to happen. At first I really resisted this change. I thought I can still do all these creative things. I can still run programs. I can still be that youth services librarian and also be a library director. You can't really do two things at once like that. If you just accept where you're at and say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is what I need to do. I'm going to put the past behind me, but I'm going to figure out ways to bring that past ahead for people in the future. Just let things happen naturally.  When I was a youth services librarian, it was creativity all the time. You're surrounded by kids and teenagers. They're running around, kids and teenagers. They just want to do things. They want to have an impact on the world. They want to make their mark, I guess. This is where as a creative leader, you have to retrain your brain to not always have that constant stimulus happening, to be able to gain patience, to be able to sit back, process things, and think about, yes, you want creativity to happen and let it flow naturally, but you also know that as the leader, you have to build in systems to help people achieve that. Office work. That's one of the things you're going to do a lot as a manager, even if you're creative. I found that my creativity flourished when I organized my space. I found a focus and I got to work. I knew that there were things that needed to be done every day as a library director and as a manager. I got those things out of the way first, and then I was able to find my focus, and then I was able to dedicate the second half of my day to helping people with creative projects, doing creative projects of my own. I found that that organization really helped me. It actually gave me a lot more time to be creative, and I was never able to lose that even as I was a manager. Never lose sight. Krista, if there are any questions, any comments, you can always feel free to chime in. I do not mind that at all. Anybody, if you ever think of anything you want to say or share a question or a comment or sharing your experience or anything as a leader, go ahead and type in the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface, everyone, and I'm monitoring that over here. I'm going to monitor and I will grab it. Thank you. Never lose sight. One of the things that hit, I hit a wall in 2017 where I lost sight of who I was as a librarian, as a person, as a manager. I stayed in my office too much, and I think that's a thing that hinders our creativity. We might think we're staying in our office, we are, we're really working on projects, we're really putting our head down, we're really getting to work, but creative people, even if we're a little bit shy and you know, I think it happens with creative people, I think we tend to stand back a little bit, not wanting to put our creativity out there, but I think it's important for us to always get out, don't stay in our offices, get out into the world. Remember that we all came from a place in libraries where we were, we all had front-facing customer service jobs at one point. Remember where you came from in libraries? Remember that you're always serving a community, you're always serving people. And the one thing that I'm always going to stress is changing kindness. Through this all, as a creative person, kindness is always going to be at the front of what you're doing. Going through big changes, if you're moving from a creative role into leadership, make sure you're kind to yourself, make sure you're, as I said before, let go, you're entering a period of growth and change, let it happen naturally, be good to yourself, make sure you take time out to take care of yourself. Let me see, okay, there we go. Communication. I want to talk about how important it is as a creative person and as a library manager, how important communication is. I found this out the hard way. As a creative person, sometimes I get really in my own head about my projects, about the ideas that I'm having that I kind of fail to let the world in until they're fully realized. But one of the things that I've learned is every step along the way, no matter where you're working, keep people updated on where you're at, where you're headed, why you're on this path. I think that when we all know what each other's doing and we talk to each other in a kind and honest way, we're able to put aside all of this drama, a lot of wondering about what's going to happen, where are things going to go if we just talk to each other. Right before I signed on here, my wife and I homeschool our kids and we're having kind of a homeschool off day, it's vacation week here for the public schools and my kids were having a little tip about video games. One was playing, one was not, they wanted to switch and they just had to have one minute of communication, but instead they stormed off in two separate areas. One kid's on the third floor, one kid's on the first floor. After this presentation, I'm going to have to mop up the damage. It's just a real life example of I think communication, every step of the way when you're diving into a creative project, when you're working in a library, keep people up to date on what you're doing, why you're doing it and when you're going to get there. It's also good to share your stories. We'll talk about that too later. Sharing your stories lets people know how excited you are to be doing the work that you're doing and when people are excited about the work you're doing, I think it's going to have a bigger impact on the world. All right, as I said before, communication, part of communication is connection. As a manager of a creative team, you need to connect with these people, you need to let them know that you are there for them, you are going to support their ideas, you're going to help them realize their ideas. So first, listen, let your team generate ideas. My first library was in Titusville, Pennsylvania that I was a director of and I remember I came into that library after I had worked for about four libraries before that, looking at it and going, I know this place, I've been in a library like this before, here's what we need and I was very wrong and it's okay to admit that you're wrong. I did not know anything about that community because I wasn't there long enough. I should have let the team who had been living there all their lives generate the ideas. I learned my lesson the hard way. I gave them the keys to the car and for the next four years after that, it was pretty awesome because they were doing cool things and I got to be a manager and that was pretty neat too. Connect, you've got to connect with the people you work with. This connection will make the library grow and connect to the community more. I don't like to use the term work family because that's kind of a weird thing. I don't know. I have a family. I'm cool with that one. I don't need a second one. Work is kind of like a family at the same time. I just don't have the right word for it. Think about how you connect with your family. Think about how you communicate. Even though I know it's hard sometimes, but it's necessary. Think about how you want to, how you have to have these connections in your life and I think when you have at least understandings with each other and have good relationships, libraries can really take off. Once you have those connections with your staff, that's when magic starts to happen. That's when people start to get to the good work to connect with the community. Hang out. Think about how much time you spend with your staff. Enjoy that time. Sometimes that means you buy way too many donuts and for like six months every day you buy donuts and everybody gains a lot of weight and then everybody realizes you got to lose that weight so you work together to lose that weight. That was an actual real thing that happened and that's okay. Yeah. I mean, but those things are really great. Have coffee time with your staff. Just hang out. Have chit chats. As we were saying, chit chats before this presentation started. Talk to people. I think as we spend more time with our staff, we start to understand who they are. We start to understand what drives them creatively and we start to let them do those things and give them more options to do those things. Listen part two. I just put that in there because I can't stress how important it is to listen to your team. Trust me from not listening to my team for six months, listen to them. Encourage your team. There is never a bad time in the day to remind somebody that they are the brightest shining beacon of positivity in the world. We are connected in so many ways over the internet, over text, over phone calls and through video and all that. We've got all the time in the world just to let people know that they're doing a good job and that you believe in them and that they'll get to where they need to be. Just keep on encouraging each other. Some as mentioned, you said family. Some people do call their work family, work family, but some people I sure would be like uncomfortable with it, but some people suggest that they sometimes call their non-traditional family their tribe or their clan. In other words, you can use if you want to give a little sense of community or connection. Yeah. My work tribe. I like that. Thank you. I don't have a work environment right now, so I don't think about that. I'm just constantly surrounded by a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old in a dog. That's cool. Where was that? Where was that second one? Oh, okay. I was going to talk to people about, where did I go? Sorry about that. I haven't done this in a while. Encouraging people. Do you see my cursor on here on the screen? Yes. That person I'm circling is Corinne Hill. She was the library director of the Chattanooga Public Library and in 2013, I believe she brought all of these people to Chattanooga to be creative and weird and kind of give that library a nice little renaissance. And everything that I did in these ones, listen, connect, hang out, encourage them, that's what Corinne did. And I put this photo up because I like to reminisce about that wonderful time with Corinne, Nate Hill, Allie Burns, and Meg Bacchus. And I think about the creativity in that library and the culture of yes that Corinne put into that library. We had a fourth floor to that library and on that fourth floor, it was a 12,000 square foot space, I believe, and it was just kind of empty. And Corinne let Nate and Meg have that whole floor to build a very early maker space in libraries with community space so they could have presentations and workshops and events and all that. And we had these big empty walls. And Meg had this great idea to paint this wall. You would come out of the elevator of the stairs and you'd stare at this yellow wall. And she painted it yellow and put up, you're in the right place, which she made with the vinyl cutter in the maker space. And that was, everybody came up to that floor and said, where am I? Am I on the fourth floor? You're in the right place. And that was just Meg's wonderful brilliance and creativity. She kind of just had that idea. And all that Corinne said was, go for it. Here's the money to get that yellow paint and you know how to run the laser cutter or whatever it was, not laser cutter, vinyl cutter. Saying yes can lead to amazing things. And I don't know if that's still up there in Chattanooga, but when it was, it was one of those things I kept seeing people go up to the fourth floor just to take a picture of them in that space. And how easy it is to say yes and how life changing that yes can be. Just to let somebody know they're in the right place. There's this destination now.  I like that the culture of yes, more people need, that's a perfect phrase that more people need to embrace, I think.  