Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better. Teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable or Jupyter Notebook servers. Our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education. Future developments include a text and data mining service, working with satellite data and machine learning, and smart campus technology. Good morning. We are going to start the session. I'm Marie-Cruz Garcia. I will be chairing the session this morning. We have three outstanding presentations. I am going to remind everybody that in addition to obviously your questions and life interactions, you can also send any questions to the VBOX session. The meeting ID is there in the scenario. I think without any further ado, I'm going to give the floor to the first presenter. Mapping professional accreditation paid-wise in higher education is the survey from a systematic review and analysis and is Martin Jenkins from the Coventry University. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Martin Jenkins. My role is head of academic development at Coventry University. The work I'm talking about is work that I've been doing with Tom Cochran from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Tom, unfortunately, couldn't make it, but for those of you who know Tom, how keen he is, he has sent through some video, so I've weaved some video of Tom contributing to the presentation as part of this session. Before I start, there is a link there, the tiny URL, which has linked to a Google Drive, which has got some resources relevant to this presentation. Some of the things we're actually looking for feedback on as well, so there's copies of the slides, there's copies of Tom's full video, so please use that. I've also sent it round on the Twitter feed as well, so the link is sort of easily accessible. So the tiny URL, it's Y492XR8 and yay, so that will be useful to actually look at. So having done my introduction, I'm now going to sort of allow Tom to do his introduction. Welcome to our presentation for ALT-C 2019. We're looking at Mapping Professional Accreditation Pathways in Higher Education. My name is Thomas Cochran, I'm an academic advisor and senior lecturer in e-learning and learning technologies at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and I'm part of our Centre for Learning and Teaching. And alongside Martin Jenkins from Coventry University and the Accurate Development Unit, we're looking at the current state of the art of accreditation for teaching and learning in higher education, and in particular the mapping or the overlap between two main frameworks, which are the HEA Fellowship or Advanced HE Fellowship, and CMOLT, the Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology. And we're doing this by looking at the current literature, we're doing a systematic literature review to see what people have published on this already and to see what the gaps are to do a bit of analysis and see if there's a way of providing a bit more of a closer mapping between the two, particularly for people who want to explore getting CMOLT accreditation who already have HEA Fellowship or vice versa. So as part of this process, we're doing a systematic review through the Campbell Library. Now the Campbell Library has a very set process for doing this, it's a very structured systematic review process. I should pause it there because that should have stopped. So Tom introduced the sort of three main strands of what we're going to do in terms of the systematic review, the mapping work, and also makes reference to the CMOLT CMOOK, which I shall come to, and these are the sort of key questions that we've sort of come up with for part of the work. Now the background to this comes from a conversation that Tom and I had following the results of the most recent USISA Technology Enhanced Learning Survey, and it heads up that that will be being repeated again next year. And through that survey, it highlighted again how we're not yet getting the full potential of learning technologies within the sector. And then highlighted the need for more professional development activity within the sector as a whole, which reinforces some of the points that Sue raised yesterday in her Keenery and Jesse this morning as well, that we need that sort of more critical sort of analysis of technologies and how we're actually using them. And that led Tom and I on to sort of a conversation about the use of frameworks such as the UK PSF and the HTA accreditation and the role of CMOLT and what impact they were actually having on practice. We recognize that these frameworks have been beneficial in terms of actually sort of setting standards, sort of that professionalization, again something that Melissa mentioned when in the opening of the sort of conference yesterday, and also used in sort of progression pathways now. So they bring very much some personal benefits to those who are actually engaged in going through the accreditation process in terms of encouraging sort of the conversations, the confidence that comes from the sort of the peer recognition, but what's the evidence of actually of those, of the engagement actually on sort of practice. So that's the sort of why we're doing the sort of systematic analysis to actually sort of see what the literature says about that. And at the moment I say the indications are that that's potentially sort of the evidence is not quite there in that respect. So I'll go back to Tom, who will explain a little bit more about that systematic review. Thank you all and welcome to our presentation for ALT-C 2019. Apologies for this, my testing of the thing not worked. As part of this process, we're doing a systematic review through the Campbell Library. Now the Campbell Library has a very set process for doing this. It's a very structured systematic