The next principle has to do with prior experience, that new learning is influenced by prior experience. We did not talk enough about the physiology of this, and many of you said, Okay, what is the latest research tell us about this? How does this really happen, you know, mechanically? What is going on in the brain? What exact experiences are you talking about? Many of you asked, are these things that are explicitly known to the individual? Like, do I have to know that I had that experience for it to influence me? Which you don't, right? So one of you really summarized this really well by saying, okay, tell me, one, two, three. How does the brain learn specifically? Which areas are heavily involved? Okay, the whole brain is involved. As we mentioned before, you have sensory perception, it goes in through the brain. There's a review of prior knowledge internally in the limbic system in the brain, but then where are memories stored throughout the cortex, which is on the outer layers of the brain? There's so much to all of us. You don't have memories stored in any single part of the brain, although there do tend to be, for example, memories of musical songs. They tend to be in the auditory cortex stored in these areas. However, they are processed thanks to the hippocampus, and they may be retrieved through emotional systems in the brain. So these are different pathways all over the place. So your entire brain is important for learning. So there are key hubs when we say which areas are heavily involved. So we're always talking about networks, right? But the key hubs would be, for example, when we talk about mathematical symbol processing, the singular gyrate, which is a key hub for mathematical processing. Or you'll see that, you know, Broca's or Vernici's areas tend to be a key hub for linguistic processing. But it's not that it's just that area of the brain. It's that there's multiple pathways. So when you say, what are the key areas that are heavily involved? It depends on the type of learning, for example, whether it's math or language or music or interpreting other people's faces or doing body movements or catching a baseball. Different areas will have more emphasis. For example, you can see a growth in motor cortex areas when an individual does something like learn how to drive or hit a baseball or play a piano piece. You'll see the expansion in the motor cortex, which on the other hand, physics or higher math problems or things like that. As I mentioned before, the antiques singular gyrates see a lot more movement. And how do we measure that? You can look at the increase in white matter tracks that occur in these different areas of the brain. It's not that learning is in any one area of the brain. And it's not, for example, when we talk about importance of executive functions, it's not just frontal lobes. There's a lot of key hubs in the frontal lobes that are, you know, ping-ponging back and forth. But it's not just that you learn how to have inhibitory control or working memory or cognitive flexibility just using those pieces of your brain, right? In fact, you'll see all kinds of other things that relate to visual processing or motor processing based on executive functions as well. So it's never in one part of your brain. And I think that that's a real challenge to us to get around the complexities of typical learning pathways, for example. I mentioned to you before, and if you're interested in having a look at study that we did on what literature exists to show how an individual learns to read, zero to eight years old, what parts of the brain are involved in that. And it's stunning. We find at least 16 neural networks which branch out into like 107 different pathways which in turn are related to thousands or hundreds of thousands of neural connections. And that is all over the brain. Being able to retrieve the meaning of a word is very different from understanding how to spell the word or understanding how intonation changes the emphasis of the meaning of the sentence or whatever. Those are all different neural networks. And so where does learning occur in the brain? It's everywhere in the brain. So it's very, very hard to limit this. But what we can now see thanks to the Connectome Project are a lot of key hubs. Sometimes they're called nodes but they're the main spaces through which information tends to travel through those places multiple times. So you'll see these brain scans and the imaging nowadays before it started off with like these simple models where these blue dots would indicate core hubs of where things are occurring in the brain. Where through which the information tends to pass or when they would say, oh, this is where reading is occurring in the brain. No, guess what? It's going all over the place and there's multiple hubs that we can see here. So you'll find now that in some of the better graphs they actually have sized these hubs. So they do this on a three-dimensional scale. So they do it by color. They do it by location. They also do it by the size of the little ball there. We'll tell you how many different times information has passed through a particular network. When somebody is trying to understand a piece of information or listen to information or to read something or to do a math problem or whatever, the visuals now are very different. We don't just see one space of your brain lighting up because we're combining multiple different types of neural networks. So you can actually see through which types of hubs is the information passing multiple times and with what frequency and in what order. So it's really based on that information that we can say which areas are most heavily involved. It depends. So if you say to learn a violin piece, you know, if you ask me that then I can send you research on that particular skill set and what neural networks tend to be involved in that. So it's a very wishy washy answer, but it's everywhere. The brain is involved. The entire brain is involved in learning, especially in school learning, which has such a variety of different types of learning that occurs. So how to experience is shape pathways of learning. One of the most interesting things that is happening is that when you see the networks, the repetition through the different pathways actually changes the brain. And so between the connections that you have here, you have between one neuron or groups of neurons and other neurons. You have what's called a myelin sheath, which links these different pieces together, right? And as they are linked, this gets strengthened. The myelination gets strengthened based on repetition. So the myelination will become thicker. It's kind of like a fatty glial cell. So basically it creates the speed with which information passes between these neurons. So this is an animation here, but when you have a neuron, you have the connections between the neurons. The more that this link is strengthened, the faster the retrieval. So based on that, the multiple experiences you have with a similar concept would reinforce that speed of recall between those different parts of the brain, which means that really it can become habituated. For example, you don't remember right now how you learned to drive, but because it's been rehearsed so many times, those connections are so, so strong that the speed that you can do it is almost unconscious so that we know that the more experiences, the more quality, good experiences you have with something, the stronger that connection is. And that can be good or bad. If you have had a negative learning experience where you've seen one parent abuses the other parent, you know, and that's a norm in the house, you begin to think that, well, you know, dad comes home, gets angry, has a drink, his mom, that's normal. So that's a link in your brain where you've decided that that's a pattern of behavior that's acceptable just because of the frequency that it's occurred. So we know that higher experiences don't always have to be good and the learning that results isn't always good. You can learn to be racist. You can learn to accept violence. You can accept those things because the frequency of the experience has created this really kind of cemented version of an experience for you, which means that a lot of times you might have to unlearn something in order to relearn a new pattern of behavior. The third question here is, how does variation in normal childhood experiences shape learning, which is exactly what we're talking about here. You know, growing up in a healthy home environment versus one in which there's, you know, toxic stress and where you feel threatened all the time, you learn behavior based on that experience. And so it does literally change the structure of the human brain. Kids who are brought up in situations where there's extreme toxic levels of stress do suffer. Kids without mistreatment in the home, they tend to have a greater variety of links, connections. Whereas maltreated children might have a much more limited amount of neural networks they can depend on for future learning just because they have been taught not to rehearse certain networks, not to see things, not to react to things in different ways. So we know that the effects of abuse and neglect are severe. They do have an impact on a child's brain. Children who are under extreme conditions of neglect who are in constant levels of high threat mode may have higher levels of cortisol, for example, stress hormone which actually will reduce brain volume. So we know that these types of experiences, neglect, abuse, traumatic experiences can have a very big effect on the developing brain. Another person asks very philosophically, you know, I'd like to learn how the relationship between past experiences and how we end up being who we are, what is that link?  There's a lot of wonderful reflection on this, I believe, Eric Candell and some others who've written about memory really talk about the tragedy of Alzheimer's, for example, because who you are was so grounded in what you had experienced that you can't uncouple the two. So if you'd like to get more specific with that question, if it does have to do with aging and past experience, please let me know. Or if there's something else that you're getting out with that question, please, please write to me. But the bottom line is basically your experiences really do create the sum of who you are. And this is connected to getting to this idea. The more you know, the more you can know. The more links, and this is very much based on the physiological structures of your brain. When you know something, you've created links, right? But by knowing that, it potentiates the fact that you can connect to something else to that new link, right? So the more you know, the more you can know. The technical biology related to these topics, again, I'll refer you to the longer videos. If you have the chance to look at those, I think it'd be a great way to better understand how prior experiences actually influence new learning. The bottom line, though, is due to the simple efficiency of the brain. The brain seeks out what it already knows about anything that it's exposed to. Before, it tries to forge a whole new connection. The first thing it does is ask yourself, what do I already know about this concept? And this is something really great for teachers to do in class. You all know that power of stimulating prior experiences to help link to new information, right? So even asking explicitly, what do you already know about this concept?  