But always trying to find a way to say yes. I know in the library world, we talk a lot about how we just don't have the budget or we just don't have the time or the resources. And I think that instead of saying that we can always try to find a way to make something happen. Even if we have to scale back the idea, I think the idea of the culture of saying yes to an idea really shows a person like go for it. Just make it happen. It might not be exactly what's in your brain, but just try it and see what happens. Who knows what'll happen that way. I believe in encouraging creativity every day. As I said before, we homeschool our kids and that's kind of our platform for how to teach our kids. You know, math is boring. All those typical textbooks, that kind of stuff's kind of, it's tough to learn that way. It was tough for me at least. So we find creative ways to connect with our kids and hope that they learn that way. And they do and it's great. And I think that that's by encouraging creativity every day, that's another way you can connect with your staff. Listen to their ideas that shape library services. Listen to the ideas the staff has. Find out how you can support them and trust them to happen. My first library director was in Cape May, Courthouse, New Jersey. Her name is Deb Puyon. Does anybody know, do we have anybody from New Jersey here? Not a bad state. Not the armpit of America like people say. No, there's some wonderful places there, yes. It's wonderful. She was the person who always had her office door open. She listened to our ideas. She said, that's a great idea. Let me figure out how I can support you. She would always support us. She would always find the money. She would always find the time. And then she trusted us. She gave us, at that library, we wanted to have a beautiful gaming program. She gave us all the tools and resources that we need. She never came to an event and that's okay because she trusted us as the video gaming nerds that we were to run the things. And I think that's a really great thing for a leader to know. Just trust your staff to do the thing once you give them the resources. Always encourage your staff. Nudge them to think differently about both library services and how things are done. Get them trying new things at their own pace. We have to constantly move ahead in this library world. Our world is changing so fast. I went to computers and libraries last year around this time and the whole discussion was about AI. And I hadn't even thought about AI the year before. And I guarantee that whole conversation around AI right now is completely different than last year and even scarier. I just saw this Reddit video, by the way, of how fast AI has advanced in a year. It was showing AI-generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti from a year ago and today. And like a year ago, it was like, you know, he had 10 fingers per hand and it was like very scary. But now it legit just looks like Will Smith eating spaghetti. Crazy, okay. That's very scary. That's just very horrifying, not natural looking photos, the fact that it is so accurate. So accurate. So in this world where everything is changing so fast, we can't just rest on our laurels and libraries and say, we've got all these great things here. Why don't you come and visit our spaces. Constantly nudge your staff to think differently about how they can provide library services, what is an actual library service, what is an actual library service, and how can they get things done? Like, we don't have to do things the same way. We can reinvent how we do things. So just always kind of encourage your staff to think differently about that. I always call that encouragement planting a garden. If you think about it, like here in Maine right now, we're getting ready for spring. We're putting our little, we're doing winter sowing and we're saving in our house a bunch of milk jugs. We're putting the soil in them and the seeds and all that. So you find ways to encourage your creativity. Pretend that you're planting a garden, sprinkle those seeds in the soil, which is your library, water them, nurture them, see what they need. Every little seed and every little plant is differently. Think about how different plants are. I have this one plant in my garden here called borage. Does anybody know what borage is? Beautiful purple thing. Bees love them. You can never get rid of borage. I've carried borage across the world almost. Actually, I didn't because New Zealand would have killed me if I did that. I've carried it across all of America, I should say that. You can never get rid of borage. You can neglect borage. You can give it no water. You can give it no sun. Borage will grow, but then you have these other plants that if you don't water them every 15 minutes on a regular basis, they're going to die. Every staff member is going to be different, but tend to those people in those different ways, tend to their garden, let them grow. You'll be surprised what happens. As a manager of creative people, you're going to want to always be a little bit of a part of everything. I know I said before, stand back, let your staff do the thing, but make sure that you do keep yourself in tune with the day-to-day happenings. For a while there, when I was in New Zealand, I really wasn't involved in any of the day-to-day happenings, and then COVID came, and it was, I think, the day before we closed the libraries for good.   Also, find time for yourself. You're going to be overwhelmed with a lot of work, but always remember your creative pursuits. Make sure you take care of yourself and keep yourself creative. Libraries are not everything, and we're not just our work. I'm talking to you today as a person who does not work in a library anymore, and I think a lot of the reason that I don't work in a library is because I didn't take care of myself. I didn't allow myself to be creative for a while, and I thought that libraries were everything, and I think I burnt myself out, and I think having that balance, the yin and the yang, you know, there's a reason we've been talking about that for a very long time. Achieve that balance and you'll be good, and I think your staff will be better. Self-care is so important, and especially in the world we live in today, not just dealing with libraries, but just in general what's happening in all sorts of places in the world that you need to take a step back from things, and think about yourself. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah, I feel like when I come on here, when I was preparing this to talk to you, I was like, man, I just feel like a self-help guru, like talking about like, be positive, be kind, take care of yourself, drink water. I think this is a really important thing to remember in the world today. We're very creative people. Humans are super creative. Look, we've lasted this long, and we've seen so many things and been through so many things. We're still here. We are creative people, but that creativity can be like snuffed out very quickly if we don't take care of ourselves and if we don't take care of each other. I think that's a lot of the reason why I'm talking about that today. There's a mantra that goes in a lot of the discords that I'm in that is for various gaming and things that a lot of people always repeat and try to remind each other about. It's good to have other people that are reminding you about this, like this presentation. You're not doing this all by yourself on your own. Hydrate, touch grass, untrimp. Have you ever heard that phrase, untrimp? I like that one, yeah. And that's a lot of people who are on their computers all hunched over all the time, or being artistic and drawing and whatever, you know, untrimp, stretch your back, stand up, walk around, touch grass, hydrate. Yes, take care of yourself. I just read a really great piece in, I think, Mother Jones Magazine this morning. Yeah, it was Mother Jones Magazine was sitting out on our dining room table like magic. I think a magical little like being left it there. And it was talking about these things that we carry around our phones and how we think we're looking at them to broadcast out into the world. But all that we're doing is we're talking to this screen. And we are broadcasting out to the world, but not a lot of people are listening because we're all just kind of talking to this thing. I think it's really important in a world where this dominates that we kind of set it down sometimes.  And we connect with others, with ourselves. And yeah, touch grass, stay hydrated, untrimp. Okay, this is my whole thing on taking care of yourself. I added this a few days ago when I was like, we need to talk about this more. Okay, first, when you get into a creative position in a library or a management position, ask yourself, what can I contribute creatively to my library? Take a look at the surroundings. What's going on? You don't want to step on anybody's toes. You don't want to do something that somebody else is already doing. You also want to see where there are gaps. Look into the community. Where can you find things that, what does the community need? Every community is going to be different. Some communities are just going to have more resources and you don't have to do as many things. There's one library where I had to have summer lunches for kids. It was just, if we didn't have the summer lunches during this one month of summer, kids didn't have a place to eat for free. I've worked in other communities where it was like, why would we ever do that? Because everybody was fine or fine. Everybody thought they were fine. I don't know if they were, but identify the gaps. Do what your community needs. When you do that, you're bound to reach someone. After you've found what you can contribute creatively to your library, set goals and clear boundaries to allow yourself to flourish.    They're going on their first overnight adventure today to a friend's house and they were just getting completely overwhelmed thinking about every scenario and every single thing that they needed to take. We just took them aside and said, set these goals, set these boundaries. You're going to be there for exactly 23 hours. What do you need in 23 hours to allow yourself to flourish? Once we set those boundaries, they were able to pack a bag. They seemed to be happy despite their fighting about the TV earlier. Oh well. Set aside time to allow yourself to be creative, especially if you're in management. You're going to notice your time being sucked away. Always find some time in your schedule, even if it's 15 minutes an hour where you can do something creative. It can be whatever you want. I used to just, when I was a library manager, I used to open a Google doc and just do free writing, just whatever came to my mind. I was a creative writing major. I enjoyed that and it never amounted to anything, but it kept my creative brain flowing.  We have a third floor in my house and we gave it to our kids so that they could have a Lego lab, but with dad being home all the time now, dad needs a space. Dad doesn't have anything. I carved out a little corner that is my creative nook where I can listen to and make music. I've really enjoyed having that space. I can go there and I can do that thing and then when I'm done, I can turn it off and leave. I find having all my tools, all my resources in one space allows me to turn my creativity on easier. I don't have to charge up, I guess. If you have an office, use that as your space. Find something.  