review process and we're in the process of doing that, we haven't finished yet, but some interesting things are coming out of that systematic review. So as part of that process, we do a title registration, we do a protocol, the review protocol looks at the review criteria that we're looking at, the databases that we're searching, the key words that we're using, and does it in a reproducible way. So, so far we've looked at Scopus, Web of Science, Eric and Google Scholar, looking with various key words around higher education, professional development, mapping and the scholarship of teaching and learning. And thus far there's certainly a gap in the literature, there's a gap around, particularly around Seamold accreditation, there's a gap around the impact of accreditation frameworks, and there's really nothing at the moment that looks at mapping these different accreditation pathways. So we think this might be of interest to people to look at and see what some of the ways of perhaps cross-pollinating between the two frameworks and some of the issues around the impact and professional development of these accreditation pathways. So, Martin will talk you through a little bit more about... So we've started the systematic analysis, the flow diagram here sort of represents sort of where we're at at the moment, so Tom sort of highlighted the databases that we've actually sort of made use of, identified sort of couple of thousand sort of potential references which have been screened down and then sort of filtered further, and there's sort of like 36 sort of items that have been sort of particularly sort of highlighted, and again there's a list of those in the Google folder of people are actually interested, and one of the reasons for doing this sort of systematic analysis is that it's there as something that can be sort of replicable, so if people are interested they can also be repeating exactly the same sort of the research that we're actually doing at the moment, so the work that Tom and I are doing now is to actually go through that and then we'll say we'll be hoping to sort of publish the outcomes for that analysis. The next element that we've sort of referenced to this day is the mapping of the Seamult and the UK PSF, and those of you who know Tom will be aware of how sort of passionate it is about the Seamult sort of generally and sort of pushing that but the issue that again as part of our conversation that we were conscious of is that in both of our cases and we don't think we can be unique in this is that how our institutions put much more emphasis on getting HEA accreditation, but again recognising the things that have been said at this conference about encouraging more professional development and getting more people to be sort of more digital champions and sort of being critical around sort of pedagogy is about how can we perhaps encourage more people down the Seamult route. Now we're aware that there's been mapping done by a lot of the UK PSF to the Seamult but that's fairly high level maps the actual dimensions of the UK PSF against the core areas of Seamult and we were thinking perhaps could we do something that's perhaps a little bit more practical that might help people with that sort of translation. Now this is where we need your feedback so the approach we've taken is to look at some evidence that people have used as part of HEA applications and then just to sort of list those against the core areas on the Seamult with an indication of which dimension they've been used in the HEA application. So it's giving people more practical examples of what evidence could be used and how it sort of relates and they could sort of cross populate in that respect and I say this is just a screenshot of the table the full table is available on the Google Docs so please have a look at it give us your feedback. Is it useful? Have you got any other ideas or examples that would actually help enhance this as well? We're always happy to receive that. So that's the sort of process and I say that we really need sort of feedback now is to sort of where this is actually practicable and useful as a sort of a way forward. The third element as part of what we're doing and this is building on work that Tom has been doing for a number of years now is providing that support structures for people through the Seamult process. Now Tom's been running this Seamult Seamook this online sort of network and he's very keen to make that sort of an international collaboration. We've had we've had one member of staff from Coventry go through the process but Liz who's actually is now deserted us for the University of Highlands and Islands who actually sort of was a participant in this network to help her get her Seamult accreditation. The next iteration of this support network is running again starting on sort of the 20th of September and say Tom will be is really keen for Peter to participate in that and open that as a network. I say it's not a sort of how to in terms of policing the Seamult is there very much as that sort of sharing networks again picking up points that Sue was raising yesterday the importance of that sort of sharing and collaboration in what we actually do. Now Tom is going to talk about this. I'm hoping this may jump to the beginning again. This is a structured framework for supporting Seamult accreditation. So HAA Fellowship has has a very structured support network, very, very structured support across UK, Australia and increasingly New Zealand. But there's been very little structured support for Seamult accreditation. So what we've developed is a Seamook, a Connectivist MOOC. And we've run this four times already. We're about to start the fifth iteration of this and we'd be really keen for people to join us in this journey, join this community or practice effectively