All right, let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host, the creator of the forum, as well as your catherter for the next hour. I'm delighted to see all of you here today. We have a terrific guest with a fantastic topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. One last note before we proceed. About a month ago, we polled everybody to ask what you wanted from the forum and what things we should experiment with. And we have a few experiments coming up. So just to let you know, one of the things that people were interested in was tutorials. So a session that would basically be an interactive session that would teach a particular topic. We've got one of those signed up for January already. And we also asked about news sessions that are sessions where some experts would respond to developments in the past week. We have one of those scheduled for November. So just to let you know, we have more experiments coming down the pipe. Now I'd like to welcome this week's guest. I'm just delighted to welcome Trent Hergenraeder. Trent is a professor at RIT in upstate New York. He specializes in what I think of as just non-stop creativity. Trent teaches with games. He teaches with world building. He teaches with the nerdiest science fiction and fantasy. And he teaches people how to develop stories based on them and how to think critically about them. He's one of the most fascinating and innovative faculty members I've ever seen. I'm delighted that we have him here to talk with. Trent, welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for the invite. Oh, it's my pleasure. My pleasure. Now, Trent, I just have to ask in order to kick things off. There are a lot of people to introduce you and I could ask you to show us your lightsaber collection. I could I could ask you to talk about your beard, which is very, very good. But what I'd like to ask is over the next academic year, 2019, 2020, what are the big things you're going to be working on? What's going to be taking up most of your brain? What excites you the most? Yeah, so what I'm working on right now, I just got tenure this year. So this is my year to sort of chill out a little bit, right? So I got my book out last year. That was sort of the big push and then promoting that. But what I'm planning on doing now, I've got the world building book, but then I've got the world building card deck that goes along with it that we can talk about and I've got examples if you want to see that. But there are two other parts to that. There's a character building deck and then a plot building deck that I want to try and develop and play test a little bit more rigorously. So the world building deck obviously came first. And once that went from prototype to sort of finished product, the other two just went on the shelf as I had to start promoting the book and doing those kind of things. So in this next year, I've got some students who are interested in working in procedural narrative and things like that. So trying to figure out how would we make like a cyberpunk plot deck? How would we make a steampunk plot deck? How would you make a Cthulhu horror deck or whatever? Trying to sort of break apart different types of genres, different types of stories with the ultimate goal being a game that you can right now, the prototype, you can play from beginning to end with three or four people where you start, you build a world, then you create three characters and then you tell a story using the three structure, using all the cards and it's all collaborative and it's basically just having a conversation with friends. And it takes about three hours to play, but it's not to the point yet where you can't you can play it without me like hovering over you, right? Saying, OK, now you got to do this, now you got to do that. So that's really the next thing that I'm looking forward to working on. And it should be a lot of fun. Well, that sounds terrific. Friends, we tweeted out the location of your book. And if you could just tell us the full title again. Sure, it's a collaborative world building for writers and gamers. So make sure you grab a copy of that. And that's it's a fantastic, fantastic and important book. And it looks like I have all kinds of questions. And friends, if you're new to the forum, keep in mind that I could interrogate our poor guest forever. But the key thing here is to hear your thoughts and your questions. So if you're really curious about what does Professor Hergene Raider mean by procedural gaming? If you're curious about how this plays out with the Curricular Committee, what does student evaluation say? How does this fit into pedagogy? This is your time to ask those questions. Just press that video button to join us on stage or press the text button to type me a question. I'm looking forward to hearing your kind of thoughts and conversations. Just to begin with, I have to ask, when you say world building, are you drawing on, say, the token heritage of subcreation and creating elaborate fantasy narratives? Yeah, to an extent. I mean, when I'm working with students, one of the things that I really focus on and the reason why the book title is Collaborative World Building is I find that beginning writers and young people don't understand that they don't have sort of an objective view of how the world works. We all have very subjective views based on our experiences and things like that. So my goal really with the courses that I teach here at RIT with the world building course that I teach is to get them talking about how they think worlds work and using some structures to help give an easy end to those conversations because they obviously when they get out of college, they're going to be working on their own and they probably have a million world building projects. The other thing I hear all the time is I've been working on this world since I was 14 and I always say that's great. But this semester, you're going to be working with other people because you have to have your imaginations bump into each other and young women and young men feel that gender relations work very differently and levels of equality and things like that. So that's really what I'm trying to do with the world building is sort of bridge critical thinking with creative production where if you're making a fictional world with other people, you need to sort of calibrate and figure out how you think our world works before you can make a coherent fictional world. But yeah, any genre? And by so far, you've been looking at, if I remember rightly, let's see fantasy, horror, science fiction, post-apocalyptic. Yep. Basically, when I'm teaching the class, the first one that we start out with is always the post-apocalypse because I think it's pretty easy to see how you can have one foot in our world and then one foot in a post-apocalyptic future. It could be a very near future. But then from that point forward, I do polls and say, well, what genre do you want to do next? And I've just got a library of short stories that we'll talk about what are some of the features. We've had interesting conversations about similarities and differences between cyberpunk and steampunk or post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, right? Because sometimes the borderline between those are very, very narrow. And I think students find it interesting to sort of interrogate what we expect from those genres. We do a listing on the board of all the things, all the markers that sort of call out, well, what makes a cyberpunk? And then we talk about, well, how many of those do you want to adopt and how many of those do you maybe want to turn on their head? Because you don't want to make it stereotypical of the cyberpunk world that we've all seen before. That's pretty dull. And just that act of getting everybody to sort of list them out and talk about the things that they think make up those genres end up being really rich conversations in and of themselves. So it's only if the class is really, among other things, these classes are about genre and understanding what's in the show. Yeah, absolutely. We have a question that has just come up. Here, let me flash this on the screen so people can see this. This is a question from Sierra Adare, Tassie Woopa, and Sierra, I really hope I pronounced that correctly. How do you get students to buy into gamification of a course? Yeah, I think, to be honest, I've got the opposite problem in which these classes fill immediately, they fill with full wait lists immediately. And once registration opens within about 48 hours, I start getting emails from students saying they can't get in and is there any way that I can do over-enrollment and things like that. So it's not just there's a strong game design program here, but I think only about a third of my students are actually game designers. I think it's just in the water with this generation. They understand that games can do a lot of different things. And the way that if you're working in games and learning, like I'm assuming other people in this group are, you know what you're trying to do is align your learning outcomes or learning objectives with rules and games that will help you leverage those. You use the rules and you use the games, not because they're fun and it's going to be enticing, but because those actually do a better job of teaching the content in many ways than more traditional methods. So just to use one example, the classes that I use, one of my classes is called game-based fiction and we use role-playing games and structures of role-playing games to teach fiction writing. And the idea is to get them really immersed in a character's viewpoint. It's very different than the traditional mode, which is read a short story, talk about it, try and write a short story and then critique it. I find it's been much more successful and students understand different concepts of perspective and questions along those lines and other aspects of craft. When they're doing role-playing games and then want to write about their characters, I feel much more connected to it in my experience. So you're teaching as well fiction and storytelling? Yes, yes, that's what I, it's more, I mean too, one of the things that my degree is, my PhD is in English with an emphasis in creative writing, but it is slowly over the years, it's sort of using language, but it's become more about narrative design because very, very few of my students, I think two and you know, whatever it is now, 10 years of teaching have gone on to MFA's, but I have a lot of people who are entering creative industries, they make films, they make 3D animations, I've got a number of