Is really, really helpful in teaching new concepts. As we know that prior experiences influence new learning. The natural question emerges then, okay, so how many prior experiences do I need to learn something new? Or how many times do I have to be exposed something to know it now, to own it, to really say, I know this? Well, again, like in all answers in this field, it depends. One, based on what you already know, a new experience, a single new experience this could be enough to consolidate new learning about something else. Remember we gave the example of if you already know how to add, I can teach you to subtract in about 10 steps, right? So because you have strong foundation on knowledge and prior experience, it's very similar. All I have to do is call out the slight differences between addition and subtraction and that can really consolidate the concept. We know that things get into long-term memory in just one of three ways. You know, one is self-preservation. Things that help you survive are learned really fast. Like just one quick experience, like sticking the fork and the light socket once is enough to learn it. But then the way we typically teach in school is by association. So what we're saying is, you know, addition, subtraction. They're very similar. How are they different, right? So if you can associate new learning to something that the kid already knows, that is taking advantage of prior experience. The third way is through an emotional link. And this is the free will part. If you really love a topic and you don't know anything about it, you can learn it really quickly as if you'd had multiple prior experiences just because of your own interest in that particular topic. So we know that it really depends how many experiences. Do you need one shocking experience or a dozen mild experiences? It depends. It depends on what you already know. It depends on your own personal level of interest in the information. And we've mentioned several times before that sometimes what is learned is not always positive. Having traumatic experience or having something negative happen to you related to other types of learning can just, you know, block you out from learning new things. So how do you unlearn something? And this gets to a concept. It's called fossilized errors, which is super, super complex. In language teaching, for example, if a kid has learned an incorrect sentence structure or incorrect pronunciation for so long, it's so hard to chip away at that. Like the fossil, right? It's really like ingrained there. It's harder to get rid of that than to learn a whole new language. But we know it's possible. This is why people go to therapy. For example, you can spend weeks, months, years until you can successfully decouple your immediate reaction. So dad comes home, he drinks, he hits my mom and then he comes after me. To decouple that that is not a normal way to live life is really hard and will take a long time to undo. Okay, it's a natural thing that should occur. Then on top of that, there has to be a new learning. This new experience, when dad comes home, there has to be a different way that things occur or things that happen should be normal to reconnect that to something new. That's the whole new learning. So there's a step of unlearning to get back to zero then to get into new learning. What is the correct way to do things? Habituated actions are very, very hard to undo but they can be undone. Okay? So unlearning is effortful but it's possible. And once again, this other person is reiterating how important it is to understand, you know, what is this connection between the nurture environment experience that impacts the brain? What is this process? And as we mentioned before, I hope you can look at the other videos but also understand this general concept of the more you know, the more you can know. So the more richer varied life experiences that an individual has, the greater their potential to connect other new ideas in the future. We've already spoken a little bit about the idea of negative experiences and how that can influence learning and the need to unlearn a conditioned response towards that to uncouple that. Psychology, I'm sure that a lot of you are familiar with, you know, these conditioned responses. That's just not on a psychological level. Those things create links in the brain that have to be decoupled before new connections can be made for a different pattern of behavior. And somebody else asks, if this is so true and we don't get kids until they're four or five years old into our schools and how is it that what has happened in other contexts in the home, for example, we have to begin to work with kids that we don't even know what their prior experiences were. And that is a huge thing. And this gets back to this big question of what is the role of the school and does it have this similar impact to what happens in the home? And thankfully it does. I guess two big things come out of this particular question. One is that it takes a village. Seriously, it takes a village to raise a child. So the idea of communal expectations, what is our community believe is the way we educate children and how do we do this as somebody else referred to earlier at this more systemic level? Is it just what I do with this one kid or what his genes do to him? But it's also, you know, what does our school do? What is our institution? What is our community? What are our values? And how do we habituate positive interactions with kids and reinforce things like resiliency and positive mindsets? Where does that all come from? Right? So what is the school's role? That's one point. But the second point that's really important and this comes from John Hattie's research in which he found what has the greatest influence in student learning outcomes? It actually ends up being the student's own self-perception as a learner which is shaped in turn by the self-efficacy or the group self-efficacy of the teachers around him. After that is teachers. The teacher is an individual and teaching. And way down there is the actual home because this has to do with student learning outcomes. So by the time the kid gets into school then they spend much more time in the school environment than they actually do with interacting with other members of their own family often. So we see that the school plays a huge role. And as we mentioned before the school has that real tipping point leverage where you can say it's not just what you are in your biology. It's not just what has happened to that kid in his early life at school with the two exceptions of toxic stress and poor nutrition in the early years. That can ruin brain architecture for long run. So minus those two conditions if you have a general normal upbringing the school then is the tipping point. The school can leverage what likely many parents didn't understand about their own children's potential. So this is why school experiences are so impacting. And so Hattie's work has shown that literally getting that kid to adopt that more positive mindset I can do this. It might be hard. I can get over this. Embracing challenges. Embracing failure. Those times of habituated reactions to learning experiences are things that can be learned within the school setting that will influence the child for life. Again, many people were also questioning so how damaging can some of these prior experiences that have occurred in the home be to a child and what can we do about it in schools? And for those of you who have the time and the interest I would love to motivate you to have a look at the Center for the Developing Child the webpage around Harvard University that really goes into a lot of these topics of toxic stress, brain architecture and young children and especially on this element of building resilience where does resilience come from and how can we as teachers participate in the construction of something that you know perhaps in the home the kid hasn't developed this cognitive resource to be able to react to disappointments in the world and life challenges that might occur through learning. It's a great series and Jack Shunkoff as the director has done a really phenomenal job of trying to go in some of these very important aspects you know what happens with neglect in children. What is this basic understanding of the gene and the environment interaction? If you do have the chance and you'd like to have more information about that we have a great relationship with them and we have many of their articles also available to you if you'd like to look at that. So hopefully we can address this question about understanding healing or repairing past experiences that have been negative or that it cause challenges for those children who are now in your classrooms. So again the majority of the questions looked at you know okay so practically what does this mean and there's this wonderful insight by this individual here who realizes you know that children from the same families you know they might have had similar experiences. Why how is it that the brains are so different? So what is this role of nature versus nurture? We now say basically it's nature via nurture. Those kids might have had very similar alleles they have these 23 pairs of chromosomes and they might look very similar genetically but the way that they took in these experiences or which of those genes because only a fraction of those genes are potentiated to become you know their phenotype the personality the way they are to the rest of the world that can be very very different so the kids might have similar parents and they seem like they have similar experiences but why are they so different? It's because not all of the same genes were potentiated in the same way. So this is why different people can have the same or live the same life experiences but take away very different types of things and so the family environment is important but it's not the ultimate arbiter of success in society. So we do deeply value great family and home environments but you and your colleagues know that you as teachers can really be the decisive factor in children's lives and changing those lives. One significant one significant adult model in the life of child is all you need to trigger resiliency but I would like to argue that the school experience and the interactions with great teachers can tip the final outcome of whether or not a child has success or finds success. There was a very clear question here related to critical periods. We no longer talk about critical periods for anything that's done in academia. What's more important is the order of steps. So if you didn't learn to read when you were three and you didn't learn when you were 13 and you didn't learn when you're 30. Could you learn when you're older? Yes, it's possible. What's more important than your age is actually the prior experience is the order of the introduction of concepts is more important than the age of the individual. But we do talk about critical periods in gestation.  So we do say that there's a critical period that may exist in gestation and there might be two other critical periods in development. One has to do with first language development and the other has to do with gross motor skills and these are both based on really limited number of studies. First, language development. The studies are based on the very few feral children studies we have around 249 studies. I think it is on children who at different ages some newborns and some kids you know three, four, five years old, seven years old who were separated from humanity for a while like they were lost in the jungle like Mowgli or something like that. And then when they came back were they able to develop language? And what's fascinating to see is that a child who might have been three, four, five who was lost and was gone for five years or six years could come back and pretty much get up to speed with language levels. Pretty interesting, right? But a kid who was lost from birth and didn't have contact with human language but came back in even shorter period of time like say when he's three or four years old actually had a lower probability of learning full language. So there's a suspicion that there's a critical period for developing your first language but it's not totally proven and it's unethical to try this.  