Don't give everything to your library. Allow yourself to pursue your creativity outside of work. Like I said before, I gave everything to a library for a while and I stopped really listening to music and making music, which is the thing that makes Justin happy. I struggled because of that. I've been allowing myself more time to achieve that balance again and I think I'm getting back there. Finally, show your coworkers how your creativity is having a positive impact on your community. We all have great stories to tell. I think it is very important for us to share our work, to be out there, to be proud of what we're doing, to share the successes and failures on my website, which is justinthelibrarian.com. My biggest post, no matter what I've done in all of my career, is there's a post called, Oops, I Broke the 3D Printer. It was about how when I was in Chattanooga, they bought me a 3D printer and within an hour, I broke it. Like to the point where the plastic, instead of going down, it went back up in it in case the machine in it. Oh my. But it was fine because then I learned out how to fix it. That was a story. But share your stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. When we talk about these things, I think we grow from that and I bet you all have amazing stories to tell. I still tell stories about my time in libraries to people and you probably have this. They always say you should write a book. And if anybody's ever said you should write a book, you should probably start a blog or something. I guess nobody blogs anymore. Share your stories because I think, man, they're so positive and they're so good. There's this one librarian out there. I keep following him on LinkedIn. I think his name is Michael. He's in California. He's on TikTok, which I'm not on TikTok, but I watch him on TikTok. He just shared stories about how positive libraries are. Yes, I fell him too. He's famous now. He's been on Good Morning America. And I just saw he was at, he did an in-service day at West Des Moines, Iowa Public Library. Beautiful. That's share your stories because I see that person in my timeline and every day I smile. I'm like, wow.  I don't even have it. But I go to TikTok to watch this person. So believe in your stories and believe in the amazing work that you do and believe in your creativity and share that with the world because I want to see it at least and I bet other people will as well. And I think when other people may see these things too. My husband, who is not a librarian, is not in the library world. He's following Michael Librarian. He saw him. He has big TikTok user and he must have just come up in his, you know, in his, in his thing. And he said, oh, this librarian dude, do you know about him? I'm like, yeah, I know about him. So it will get out to people that are even not, you know, your library people, your staff, your colleagues. Definitely. And he talks about a lot of things, you know, about self-care as well and mental health. But he is just so positive about it as well. Yeah. And something I wanted to say too about your previous slide about the failure had with the 3D printer. This is a big thing I remember a few years ago. There were a lot of presentations at conferences about failure and that it's okay to fail and it's a good thing as you learn from it. And it's just because something didn't work doesn't mean it's a bad thing. You just may need to rework it. Or just like you said, learn from it. It's okay and share those stories, the good and the bad. Because other people learn from it too and feel it's not just me. I'm not the only one that didn't know how to do this thing on the 3D printer or who had this problem. Yeah. Yeah. The last library I worked at, I worked there for a year and I sucked at it. I was the worst. I was just a terrible library director and I wasn't into it. And I had to step away. And I'm not ready to be a library director right now, but I think I'm regaining it back. And I think knowing that I had to leave and all that kind of, you know, you take the good, you take the bad, you take the both and there you have the facts of life. Which is my final slide. I'm a child of the 80s and I remember watching The Facts of Life and that sticking with me. It's a, is it a great show, Krista? I don't even remember. I'm probably not great anymore. Yeah, this is our Gen X, yeah. This is our old people moment of the presentation. I'm sure some of you watching are of our generation too. Thanks for joining us at the Gen X. It was a show, but yes, it did have, you know, that theme song. It's true. It's a good, yeah, it is what it is. I think it's very important that you remember that just, you're going to have good, you're going to have bad and that's life. As a creative person and working with creative people, we are, we're going to have ups and downs like you wouldn't believe, you know, we're going to have great creative ideas and then I've had great creative ideas in five minutes after that been down in the dumps. It's just going to be that way. But when we look at the whole thing together, good and bad, we're going to get through this. We're going to get some good work done. These are my, these are everything I think I talked about all the creative projects that I've been a part of. You can check those out. And I don't even know what time it is. I don't even know where we're at, but I don't have anything else to say, but I would love to just hang out and talk and we can leave these slides, this slide up here with those links. Now I will tell you too, while we're here, do not try and scribble down and write all these links. You don't have to do that if you're interested in them afterwards when the recording goes up, I will have a link to Justin Slides. This is Google Slides, right? Yes. So you will have a link to all of these later with the archive, yeah. Along with the recording of today's show, yeah. Yeah. As I'm looking at this, my links here, I can't believe how many of my, the creative projects that I've been involved in have all been a result of maker spaces. And I'm kind of going back to my, like, thought in my earlier slide of just how important it is when we carve out these spaces to allow creativity and thinking to happen, what can happen in the, I guess, while I'm just realizing there was thanks maker spaces that have changed my life. Yeah.  No, go ahead, ask. Go ahead. I was going to say, are maker spaces still often discussed in libraries? I guess I'm a little bit out of the loop on that. Definitely, I would say yes. In new and interesting ways, I would think, yeah. We actually hear, and so first I would say, yeah, anybody have any questions, comments, thoughts, type into the question section? Like we said, we still got about 15 minutes left in the show. We will chat and talk and answer and whatever you have to offer. But yes, maker spaces are definitely still big in libraries. Here in Nebraska, we just last year wrapped up a like four or five year grant program that we did where we put maker spaces into libraries temporarily. It was our, where we got a grant for them in student museum and library services for a couple million dollars. And we bought like a set of maker space equipment, multiple sets.  And we had four sets of these that we would temporarily put into a library for about 20 weeks for them to try them out, test them out, get a feel for it, and get their community involved in it, and then move it to another library and then to another library. And we went through about 35, 40 libraries in the state. Oh, that's beautiful. And it was huge. Yeah. And now as a result of that, it was a, it was kind of like, you know, well, give them a taste and then they wanted to buy it for themselves.  And it's not the right piece of equipment for their library, but we gave them a taste of all of them, and then they could figure out, oh, our people, like, they need an embroidery machine, and they need a 3D printer, but they don't need all the other stuff. And they learn that. And then they go on to buy their own of that or apply for grants. We offer grants here through the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm just wrapping up awarding those right now, our 2024 grants, library improvement grants, which is also funding from the NC Museum Library Services. And yes, people are still applying for, we're giving one library a new 3D printer. Others are going to make equipment and cabinets to hold the stuff and all sorts of things. So I don't know about anywhere else, but yes, here in Nebraska. Very cool. That's good to know. We encouraged it by offering these, I think, by helping them test out all this equipment. That's super awesome. You mentioned a button maker, and I think one of the coolest, most low-key creative tools we can put in a library is a button maker. When I was in Chattanooga, we were on the second floor. It was an entire floor for youth. And the first thing you saw was a table with old magazines and a few button makers on it. And just the creativity that I saw come out of that pile of old magazines and scraps of paper. Wow. It gave me a lot of hope about the world. I was like, this is awesome. Everyone likes to make a button. Everybody likes to make a button. It gets a whole setup for a couple hundred dollars now, maybe 300. And then you can put anything in there. We did it with paper. We did it with fabric. Different fabrics that you can cut out pieces from. Button maker and laminator. We took to our state fair, the Nebraska State Fair, for two or three years in a row. They had one area for the kids where you'd walk through this hallway and there was rooms outside. And we set up there to show off this because it was going to be coming to their library. So this is coming soon to your library. And we had a button maker and laminator there. And oh my gosh, the line of kids and adults just wanting to make their own things. It's just, yeah. Beautiful. And I think it really shows how people want to be creative. And if you have the resources for them. Until they see it, they don't realize it. They just do it. What is this? I can do it. You can make a button. Make it anything you want. Look at all that. Yeah. Oh. Her Christmas this year, our kids, one got a guitar and one got an iPad and an Apple Pen. And my wife Haley was just like, you know, we're just going to leave the guitar out. We're just going to put it in the living room and it's just going to be played whenever. And you'll see like they'll just touch it all the time and they won't be able to avoid it. Like they'll just she said it'll be like two months and they'll be awesome. And like it's pretty cool to like watch my 12 year old just like playing Nirvana songs right now. When you have like access to the tools and the resources, which you know, I think libraries are like the place to do that. Amazing things happen. And cheese. Yeah. Just imagine if we just had more stuff. I keep thinking about how cool our communities could be. Absolutely. If you have a question, if you want some advice on and anyone else go ahead and type into what advice do you have for encouraging team members to develop their own ideas and run with them? Hmm. Okay. You should do, but how I guess it's maybe more of the how. I'm trying to think back to experiences that I had. Wow, how, how. Okay. I'm taking back to my time in New Zealand where everybody seemed to, everybody had a hand in running the story time events that were happening there. Everybody kind of had to do, you know, we had a roster and everybody kind of had the cycle through. And I just remember having a lot of conversations with the more, I don't want to say anti-social, shy staff members who didn't want to get out there and sing to the children and, you know, be out there with the parents. I just remember trying to relate to them and talk about how, you know, I think everybody has some kind of stage fright. Relating to them on a personal level, trying to tell them about, I talked about my first program that I ever ran, which was a open mic night, which one teenager attended.  I guess we're not going to have the open mic night.  