students who are working Blizzard, you know, they're level designers on World of Warcraft and things like that. So talking about how language is always really important, but it's not very important for me to teach them the structure of say a traditional short story, right? I do that in some of my classes, but it's more important for them to think about, well, what makes for a really rich character? What makes for an interesting setting? What things do I need to think about in terms of what this character is going to do? What kind of obstacles they will face in this setting? So it feels really liberating for me to not feel constrained by those old genres and it's sort of exciting, creative writing in different pockets now, those walls are starting to break down of poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. I think the digital realm really blends and blurs those things, especially when you start bringing in visual elements and audio elements. So yeah, there's some really pioneering stuff going on, creative writing and higher ed too. It's a little bit spread out, but it's really exciting to kind of know where to look. It must be and just let everybody know, just in case you aren't impressed by Professor Hergan reader enough, he's published multiple science fiction fantasy short stories just on the side. Yeah, the funny thing is like my love really is short stories and it's sort of a form that either is completely obsolescent or is obsolescing, but yeah, that's really my favorite form. Ideally suited for podcasting as well as for reading on the phone, I think. Yeah. So we have a question that's come in on video, so let me bring in a long time participant, Tom Riley from Boston. Hello, Tom. Hello. I'm working at use of story specifically on our climate crisis. And the idea is that very soon, probably during the next presidential period, we're going to hit a big driven point and it's going to be all hands to the pump. Every concept, everybody get to work on addressing a million different problems, different ways. To get that started, it looks like we need stories. And I did write a book, got a book published of about 10 science fiction stories, hard science fiction, written as a teaching aid, but the book's so expensive that yeah, and the people, the young people today, science fiction stories ain't it. We're now writing technical papers and plays, screenplays. The question then becomes does your thing specifically cover not a dystopia, but a push hard to address climate change universe? So you're asking whether it could be used for that, the world building system that I use? Yeah, whether it is used for that and is that, do you have any students at least been interested? So I think most of the students that I get are pursuing creative projects more so and I wish we would get a little bit more of the critical side in there. I can show you real quickly, I've got the cards here. I've got, so there's world building deck that accompanies the book. You can use the book separately or the deck separately. You don't need them, but they do inform each other. There are 14 categories under the headings of governance, economics, social relations and cultural influences. So they look, this is the card for rule of law as one of the governance areas. Wealth distribution is one of the factors in economics, religious influence is one of the cultural influences. And then finally we've got race relations which is one of the social relations. And then everyone of those cards gets a number from one to five, meaning that one means there's hardly any of it, it's a very weak force in the world and five means that it's overwhelming when you're in that world, it's unavoidable, right? So if you had a religious influence of five, then you would expect to see that religious influence bleeding over into the governance area, right? Like maybe their founding documents would be based on religious texts and things like that. And then finally there's two categories for trending and stable, so each card, each one of those 14 categories gets a number and then trending or stable. And you can either use them to model the world which is really interesting when I say let's model Rochester, New York and see how people use those numbers. We do it, we'll watch films, play games or read stories and I'll say everybody model that world and what they find out really quickly is that the numbers don't really mean much and the categories don't really mean much in and of themselves. It's how you yourself are choosing to define those, right? So that becomes the conversation is what did you mean by rule of law? Because I gave it a three and you gave it a five. So how is that different, right? So then they have to talk about what those numbers meant, how they individually define those categories and I have them do that in isolation so then they can compare what they came up with. So one of the concepts I think to address this question that I came up with in terms of there was the dean had asked for some sort of first year classes for students that may show them the broad range of the way that liberal arts can sort of address problems. And one of the ideas that I had was alternate Rochester's because this is already something that I do in terms of making post-apocalyptic Rochester's and things like that. I also have a class that we do steampunk Rochester. So we go back to the 1920s, inject a steam technology and ask, well, how does technology affect society? How does society affect the technologies that are being developed? But my idea was you could do three Rochester's. You could do a historical Rochester from whatever era, you know, 19th century, you could do the present and then you could do a future one. If you want Rochester to look a certain way, a utopian future, what are those categories that you would need to start getting to move in certain directions, right? Just to achieve that. And then how does that even happen? How do we even make these things improve? So one of the big things for Rochester is it's extremely segregated and that the money in this town is also very segregated. So that's one of the things that you would say for a utopian future, you'd want better wealth distribution, then you'd have to ask, well, how do we do that? Like what are the mechanisms? We just can't magically make it a five from a, you know, meaning total equality. So how do we get there? In terms of the climate, I think it would be something similar in which I also encourage people to swap in and out their own cards for the categories that they think might be more interesting or useful for them. So I've worked with a professor in public policy who has adopted this to run some sort of simulations in which they will model the world in which they think it is as a group and then he'll randomly pick one category that just flips to the exact reverse, right? And then says from a policy perspective, how would you need to intervene and start building policy to take into account this black swan event? So it can be used for a lot of different reasons and a lot of different ways and for a lot of different age groups as well. I've got teachers who were using it in middle school. And again, it's how you introduce those concepts. I think there are ways to simplify it and there are ways to add even more complexity to the system. But the idea is that structure invites people in, right? If I say, okay, well, here are these 14 structures, give me a one to five. It's really easy, right? It's like taking a survey. The hard part is when you have to start justifying what is it that you came, like why did you say it's a three? Why did you say it's a four? When we're looking at movies or books or whatever, I'll ask, well, what's the textual evidence that you would point to to say, you know, that race relations are bad or gender relations are great. And I think you can do the same thing if you ask somebody to, you know, model present-day Cleveland, right? Well, why did you come up with the numbers, the numeric values that you did? Another thing too that we do, I'm just doing, I'm doing an independent study with a group of five students on advanced world building. And one of the things that I'm asking them to do is thinking about almost like network permissions, what things does a world inherit from the next larger world up? And then, you know, start thinking about the world that may exist within that world. So using Rochester as an example, if we build the world of Rochester, well, what's the world of Western New York and how is it different and how is it similar or the Northeast or the United States compared to say South America or other countries or other states. And then on the other end, we can also say, well, campus is out in Henrietta. It's very different than downtown Rochester. Are those effectively separate worlds that we crossed through? In how many world are we crossing through when we drive from one side of town to the other? So those ideas as well, and that's where you can use that same system to be able to say, well, here are the structures. How radically do they change when we move from place to place and where are they similar? And then always, what are you, how are you justifying your opinions? How are you justifying those numbers that you came up with? I'm just, go ahead, Tom.  I think we're right on the edge of a tipping point. Yeah. For writing fiction or screenplays, they're supposed to have a rhythm like, and so they're called beats. I am writing the beats for a massive, we gotta do it, no options, climate crisis world. And if anybody's interested in that one, I need to work my ideas against other people. Thank you. Well, it sounds great. It's a great question to bring up, Tom. And also, I wonder about using this deck, a modified form of this to look at, say, a given city over the course of the next 75 years and then bringing in different cards or different functions, everything from, you know, flooding to extreme. Well, actually, it's a given world. That's true. That's true. We're all in this together, folks. Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you. Friends, you can see it's really easy to ask questions either through video or through typing things in the question mark. So we'd love to hear more. As I say that, another question has come up. So let me just bring this up. This is from Charles Finley from Northeastern. He asks, do students implement their worlds in VR platforms such as the central land or are the worlds limited to the design? So when we're working in the world building classes and then this upper level class, the one that, so the world building is a 300 level class. The game-based fiction, the one that uses role-playing games is a 500 level class. We usually start with a little bit of world building there can be fan fiction elements into that as well. But there's a different level of world building that happens in both of those classes. In the 300 level class, we're really talking about concepts and then trying to capture those concepts in language because I am an English and a creative writing instructor. So that's really my area of expertise is trying to figure out how do you make the language really sparkle? And I argue that if you're making a film, you're gonna have to write some sort of synopsis, some sort of treatment that is going to sparkle. So all that language stuff works. But for the upper level courses particularly, a number of students are using the world that they build for their capstone projects for games that they're designing. I've not had anybody do anything in VR yet. Another big one is, and I really encourage this, is their own tabletop role-playing game campaigns. So they'll build a sophisticated world that they will then take to their friends and they'll play D&D in it, right? So really it's open. They have not yet had a situation which I'm saying we are doing this project for this reason, you will build a VR world based on this world that we have that we're going to create together. But I would love to. One of the things that I would like to propose at RIT too is making like an alternate campus where you can just have a fictional layer that you lay over the campus and the buildings become sides of the village or whatever it is. And I think that would be really easy to then have an AR layover or maybe have some sort of VR representation to it as well. So there's lots of exciting potential. And then the question always just becomes time and kind of get more people to do it. And that's why I'm always really excited to sort of proselytize and say, well, this is the way I do it. Why don't you check out some of this stuff and try it yourself and drop me a line and let me know how it goes, right? Because different people will use it in different ways. And it's just really exciting to be able to see how different people use it. Indeed, very, very exciting. I love the AR aspect to really turn your campus into a different layer. We have more questions coming in and by the way, we also have more people coming in. So hello to folks who've come in over the past few minutes. Good to see all of you here, like people like Keith McIntosh and Genevieve. So we have one question that has to do with integrating ideas. And this is from Gabrielle Maylock at Southern New Hampshire. How can you integrate your ideas on teaching with games, fan culture, world building in an online learning environment? Yeah, I think it's actually not that difficult because a lot of the work that we do in the conversations that we have, I mean, most of my classes, I try to lecture as little as possible and really want the ideas from the students to sort of be the central part. But like the way that I run the world building class could very easily be done on discussion boards online. I sometimes wonder if the conversations aren't as rich because people may self-center or self-censor rather or delete things when you're having a discussion and people start to get a little heated especially, they may blurt something out that someone says, oh, well, doesn't that sort of suggest that you think this about this topic or something like that? But I think it can very easily be done. I mean, we use Google Maps to be able to create these fictional layers over actual real world places. So I think most of it, the discussion could be moved to the discussion boards. What I'm trying to figure out for spring is I can never do the same thing twice. I'm trying to figure out if I can do sort of like a play-by-mail role-playing game campaign that doesn't require a Game Master because one of the things that I've covered over eight or nine years of now doing this and presenting at conferences, the number one thing I get is that's great but I could never do it because I don't understand role-playing games enough and whatever. So what I want to try and do is create a sort of package deal in which if you're interested in it then you hear the rules that you could use to be able to roll this out for 20 or 25 students. And it's basically just, I mean, this is the great thing too, especially with the fan culture. Students are already doing this in fan fiction, right? On fan fiction sites and they do their own play-by-mail sort of things. So it doesn't really matter for me if we're doing Star Wars fan fiction, we have done Game of Thrones fan fiction. What matters for me is that they're grappling with the idea that your characters are gonna be socially situated within this environment and they're gonna have different opportunities based on maybe their class or their race or their religion, that not all characters have the same opportunities. So that's sort of like the core of it. And then looking at the language. So the content doesn't really matter, right? And this is where people will knock fan fiction and it's like, well, fan fiction that is using Marvel superheroes is really no different than students who are trying to ape literary tradition, right? It's not like the literary beginning writing is all that much better than the fan fiction. So my perspective is let's just look at the language. Let's look at the ideas. Let's not go to stereotype. Let's make this complicated because that's the thing is I'm not a big fan of commercial fiction either, right? I like the good genre fiction. The things like China Mieville is one of my favorite factors because it's just a bewildering array of complexity and diversity in his writing. And that's what I want my students to understand going back to one of the things you said earlier, Brian learning about what makes these genres interesting, right? It's not the commercial side that is the most schlocky, you know, dime store kind of novel. Those can be fun, but that's not the kind of writing that I want my students to be doing. I want them to be doing some of the intellectual work and drawing from especially on a STEM campus from their backgrounds in engineering and other sciences, computer science and start to extrapolate and bring in ideas that they have from their scientific backgrounds into the world of the arts and creation. So this is an engineering campus primarily. Are your students mostly traditional age undergrads 18 to 22? Yes, I've not. So I did my undergraduate or did my graduate work at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, way more diverse. I had lots of returning students, lots of students who were coming back from the military or job changers in their 40s. I don't think I've had a single non-traditional student while I've been at RIT. I think everybody pretty much fits within 18 to 22 years. So that's another thing too that the more diverse the group that you're working with, more rich world you get in the end, right? Because you get so many more perspectives. So sometimes it's hard if you have a lot of people who are coming from a similar background to sort of encourage them to think about the world in different ways. We have all kinds of topics that have come in and I have all kinds of things I want to run by you. But let me remind everybody that you can join with your own questions, turn on your camera and then you can join us up here on stage, like Tom just did, or if you can't type in a question like Sierra's done, then Gabrielle, then Charles. We have a question that came in via Twitter actually. I just want to run this value. This is from Dan Lasota in Alaska, an instructional designer, and he asks, I'm hoping to learn some techniques in making games for education that avoid the trap that in order to achieve a learning objective, the game avoids fun. So how do you make these learning experiences, how do you make these learning games actually games and fun? Yeah, so I think that's, one thing that I encourage people to if they're not experienced with game design because I'm not an accomplished game designer by any stretch of the imagination is to think about games where you can easily see the mechanics of the game and the rules of the game could be applied to the content that you're trying to teach what your learning outcomes are. So this is something too where I've been talking some professors here that I think they're going to try it either this year or in the spring to have their final project be like, I've got a friend who's a French historian and she's got this class on the French Revolution and her final project, one of the options will be make a French Revolution game, right? And it's not just your key goal or whatever. You'd have to come up with some way of using those mechanics that would reflect that you're able to take the content and then put it into a game. And that way you don't have to worry about if nobody in the room is a game designer. You don't have to worry about balance. You don't have to worry about those kind of things. And there are so many different kind of, I mean, this is sort of a tabletop gaming renaissance right now that there's so many games. And if you go on board game geek, if you go on other discussion boards and just ask, I'm looking for a game that maybe pandemic, if you're not familiar with that game, it's about trying to keep a global viral outbreak contained. Could you use that perhaps for the content that you're looking for because we already know those games are super fun and just be able to sort of map what you wanna have them get out of it onto the game itself. So that's one easy way, probably easy entry point into making educational games. Well, I understand that's a good one. And there's a wide range of those, pandemic and centers of Catan, Slyster, different areas. My son and I got very excited about terraforming Mars, which is an educational game that was designed by a high school science teacher. And so they've done terraforming Venus and added more experiences. So meanwhile, as Tom pointed out, we're terraforming the earth in some ways that are pretty terrifying. We have lots of questions that are coming in. And Ryan, I'm gonna put your question up. If you wanna follow up in video, let me know. This is a question, a very practical one. He's a central Methodist. He's another English professor, watch out. Is in terms of deliverables and assessment, what kind of documents are produced at the end of your semester? And do they distribute their materials to local audience? To start on the end of