We can't really test it. So we think there might be a critical period for first language but we're not sure. Similarly gross mortar skills. We only have these really terrible cases of neglect. For example of the Romanian orphans who were confined to a small space to to a crib to a bed and you when they find these poor children who might be four or five years old. They were actually, you know, limited to that space. They defecated there. They ate there. They did everything this small space and never developed gross motor skills. And so they found that some of those kids were unable to actually get up to a hundred percent of what would be a normal ability to walk and run and to have good physical activity once that they were taken out of that that terrible condition. So we think there might be critical periods for first language and gross motor skills, but we can't really confirm it. What we do know is that there's no critical period for anything that you learn in school. It's really much more the order of introduction of concepts. So starting from the base concepts, getting those solid and moving onward. That's far more important than the age of an individual. And the specific question has to do with multilingual experiences. So always, you know, with any kind of learning, the earlier, the better. Why? Because there's longer-term practice over your lifespan is one main reason, but the benefits of multilingual experiences on the brain, for example, extended executive functions, working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control is gained independent of the age that you learn the language. So here's the big reflection then. If we know the prior experiences influence learning outcomes and if we know that not everybody has the same level and quality of prior experiences and in fact can have negative experiences that can impede learning, what does this mean about curriculum design? How can we design something then that would naturally progress and help children learn to their best potential? And I think this leads to two big questions. If you recall when we talked about the uniqueness of brains, we talked about a curriculum challenge there as well and one suggestion being mastery learning. Can we return to mastery learning?  That's one big thing. The other thing has to do with what's considered like a spiral curriculum design and which was first suggested I believe by Brunner in the 70s and it's something that's actually done in other school systems like in Japan in Germany where a concept is introduced but then just you know a few weeks later it's reinforced and it's connected to the new learning and then another concept is introduced and it's reinforced in this way you are constantly constantly building on the prior experiences and making sure that that prior experience that link is strengthened as continual new learning is developed throughout the lifespan. So another thing is not to have these kind of silos of learning where you teach as you know algebra in the next week is geometry but this idea of the integration of all these concepts throughout. So this begs us to look at a much more transdisciplinary way of learning but also to return in a spiral fashion to these core concepts throughout a child's learning experience to take advantage of reinforcing prior learning experiences in the long term. Many of you ask you know how what is the strategy then you know how can we link prior knowledge to new things you know what can we actually do in a classroom and there are explicit strategies and implicit strategies I mean those are two big categories I'm sure there's others but what comes to mind for me is that explicitly you can basically say to a kid what do you already know about this you know or you know have you ever experienced that yourself to sort of hook them into realizing they know more about the new topic than they think the other link that's related to this has to do with really creating experiential learning that then makes them remember that they have already had a similar experience right asking if they you know set off firecrackers you know over the new years okay then reminding them explosions and reminding of chemical process than having a little explosion in the classroom makes them realize they have experienced you know explosions or whatever it is so giving them an experience that reminds them of prior experiences can also help so those are more explicit ways so explicitly asking them what do you already know about this that's very explicit right or implicitly creating a context in which they remember prior experiences based on whatever you do in your classroom these are subtle ways of doing it the one difficulty we have is that often times it might be harder than we think for a kid to say oh yes you know I do relate that to something I already know or I've done that before it's much easier for them to have those other kinds of experiences and relate them themselves or to do this in small groups or to do this on a quick reflection paper beforehand for example I often ask students you know let's do a one minute paper tell me something you know about this idea and something you want to know about this idea this really lets them off the know but you're basically saying I bet you know something about this so let's you know jar your memory about this what prior experiences have you had related to this other concept what do you already know about this and what would you like to know so doing a one minute paper is something that you could also do in class that would help stimulate prior experience but again all of this depends on the individual and on the objective of the class so it's it's very hard to sort of dictate specific activities but hopefully those two or three ideas might start this reflection and if you'd like something very specific about a particular class and age group please don't hesitate to write me one other thing to also remember is that when we're talking about you know stimulating prior experience to help the kids learn new things sometimes their prior experience with the information wasn't necessarily a positive thing so a really smart question here is you know asking whether or not bringing up prior experiences always a good thing if especially if we know that it might not be something that was positive in that individual's life so again what is the goal here so bringing up negative past experiences say we're doing literature and thematic collections let's do Romeo and Juliet and you have these awful you know teen suicide things and okay maybe that's too close to home for some students do you want to remind them of prior experiences about that and that is a really this is really where the the art in your science of teaching really comes in do you have your finger on the pulse of understanding to what extent you can go into those things that might be highly personal and also highly painful to that individual would that help that learning moment or hurt that learning moment and that's a real judgment call on your part on what to what extent do you actually dig deep into something you know is negative so again we get many many teachers asking for you know really the how to's how to how can I help students access their prior knowledge and then build upon it with a lesson so the quick tips activities questions really depend on on what your objective is and so as I mentioned before you know asking a student you know outright explicitly is one way to do it another thing are to do one minute papers other things can actually you be small do group discussions others can be implicit ways of actually creating a new experience in the classroom that's related to what might be likely be prior experiences to those other students and another teacher asks you know how to how can you make that more personal and I think one of the main ways is that students love they love to hear about what you did or what you know and so it might very well be that some of these things relate to prior experience if you give an example from your own life that's related to the conceptual understanding that you're seeking and then in the class that's also a very good opening for students to see a model of how I can go about thinking about this or the type of life experiences that really fit into this category and very practically another teacher asks what is the most efficient way to train our brains to go from novel and awkward to familiar in practice basically it's just repetition unfortunately familiarity repetition and practice are key to all learning but the idea for something be to become habituated in the brain has to have multiple enough frequency for that link to become automated and most of the time except for when it's in survival mode but most of the time it takes multiple repetitions for that information to become solidified in the brain become habituated and easy to recall and the last point here has to do with somebody asking what evidence and research can help me when I encounter these different brains in second grade you know I would just celebrate that as we said before their brains plastic throughout the lifespan and will change throughout the lifespan but I think you have a particularly wonderful age group to be able to work with because the earlier the betters is a general rule of thumb just because the amount of rehearsal can be increased the earlier the information is shared with an individual okay with that we'll move on to the next principle


Welcome to the 5.30 to 6.00 p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called Using Browser-Based Virtual Environments as a Gateway Drug to Get People Hooked on Virtual Worlds. Our speakers this evening are Dr. Marie Vanz, better known as Am Vanz Lapis, and Bethany Winslow, better known as Bethany Winslow. Dr. Vanz is a senior research scientist for HP Labs, HP Incorporated, and an instructor at San Jose State University. And Bethany is an instructional designer at San Jose State. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the session, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag, hashtag OSCC20. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Well, thank you for the introduction, Scott. Hey, everyone. We know you must all be wondering what is up with us, crazy cats, and our theme for this presentation. In a nutshell, we're going to talk about what we're doing to lure people into the incredible wonderland of virtual worlds. And we want to talk a little bit about why we think that browser-based environments can be an excellent and easy sort of gateway drug, one that we hope gets people hooked and coming back for more functionality. Our Alice in Wonderland theme is relevant because the characters from this story offer useful insights about identity and change, and this is very much akin to what educators grapple with in terms of adopting technology and learning to teach in new ways. Marie, can you drive the next slide? Thank you. Many of us have long been trying to find ways to entice our colleagues to see the value of virtual worlds, but showing them machinima and referencing the research literature is not enough to get them to take the leap into this environment.  We know the investment of time required to actually experience the power of these environments. And that needs to happen to hook people. So when I started playing with Mozilla Hubs, I was intrigued because it's a free open source platform that works on any device, even a phone. You can easily create a virtual environment to share with others and it's social in nature. When I created my own account earlier this year, it's not a coincidence I chose the Cheshire Cat as my avatar. He offers one of the most important insights about this vast and confusing wonderland of options here in OpenSim. And that is, if you don't know where you want to go, it really doesn't matter what direction you choose. And that, my friends, is the real dilemma because we know that when people are overwhelmed with options, it's just plain easier to make no choice at all. So this is a problem for virtual world adoption. People don't know where to go or even how to start. And even what to do here if they do get here, because it's just so completely foreign to them. Even though everyone we know is sick of Zoom meetings, we can't wait for people to become interested in virtual worlds. That day is never going to come.  