And just like the guts it took to do that. And I think people just sometimes need somebody to listen to them and hear out their fears and hear out their worries and just be there to encourage them and go, you know, take it slow. You'll get there. It might not be right now, but like, let's work together on this. I think amazing things can happen that way. Absolutely. And yeah, telling them you can do this and you're not, yeah. I remember when I first started teaching way back when, before I worked here at the library commission, I worked at a university library back in New York. And my first couple, probably first six months or so having to teach in front of students, oh my God, my stomach didn't flip flops.  But now, you know, I just do it off the cuff. Yeah, I think it's, I don't remember where I heard this, but there was like that 10,000 hour idea where you just do things and do things over and you keep doing them. And once you hit 10,000 hours of doing that thing, you become an expert. But it takes a long time. Yeah, it's not. It just takes a long time. And yeah, and giving opportunities to, I remember there were definitely story times that were less well attended than the other story times in New Zealand. So we try to roster those people into like maybe the smaller story times, the ones that got only six people instead of 60 people for some reason. To kind of, you know, I guess to use like a baseball analogy, they have the minor leagues and the major leagues. Not everybody starts off in the major leagues. Sometimes they got to work through the minor leagues to get to where they need to be. And yeah, just giving people the time and the patience. I think showing that to a person that you have the time and the patience for them to allow them to grow and to get to where they need to be. I think people really respond to that. There's, yeah, and giving the space to do their own thing. I have been lucky with, yeah, I've been lucky with almost all of my supervisors over my career that have been not micromanager type things. Enough to know what I'm doing, but also enough to, there's that balance to let me do the thing and try to, and like you said, the culture of yes, saying, yeah, try it out. I mean, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. And you go into something else, but there's no reason to say, no, you shouldn't be doing that because you might not have the time for it. Exactly. We don't know what'll come of it. We'll know, we won't unless we try. Yeah. But that's one thing that I follow in my current directors put steps, I'd say. I try to, he's really good at giving the encouragement into just saying, do your thing. Absolutely. I will support whatever, but then checking in on, so how the thing do, how to go. I want to, and then telling others about it, like following me and following you, talking about telling your stories about what you do. But if your supervisor is also bragging about you, honestly, you've got to follow through with that as well, that hey, that's a cool thing. I wasn't involved in it. Absolutely not, but they did, and I want you to go see that. So, they have to have the follow through too, I think of letting you do the thing and then also promoting that you did the thing and telling everyone. Exactly. You mentioned micromanagers. You mentioned micromanagers, and I just wanted to add, I had a micromanager once, and I remember being so depressed, I was like, this person just doesn't want me to do anything and my life is miserable. And my wife, who's just cuts to the chase, she was just like, quit whining, Justin, like this idiot's just like giving you a template for what not to do. Like, they're laying it out for you. Don't do this. Like, you never have to do that stuff again. Like, you don't have to go through that experience.  You can learn from that too. Yep, I had learned from that. And I'm like, that's always in my head, never do anything. When you think of something, do the opposite of what that person did. Exactly. It's crazy. I think about that person more than some of my best managers.  Absolutely. I would like to take back my one thing that I asked everybody to do, and it was go be kind to somebody in the community. Actually, just go binge watch every season of Facts of Life. I'm not joking, no. Do the nice thing. But try and look for them too, just to get, you know, try and try it. It wasn't a horrible show, I don't think. Go to your library and see if they have it. Yeah, it's got to be somewhere, absolutely. Cool. All right, we're almost at the top of the hour again. Does anybody have any last minute desperate questions they want to ask of Justin or anything you want to share? We do have some thank yous coming out, coming through. Great inspiration. Yep, that was the idea. It was very nice to talk with you and to be a part of Nebraska again. Thank you for coming, everybody. So glad to have you on.  I think I want to be a shelver again sometime. I think that's really what I want to do. I want to start there and not get to up here. I want to get to like there, the middle. Yeah, the getting burnt out on certain things.  I was like, I can't. This particular thing anymore is just making me and now I'm on the other side here at the library. I help librarians do their jobs. And I'm so much happier. You're doing an awesome job at it. I've been here for 20 years and I don't think I would ever go anywhere else or do something because this is my, I found my happy place for now. Awesome. You're doing great work. Keep it up. Thank you. You too. I will keep an eye on what you do next and maybe we'll have you on in the future to talk about whatever your next adventure is. Sounds great. I'd love to check. The library connected. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to change my, I'm going to pull back presenter screen to my monitor here. There we go. To wrap things up for today. So thank you everybody for being here. Thank you so much, Justin. It's good to see you. Thank you. I know you said it's cold up there. It's my wife's, but I think, I think I'm rocking it. It looks so cozy. Yes. I love it. And all right. So here is the session page for today's show. If, as I said, today's show is recorded and if you go to whatever is your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live, the name of our show, you will find links to our main page and to our archive page. No one else is allowed to use the name. I don't have a trademark or anything, but so far we're the only thing that comes up. So if I go back to our main Encompass Live page, here's our upcoming shows. But here's a link to our archives. I wanted to show you where you can access them. And today's show will be at the top of this list. There is a last week show. It should be up here and ready by the end of the day tomorrow, as long as GoToWebinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone who attended today's show and registered today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's available. We also pushed out on our mailing list here in the library commission, through the library commission and on our social media. We have a Facebook page. There it is for Encompass Live. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show. Here's when we posted the recordings for the last week's show. We post that up there as well. We also pushed out onto our Twitter account for the library commission and Instagram, which I've got a catch up on. We use the hashtag and comp live little abbreviation for our show name anywhere that we post as well. So you can look for that if you want to. While we're here on our archives, I will show you, you can search our show archives to see if we've done a topic, a show on any topic, type in anything you want on here. You can do just all the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something just very current. And that is because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to go all the way down because this is a huge page as you can see. But this is the full show archives going back to when and compass live first premiered, which was in January 2009. Meaning this is our, this is our sweet 16. This is the 16th year of and compass live. Yeah, thank you. Crazy, but been doing it. I've been doing it 16 years. But just pay attention to the original broadcast date. They all have a date on there when they first were done. And some of these shows will be fine. Great shows will stand the topics will stand the test of time would be good resources. But some things will become old and outdated. Resources may have changed drastically or no longer exist anymore. Topics may need to be definitely updated. Like in 2017 talking about getting internet probably want to have something more more recent than that. But it's good to look at the old things too. Some links will be broken. People may will work at a different library or different place than when they promote presented for us like 10 years ago. So just pay attention to that original broadcast date. But this is something that libraries do. We keep things for historical purposes and make them available. And as long as we have a place to host them, which right now is all on these are all on the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel. We'll always keep our show archives up there and available for you. Get back to the top as you can see as you. All right. So that wraps it up for today's show. Next week it is, as you can see here, we've got two pretty sweet texts, pretty sweet tech. It's the last Wednesday of the month, the next week, which means it is pretty sweet tech day. Every last Wednesday of the month, Amanda Sweet, who's our technology innovation librarian here at the library commission, she comes on and talks about something tech related. We may have tech related shows throughout the month, but you can always depend on the last Wednesday of the month. It will be Amanda. And next week she is bringing Brian Pitchman from the Evolve project. He's been on the show a few times before. Also another computers and libraries, internet librarian person. And he's going to talk about his Evolve project project. He's a nice dude. He is. He's awesome. Yeah. He and Amanda do, they do a lot of work together. So he's going to talk. And I will be filling in more dates here. As you can see, I've just got one other date for March, but I am working on some finalizing some more presenters. So do keep an eye on our schedule here.  This is another online thing that I do here.  It's always the last Friday in February. We started this in 2012. Big talk from small libraries. All of our presenters are from libraries with an FTE or population served of 10,000 or less. It is online. It is free. Anyone from anywhere is invited to attend to watch. What we are is sponsored by us here, the Nebraska Library Commission and ARSL, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. The schedule is available so you can check and see who's present, what topics we have on. We are also very happy this year. We have the Page Public Library, the best small library in America award winner for 2023. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Library Journal, they suspended doing this award, but they brought it back last year for the first time. We do have the Page Public Library will be on at our 10 a.m. central time session talking about what they've been doing and how they won this wonderful award. We've got speaker information. You want to see who is presenting and then you can register right over here on our registration page. Please do join us on Friday for a big talk. The entire, almost the entire day will be recorded. There's one session at the end of the day who will not be recorded, but all of the sessions will be recorded and available in our previous conference link over here if you're unable to join us on Friday. So that wraps it up today. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Justin. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. This is a lot of fun. I think hopefully we've got a lot of good good vibes and good things we'll be doing now in our libraries. Positivity always wins. Yeah, absolutely. I try to be. All right, so hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye, everyone. Bye.


Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to the 2016 Open Simulator Community Conference. I want to remind you all, in World and our web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, and tweet your questions or comments to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag hashtag OSCC16. We had a great day of presentations yesterday, and if you missed them, never fear, we'll be posting them on our site and all of today's presentations as well in the near future, so definitely look for that. This hour, we are happy to introduce the session called Virtual Robotics, Creating, Collaborating, and Constructionists Learning in a Virtual World. Our speakers are Karina Gurvin and John Lester. Dr. Gurvin is an academic at Cardiff University and co-editor of the British Journal of Educational Technology. Interested in new technology, she has been actively researching the use of virtual worlds and robotics. In this project, she brings these interests together as part of a European Commission funded project on educational robotics for STEM. And John, Pathfinder as many know him in the virtual world, Lester, is currently a product manager at OpenText and has been a pioneer of developing educational communities for Linden Labs, OpenSimulator, and Unity Platforms. John also sits on the board of Virtual Ability as a champion for accessibility. Welcome to you both, and I will pass the mic to Dr. Gurvin. Okay, thank you very much. So my name is Karina Gurvin, thank you for the introduction. And yes, today I'm going to be talking about virtual robotics, creating, collaborating, and constructionist learning in a virtual world. In world, and in second life, I'm known as Sleepy Little Thing, and I'm really lucky to have met John, who has worked as a consultant with me on this project. And hopefully what we're going to talk to you about today, you'll find really interesting. It'll be a little bit different maybe for some of you, and it's a lot of fun for us. So I hope you'll enjoy it. And so just to give you an overview to the talk, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the background to the virtual robotics project that I'm involved in, just to set the scene. And then myself and John will talk a little bit about why we're using OpenSim for this project, and the design of the environment. I'm then going to talk to you a little bit more about slur tools, and we'll have a demonstration of them in action. And then I'll talk just very briefly about what the next steps are for the project, and then we'll open up to Q&A. So just to tell you a little bit about the robotics project that's funded by the European Commission, it's called ER4STEM, or Educational Robotics for STEM. And it's a collaboration between seven institutions in Europe. It's led by the Technical University of Vienna, and then we have a pedagogic partner at the University of Athens. Myself at Cardiff University, I'm involved in the pedagogy during the virtual world angle, and I'm also evaluating the whole project. And then we have the Practical Robotics Institute of Austria, CERTICON Across Limits, and the European Software Institute, who are all the commercial partners on the project. And the project aims to do a number of things. The first is that in educational robotics, we see a lot of educational robotics projects, research being done, generally by people in computer science or engineering domains. But they don't have the pedagogic background that a number of us have. And so the focus of the project is to design and implement a framework of best practice, looking at what's already being done, but also what's being done by our partners. This comprises of creating an educational robotics activity template. So something that's a bit broader than a simple lesson plan, but not so vague as something like a scheme of work that might last maybe over a month or two months. And really thinking about what are the components of educational robotics that are different to a normal lesson. We're creating a repository of resources for teachers, and we're running workshops with just over 4,000 students across Europe. And this comes under an imperative from the European Commission that we need to increase students with 21st century skills, increase engagement in STEM subjects, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And we want to get more women in STEM. And these are imperatives both in education, and I'm talking right the way through it from primary all the way to the end of secondary or K to 12 education, and also getting more women in STEM careers. So this is kind of the frame, the background for the project. But robotics in education really isn't that new. It's been going since kind of the 70s, really, with the work of people like Seymour Pappert, built very early robots, which were programmed by students. And so we already know quite a lot of stuff. And we actually already know that educational robotics activities are likely to increase STEM knowledge, interest, attitude and motivation across both genders, but actually particularly for girls, which is really interesting. And there's a number of possible reasons why, but generally speaking, the research doesn't go into it very much. So that's one of the things that we're looking at with the evaluation that I'm running. And what we see is that robotics, educational robotics activities are a great way to develop 21st century skills. Again, not really revolutionary knowledge this. I think some of this is possibly quite obvious. But with this project, what we're trying to do is actually unpick what's going on during these robotics activities, where you have single gender groups of all boys or all girls, mixed gender groups. We've got some boys and some girls. And what's quite interesting, what we're seeing so far, I've got lots and lots of video data from all around Europe that I'm going through at the moment. And what we see is when we've got, say for example, two boys and two girls, we seem to tend to get fairly good collaboration and teamwork going on. Where there's a gender imbalance, so there's only one girl in the group or only one boy in the group, those children tend to stay quite quiet. They follow along with what everybody else does. And maybe that's actually quite good collaboration, but it's interesting that that happens. Going back to our equal gender groups, what we also see is that our groups tend to pair off. So we've got two boys, the boys work together, two girls, the girls work together. And actually we tend to get cooperation between those two groups rather than collaboration. And communication tends to break down. Again, this is really interesting. If we're going to get more and more young people into STEM subjects, things like collaboration, teamwork, communication are really, really important. So how can we ensure that these young people are developing these skills in a useful way that they can apply with people of different genders? So we're looking at, like I say, collaboration, teamwork, communication, critical thinking, and along with that reflection as well, reflection on learning, computational thinking, and of course, more broadly, problem solving, and of course, creativity, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship. So we're looking at a lot in this project, basically. But specifically thinking about the virtual world element. Everybody else on this project or the other partners are all running robotics workshops in their countries. And they're all with physical robots. And because of some of my past research, I was really interested in, actually, what would be the difference if we used virtual robots in a virtual world? Would we be able to use them to support similar outcomes? Would there be new opportunities? And what would be the limitations? And in this, I'm thinking about both the pedagogical, so the teaching and the learning, the technical, and the outcomes for the learners, not just in terms of what they learn, but also in terms of their experience, because we need them to enjoy this stuff and want to participate. So why would anybody be interested in doing virtual educational robots? Well, there's a number of reasons. First of all, the cost. Things like Lego Mindstorms or even Raspberry Pi kits do cost quite a bit of money just to purchase, particularly a class set if you've got 30 children and you want to have one between two. You've got to buy 15 of them. And all of these kits need to be maintained. Also, parts go missing, bits go missing.  