that, they actually distribute their materials to a global audience. Almost everything that we do is available on the internet. And I do encourage, I tweet things out, I'll post them to Facebook. And that's too, this idea of the class next semester. The Play by Mail campaigns can get really large. And that's one of the things that I'm toying with is can I have friends, colleagues, other people create the sort of the NPCs that the students in the world, their characters will have to interact with. I think that could be a lot of fun. But really breaking down that idea that the classroom is this bubble that doesn't have anything to do with the outside world. Like really, there were, they can anonymize it if they use whatever handle that they want. And sometimes they come up with some very creative ones. But then that allows them to be able to work without really worrying about, is a future employer going to Google me and figure out that I made this homicidal maniac character or something like that. So on the first part of that question, a lot of it, the big question that I sort of asked throughout the semester is, did you show up to work? Did you, I asked you to make, to participate and add so many words to the meta narrative of the story of the world. And can you show me where you did that? And I have peer assessment and things like that. I asked you to make three locations, three characters and three items that exist in the world. Did you do that? Did you do that on time? So a lot of it is beam counting and just sort of looking to make sure that they stayed engaged. And that's one of the things too that's a struggle on this campus particularly is they just get crushed by other projects in coding projects and computer science and other really heavyweight engineering problems that are a project that they're working on. And these are sort of the fun elective, right? So it's sort of the first thing that they're often coached in fact to let go. So that's really at the end of the day, I'm looking at quality, whether they are able at the end of the semester to be able to revise. I have a lot of reflective assignments and even though the final product may not be the quality that you'd wanted, a short story that worked out as well as you'd wanted. But what did you learn? What did you think about? What were the decisions that you had to make? One of the things that I love doing for the 500 level class, the role-playing game class is I do oral exams at the end. And we do teach story structure in that. And what they need to do when they come in is tell me, I give them the floor and I ask them basic questions. What do you think is working in this story? What do you think means work in the story? And that's how we open up the conversation. I've got my notes on what I think was working and what I think was not, but it really avoids, I mean, they're scared to death about doing an oral exam on their fiction writing at the end of the semester. But it really motivates them to actually think, right? So many times with creative writers, especially people who are working sort of on their own, they just kind of sit down and start writing whatever they want. And I think there's value to that. But the things that I'm trying to reinforce throughout the class are these aspects of critical thinking and thinking about, well, how is your character different than the character that they're standing next to, right? How do they view the world differently? So what I've found is, I mean, I think probably the most accomplished short story that I've ever had students produce, it was a collaborative effort from two students that was in a Star Wars fan fiction class. And they wrote this beautiful story of these two characters who were both sort of emotionally closed off and worked together out of convenience. And then if you know the sort of Star Wars mythos, they go into this cave to find kyber crystals and they both have sort of semi-religious experiences with the force and they come out really transformed and they're able to have a different kind of relationship. And it was super sophisticated, right? And I was like, wow, this is well written, both students just really hit it off. I'm like, this is the best thing that I've ever seen students put together. And I mean, maybe that description makes it sound a little cheesy, but really trust me, it worked. And at the end of the day, it's like, well, you can't do anything with this because it's Star Wars, right? It's copyrighted. So there's nowhere really that you can do it. But again, those kind of moments too, really have shown me that I've gotten way better results out of students with these approaches than I have with other approaches. Because especially when I was in graduate school, I would teach a little bit more traditional creative writing and I had some students say that they wanted me to do a class on science fiction, fantasy and horror and how to get published in short fiction because that's my background and I did it.  Nobody is into it. They don't enjoy it, right? They thought they were going to like it, but they don't. So what I find too is with the collaborative aspects, if Brian and I and one other person are creating a world together and Brian suddenly uses that weird, empowered screwdriver in his story that I created, I'm suddenly way more interested in seeing how that appears in somebody else's fiction, right?  And the other thing I say is that, when you're working on, if you do get a job in the creative industry, which so many of them do, they're not gonna say, okay, 23-year-old, why don't you write me a story from beginning to end with all your new characters and all your new world building, you know, and all this stuff, they're probably gonna have to be in a team that will either come up with that or even more often, they're gonna have to be able to figure out, well, if I'm working for World of Warcraft, how do I build a level that feels warcraft-y enough? So that's where some of the aspects of the fan fiction come in, is if you're working in that entertainment industry and you would get hired by Lucasfilm, right? Well, how are you gonna build assets or come up with narrative ideas that are complementary to what already exists? I think these are actually much more important skills and things that most people in creative writing ignore. But I think these are really important for equipping these students, not only to be savvy 21st century media consumers, but then also the producers. How do you fit? Because as we've seen is Disney takes over the planet with Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, right? Thinking very critically about what makes for good stories in those worlds, how can you participate? How can you own some of that or at least be able to take ideas from it and make it something that's personalized? So if you have to work on how to train your dragon six, then it's gotta fit in and you can't just do it from scratch. Right. There are a lot of different points here. And if I could just ask you to go back up to something you said earlier, you were talking about one of your students being interested in procedural narrative. If you could just quickly tell people what procedural narrative is. And if you could say, there's an example of a student doing some really creative work on some challenging technique. Sure. So procedural narrative is a term that's used a little differently in different fields. And the way I use it may not be the way that other people use it. But generally speaking, procedural narrative, like in video games is that there are things that will be randomly, there'll be a table of characteristics or something like that that will be drawn randomly. And the world that I'm playing in will end up being procedurally generated, randomly generated in a way that'll be different than every other person who is playing that game. So Minecraft would be one example of that, right? In which the aspects of the world are procedurally generated. So the way that it works for me in the example of using the world building deck which I showed before, we procedurally generate the world. Sometimes either we'll model or you can sort of half model where you set a couple of the values and then you shuffle the rest. Students almost always go for the full Monty where they wanna shuffle all 14 and create that randomly. So that's the way that I talk about procedural narrative. And when we get to characters, like I've got a deck of positive traits, a deck of narrative traits, a deck of motivations and a deck of things that connect the character to the world and then also a deck of relationship cards. So I shuffle those up and then each character gets one of those cards and then we build relationships between them. And this also, I mean, one of the strategies for this in thinking through the rationale for this is coming up with a story can be really hard, especially if you've not read a lot or you've read a lot of things that are very commercial and very stereotypical. So this gives you all the things that you need to get a story rolling that you may not have thought about before, right? You can't plan for it. And that's also where the collaborative aspect comes in. If you deal out, like I tend to play, when I'm play testing, I'll do a lot of solo runs, like a solitaire run through. And I'm an experienced storyteller so I can find stories all over in these things. But, you know, a lot of times there'll be three or four students who will be crouched over the table and like, where are we finding the story in these random things that we've been delivered? And to me, again, that aspect of finding story, I say that in my classes all the time, it's really important because that's what we do on a daily basis. If I come home and my partner asks me, how was my day, right? I don't say, well, I woke up and then I had breakfast and I took the dog for a walk. You know, we pick and choose. We decide what part of our day was interesting. It starts shaping a narrative around that. We find the story of our days. That's one of the things that I'm trying to teach students to be able to do to be way more flexible rather than thinking about hero's journey, which that's where they sort of taught that's the one and only kind of story, right? The hero called the duty and goes out and saves the world. It's one story structure out of many different possibilities. So that's where the procedural part is, you know, randomly generate it and then find the story in this. And this is where the character deck is, the world building deck is sort of universal. The character deck is universal, but then the plot building deck, you need those elements that are genre based, right? So what would be in a cyberpunk deck? What would be in a high fantasy or epic fantasy deck, right? So you may draw a sword in one and you may draw, you know, like a data chip that you plug into your head in another one. But the idea is you deal out all those things for the plot building deck. You get plot points, characters, locations and items and you get them all out on the table and you start building scenes around well, what would be an interesting conflict between the characters that we created 15 minutes ago to get this story sort of moving. So that, you know, basically those structures are what helps them and allows them to have entry and they don't have to come up with everything. The procedures are such, the rules are such that they're given the material and then they have to figure out what to do with it. That sounds like a rather bit of a prop in the morphology of the folktale. You know, you have these pieces and you get to see them but you're really pushing them towards creatively building these links up. Yeah. Let me, if I can, turn the conversation to look ahead a bit. I'm trying to imagine what your kind of pedagogy and your curriculum would look like in say five years. What are some of the dreams you'd like to realize?  