And it's quick and easy enough for me to create a room. So why not just hand out a few rooms with a page in Canvas that tells someone and their students how to use it. But it remains to be seen who comes back for more and wanting more functionality. I have started hearing some feedback indicating that our addiction model might really work. And so great. This is the slide. Thanks, Marie. So for example, one of the first people that I wanted to work with who teaches photojournalism, normally his students, their final showcase, they go on a wall in the journalism building on campus. And I knew this semester because we're 100% online. Those pictures were just going to end up on a web page somewhere. And that's super boring. It's a small class. There's only 15 people. So I just had him send me the pictures and I just pinned them up in a couple of connected rooms. Well, Dr. Cheers just reported to me that his students and he were really excited to view their work in a very professional looking 3D art gallery where they could navigate with each other and see their work. And they saw their names as featured artists. Dr. Cheers told me students describe the gallery as cool and interactive and creative, and they can send the link to meet a family member or friend in there to show them what they're doing. So it's a lot more accessible to people than when it's on campus. So Dr. Cheers reports that, and this is a quote, all of the students are excited to explore Mozilla Hubs. And pinning up those images myself was a lot easier than trying to convince him or anyone really to build it themselves. Hubs is easy, but we have got to get people to really experience the power of a customized virtual environment for themselves before they'll invest the time to do more to create their own. So I'm focused on just giving people virtual rooms. In fact, I recently installed a Hubs instance on AWS for a large event for our College of Business. And I created 43 rooms, one for each of the teams of students so that conference guests who wanted to talk to that particular team could jump into their room and chat with them. And this was just the networking coffee break hour. It was part of a day-long, like, 400-person event that was on Zoom.  But the feedback that I got from everyone was that everyone who did attend the coffee break sessions loved them. In fact, when I first showed the Mozilla Hubs to the events team at San Jose State University, the people who actually managed the Zoom portion of the event, they were absolutely blown away. They'd never seen anything like it. And they loved it so much, they asked me for a room of their own to have their weekly team meetings. And they planned to show it to other people who are looking for alternatives to Zoom. So that's promising. So here's my thoughts so far from a bunch of different times getting people into Hubs. And I'm not exaggerating. When I describe grown-ups, adults, not students, this is faculty and staff, they get downright giddy. They are excited to change their avatars. They giggle wildly when they're in a group. They literally run around excitedly. In fact, one of the very first things someone from the events team asked me was if they could click on the model of the coffee bar to sit themselves down or animate their avatar to make it look like they were drinking a coffee. Other people asked me if they could make their avatar dance. In other meetings, I heard people say they wished they could cam around and see their own avatars. Believe me, I took note of all of this with great interest. I thought to myself, well, that was fast. And I tell everyone that browser-based environments are just the first step. And that there are more robust environments when they're ready to take the tumble down the rabbit hole with us. And this next slide here, I'm going to wrap this up with something I'm currently working on for the spring semester, which also, I think, follows our model of luring people in. And in this instance, I am going straight to the students who will often do anything for extra credit. And I finally got my own Kitely World, and I have a lot of different things in the works. But I stumbled upon this incredible build. Josh Bohm, big props. And can you believe the coincidence that I actually have an instructor, yes, who teaches cruise ship operations and management in the hospitality department in the College of Business at San Jose State University? And I have a great working relationship with him because I helped revise his course to be 100% online two years ago, and I had a hand in tweaking the curriculum quite a bit. So Rick is excited about my plans. I'm creating an extra credit activity for his students, which will have them be investigators for the cruise ship company. And they're gonna explore various areas of the ship and reflect on the information there, specifically about how COVID-19 has impacted and will continue to challenge the cruising industry. Students will create a field study report that documents their reflections with screenshots and whatnot. And so I'm working on this now. It's gonna go live at the end of January. But now let's turn this over to Marie. Okay, hi, you can hear me, right? Great, okay. So my name is Marie Vans in the physical realm and Anne Vans Lapis in the virtual world. I just recently finished teaching a course at the San Jose State University High School on Design for Teaching and Learning in Social Virtual Reality. I'm going to show you an example of using browser-based and easy-to-use virtual worlds to get students hooked on using 3D worlds to deliver education and training. I had two student learning outcomes defined for this course. Number one, to evaluate and apply technical criteria to state-of-the-art learning platforms for digital archives or special collections because I'm in the high school. And two, understand learning models and how they can be applied using novel learning technologies by developing curricula and designing experiences based on learning models applied to archives of special collections. Okay, so I'm going to describe how I went about that. It all starts with the top criteria for VR platforms. And I believe Ellie talked about this earlier that the survey that we did a little over a year ago where we started out with 29 criteria, but after analyzing the results we were able to identify eight that were clearly the most important. As you can see from the slide, it includes things like in-world speech, ability to present slides and having desktop top access among others. The bulk of their grade is on a design project for an educational experience of their choice. They learned about models for learning such as situated learning and constructivism. And they were required to discuss the learning model their designs were based on. They had to think about how they would measure learning in their design, what content they needed, what problem they were addressing and the costs. There was much more they needed to have in their designs, but a large part of the design document had to include schematics of how their chosen experience would look once it was implemented. I will show you a couple of those examples in a minute. So armed with this knowledge and the criteria, the students explored different social VR platforms. We started with Verbella as this has the easiest user interface and requires no prior experience with 3D worlds. I had one student who was older and it was not a gamer. So this was a very gentle introduction to VR worlds for him. I met up with students twice a week on Friday and Saturday mornings in one of the chosen worlds. So I could show them around, ask them to consider whether the particular world we were in addresses those criteria we talked about earlier. After Verbella, we went to Mozilla Hubs and Frame. The next two field trips were Science Space and finally Kitely. I saved Kitely for last because I knew it would blow them away after visiting the other platforms. I should mention that while I let the students know they are free to explore worlds not on our list like VR Chat, Engage and Alt Space, I could not require them to go because all the software and programs that we require students to use have to work on both Macs and PCs. And unfortunately, unless you have a wireless headset, none of the platforms mentioned above will work on Mac OS. So here's a schematic, some of the images from the design of one of my students called Biography of the Book. And he chose Kitely for his platform which was very surprising to me because he was the one I mentioned above who had zero experience with 3D or gaming. He found a working 3D model of a Gutenberg press and all the other objects he needs to implement his experience. What was amazing was that after visiting all the other worlds, he immediately saw the trade-offs between the easier but less interactive platforms and the higher learning curve but more flexibility available in Opensim. Throughout the course, I emphasized that they needed to think about how effective their design would be on their learners. For example, if the experience is mostly passive like watching lectures and maybe watching YouTube videos then maybe all they need is a 360 video or even Zoom. They had to think about the affordances of the platform they were exploring so they could justify the use of that platform. It makes no sense to spend time and money to create an elaborate build where no objects are interactables and it just basically a tour. While there is a cool factor there in VR is clearly not, there's no evidence that it leads to better learning. So here's another example from a different student who is a librarian for NASA. She created two rooms and this is only one in frame to educate student and teachers about encouraging women to consider STEM careers. Oops, sorry, wrong thing. I have to say this is one of my favorites as well because it's a subject I care deeply about myself. But here I wanted to point out that her experience does lend itself to a more passive learning experience by using frame which is web base. So she can easily expose her target learners to the content she wants them to absorb without distractions from the technology itself. While the target audience for the biography of the book experience were tech savvy students the audience for the women in STEM experience is K to 12 teachers and students who may or may not have the technical skills or the time to learn those skills for a foreign experience that's mostly watching videos and reading note cards. So to wrap up, I'd wanna just leave you with some main takeaways for me after the opportunity to teach this course. First, as we saw with my inexperienced student if you start easy and progressively show the power of these 3D environments, people will gain more confidence and be motivated to jump over the larger hurdles to create the learning experiences they want. Second, I met my students and let them direct the discussion. Mostly I asked the questions. For example, what types of learning experiences will be perfect on the platforms we are exploring? What about the criteria? Does this platform address those? Last but probably most important, allow them to choose the domain and the experience they are most interested in implementing. This will be, they will be more motivated because their hearts are really in it. Thanks much and please feel free to reach out to us to connect. Enjoying the VR Exploders Club. That's true, that's true too. We have a lot of fun. I'll second that, yes, by all means. Thank you Marie and Bethany for such a terrific presentation. Now, as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next event will be at six o'clock in the music region and will feature country rock singer Liberty Bell Lyric. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC20 poster expo and the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper grid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to you, the audience.