They can collaborate a distance so we can get children in different schools to collaborate on a project together. They can develop digital literacy and competency. Of course, we can have multiple users and it supports in situ engagement. Now, this is not the first time that I've done this. I've had a little bit of a proof of concept activity back in second life. And there's a little picture of the slursels when they were first created. And the first project was actually looking at constructionism as a pedagogy in the virtual world. Constructionism for those who aren't familiar with this, the idea that by exploring, testing and extending our understanding through the construction of shareable, personally meaningful artifacts, we can really develop and enhance our learning. And this was implemented with adults with very little experience of programming in second life and using slursels. Scratch for second life. But for this particular project, the one I'm working on now, I wanted to move into OpenSim. Why? Because it's a project with seven to 18 year olds. Schools want control in terms of privacy and protection. They need reliability. They need a reliable system. OpenSim has really come on leaps and bounds since the stuff that I first did in second life. It's low cost. We can also have a focus on the task, on the robotics tasks we're asking learners to engage in rather than them having to go off and find resources, for example. And it's a very flexible environment in terms of the design. So at this point, I'd like to pass over to Pathfinder. Cool. Thanks a lot, Karina. I'm gonna go through these slides really quick and just give you my perspective as the consultant and the contractor or developer on creating, setting up these spaces for Karina in OpenSim. And the quick, the three questions I wanna go through is really talk about why OpenSim was a great technology match for the project. How did the age appropriate design influence the content and configuration of the grid? And in particular, how did the hyper grid enabled content enrich the build? So the first question, why was OpenSim a great match for the technology? And there's really nothing else out there in terms of an in-situ and atomistic content creation platform. By in-situ, I mean people creating at the same time in real time, in an environment that's live. And atomistic, meaning the tools are there to build things from very, very small components. You're not just given like, here's a chair. It's like, we have to build a chair out of prims. Multi-user interactions, full control over the grid. The privacy and content backup was a real big issue. And also we have the option now, obviously, for running a local grid off a USB drive with OpenSim, in particular with Ferd Frederick's DreamWorld software that allows you to run or set up your own grid locally so that the project could be instantiated in schools that maybe don't have access to servers on the internet. And in particular, in terms of content creation, OpenSim has come leaps and bounds in terms of the availability for content. In addition to a professional community, the way the grid was set up is that no one else can teleport into the grid from other grids, but administrators who have logged into the grid can leave. So they're able to free range. The administrator are able to free range like Karina and myself and any additional teachers in the future can explore the rest of the grid. So that opens up a great big potential for growing the community, which is critical because in academia, it's all about colleagues. It's all about getting connections to other people. Oops. How did the age appropriate design influence both the content and the configuration of the slurred grid? I just wanted to back up here because I love this image here. That's the space where the students collect a lot of their resources. Some of them including avatars, right? So we had to create age appropriate avatars, both human and non-human, and allow local accounts that are locked onto the grid. We created the usual socializing spaces and spaces for play and also creating an environment where there's a lot of reward for exploration, which is always critical and the sort of classic orientation pathways and sandboxes. So all of the things that most people here know intuitively is important in building community. Those are the types of environments that we set up in this space. But really, this thing I really wanted to stress is the hypergrid-enabled content enriching the build, there's an incredible amount of quality content that's needed to build out any environment like this. And my focus is really on level design and user experience, maybe tweaking some highly customized content. But there's a huge need for things like quality models of buildings and trees and avatars and furniture and so forth. I spent a lot of time looking across the hypergrid and both free content and content for sale in places like Kytley Marketplace and by the end of it, I had a list of over 60 people because I wanted to keep track of who are all the content creators who were providing content that could be used in this project. So moving forward, I'm gonna make sure that all of those folks are always recognized in any presentations or anything like this. And here's a list of all of them here. And if you go to that link, there's actually a backup copy that I have running on an Outworlds Dream World build or running on my desktop if you want to poke around and see what it looks like. And lastly, I wanted to mention that the, we'll put the slides up after the presentation is over and there's the URL for it. And that's it, I wanted to hand it back to you, Karina, so you can talk more about the cool details. Great, thanks, John. So that was actually quite a nice little chance for me to have a go at trying to tweet the conference presentation whilst presenting. Interesting experience. Hopefully some of you will see that soon. So just to give you a little background to the slurrtles, which you'll see a couple of them just floating to my right by the Adcon Presenter podium. And slurrtles are designed to be what we'd call low floor, so they're very easy to use, wide wall so that we can create a really wide range of things with them and also so they've got a high ceiling so we can make something very simple so we can engage with them very easily and quickly but they also allow us to create quite complex things and engage in conceptually complex ideas. And really what I've done is I've borrowed, stolen some existing and wonderful ideas, things like Lego bricks, the idea that you can just take these very simple little bricks and click them together and we can make something really quite complicated with them, really just limited by imagination. We've got turtle graphics, which some of you will be familiar with, little line drawing program, whereby you program the turtle and it draws a line as it moves. We've got Lego Mindstorms just below that then, which is a robot in the physical world. And then on the right-hand side, we've got Scratch, which some of you be familiar with, which is a graphical programming environment and basically I'm taking all these ideas together and putting them into slurples. So I'm going to ask my glamorous assistant, John, to kindly give us a quick demonstration of the slurples in action. All right, here we go, operating live without a net here. Let's see here, so if you look at the turtle, the slurple that's sitting on the ground near the podium, let me turn his scripts on here. And let's see here, oh, come on. Oh, here we go. Okay, if you click on him, you'll see he goes, woo, I'm drawing a rainbow. There you go. And that's just a basic series of commands. But one of the key little things is, oh, and if anybody clicks on it, yes, it'll just obey your command, so it's gonna now just keep drawing a rainbow into the sky forever. That's awesome. And then the other one here, that's floating above the, above the, let me see here, turn the scripts to running. Okay, then that's above the ground here. When I click on him, he draws a star, see? And it's really interesting, kids look at a star and it's like, how do I draw a star? And they realize, okay, there are angles and one is 108 degrees and one is 36 degrees and how can I, from the turtle's perspective, draw that and so it's a very fun, very tangible way to visualize mathematics and to visualize the concept of, if this, then that, which is how you program robots. Great, thanks, John. And off the turtle goes again. And yeah, the way it's programmed is just using, well, I've got a picture of scratch for Second Life, but we've got a scratch for OpenSim as well. And we just click and drag our blocks on the left-hand side and build up our script on the right-hand side. So John's using a when I'm touched, so every time you touch it, the turtle goes around again and you just press the copy Lyndon script button and that gives us our text star language just to be able to put in our turtle. And the turtle's just, every time it moves, it draws a line by using the pen down command. So really very nice and simple for the learners to use Yeah, they can engage in 3D graphics or thinking about 3D mathematical concepts, which is fantastic. I'm being told to wrap up, so I'm gonna just steal one extra minute from question time. Just to show you just a picture of the stairs there and an example script. So you can see that's quite simple, but if we had to write that in a text-based language right from the very beginning, when we haven't done any programming before, it's going to be quite complicated. And these are some of the things that our learners have created using slurtles. So we've got an interactive piano, one group decided to make an obstacle course, another group made an enchanted forest, which was all kind of cool. And just to finish up, I just wanted to mention to you a couple of next steps. So I'm piloting this with a couple of schools, one in the UK and one in Ireland, and I'm co-creating lessons with the teachers for to introduce students to computer programming, seven to 12 year olds, and to actually, they will be using programming of course, but actually to learn different mathematical concepts. So instead of learning maths, the students use the turtles to become mathematicians. They explore and work out the mathematical concepts themselves. And that's with 12 to 13 year olds in Ireland. And from that, so we're gonna get feedback from the students and the teachers, refine the island design a little bit and be looking to recruit new schools. I've actually already got one in Greece that's really keen to get involved. And obviously we're talking about primary, yes, middle school and secondary school. So if anybody would like more information, I do have a journal article, which I think John's put up for me in the Expo Center. And otherwise feel free to drop me a line. So thank you very much, everyone. All right, Karina and John, thank you very much.  And Karina, I think the programming that you've come up with for these kids is gonna be wonderful for all of them. I wanna remind the audience that you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Coming up in a little bit here at 7.30 a.m. PST, our session entitled Remote Controlling Open Simulator. So we will see you all in a little bit here as we change our speakers out. And if you have a little bit of time, you can go over to OSCC 16 Expo 3 Region or Expo 2 Region and check out all of our booths there. Thank you.