What else do you see coming up? What are some of the changes and expansions? Well, one of the things that I know this campus prioritizes at least in sort of the marketing materials but struggles to do on a day-to-day basis is break down some of these disciplinary silos, right? And let faculty work in a much more fluid way than rather trying to account for every hour do we have the student contact hours, right? Most of the people that I work with are not trying to get out of work. We all make ourselves work more than we probably have to. But this is where I'm excited about, you know, if there are opportunities to be able to build things that are truly interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, I'd love to set up an advanced world-building course where we bring in an economist, a political science professor, somebody from history, right? And then start getting into, because I'm not an expert in any of those areas, right? But really start getting into, you know, philosophy second and third layer, sort of like, what do we mean when we talk about world-building? And then what are we gonna do? Like how can we get, I already have these things out on the internet, but unless you're somebody's, you know, aunt or parent or whatever, it's probably not making that big of an impact. So then how do we package this in something in an app or, you know, an interactive experience or something that will actually have an impact besides the group of people who are working on it, right? So I know from talking with students who have taken my classes over all these years I still have students from my very first time that I taught a class like this at UW Milwaukee still come back to me today and talk about very specific moments in that class where they're like, that's never left me, right? So that's great. That was great for those 25 students and I'm working with students usually now at RIT in batches of 20. Well, how can we break that wall and have say a thousand people in Rochester somehow be able to interact? Can they build parts of this world? Can they claim ownership? You know, in my own utopian thinking if you have a rule set and you have some technology that gives them some structures where they could log in I think we could start building things that going back to Tim's question earlier they have a fictional veneer but they're actually getting at social issues other issues that we're trying to solve through using fiction, right? Through using fiction and through moral or ethical decisions that you could perhaps put in front of characters to be able to think through. So those are the things that I really get excited about and there's a lot of energy for that in a campus like this. The question though is just always how to transform that into some actual product. Just doesn't seem like things work well enough and it's mostly unfortunately got to do with can I get scheduled in a time in which my class meets at the same time as this other professor or I can't teach this class this semester because I'm required to teach something else. Those wind up being the biggest roadblocks. So hopefully that trend of departments and disciplines melting would be great, right? I wonder about in terms of public science and in terms of outreach or getting people who are anxious about a lack of scientific literacy might really want to follow this out. Yeah. We have a question that came in from a longtime friend of the program who couldn't make it today for scheduling reasons. Tom Hames wanted to ask, what do you think of the convergence of gamification and design thinking? He was referring to the recent pair of books from a couple of authors about design on bound and wondering where do you stream the gamification design thinking? Yeah, I think for people too who are not as familiar with this area, gamification is usually used where it's a badge system or a warrant system where the game element, so it's like math blaster, like my kids will play that on the iPad in which you're zooming along in your spaceship and then there's a space octopus and you need to figure out these math problems, right? Five plus 10 is 15, right? Has nothing to do with the space squid but you can't shoot the space squid until you solve all the math problems, right? So that tends to be more of a gamification approach or having a leaderboard instead of having a leaderboard for your class so people can see where they fit along with their peers. That's more of a gamification process. Game-based learning, which is where I tend to do all of my work is much more about aligning those learning outcomes with game mechanics, right? So what kind of games, and this is where you probably can put this together on your own, the reason why I use role-playing games is because it's deeply about the character's perspective that you're in, right? When you're playing a role-playing game, you form a bond with this character that you've created. So that's what I'm trying to get them to think through when they're writing fiction is really get that perspective. But I think really, one of the things too that I talk about with my students in my classes all the time, and I think this is going to go back to the design thinking is intentionality, right? What is it that you want this to have to succeed at at the end of the day? And a lot of times what I'm finding too is students that come up with things that are clever but aren't very sophisticated. And that's where I can introduce them to other avenues, other ideas, other faculty members, point them to other faculty members and other disciplines and say, can we get this to that next level of complexity to think about, well, what is it that you want it to do? And this is why as well like in classes and so many of my colleagues are starting to do this is to go towards projects at the end of the semester, right? Where it's not just writing a paper where you submit it to the professor and that's the only person who ever reads it because then the intention is to pass the class, right? If you allow people to do a project of their own choosing, they have to think about, well, how is this gonna work, right? How much time do I have to put it together? What's the scope of this problem? What are the ways that I'm gonna be able to reach a different audience than maybe just this one instructor who is assessing me? So I think that design thinking can also be used in a very buzzwordy way just like we're disrupting education and you're doing all these other things and it's like really just sort of marketing copy to be able to sell some new book or product or something like that. But I think if you start thinking through, when I think of design thinking, it's about those inner relationships and the interconnectivity of all the different pieces that will go into whatever project is that you're working on and being really intentional about it, right? How is this one piece going to affect the rest of it? And especially all of these things only multiply, I think when you start doing team-based projects because then you gotta work with other people and not everybody can get their own way which is a really, I know, group projects can drive students crazy because some of the students are lazier, right? Some students are pushier, but it's a skill that they're gonna need when they go into their professional careers. They're gonna need to know how to cope with those things so I don't lose too much sleep over not allowing them to do, like in the world-building class, many of their faces fall when I tell them everything we're doing this semester is collaborative. You will not be working on a world with fewer than four other people. They're really disappointed, but then by the end of this semester, in rare cases, they end disappointed, but in most cases, it's like, oh yeah, well now I can go work on my project by myself. How big are your classes? 20 students for creative writing classes and then for the lit and media classes, 32. Okay, so some are seminar-sized and some are a bit bigger than that. Yep. For instance, we're almost at the end of the hour and so we are, this is your last shot to ask Professor Hergan reader a question and I know some of you have been chatting about some different ways these projects can be implemented and where these can possibly go. So let me just remind you, you have one last chance to fire off a question, again, either through video or through typing in a question. So I'll ask one in order to give you a minute to scramble and think of a good question, which is, you know, Eric Zimmerman, I think, I was suggesting that the 21st century would be known as ludic century, century games, the gaming becoming our highest art form succeeding film. I wonder if what you seem to be describing is a version of that, that more and more people will be participating in games, more and more faculty across the disciplines, more students and then more people from outside, from, you know, the local campus, the area, Rochester and so on. How far does this go? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think it's one of these things that I've been asked before too, because of my work in role-playing games, like why is there this renaissance of Dungeons and Dragons? Because we're not getting just a big upswing in their sales and Dungeons and Dragons is sold more with this recent fifth edition than any other edition, and I'm sure several of the editions combined. But we're seeing, you know, books coming out where people are reflecting on their youth and when they were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I think it's generational. I think it's also with video games in that I grew up, I was born in 74, and we had an Atari 2600 in the house, we had a Colecovision, we had a Nintendo. Gaming was part of my culture, just growing up, that was just around me all of the time, in a way that it wouldn't have been for my parents' generation. I mean, they would have games, they would have monopoly and things like that, but it was not nearly as ubiquitous, and it certainly was for me, and I think that when you realize that other people have those same experiences, that it starts to sort of break down the walls of being afraid of talking about these things or thinking that they're silly, and I think that's where we've reached right now is that first generations of D&D players are now in their 40s and their 50s, and they're in control of editorial content for newspapers and magazines, and they're professors creating courses and these kinds of things. So I think the students today get it, and I mean, this is where too, one of the earlier questions sort of alluded to this. When I'm saying I'm teaching with games, they think it's cool, but they don't think it's weird and they're not suspicious of it, right? They wanna get in because they think it's like, okay, that makes sense, let's see how it works. So I think as the generations, and this is where too in higher ed, the generational divide between some of my older colleagues who, you know, they wanna lecture, that's the way they learned and that's the way that they wanna do it. And then some of the people who are more recently graduated and are looking in more innovative ways, there can be tension there as well, of course, between what is the right way to be able to teach these concepts. But I think games are just gonna be another lens in which we understand our world, and as more people get on board, I mean, I'm not a game designer, but I've made a game, right, it's the same thing where people like, I'm not a writer, but I wrote a novel, right? People do that all the time. So yeah, I think it's gonna continue, and it's really gonna be for the next generation to determine where games go. I mean, I think Gen Xers have done a pretty good job bringing them into the light now, so we'll see where the next generations take it. I'm about eight years older than you. So I remember as a teenager, the D&D panics over, James Dallas Egbert, and one of the worst time of Hanks movies of all time. Yes. Maze and Monsters, I think. Yes. We have a great question, another follow-up from Charles Finlay. He asks, this is an ethical consideration. How do you consider the validity of the consequences in the real world of these games? And he's thinking about, does the knowledge support and reward the decision based on real world knowledge? And Charles, if you wanna follow up with that, please, please feel free. Yeah, so I guess I'm a little confused. So the result of the work that the students do, does that have real world consequences or how do I measure those real world consequences? Is that sort of the root of the question? Yeah, Charles, if you can do video, let me know or if you wanna type in another follow-up with that in the chat to me, please go ahead. I can answer that question very briefly because I don't have great data. Like I do qualitative studies at the end and students are able to be able to express in their own words what they've learned and what they got out of the course. I do not ever claim that I am improving their critical or critical thinking or empathy or things like that. Not because I don't think it's happening, but because I'm not trained to measure it. And that's where again, like having a collaboration with could we build a role-playing game course just like I do in my creative writing classes with somebody who is in ethics or moral philosophy or things like that and then try and have that outcome and then have the group that will go through it and then measure how much that happens, right? One of the nice things about teaching and creative writing is no one really expects anything of you, right? It's art. They're not expecting us to have students come out and write stories for the New Yorker. And if there's anything else we do, collaborative, digital, it's all gravy, right? I mean, it's just sort of like a nice art class for students to take. So the stakes in creative writing are really, really low as well. And I'm always hesitant. I mean, I know from having talked to students that the critical thinking improves, but I'd love to be able to measure that somehow. It's just not my area of expertise. That's a whole different level of assessment. I think Charles is asking along the lines of what gamification does, both for good and for ill, and what does that teach us to do? And then what kind of behavior do we simulate? However, we're right at the edge of the hour. We have just burned through an hour of the forum. Let me just ask, on behalf of Charles and everybody else, Trent, how do we keep up with you? How do we follow all the different projects? What's the next step? It's, you know, if you wanna friend me on Facebook, feel free, that's where I actually post a lot of questions, a lot of ideas to my network to say, you know, what do you think of this idea or that idea? I'm also on Twitter at T. Hergen-Raid, no R. I can't, I'm over the character count. So T-H-E-R-G-E-N-R-A-D-E is probably the most sort of public way to keep in contact with me. And then, you know, I try to go to conferences that are games in education, although the Game Learning Society GLS Conference that was at Madison, Wisconsin, stopped running a few years ago and I think a number of people who are really into this are still trying to find a new home. But yeah, if people know of other conferences, meaningful play is one that I'm just gonna start going to the CUNY Games Festival. It happens in January in New York City. So trying to figure out, do we have a critical mass here? Are there other people who want to adopt these things or at least talk about it? Drop me an email, right? You can find my email address either on my faculty profile or it's just my name, Trent Hergen-Rader at Gmail. We had an email from Sue Boll who runs the serious play conference in cheese. Yeah, absolutely. That's another one. So we can follow up with you that way. Let me thank you for being both a terrific guest but also an inspiring faculty member. Thank you. This is so exciting. I really look forward to seeing where you go with this next. Yeah, great. Thank you very much. It was one of those things that I had to wait. My advisor in graduate school was Stuart Malthrip and he's very on page with all of these things. I really about it. And before he arrived, there were a lot of questions about, you know, from other faculty and members about what the hell it was that I was doing. So I'm always very thankful for him to be able to, for him to come in and use his position to be able to say, no, this is good stuff. And then being hired at a university that also allows me to do these things and I'm lucky in that regard. And as are your students to have you. Stuart's a great guy. If you talk to him soon, please tell him I said hi. I will. Thank you again. We're gonna follow up. I think next year we're gonna bring you back to see what else you've been up to. Great, it sounds great. Thank you so much. But don't go, friends. We have information about the next week and make sure they share this with you. Next week's guest, we change gears to take a look at students today based on the most cutting-edge, extensive research available. We have Doug Shapiro, really lucky to land him as a guest. He's the director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which does terrific work about the demographics, the identity, the classes, the enrollment of students. So he gets to really dig in and learn more. And there on the slide, there's the link to the signup session, chinding.com.slash, login.slash, event.slash, these Shapiro. Now also coming up, if you'd like to find recordings of this session and all others, just head to tinyorel.com slash FTFarchive and you can see all of those there going back almost four years. And if you want to keep talking about these questions about what does it mean to have students make role-playing games and collaboratively build worlds and how do you support gamification and how does this actually play out in reality, then let's keep talking about this. We have groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. We have a group on Slack. On Slack, very reactive on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, thank you all for the terrific questions. We really appreciate the conversation. We look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, take care. Goodbye.


Sam here with late sports cards rip in 10 bucks Tuesdays 10 box treasures football mix number 173 random team style To look again at your random results as always you can find those on the website under the results tab as well as the link That's in chat. So good look. Yeah, that's valid to Anthony. I love sports, dude That's that's like I'm right there with Vaughn and sports Fandom man. All right optic retail start off with that one box Needless Jones In Hutchinson gridiron Kings rookie Stop Dennis hi doing buddy Do stars Devin Singletair? Larry me Tunsel Jelani Woods Malik Willis rookie Steve Young retro series Kyle Dugger cave on tibet oh blue stars Jemera skirt blue stars Sounds like an old Who's your favorite know to watch while you were there? I'd say a spiller we were there Or 13 when they won Christian Watson all right, so take out Janice James Wilder. Oh JWJ number 32 he only signed it junior Chris Olavi. He was a beast Yeah, he was a beast to Jaguars legend. Oh, of course the legend Cam Jordan of invention. He was beast to Terrainerson one. No, I really want to be good for the Raven's parents ropes. He was the safety with Jalen George Kittle and Hassan Haskins That James Wilder juniors. That's a throwback. He was a beast.  