My name is Adam Lyon, so I'm known in the community as AFC Adam. I have so many different ambitions and things that I want to be doing in life, beyond just pick up and stuff like that.  So, some of the things that I want to do is obviously I want to make an independent horror film, start off with maybe a small film or build it up from there, but I've also got ambitions to, I've started sword fighting again, so I've been doing actually my live action role playing where you like dress up in costume and sword fight people. So, I've been doing that again and I'm looking to maybe put on some kind of small event like that. And yeah, just following the road to see where it takes me. The big thing that got me into the community was I realised that one of the goals that I was kind of dating, I'd had four relationships prior to learning game. One of the relationships, the last one that I was in, I found out that not only had she been seeing a whole bunch of guys behind my back, but when I confronted her with it and we broke up, she ended up stealing all of the belongings from my house, my PlayStation, my PC, my video games, absolutely everything she could take, she did, leaving my house completely barren. I think I've still got the photograph somewhere of how she kind of left my room. And about six months earlier, one of my friends had handed me this book called The Game and he said to me, he said, Adam, this book is designed for you. He said, do you don't realise it yet? He goes, but you were supposed to do this. He goes, I know when you do this, you're going to take to it like a duck to water. And I kind of threw it on a back shelf and ignored it, but it was one of the things she didn't take. So I sort of opened up the book, started reading it, signed up on a course and that was the start. Neil Strauss is obviously a big inspiration to me because of reading The Game and he was kind of like my first sort of look into the community. But I actually got to meet Neil Strauss quite soon afterwards, which was really great. He's a really nice guy, really genuine and I suppose he made me realise that a lot of the misconceptions about some of the top pickup artists were actually a lot of hearsay and a lot of it didn't hold true because when I met Neil in person, he was very different to the kind of image that I had kind of been led to perceive by the majority of the people in the community. With regards to my own journey through the game, there was definitely mixed sort of like good points about meeting some of the top gurus and definitely some negative sides. I had a lot of conceptions that some of these pickup guys were absolutely untouchable. They could do whatever they wanted when it came to women. And some of my aspirations to kind of like to maybe be as good as Neil Strauss and be able to get any woman I want, when I actually met him, I realised that actually he's very down to earth. He's kind of hit and miss, kind of just like everybody else, but still a very cool, fun down to earth guy who wasn't too proud of himself or too up his own rectum, should we say. Whereas there were definitely some other people that I met who not only want as good as they were trying to prove that they were, but they actually were kind of trying to force that idea on people that they were amazing, that they really could pick up absolutely everybody they wanted. And it was a shame because if they just accepted they could fail sometimes, it might make it a lot easier to maybe relate to them and to believe half the things they were saying. The lowest point for me in my journey in the game was actually probably the point where everybody else was looking up to me the most. It was the point where I had 14 different girlfriends. I had some of the most beautiful women throwing themselves at me. I would walk into a nightclub in London, 250 girls would walk in the door with me. I literally was probably at the top of my game and I realised I wasn't happy. I was unfulfilled.  I realised I didn't have to work for anything. Women would just throw themselves at me. I was at the lowest point of self-motivation in my life. I had guys that wanted to be like me and I was actively looking at them and being like, why do you want this? This isn't fun. This isn't happy. And the turning point for that for me, the point where suddenly everything became happy and enjoyable was really when I realised that I wanted just one girl and I wanted to settle down. And I think anybody that says that they really do just one whole bunch of different random girls I don't think they've really experienced the pinnacle of that. Because when you really have that, when you really have a lifestyle where women are throwing themselves at you, Johnny Wolf from the P-Way Summit actually flew out to come and meet me to see how true this was. I've got a testimonial where he saw me throwing women out of my bedroom who were begging to come in there to have sex with me. And that was the lifestyle I was living and it wasn't fulfilling. David DiAngelo was a guy whose name I'd heard mentioned a lot throughout my journeys in the community, but I'd never actually bought any of his products or read anything of his. And it was only actually quite recently, although I was kind of familiar with some of his concepts like cocky funny, it was only very recently that I actually got to find out more about him when he interviewed me for his interview series. And I got a call from some of the people in his camp saying, hey, David DiAngelo would like to interview you. And I kind of got to speak to him firsthand. And the guy's an absolute genius. I mean, not just what he knows about pickup, but what he knows about life in general and about business and marketing. He's a very genuine individual and I learnt a lot just from a half hour phone conversation with him. There are definitely some people out there that have a negative outlook on the community. And I think that any time I've ever come across that, it's usually the person doesn't actually fully understand what the community is. For me specifically, and I think really that's what the community is, it's always a personal choice of how you view it, I've always viewed the community as a male self-help group. It's a bunch of guys that are firstly admitting they have a problem and they can't meet girls and secondly they're willing to do whatever it takes to get there. And yeah, different people have different journeys. Some it's maybe a bit more aggressive, some it may not be a pleasant experience. But I think on the whole for most it's a really good positive experience that they come out the other side of it with a better understanding of women. I think one of the main reasons that the community is taboo or is seen as being secretive and underground and maybe a little bit manipulative is specifically because us guys are kind of scared of letting the girls know what we're doing. There are so many people that hide behind false names, hide behind online stories whereas in reality you can kind of come out and tell the truth. Cosmopolitan and FHM, they're full of true life stories, things that have actually happened to me. There's nothing wrong with accepting it. One of my biggest signs for whether a guy actually is comfortable with what they're doing and in my opinion really should be giving out and giving this advice is based on how comfortable they are, A, being seen by people to be doing what they're doing and B, being comfortable with their name being put to it. Everybody knows me, I'm out in the open. I've made mistakes, I've done some things that are amazing but I've done all of it open. Everyone found out about my girlfriend before I got with her I told them what I was going to do, I told them before I was going to propose they've seen the whole thing, they saw it out there on the cards and it could have gone wrong, maybe something would have happened. Would my name have been ruined? Who knows? But the point is I was brave enough to stand by it and do it. One of the biggest reasons that I think that I've been so successful is this is not only have I been really open and told everyone what's going on but I've also tried my best to be as truthful as possible.  What I love is so many people don't even believe it. There's no way that Adam can just come out and tell the truth and yet I do and I find that's the only way to be completely congruent is to not only be open but to also be truthful and that way you can, people see you for who you are and then you only get judged accordingly. From my personal point of view with regards to where I sit in the community I've always associated myself as a pickup artist because I wanted to go out there and I wanted to pick up chicks and end up dating them. Up until the point I got married was a definite turning point for me because I'm no longer a pickup artist. It's great that I still will get perceived as one and there's no way I'm leaving the community. I'm going to keep helping guys out as much as possible but I'm not out there to pick up chicks and as much as I'm going to help other people do that I see myself as somebody who trains other people to be pickup artists rather than being a pickup artist myself and I'm definitely starting to identify more with being a dating coach and looking at helping people with things beyond just picking up things how to handle a date, how to handle a relationship, things that I genuinely feel that I'm starting to gain a much stronger experience based on than a lot of other pickup artists who kind of meet a girl and move on to the next girl and concentrate on things like, you know, instant lays and how to have one night stands. For me it's much more about how can you prolong that how can you ideally meet the person you want to be with and stay with them forever. Two years ago there is absolutely no way that I would have considered myself as somebody qualified enough to teach relationships. I purposely haven't, even though I was dating at the time I wanted to make sure that I was coming down with a point of authority. I don't think you can talk about relationships until you've been married and seen it right through to the end. I'm still new in my marriage, I'm still not in a position you're not going to find me coming out of any kind of marriage product anytime soon. I want the experience and the wealth of knowledge before I teach about it. It's really hard for me to work out whether my personal journey through this and come into the conclusion of one perfect woman being for me is what everybody wants but I truthfully believe that for me, for my own journey from somebody who did have that and people have seen my journey and seen the phases where I didn't have any girls in my life they've seen me learn, they've seen me go through it it's been documented how I went from somebody who wanted to get a lot of girls to somebody who succeeded. I ran projectdontorage.com one of the largest club hosting companies in London I had those women in my life, they're still on my Facebook I achieved that and I know that for me specifically I definitely wanted that one. I speculate, I hypothesize that that's the same for every other guy but unfortunately this is a case study of just one guy and from there I can't judge any further than that. With regards to people who view that perhaps the male population of the world has become feminized and we've allowed that women to kind of like take over I really just see that as part of the balance in the sexes I think that we definitely lived in a very male patriarchal society where males are very much dominating things and I think that now as we've started to reintroduce that balance I think guys don't really know their place in the world I think they've never really known how to maintain a balance because they've always used to being in a position of power and I think that's definitely created some sort of imbalance and I do think that the community is a splinter off that's kind of evolved from that need for men to realize how to maintain that balance and I've always said this, when you learn pickup