Hey guys happy 2017. This is my first review obviously I'm still recovering from the surgery and it's been I haven't gone to see a movie yet But I did get a movie for Christmas that I was very excited to see and now that I've watched it I'm kind of on the fence of whether I'm happy with it or not the movie We're gonna talk about is the black and chrome edition of Mad Max Fury Road Now a lot of people were quite excited for this version I was one of them because when in Post-production of the film George Miller kept on saying that he really wanted to see had a black and white version of this film with very minimalist dialogue and more so music and sound effects and that was it like he was Really adamant about it obviously he didn't get that they went with this version of the version that we got in theaters Which are still really kick-ass, but we were all very interested in it And in fact there was a guy who was on Vimeo who actually put up a Version of the film that he edited himself However, obviously Warner Brothers took that down so because they said well We're gonna do the black and chrome edition and everyone was really excited for it and he included 15 minutes in I've realized that they literally did nothing else to this movie except change the color contrast Like literally that's it. Like it's a nice black and white, but that's it We literally could have been watching the original version fucked with a contrast on the TV And we've gotten the same result me and I'll be it maybe a little odd, but That's the first thing that's kind of it's it's niggling me a little bit Mainly because I was really expecting a different version of the film and literally all we have is a version that had a color contrast However, when we think about it There are different versions of media that have been changed to black and white that we still like even though They are exactly the same thing one of the examples. I'm going to use here is Batman noir this is one of my favorite graphic novels and Oddly enough, it is literally just issues 620 to 625 Done in black and white now Why do I like it because well for one I never read those issues before before I read this and Two they did upgrade a little bit of the coloring mainly the sort of the outlines of characters they did alter them a little bit for the black and white version of it and Honestly, I think there are maybe some tweaks here and there through Mad Max 3 Road black and chrome edition There are certain aspects of the film that do look different I'll be a lot different for instance the beginning of the movie where Morton Joe is giving the people water The world just looks shittier Like it already looks pretty bad right but because of the high color contrast the blue and the hue yellow The orange it kind of gives us a little comfort feeling remember those are two colors that people find most alluring Without those colors the world looks way crappier than it did before oddly enough too. It also reminds me of Schindler's list Feel awful for that But a lot of the movie I'm seeing when people are talking I'm thinking of Schindler's list the action scenes however are Very different in terms of how you visually see them with the light. It's definitely a color contrast. There's a much Leaker it's kind of like watching an old stagecoach movie well an old black and white monster film It also reminds me of the Van Helsing scene the very beginning of the movie that wasn't done in black and white So it's almost a homage to the old horror films because it just takes out the color it takes out the life It's very brutal. There's a lot less to the world But at the same time we have a lot we have a different perspective of it and all we did was you just change the color Now while I'm definitely saying that if you already have the movie There's almost no point and buying this version if you're a super fan like me I'm happy to have it on my wall. Well, I always say let's watch the black and chrome edition over the regular version Probably not. This is more of an experimental thing George Miller at the very beginning says this is the version that he prefers to watch Which good for him But we were all expecting something a little bit more because of what he talked about in the post-production interviews and everything So I'll still say that black and chrome edition is something that you could watch I'm not gonna rate this out of seven because literally I've already rated the movie a seven out of seven But in terms of this product, I don't know I would say it's I think that If you were a super fan You you would like it, but I don't know if you're gonna watch it every time. That's is my opinion I still think that it's not worth full price because you are literally just playing for a color contrast version If you are good enough with a computer and you have a downloaded version of this You can literally just fudge around with his settings and VLC and get the exact same result But that's just me. Anyway guys, that's all for me. I hope you enjoyed this view I will be doing more reviews. Hopefully soon as I will be able to sit down again for a long a period of time without slouching It's quite soon. Hopefully anyway guys, that's all for me. See you later


The stage is yours. Thank you very much. I'd like to start with a small background story. I joined Yoast in 2013, and back then I was still convinced that I could be a developer. And so was Yoast. Things turned out differently, but at my very first day at Yoast, he told me, you are going to WordCamp Europe. Well, I had been working with WordPress for about a week, and I had no clue what a WordCamp was, but it was something in Europe, so okay, I'll go. It happened to be in the Netherlands, so slightly less exciting. But I went. I went to WordCamp Europe, and I attended sessions, and there were a great many developers, so many very skilled people, and I felt kind of out of place. I just started at Yoast, and people saw me. We weren't that good at branding back then, but still they knew I was from Yoast, and they started asking questions, and I had no idea. And they were all developers, and it was scary. And then after a day of sessions, and after a second day of sessions, I was like, okay, I'm not sure if this community really is my community. But things happened on Twitter even back in 2013, and we ended up in a local bar in Leiden for the people from the Netherlands, exactly one, North End in Leiden, and I went there and I talked to some people, and at some point I mentioned to a guy named Jeremy Feld that I felt misplaced there, that I didn't know if I should be in that place if I should be in the WordPress community. And he said, famous words, he said, all you have to do to be part of the WordPress community is to show up. You are here, so let me introduce you to a couple of people. Well, I can tell you that escalated. We got thrown out of the very same bar at 4am in the morning, and I made many, many new friends.  Don't say you love tacos when I'm around because stuff like this happens after drinking. But I met so many people that I still run into at WordCamps and I still talk to online from that very first experience. So I concluded, WordCamps, I like that. I want to go to more of them. And then someone introduced me to a concept just like a WordCamp. And they called it a Meetup, which is like a mini WordCamp with a lot less people usually with just one or two talks or maybe no talks at all. And they are not as scary to go to. So if you've never been to a Meetup, you should because they're not so scary as those big WordCamps. But they do add great value to your life as a professional to your working life. So as a professional, let me get to that. Who of you sees him or herself as a professional? That's about half. You're not doing that great. I looked it up. Merriam Webster has a couple of definitions for professional, but the most important one that I found in this list is being a professional means that you act like you're doing something professionally. Well, we all act as if we know WordPress. So you're all professionals. To me, it has a slightly different meaning. When I think of a professional, I think of someone that is trying to do his very best at what he's doing and maybe even more important, he or she is trying to improve that specific thing, whether you're a developer, a designer, a translator, whatever, as long as you're trying to improve yourself, I'll count you as a professional. And what do professionals do? Well, professionals do a lot. But most important, professionals learn. They keep learning new stuff about the things they are interested in. One of the places you can go to learn more is, well, a meet-up or a WordCamp. So you're doing pretty fine. And one of the other things a professional does is meeting peers. Different settings. WordCamps, Karim talked about it earlier today. There may be competition, but you can also partner with the people you meet at WordCamps. They're also, well, pretty famous for after parties. So if you didn't plan on going to the after party tonight, change your schedule, go. This was WordCamp Europe last year. It's a bit of a dark picture, but trust me, it's good. There are no clear pictures. It was great fun, though. And I didn't get eaten. So when we're talking about WordCamps and meet-ups, there is a best meet-up to go to. And that's your local meet-up. You can go to WordCamps in a lot of places. You can go to meet-ups in a lot of places. But your local meet-up is where you meet the people that are able to help you, that are able to help you outside of that specific event. For example, if you want to do business with someone, it can be a lot easier if they're in the same town or the same city. So attend your local meet-up. Gain knowledge there, but also share your knowledge. What you learned today, bring it to your own city and town. And there's another advantage, and that became really clear to me today when I attended a session in Italian, and I didn't speak a single word of Italian. I received a very nice private message on Twitter. Yeah. Thank you, Luca. I was just really focused. I was not in pain. But this is not going to happen if you're at a local meet-up because those people speak your language. And business-wise, you know, if you're looking for a job, looking for employees, maybe, if you're hiring, looking to get hired, looking to partner, your local meet-up might as well be the best place to find people. And if you are interested in working... No, I'm not going to say that. You know, just come to WordPress Meetup Nijmegen and