Yeah, not Freeman was Loaded dude Freakin loaded because Ramsey was there when they won right and then they have another Ronald Darby That's white hot of Christian Watson that's Logan Hall All right, we've got optic team all now How much hope I felt when we drafted Ramsey I wanted Ramsey so bad dude so bad and he got taken like two picks before us I was so pissed Back of the Brinkstruck Charles Woodson Dax Hill. Thank you shorts. That's what I'm saying. Do you like Nickelbacker now? There's James Conner and David Bell delete Like Dylan Dylan just didn't like him because like the internet told him not to like it. Yeah They got some bangers Some absolute bangers Jalen hurts Yes, so maybe that was maybe and maybe maybe the first one wasn't the chain smokers Maybe that was like oh after the game Josh Downs Why are they singing That is Clark Phillips to 56 Will Anderson if I go a chain smokers concert and they're singing like this. I'm pissed. I'm wanting a refund Looks like that's it. That is what that's such a big table 999 is Jake Moody Dorian Thompson Robinson nice one there for the Browns Didn't know him. Yeah for some other random guy. Oh gotcha. You strike me as somebody who had a DJ current table. Yeah Josh Allen now use some Anton Harrison to 399 one of my buddies in college for some reason had like a one-week like obsession with DJ stuff and we'd never let him we still don't to this day let him hear the end of it Jamar Chase is so bad at it. It was so funny. Never do that That the true to 99 JJ that is it's valid. Oh nice We've got Lombardi bound Peyton Williams manning the end for the Colts. That's when they're those are short-printed I'd rather definitely have shack the Germans It's going through the base You get always four on the back. That is Marta Mappu to 999 Jay Jettus the 375 for the Vikings Congrats Minnesota Bijan that is sauce gardener to 149. Thank you. Thank you, Timmy Appreciate you as always buddy to 25 is elitist Jalen Hertz On the orange rookie and like second year jersey number JSN nice one there to 149 Gary Terry we need hit you a picket RPA out of that'd be massive out of NT Scott That's kind of where you're looking Anthony Richardson Malama Fajoco junior 999 Eric Gray nice one there for the Giants 399 Congrats G men Jalen Hertz Christian Watson to 399 and base Kid reporters on Uh, mosaic no huddle next I want to say I guess what just go in order to do plates now It's going order. I suppose Heavy box of plates do a lot of plates in this This is like exclusively place Nice case hit Cooper cup on the nuclear nice one there congrats to the Rams A couple nuclear very nice We'll start off with the Dorian Thompson Robinson double coverage Jersey to 55 Yeah, Ernie is kind of a legend That is gonna be a Jordan Addison to 25 for the Vikings. There you go. I think that's Sean M, right? Yeah, not bad there Sean Jordan Addison Congrats buddy We've got That's cool 235 Darius slain that's kind of nasty Gonna bury why in the bills go Barry 10 of 10 Dalton Kincaid on the logo patch Congrats on that one Just being up till 1 30 a.m. And them rambling on about random stuff fair. It's very valid fun Congrats on that Barry good stuff buddy. I'm at collegiate now. I'm at collegiate. I'm not listening but I imagine Chuck and Chakrin Pete rambling for me. Oh, yeah That one's cool. That one's sick very good season ramble. It's season ramble on opening night So happy basketball back It gives us something on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which is good Just like that and hockey besides the action Besides the action correct. Yeah. Ooh, that's a big one All right, so we're gonna have a random two all at the end 235 is AJ Brown for Ole Miss and the Eagles this will be a random because there's no nobody has more than one spot in this so All cards will be random that are dual hendon hooker Peyton Manning 7 to 25 Nice one there. Yes, it is read that is a brew crew had them rocking today They're rocking the brew crew I love I love this logo in the jerseys man. This is one of my favorites. I want to just be long Or uh, oh no, I have lines. Yeah lines holds something blue chase brown Uh, we're gonna see the the angles Thanks read Appreciate that buddy Yep fangals on chase brown Going to the browns again. That is going to be a dorian thompson robinson Yeah to 10 max duggin He's still I think he's on the chargers practice squad It said most recently played for the chargers and he hasn't anywhere else. So that'll still go to the chargers Congrats chargers And then big one here random two all at the end two 99 arch manning Nice one there With yours being out If their backup guy forget his name, are we going to see arch manning action? But what if the backup comes in and flops red shirt I'm gonna red shirt Nice one there. Congrats. I don't think he's playing I don't either but Who's their backup? It's mleek something mleek uh Mleek murphy that's who it is mleek murphy Uh, all right mleek no huddle now everybody be in luke tomorrow. That'll be fun dude. That'll be a lot of fun Disco hunter renfro tomorrow connor pierce gronsky There's some crazy autos in this checklist Then no huddle checklist tomorrow connor disco miller and jay ward I'm all all there for it B john rookie Cold comet kyler gordon nice one there on the scripts auto congrats bear second year Very nice rice young silver rookie. That'll work just fine michael parson's devon a chan and tajae spears pieces of carbon coffee God about those Oh, we got a gold anthony rickinson come on big gold Uh, anquan bolden as a raven Uh non rookie for the jets the rel revist. That's kind of sick Nice one there He's at texas, uh, berry, but uh, he is not currently now All right one two three left four five six right on the carbon copies for um Just mosaic Gonna be a six gonna go to the right. That'll go with t-law The carbon copies will go to the right quintin johnson devon witherspoon No, he's not currently started. I don't think there's a plan to plan this year smear gibbs Disco of jamar shakes the red shirt last year No, he's a freshman. Oh, is he a true freshman? I didn't know that I thought he was there last year for some reason why I'm a bot Yeah, then the eyed red shirt i'm for sure Just go pierce garonski springbook Not for football season. Yeah jaylon ramsey for the uh dolphins the 50 jaylon ramsey Lawrence taylor I'll be, uh, rocking a dolphin shame tomorrow. Well, they lost so maybe not Can you pick it? Ooh purple cj stroud to 50 9 of 50 going to the texas congrats houston. I'll do I will do Jody am congrats jody as an upside down silver kyle pits Disco introductions of levis Shoemaker, I know we gotta hit you something man There's a lot of vets coming up in these next couple of products, which is good There's definitely some chances there kyler murray rally moss dj turner And you never know go ahead and pick it up.  This is me off man. I'm not happy about that. We'll levis debut Uh, strawback. There's joe thysman to 75 blue uh moment in time of cd D tr three stevensson and a kid reporter All right, we're gonna go to mosaic choice next lukas van ness and prissy nizala's on your Uh inserts job and cook and mac jones Got auto sam la porta nice one there going to the lions because that's detroit Ron are picking up the wow braids padre's mets and angels. Thank you. They're ron and uh finest Appreciate you ron. What's finest? Yeah, that's not tomorrow right one two one two one two. Okay, it's flux flux flux draft draft draft answers Build it to your one build it to your one build it build it more build it That's fine. Oh, maybe on friday morning. It could be on friday. Nice. Well, thank you there ron. Appreciate that Uh, 280 is luke most grave jamar chase also to 80 for the bangles and then a travis etm For the jaguars. All right. We've got a gold standard hobby now 23 gold standard All right, we've got davis mills to 30 For the texans and collage a canty to 49 for the bucks Got a trelon berks to 199 heart of gold For the titans for the titans the 24 will levis three color patch nice one there Of course, love it says no auto so it's always good hitting his patches Congrats on that titans Got two that are going to be going to the lions first up is amon raw saint brown to 299 and nice one here going to the again lions jamir gibbs to 199 rookie autos Congrats, detroit This first touchdown of the season against the rates Cut the deficit to 35 to seven. Okay Penny black now. All right, josh allen is 75. He's going to the bills Got base of etn Nice one here first hit is the components to 99 cj stroud again Hexans doing well with just stroud stuff Congrats on that Got a sedrick tillman to 199 for the browns Congrats browns And going to the lions smear gibbs. That's nasty 67 to 99 three colored rpi Congrats to detroit That is brian All right, nt everybody one box of nt hobby. Let's go. Come on. All right. I'm glad you stuck around scott I'm glad you stuck around that is going to be a cordial patterson to 99 Nice one there for falcons That is a dk 249 for the seahawks Got 249 david montgomery two-color patch for the bears Rats on that chicago We've got eight of ten josh jaco so that's current jersey number eight of ten For the raiders. Congrats vegas We've got 299 that's von miller 78 of 99 for the bills Nice one here is a duel for the chargers. That is going to be jesson herbert austin eckler 299 player worn on bull very nice A rookie auto of roger mccreary to 49 That'll be going to the titans We've got a Richard dent nice one there. Super Bowl MVP in 85 42 and 99 Congrats on that bears. Richard dent. That is a tirion davis price 9 of 25 on the crossover rpa Congrats on that nice time to get this going to scott to 25 george pickings One color and ball the nfl gear rpa to 25. Congrats scott. Good stuff, buddy He is having a good year.  Congrats on that one there scott with the steelers All right, a couple of randoms to do here everybody. We've got the uh, hendon hooker and paint manning and then the arch manning random to all So we'll get all the teams in for the arch Let's go scott I know sorry about that Brandon, I apologize, man Yeah, sorry about that brother Thanks for jumping in I appreciate that though. Um today brandon Lions Here we go