artistry when you get good at it, really all you do is become a little bit more female with this imbalance that's happened with us trying to maintain a balance between the sexes there's now become an imbalance specifically in men and also in women in how people should behave, what our roles should be and I think what we're going to see is a consistent change and there'll be some kind of equilibrium that sets and that will constantly be at battle I mean at the end of the day the war between the sexes is one that will never end, hopefully because if it ever does that will mean the loss for all of us there were definitely a bunch of people when they first started the community that were seen as snake charmers there were definitely people that I believe don't have the skill to pull off what they've got I'm not the kind of person that goes around and drops names on people but I can say I know for a fact that some guys that are charging $3,000 for a course sometimes even more have had sex themselves with less than 10 girls people that come to me and say, Adam how do you do it how do you maintain a relationship, every girl I ever get just breaks up with me and all I want to do is settle down with one and then they then go out and preach how it's important to have multiple girls and you shouldn't just stick with one and it pains me, it pains me to hear it and I know there are people that would love me to come out and point the finger at those people but unfortunately if I do that they're only going to point one right back and make up falsehoods because if they're happy to lie about how great they are they're going to be happy to lie at how bad other people are so I've got this whole philosophy it comes from my game and it comes from everything I try and add value to as many people as possible and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to help as many people as I can and literally person by person I'm going to prove that this does work and that we can help people the only thing that's ever pissed me off about the community the only thing that's really got under my skin is a lot of the old issues being drug across to the current things when we first started doing our boot camps and I first started running them I was running them back in 2006 my early boot camps were nowhere near the quality that they are now my boot camps in 2008 are completely different to how they are in 2009 I'm constantly evolving and changing and I'm seeing that in my students results in the testimonials that I'm getting we're getting more and more people with success I think the one thing that pisses me off is as soon as somebody has one bad experience from the past they definitely try and translate that so if they do a really bad boot camp with one of our competitors they'll suddenly assume that all future boot camps that everybody else whether they've done one or not is bad and even if they've had perhaps a less than perfect experience with myself then they aren't willing to come again or they aren't willing even completely for free to see the improvements that have happened I know as ANSI's done with the 21 convention with regards to renaming it and rebranding it and going about changing things we're constantly doing that with our own boot camps the results we're getting now are better than ever and I just wish sometimes I could go out there find all the people that think that it doesn't work drag them out there give them a completely freebie and just show them how much difference we can really make to people there is definitely political siding and conflict and sort of like a background subterfuse that goes on around the community with the corporates definitely trying to take things for themselves to generate as much profit as possible however I think you're going to find that in any industry any around the world I've worked in public relations, I've worked in marketing I've worked in the movie industry, I've worked in television and all of these places had their own different political intrigue that was going on it's just what happens when you mix money I genuinely feel that the community itself has always had a number of different branches there's definitely been people that are very much more about improving your life, improving your lifestyle and trying to help you with that side of things and there are definitely those that are always going to be talking about magic tricks and routines and kind of like the number one line that's going to guarantee to get any girl to want you and I think that's just how it is it splinters in different ways we're always going to see that separation there'll be new types of pickup methodology that we can't even imagine right now I heard there's a guy who's specializing in Halloween game everyone's creating their own different niches within it I've seen a lot of different types of guys within the community I've seen the core big companies I've seen a lot of the independent movement within London, when I first started coming out to it I was one of the independence I was one of the first guys that came out of it from my honest experience the independent guys have a shelf life there's only so long they can maintain it because there's so much bulk of work that has to be done that eventually it starts to wear on you you need to kind of take that relaxed lifestyle now I know some of them have managed to survive that by living certain times sort of part of the year in a different part of the world that's a lot cheaper to live coming into more affluent areas and using that to help them survive I know some of my good friends do that by living in Thailand and working in Los Angeles but I think in reality if you're looking at this career, if you're looking at long term you need that infrastructure you do need support of a big company it was definitely a decision that I came to after being an independent for a good couple of years having a big company behind you definitely helps if only with advertising, marketing and having a receptionist answer emails there's definitely a tipping point where you can only have so much success without bothering to set up the infrastructure and everyone's seen it when you're an independent when you start making that much money when you start growing you have to set the infrastructure up and become a corporate and if you don't what happens is you end up with upset clients and suddenly your name ends up falling apart and you see the rise of the fall of these independence all the time the average independent lasts maybe a year or two years before everything starts to fall apart unless they set up an infrastructure and then what happens is you just have a new corporate setup I think Miha was a great example of that he was an independent that splinted off and then he went corporate he had to because in order to sustain the kind of size that he was getting he needed the corporate infrastructure to keep it alive I personally feel that the community is an ever-changing construct and I don't think it's either aligned good or bad I think that realistically the community is always going to change it'll have its ups there'll be media stories where we're portrayed in a bad light and then every so often you'll have it where it goes the other way completely and it shifts and suddenly the pickup community will be dating coaches helping out the poor guy who's a virgin it's always going to shift around it's always going to be moved around and realistically the media are going to control how people see it at the end of the day I try and do things one student at a time helping as many people as I can I really feel that the community is constantly going to change in a bunch of different ways I think we're going to see continued growth into new areas new niches coming out we're going to see new faces constantly changing as to where it's going to go exactly I think it's impossible to predict but the one thing that I'm proud of knowing is that being a part of it from its early years I want to be at the forefront of helping people continue to push it especially with regards to the media and getting it seen as publicly acceptable to enroll in one of these programs to do something about changing your personal life and to go on and be happy with regards to how people are going to be perceived in the future I do feel it's going to be personal growth it's still going to be pickup it's still going to be there we're going to see it splinter in so many different ways there will be a branch that's pure pickup there will be a branch that's pure dating coaches we're already seeing it some of the big corporates are already changing their terminology to call themselves dating coaches rather than pickup artists we're definitely going to see this happen but the community will always still be there it's just going to grow and expand into multiple different areas I think a lot of the events are kind of hit and miss and I think it's specifically because people don't have the strong level of attention to detail it takes to organize them there are definitely exceptions the PUA summit has grown from year to year to year to definitely being one of the core calendar events you have to go to the real man conference had big bang and whizz and sparks but it only did one year and we haven't seen it come back it pulled more people than any other event has ever done but it didn't pull the amount that I think they needed to maintain it at that level which was the issue the 21 convention came in from the outside it was organized by everyone thought a little kid at the time didn't really know what he was doing but it was rumored to have the people there and of course if there are guys that are going to come there and want to listen to you talk then you're going to go there and talk in reality the whole thing was organized really well it definitely had some key elements for me the big reason I tended the 21 convention initially was because it was recommended to me by one of my friends and he said you need to go and speak at this event it was actually a sin that first recommended it to me back then it was the under 21 convention and I remember thinking when I stood up on the audience I had to look out to the crowd and I was like these guys don't look like the under 21 and I was hearing all these other guys talking about college game and all of the different things they were teaching I was like man you guys aren't looking at your audience these guys aren't under 21 they're over 21 and so I stood up and I asked I was like guys who here is under 21 and no one raised their hand and it made me realize that these weren't guys that were coming out here because they were under 21 and they wanted to learn how to pick up chicks in college these were guys that wanted to come in here some of the greatest pickup artists in the world come and speak and that's what there was on stage some of the best pickup artists in the world that had all come to speak just unfortunately the other speakers didn't bother to take a look at the audience to work out what was going on so from that point on I made sure that I tailed my talk I changed it there on the spot to one that anybody could understand no matter how old they were and since then the 21 convention has consistently pulled in the big names from around the world for me it's once you meet Anthony that you realize that he's not just some young kid he's definitely a guy who does have that strong level of attention to detail maturity that's needed to organize an event like that and it's refreshing it's nice to know that he isn't just somebody who's thrown a bunch of college kids together he really is somebody who's got you know a dream and ambition to really make something of the event and as long as he keeps doing that then I think people are going to keep turning up any time someone can create a business model that involves them giving out free content and free material I'm 100% for it I've tried to make sure I give as much of my stuff away for free as possible and I've definitely taken flak for it from a personal point of view so there's