you'll get it. So, what if there is no local meet-up? It happens. And I'd like to quote one of the famous people in the PHP community. That's Kel Evans. And Kel says, if you look around you and you can't find the leader of your local user group, you're it. And I'd like to quote Michelangelo van Dam, he's the founder of PHP Benelux. And he says, if there's no local user group, start one. Actually, that was one of the reasons that we started a local PHP user group in Nijmegen. So, we can apply that to WordPress as well. And I just wanted to be in the list of quotes. So, if there's no WordPress Meetup in your city yet, you are the one to organize it. Not the person next to you, you. So, anyone here from a town or city that does not have a meet-up yet? That's at least one, two, three. There's work to do. Okay. So, what do you do to organize a meet-up? Pretty simple. You pick a name. I'll help you. Make it WordPress Meetup, name of your city. It's not that hard, people. It's not that hard. It is also SEO advice. Yeah. So, next thing you should do, and this is actually the best advice that I can give you during this talk, pick a date. Pick a date for your first meet-up. So, John, there was no meet-up in your town yet. Where do you live? Norwich. Okay. So, on Wednesday, April the 27th, you are going to organize a meet-up in Norwich. It is, by that time, it will be on WordPress.tv. So, there's no backing out. And that's actually my third advice to you. Announce publicly. Make sure that if you pick a date, you tell other people because they will help you meet your deadline, I'm sure. There are also a couple of things you... Awesome. You already put it in this calendar. There are also a couple of things you should never do. Well, for example, cancel your meet-up. You organize something and you cannot find a location. You cannot find a company to host your meet-up. Just go to a local bar. Don't cancel. Never ever cancel because people will stop looking at your meet-up because you're going to cancel anyway. The second thing you should never do is cancel your meet-up. If your speaker, your presenter for the evening, last minute cancels if whatever happens to the program you thought of, don't cancel. Just go to a bar, have a few drinks and it will be fun. Try again next time.  Whatever happens if you, I don't know, any reason you can find to cancel is not a good reason. You can always go to a local bar, to a local community center and just have fun with the people that signed up. And if no one signed up because that can happen, especially for a first meet-up, for one, you don't have enough friends, but you are going to go anyway because what if no one signed up, but they still show up and you are not there. They're never going to come again. So you are there in that location on the date and you're not going to cancel your meet-up. So you know what to do, what not to do. After today, after the after-party, when you get home, there are a few things to do for your own local meet-up. Find a venue. A bar, a company, a community center, anything that has a space large enough for at least one person, you, but preferably slightly bigger, maybe 10, 15, just, you know, something that fits your goal. You invite people, your friends, your colleagues, people you know from wordcams, from other online events. Invite them and have a fantastic meet-up. That's pretty much it. What you can do, well, invite a speaker, do a contributing evening like the contributing day we did yesterday, or just have a drink. And I'm sure you'll have a great, great meet-up. Thank you very much. Questions. I have one. How about translations? Do you think they're valuable? Yes, I think translations are really valuable and that's even easier because the 24th of April, you don't have to organize a meet-up. You can just join WPTranslationDay.org and you have your Translation Day set. Awesome. Other questions? Yes. My last name is shortened online for a reason, but my last name is Fredonscholt. Practice, and I'll meet you next week in London.


The ancient Sumerian civilization are well known for having invented the city concept that we use today. This seemingly planned urbanization began around 9,500 years ago with the development of Mesopotamian cities, including Eridu, Uruk, and Ur. There are few moments in human history which mark significant points in our physical, behavioral, and cultural evolution of humans on Earth, but one of the significant pivotal leaps our ancestors made was from an unstable life as, well, what were we again? Yeah, whatever we were, we went from that to being Earthling settlers with permanent residents here, and that began in Mesopotamia. The concept was a gift from the Sumerian gods known as the Anunnaki, a stunning realization of a utopia society that was once only a dream in the imagination of a subject of the gods, an imagined community that possesses highly desirable qualities for its citizens. That was the gift of the gods, and that is what we call a city today. Ancient authorities are strangely notable for their diversity in form and function. Theories that attempt to explain ancient urbanization by a single factor, such as economic benefit, fail to capture the range of variation documented by archaeologists. Excavations at these sites show that some ancient places were sparsely populated political capitals, whereas others were thriving trade centers and some ancient cities grew to be powerful capitals and centers of commerce and industry situated at the centers of growing ancient empires. None of these diversities would have been possible without the intervention that took place in the eyes of the Sumerians during these biblical times, and from these ancient events emerged the reawakening of our people from a before time that we know very little about. As a people, we are incomplete because we are missing a huge chunk of the history of who we are, but from the things that we reemerged from, we may find clues to the past. What we mean by this guys is the fact that early inventions by these very early civilization appear to be born of something that was previously present, yet no such artifacts exist that links a forgotten past to the reemergence, and the timeline of the history they are insisting upon is a completely squeezed effort to confuse our understanding of who we are. Historian Samuel Noah Kramer once said that, The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention. It was like the modern day explosion of technological advancements, only that these people were not advancing technology, they were inventing it, and in doing so, they lay down the very foundation of civilization as we know it. In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large scale use of existing ones. In the process they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time. They had few trees, almost no stone or metal, and that forced them to make ingenious use of materials such as clay, which some say was the plastic of the ancient world, and they used it to make everything from bricks and pottery to tablets for writing. Perhaps the ancient Sumerians real genius may have been organizational. They had the ability to take inventions that they had been developing elsewhere and apply them on a much bigger scale. This way they could mass produce goods such as textiles and pottery that they could then trade with other people. There was something in the Sumerian identity that drove them to dream big and think ingeniously. Spiritually and psychologically they laid great stress on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige, honor and recognition. The great civilization's inventions spread to the rest of the populated world and led to the development of the modern world that we live in today. If civilization spread from this very ancient place then it can be assumed to be a cradle for civilization. And from this place where the ancient things exist, the ideology from the before time reemerged. At this place the switch was made from uncivilized to civilized and this is the world of today. We envisioned Utopia and when we are of course still developing and improving upon just like the Sumerians of old, we too are advancing olden inventions to meet our modern requirements today and in doing so we are extending the use of Sumerian technological thinking. The quantum leaps in understanding that took place in Mesopotamia during these ancient times are well documented in the cuneiform text. You would have to surmise that if these stories are documented for posterity and cultures across the earth are telling similar stories of these events, right down to our own modern interpretations of biblical events, then maybe it's all true. All of it. All the so called mythology and biblical events. Maybe all these ancient stories of the gods coming to earth in their many forms are true. Maybe. Just maybe. What do you guys think about the ancient Sumerians anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching. Hey guys, this is Buzzweaver, the voice of the Lost History channel and Light Up the Dark. I wanted to take a moment and thank you personally for all the support you have given to both channels and to invite you guys to visit my channel. Yes, we do have separate channels. I cover things like gaming, reviews, how to and current events. Each Friday I do a channel V-LOG which covers activity on my channel, headlines that are in the news, current events, social media and technology. So stop by, check it out and consider subscribing as your support for my channel helps us all. Thanks.


Welcome to All Hands, this is your weekly update on Navy history. November 19, 1969, Navy astronauts Commander Charles Conrad Jr. and Commander Alan L. Bean became the third and fourth men to walk on the Moon as part of the Apollo 12 mission. Apollo 12, the second manned mission telling on the Moon, was planned and executed as a precision landing. The astronauts landed the lunar module within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had landed on the Moon in April of 1967. The astronauts brought instruments from Surveyor 3 back to Earth to examine the effects of long-term exposure to the lunar environment. On November 22, 1961, U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Robert B. Robinson, flying an F-4H1 Phantom 2, sets a world speed record, averaging 1,606.3 miles per hour and two runs over the 15 to 25 kilometer course at Edwards Air Force Base, California. If you'd like to learn more about these facts and the Navy's history, visit the Naval History and Heritage Command website.