I followed what is called a set, sit, and sell formula. Set so many appointments every week. Sit with so many appointments every week and then end up selling so many appointments every week. And I'm going to use general conservative numbers. Some have been in the business before, some have never been in the business. So I'm going to use very general conservative numbers. But as a new agent, I had to figure out what these numbers were and then I had to follow it. I'm someone that, and we'll do it today. I'm someone that likes to set a goal and a target and then break those numbers down. So that I literally know how much money I make every time I pick up the phone. It'll be pretty staggering once we do that. You guys will be like, I can go work at, you know, I love Chick-fil-A. If I can go work at Chick-fil-A for 10 bucks an hour, I can pick up a phone and make, you know, 18 bucks. I can pick it up, you know, so we'll walk through those numbers. I'm a big numbers person because, and Dallas said it earlier, 92% of interest agents fell in this business. It makes it so much easier if everyone can follow a system that works. And if you guys know what you actually need to do, because it's one thing for me to say, hey, we're going to have a call night, Monday's it from four to six and you guys need to come and pick up the phone. What's the target? You know, what do I need to do? I know I need to show up, but I don't know anything more than that. But there's another thing to say, hey, you know what, Monday from four to six, we're going to make 64 dials and you're going to end up with this many set appointments and this many sits and that kind of thing. So we'll walk through some of that. But here's my, here's my challenge to you guys. What you will, what you will want to do and I'm going to use, what I did as a new age, I'm going to show you what I did and then I'm going to show you what we're doing. Let me see a paper towel real quick actually too. Thank you buddy. Here's what I always did as a brand new agent. The only number that ever mattered to me as a brand new agent was this one and I wanted to sit with Tim. Now for the sake of, the sake of this program, Dallas has said, you know what, hey, let's do, I think he said 12, 8 and 4.  You're going to make money. You're going to do very well and get really close to making six figures, if not more in this business by doing that, by simply doing that. And then you say, well, go to that. And you know, Bruce is looking like, that doesn't seem very hard. I don't seem like a lot. Bruce, Ron, David, any way that's been in the business before, realize is that the average insurance agent gets in front of, what do you say, JVH 3? I would say one, two, three people a week. And so if this is a numbers game and if I'm only going and asking, it's Cam, right? I'm only going asking Cam and one other person. I'm only asking Cam and Jacob if they want to buy insurance this week. Guess what? The numbers aren't really in my favor very well because I'm only asking two people. Both may say yes. One may say yes. Then both may say no. And in that case, if I just sat with more people, picked up the phone more, made more dials, made more door knocks. That was one thing that I want to challenge you guys to do is, as a new agent, as an agent in general, be thinking about, you are, you are a, what I like to call a problem solver in general. In this business, Ron solved a lot of problems over the years because, and David mentioned earlier, with insurance, and I may get names wrong. I think I got it right, but okay. With insurance, it's, we are solving someone's problem. You're going there to sit with them, ask them questions. We're going to show you the four step appointment process later today, but you're going there to solve a potential future problem. And especially with life insurance, it's a problem at some point in the future. If it's, it's just weird.


Each year hundreds of Australians are killed, injured or made seriously ill by work. The human and financial costs are enormous. Importantly, these events are preventable. People can and will do something about safety issues if they know what the problems are, what works and why. Safe Work Australia and our members representing governments, industry and employees can answer these important questions. But sometimes getting this information out to people is difficult. Cost-effective and efficient information dissemination is a common challenge for many public sector organisations. Like many others, Safe Work Australia traditionally publishes information on the internet but we knew that we were not having the reach and the impact that we really needed. A better approach was required. Launched in Australia's Safety Month October 2014, the Virtual Seminar Series or VSS was the new approach. This initiative provides accurate, targeted and relevant health and safety information delivered by credible voices to the widest possible audience. It is a valuable innovation in our Health and Safety Communication Toolkit. The VSS live webinars, case studies and opinion pieces supported by engaging infographics and downloadable resources brought safety stories to life. Using multiple delivery platforms, the VSS is accessible to anyone at any time, anywhere with content streamed to mobile devices as well as workstations and available on a dedicated YouTube channel. Safe Work Australia's Safety Month app was updated so that people could get easy access to the VSS content on their mobile device. When people subscribed to our event we sent them calendar reminders. We went above and beyond the government minimum accessibility requirements. Closed captions were added to pre-recorded videos to assist viewers with hearing impairments. Transcripts of all presentations meant that people who did not have good internet bandwidth could access the unique material we presented. We recognised that our members held a goldmine of safety information. We just had to share it. We also knew that others operating within the health and safety system could provide invaluable advice. So we invited experts from around the world to contribute to our seminars. Last year Safe Work Australia bought together Australian and international experts to talk about health and safety. Why did we do that? Because we know that it's very confusing, there are lots of messages and we really wanted to present the best from local and around the world. At the virtual seminar series we bought together a great array of speakers including Professor Hudson from Delft University in the Netherlands, Diane Smith-Gander who's the Chairman of Transfield and Dr Simon Blackwood who's the lead regulator in Queensland to talk about issues like leadership and the role of the regulator in helping business proactively manage health and safety. Last year was the first time we used digital technology to get our message far and wide, to workplaces, to individuals, whether they're in the country, in the city, right across Australia. Safe Work Australia wanted the seminar series to be accessible to as many Australians as possible, so we made it available for free. A sense of inclusion in any safety conversation is critical and the innovative approach of the VSS gave everyone a seat at the table. The VSS had credible voices and real safety messages with contributions from the full spectrum of opinion leaders, from academics to business leaders to workers. People immediately saw value in our fresh approach to promoting work health and safety messages. As a result, leading thinkers often gave us their time for free. It was very pleasing to be involved in this event. It was fantastic to see businesses opening their doors and others see how they deal with difficult situations, difficult health and safety situations. Small businesses in particular would have benefited from this type of access. They don't have the time to go off to seminars, etc. Online access to this nature would have been fantastic for them. The VSS has proved to be an effective catalyst for ongoing safety discussions. Because all the resources are online, it has been integrated into company safety programs, tertiary studies, for example, by the RMIT, and accessed by overseas health and safety organisations. Seminar home pages gave people links to extra resources. In the past, health and safety has tended to get a pretty bad reputation for being very paper-heavy. And I think what's happened here has been quite a change. It's been a real shift to embracing social media, embracing that the information ought to be put out in a way that can be accessed at any time, anywhere. And also a real commitment to make sure that the best of evidence from around the world is brought to play in improving health and safety in Australia. I'm proud of SafeWork Australia because it's not easy from a governmental perspective to take a lead and take risks and actually do things differently. And I think they have in this case done just that. And it's worked. It's well and truly worked. I have plenty of evidence that the materials that have been produced have been reused. They've been reused in academia. They've been reused in industry. And I think they're going to continue to be accessed throughout the coming year or years. It was really important the way that world's best practice was addressed in this series, not just relying on homegrown knowledge and experience. So at the end of the month, you really felt as though you had drawn on the best of evidence that was available around the world to improve health and safety in our own workplaces. A small but dedicated SafeWork Australia team planned and created the first VSS, operating with a modest budget and learning important lessons along the way. Despite doing things which had never been attempted before by our agency such as live interactive panel discussions, the risks were managed and they were managed well. The number of viewers was 100 times what we could have expected from a traditional conference and eight times our original forecast. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Many people commented on the value of the interactive sessions and their high quality. Digital platforms delivering content to suit diverse audiences, which they can view when it suits them, will be an important government toolkit for communication. For SafeWork Australia, our virtual seminar series was such a success in 2014 that we're going to be using this approach again during both 2015 Safety Month and on key dates during the year. We will be using this platform to more effectively communicate our data and our research so that everyone can have access to these insights and make safety everyone's business.


A network intrusion detection system, NIDS, helps system administrators to detect network security breaches in their organizations. However, many challenges arise while developing a flexible and efficient NIDS for unforeseen and unpredictable attacks. We propose a deep learning-based approach for developing such an efficient and flexible NIDS. We use self-taught learning, STL, a deep learning-based technique, on NSLKDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion. We present the performance of our approach and compare it with a few previous work. Compaired metrics include accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure values. This article was authored by Amon Javade, Quamarniaz, Waching Sun, and others.