absolutely no way that Anthony can't be taking flak for it I get people come up to me buy my product and say you know what, I managed to find all of this stuff completely for free online so if you don't mind I'll take a refund and that sucks when you first hear that you think man you've already enjoyed the stuff you've just managed to get hold of it for free and now you don't want to pay me for the content but on the other hand there are so many people that are willing to keep supporting you to keep paying for it to make sure you can continue to do that then it's great I think realistically it's really nice to have an event that does cover everything from health to nutrition to pick up and those kind of things and I think that's always going to be a pull we are part of the self-help movement and I think guys are definitely interested in those other topics and it's definitely something that's set to 21 Convention Apart from potentially the other events where I am right now in life I'm currently in South Beach we've just done a boot camp where we've just helped 10 guys half of the guys in the course managed to get laid the rest of the guys in the course probably weren't looking for that but every single person with that 100% we've had success rate all managed to get phone numbers to get dates with girls that they were interested in and that's something that we've seen consistently for the last 15 months of doing training in the courses myself, I'm happily married I've got a lovely little house in South Texas I've got a kitten that I live with and I absolutely love my life I'm looking forward to over the next couple of years having a family and looking at what I can do to continue improving our courses because now I don't look at them from somebody who wants to help myself anymore which I feel a lot of pickup artists do I'm no longer interested in my own results every single person has a different view or an idea of what they want in the community a 21 year old virgin is worried that he's never going to get laid he's worried that for the rest of his life he's not going to know how to relate to girls and it causes problems the guy that I helped recently on this particular boot camp in Miami he didn't know how to kiss a girl when she was initiating things she tried to kiss him four times and he kept turning it down because he'd never kissed a girl and he didn't know how to do it a guy like that if somebody doesn't come in and help him and tell him the signs he may never kiss a girl he may be a 45 year old guy somebody else that I've helped in the past who is still a virgin so for everybody they've got their own goals I find it's very rare that somebody just comes into this because they want to have sex as many people as possible those guys exist there's just not that many of them the biggest challenge that I have in my way is really finding all the guys that don't believe this works because they've been burning in the past and trying to get through to them that actually can work actually they can get success rate and actually there are people that can help them and it's not just myself there are definitely a number of guys that can help and I really want to get over to them and I'm willing to sit down with each of those guys completely for free to help them to show them that we really have created something that works now whereas in the past it was definitely hit and miss there were definitely a bunch of snake charmers in the early days but there are people now that know how to make this work I really believe that there are two sides to game there's your personal self that you kind of want to redress because once you fix that then you've got a core level of attractiveness that you've built up that women are going to see and be instantly attracted to but on the other side of it I've seen guys that have an absolutely perfect core sense of self really super overachieving type guys they're absolutely great and yet have no idea how to relate to women so I feel there are two sides on one hand you've got game and on the other side you've got yourself now you can work on either one independently and it is going to have some kind of impact on your game but to truly be the best you can possibly be you have to work on absolutely everything and combine it


Hi, I am Dr. Prabhakar. I am a consultant laparoscopic surgeon at Manipal Hospital, Whitefield. We have been facing this COVID infection situation since three to four months now. So we here at Manipal Hospital were prepared for this. As coming to the general surgery department, we have started doing all regular elective surgeries including laparoscopic surgeries like Arnea surgery, appendicectomy, gallbladder surgeries and also general surgical procedures like thyroid press surgeries and pulse surgeries. So we are following a strict COVID protocol as per the management. We are doing screening for all the patients before admission and before surgery. So we are maintaining a strict protocol regarding the social distancing and taking a personal protective precautions as far as we are concerned. So we are using all protection which is supposed to be required for preventing COVID infections. So we are open OPD wise. We are doing all surgical OPDs from morning to evening. And we are also extending our video consultation facilities for patients who are not able to come to the hospital because of COVID infection situation. Thank you very much.


Over 20 lakh tribals are facing eviction following a recent Supreme Court decision which rejected the claims of the tribals under the Forest Rights Act. But what is this decision and more importantly what does it mean for the tribals? We bring you up to date with the case. On February 13th, the Supreme Court ordered the state governments to evict over 10 lakh forest dwelling people. This is only an estimate as the number of households affected by this decision could actually go up to 20 lakh. According to a report in the Business Standard, the affected families had filed claims for forest land under the Forest Rights Act of 2006 which were rejected. The court's decision will hurt some of India's most vulnerable communities. All of this owing to the Modi government's apathy towards tribals and their livelihoods. The Center, the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change which were respondents in the case for the tribals have kept silent in the last four hearings of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had specifically issued directions to the Chief Secretaries of 17 states to ensure that in all the cases where land ownership claims had been rejected eviction must be carried out or not before the next date of hearing which happens to be July 12, 2019. The court had also asked the states to explain as to why there were no evictions despite the rejection of these claims. The claims of nearly 11 lakh tribals and other forest dwelling households have been rejected on various grounds which actually include the absence of proof that the land was in their possession for at least three generations. These numbers however only are a tip of the iceberg and could actually surge as most states have been asked to submit their data. The decision of the Supreme Court has triggered protests by various tribal groups and activists with the Adivasi Adhikaar Rashtriya Manj gearing up to file a review petition in the case. Detendra Chaudhary of the AARM said that the appearance of the Tribal Affairs Ministry in the case was primarily for a namesake and had the Center shown sincere commitment to tribal rights the decision of the Supreme Court could have been something else altogether. The judgment is being seen as a complete betrayal of the tribals and their rights by the BJP government. Responding to the judgment, Brinda Karath, the Politburo member of the CPIM said this. At this point, it becomes very important to understand that what was actually the petition that the Supreme Court was responding to. The petitions challenging the law were filed by Wildlife First, a non-governmental organization and the Bombay Natural History Society and the retired forest officials who blamed the law for deforestation and encroachment on forest lands. These claims largely mean that the increasing population of the forest dwellers and tribals is posing a threat to the forests. While it will be oversimplistic to dismiss these claims, it is even more crucial to shift attention to the instances where the two have existed peacefully. If the Supreme Court's order is implemented, only the poorest and the most vulnerable will pay the price and the Forest Rights Act may be permanently hollowed out. The FRA Act was passed by the parliament in 2006 after a massive people's movement to correct the historical injustice which was done to the forest dwellers. The act was meant to recognize the scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in the forests for generations but whose rights could not be recorded due to the lack of documentation. Through this example, it becomes very clear that the Modi government is consistently trampling with tribal rights. We hope you found this explainer useful. Thank you for watching.


Welcome back to Lone Fox, I am so excited you are here and I am so excited to be making a brand new video for you. I basically took a 10 day break just for the holidays and then to celebrate New Year's and stuff so it was really really nice and fun and of course I was actually uploading on my second channel so if you've missed some of my content I do have another channel as well but I did want to get back into 2019 and kick off the new year with a brand new video for you guys that is going to be a dollar store DIY room decor video and the projects in here I think they turned out so freaking good I think you guys are really gonna like them everything was created with dollar store item and then of course I DIYed them to just make them fit my personal style and also a lot of your guys' personal style as well and if you're not already make sure to subscribe to my channel here on Lone Fox I upload brand new videos every single week relating to home decor and interior so if you're not already subscribed then make sure to click the red subscribe button down there somewhere it's a hundred percent free and also follow the Lone Fox home Instagram account but I don't want to ramble on anymore because you guys need to see these projects you're going to love them and let's just jump into these super affordable but super trendy room decor items I am really in love with this first project and what I used was this hanging light bulb some batteries from the dollar store and then the additional supplies were just some yarn and a hot glue gun and I did use a little bit of spray paint so I found this hanging LED light bulb of course it was just a dollar you open it up you insert a couple of batteries in there and then basically what you do is you pull the string and the light bulb lights up and this light isn't super bright but it's actually I tested at nighttime it's like a perfect reading light so if you were to have it by your bed or something it's a great thing just like pull on and basically read with or whatever you want to do with it and so what I started off by doing was just masking off the actual light bulb area because originally I was going to put yarn around this area but I wanted it to be able to have the batteries removed and put back in the figure to be changed so I ended up just using a 14 karat brass spray paint which you guys all know my love for this spray paint I think it looks so good it really transforms anything it makes look so expensive so I sprayed the little battery slot piece and then also the other piece and what I'm now doing is creating the cord for it so I'm just creating a loop initially as you can see on the screen here and what I'm doing is a chain stitch so I'm just putting my two fingers through and then pulling through the um excess yarn and the excess yarn is actually just attached to the entire like little ball of yarn I guess you could say and I'm just pulling it through and sort of creating this chain and the reason I'm doing this is because I didn't just want to hang my led light I don't know why I'm calling led light my light bulb essentially just from a piece of yarn I thought that was boring I really wanted to create more of like a cording or a rope so that's exactly what I'm doing here and this is super easy it took me like maybe three minutes to make a two foot long section of this you can go really really quick after you get the hang of it it goes really quickly so I just pulled through and created this nice little chain stitch yarn piece which is going to act as a cord and when you get to the end all you need to do is cut off and then put that tail end through the loop and pull it and that actually just finishes off your chain stitch there and this is going to be the cording that I'm going to be using for my hanging light and then what I'm doing is just pulling off that little masking area with the tape and the paper towel and this reveals the look and then I just cut that black string because the black string was just kind of ugly it wasn't my favorite thing and I glued onto the black string the cord that we created and I made sure just to leave a little bit of excess black string hanging out that way um you have a lot to glue on and there's a lot of like surface area for it to really stick and grasp onto and lastly just to finish off this project I really wanted to wrap the corded section because I didn't like how the black string was showing so I used a little bit of yarn and I just simply wrapped around this entire section covering the cord that we created along with the black cord that was initially there and you just have to do small sections of hot glue and just do small little wrappings each time um it's a little bit tedious but once you finish it looks amazing it looks very finished and polished and honestly this looks like it was made uh like at West Elm or created at Pottery Barn or something it just looks really really nice and pretty and you can make these extremely long and hang them from the ceiling whatever it may be and you guys honestly this project probably cost me a $1.50 so super affordable all you have to do is pull a little cording and that turns your light on and you're good to go this project is really fun and I actually used miniature wooden tables I found at the craft section in the dollar store how random is that but that's probably why they were there and I also used a hot glue gun white paint and a paint brush I laid a little bit of parchment paper down just so that my surface didn't get dirty peeled off all those little barcodes on the bottom and gave a nice white coating of paint to all the little tables here and I do want to mention that you guys the Target brand white paint is actually so good like as you can see it gets such a nice coat like I did one coat on these entire little tables here and it really gave them a full opaque white coat so if you're looking for a good white paint check out Target in their little craft section area the white paint there is really really nice and this was kind of tedious I didn't have to go in and go around all the legs and the underside and all that little stuff but I thought it was so random how they had little wooden tables at the dollar store but then I was thinking to myself it's probably because nobody wants a little wooden table but you know I do so I grabbed four of them and I'm going to make it into a miniature shelf which I'm actually going to be using in my bathroom area to store a lot of my uh samples that I get from brands that are sent so they're always such small little things that I throw into a drawers but I'd love to have them out and be able to actually see them so once you have your little miniature tables painted fully white you can paint them whatever color you want I'm just using a little bit of hot glue on all four legs and I'm going to be stacking them this part pretty self-explanatory if you watch what I'm doing just adding a little bit of glue to the bottom and stacking them you can use a stronger glue like e6000 or something if you plan to use a heavier item on this and then you can also go in at the end with a little bit of white paint and just touch up any areas you might have missed or just go over the glue spots if there are any and that finishes off your shelf next up we're just going to upcycle some simple glass vessels from the dollar store the dollar store always has a lot of glass items for a course a dollar so I use those I use a little bit of masking tape Elmer's glue paint and a paint brush as well so what I started off by doing was taking this larger sort of like watercraft sort of a vessel I guess you could say and I used a little bit of masking tape to go around and you can really mask off whatever you want this is going to create a very clean line when we do our painting and we're going to be creating a frosted glass look using just Elmer's glue and paint so what you need to do is get a small little disposable cup put a good amount of Elmer's glue in there because this is going to act as your paint and then I also added a couple drops of gold paint into this one but you can add whatever you want it could be gold paint any color paint really and the more paint you add the more opaque it's going to be and another tip is that if you guys use food coloring you actually get a fully frosted look so that's another great tip but I really wanted like a gold shimmer to the bottom of this really to match my living room area so what I did was just dip into the Elmer's glue and what I suggest you guys when you do this is to do a very thin coat as I'm doing here on this project this vessel here actually turned out really really nice but the second one that I'm going to show you that I did it did turn out a little unexpected because I did add so much of the paint too I wanted to see what was going to happen but it ended up actually like running and then having a little bit of like drip marks and it just wasn't as pretty so I definitely suggest doing like a nice thin coat so wherever you want to do it to once it's dry it becomes fully frosted and it looks so pretty has a gold shimmer in there and this is that second one I was mentioning what I did was use a little bit more paint this time to make it a little bit more opaque mixed with the Elmer's glue of course and I painted it onto this glass vessel here I don't know why I keep saying vessel it's like a container or a vase or something and then I did a really thick layer on this one because I wanted to see how it was going to turn out but it ended up drying a little bit more splotchy but honestly it kind of gave it like a very like marled effect and you're going to leave it to dry for about an hour and that finishes off this project this last one is the most creative for sure and I use a slate tray a little plate three different mason jars in a fidget spinner yes a fidget spinner and I also use a hot glue gun some cardboard and scissors and you're going to see exactly what I'm going to do but first off I'm going to cut six little one by one inch squares from the cardboard and these are actually going to be what I'm going to call spacers I guess you can call them and you'll see what I'm going to use them for in just a couple of seconds here and what I did was cut six of those out then I went and removed the barcode from the bottom and I glued the fidget spinner just this center section to the bottom of the plate and I would honestly suggest you guys use like an e6000 or like a more strong bond adhesive but I am just doing this for a time sake in the video and then what I did was I use hot glue and I glued together all my squares so I did this for um three of them so I had basically sandwich squares and the sandwich squares are actually going to be going on the three sections of the spinner and this is going to make it so that when we glue the slate tray on top it actually sits higher than that center section and if you do get any glue in the center which I actually did just let it dry and then you can use your scissors to scrape it out and then of course it spins really nicely and what you're going to need to do with this is you're going to then it need to glue your slate tray or whatever it is that you want to glue on top of it that's like a nice larger surface use a lot of glue and because the cardboard is porous and because the slate tray is porous it's actually stuck really really nicely you're just gonna stick that on top plop it down and you have a now revolving tray I know and you can put on top of it your little mason jars that you got and inside of that you could actually store like makeup brushes makeup perfumes q-tips little circular cotton rounds whatever it may be and it's a great tabletop accessory so guys that was today's video and I hope that you really really enjoyed and I forgot to preface that I'm wearing a hood because my hair looks the worst right now so I just threw it on to that I could film this intro for you guys and get this video up because I wanted you to see it and I've been away for so long I wanted to upload a new video so badly it's been like inside of me that I just need to upload so here it is and I hope you guys really did enjoy this video definitely give it a thumbs up if you did and don't forget to subscribe to my channel for brand new videos every single week I hope you guys are having an amazing start to your 2019 year and also an amazing end of 2018 um let's kill it this year everybody and I can't wait to see what comes out of loan fox this year so if you're not already please subscribe because you're not gonna want to miss it and yeah I'll catch you guys in the next one bye guys


What's going on everybody? Got Kyle and Donnie here with Layton Sports Cards and we are ripping a personal for Jeffrey H I've got three boxes of 2023 Bowman Chrome Choice It's a new release on Wednesday today on Wednesday this week. Good luck Jeffrey three boxes Bowman Chrome Choice Let's see what we got my friend. Thank you Mike grabbing a spot in NT It's like Mike grabbed the Eagles there. Thank you, sir Oh The two and oh Eagles exactly exactly By the box I could see it I could see it Bucks are Bucks are unit Don't saw us coming ready Jeffrey first up. We got a Javier Valdez for the Braves on the first Bowman base Javier Valdez Braves their first Bowman got a green on the back This one is going to be to 150 first Bowman choice that one is a Vladimir a rest studio for the Rockies there to 150 on the choice refractor Guys just six to go. We'll break it right after this doing a personal in the meantime And on the back we had to 99 green first Bowman auto of Demetrio croissante's for the d-backs Demetrio croissante is only true green to 99 ready guys box two I'm a chrome choice again. These are for Jeffrey Personals here. Oh nice. We got Brandon. My a on the first Bowman auto for the Yankees nice one there Jeffrey One of the guys were hunting this one my a for the Yankees Nice one there. They spent a nice little bag on him on the free agency So one is first bowman at Dario Barrero on the first Bowman white socks rookie base auto Barrow for the white socks and we've got to 499 refractor first Bowman auto of Joey Estes for the ace Refractor to 499 and one more box for you. Mr. Jeffrey box 323 Bowman chrome choice Hey, thank you Shaquilla Grabbing Ravens Ravens on the NT case right NT case filling nicely I've got Falcons Browns Chargers Patriots and bucks to go on NT guys Teams are on sale on those check them out a Few teams to go into full case PYT style. This one is one Benjamin first Bowman base auto for the Guardians Evelyn one Benjamin base auto We've got first Bowman base auto is Ricardo Perez for the Phillies Cardo Perez not number another one who had base in the last Bowman, but not an auto And a 499 we got refractor first Bowman auto of BJ cook on the back for the ace Jake hook 499 and that'll do it for you Jeffrey. Thank you sir on the three boxes of Bowman chrome choice Thank you. Thank you. We'll get those right out to you