a network of like one of people wanting to explore issues around learning technologies. And at the same time looking at the potential of creating any portfolio for Seamult accreditation. So we run a weekly webinar. We have a course hub for this. So it's on WordPress. So it's Seamult Seamook one word dot WordPress.com. There's a sign up page there if you're interested in joining us. We're aiming to kick off our next iteration on the 20th of September. So only a couple of weeks after the conference, we're going to have an initial webinar, which will introduce the Seamook and hopefully Martin will be able to join us for that. And then each week we'll have a weekly webinar discussing the weeks activities, the issues around different parts of the portfolio and what it means, and also create this international network. So the final thing to mention linked to this, which is some of the Tom's asked to push, is they are also developing through AUT, are these SOTL, so the Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning, which is a term that's come out of work that Tom has been doing, that sort of research network clusters, there are a number of those that he's keen to sort of get people involved in and linked to that also they have a symposium in February. And again, details of those are there and again, links within this sort of presentation. And so that so you can follow up on those if you're actually sort of interested. So that's the sort of the overview. I say very much sort of work in progress that we're doing at the moment. Around those three strands of actually doing the systematic analysis of the impact of the accreditation frameworks, starting to do some mapping to see whether there's that's practical value to encourage that sort of sort of linkages between the UK PSS and CMOLT and that greater engagement in professional development activity linked to technology enhanced learning. And then there's also there's a practical support network that's sort of being developed. The links to a lot of the resources mentioned, I say in the presentation up on the sort of the Google doc. And I say, we do welcome your feedback. So contact Tom or myself. And so really, really do want to hear from you. So thank you very much. So in terms of the impact of the framework, that's the systematic analysis. So we're actually looking at what the literature is saying in the first instance. And as I say, initial indications are at the moment that there is evidence that, particularly for people have gone through HGA accreditation, that there's a lot of benefit for individuals in terms of their own sort of personal sort of confidence. And it does sort of foster the conversations around teaching and learning. But the evidence that it's feeding through in terms of having impact of practice doesn't seem to be there yet. So there's seems to suggest there's more work needed, either to sort of prove that there is impact, or it's whether or not. I mean, the other thing that we are conscious of is whether or not the use of HGA accreditation is being taken over more as a now it's a sort of requirement for lead table requirements. And it's being done because people have to do it for more of a tipbox exercise required by the institution rather than as a developmental sort of an opportunity for the individuals. Is Kate Limsey from the University College of State Management, her presentation, reaching through the screen care as a new scaffolding to support online education? Hi. Oh, wow. This is some room, right? I'd like to start off by thanking the conference organisers for scheduling me to speak in this room. It's such a wonderful opportunity and it's such a beautiful venue. And it's great to see some friends in the audience as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to come and listen to me today. And thank you all for taking the time to come and listen to this. My slides I will make my slides available after this on my blog. I'll put up the link again at the end and also sort of a shortened transcript of what I'm saying today and there's the recording so it'll be available in different format should you want it. Okay, I'm here today to talk about scaffolding online education. I am going to talk quite a bit about my institution, its values, the students that we have, because that's core to the conversation that I want to have about what may need to change with the way we think about scaffolding at the moment to support students from many different backgrounds and with many different responsibilities. And then I'm going to look at a bit of work in progress that we're doing at my institution and transforming our educational provision and thinking about how we can support and scaffold our students better to be part of an online learning community. Okay, so I lead the learning design work at the University College of Estate Management. The institution was set up in 1919. It's our centenary year we're having lots of celebrations around that. And it was set up to provide free technical education to the sons of men who died were wounded or impoverished by the Great War. By the time it got to the 1940s, the institution was offering a lot of correspondence courses, including to the military prisoners of war and the women's land army. And in the late 1960s, we became associated with the University of Reading. We built this gorgeous building in Redding's on Redding's campus. I didn't mention this before building was our original location in London, but that was bombed during the Second World War. And Redding provided the validation for our degrees. In 2013, we received our own award bearing powers, so we could award our own degrees. And in 2016, we moved to our new building in the center of Reading. And this is a lovely sketch done by one of our architectural technologists. We provide 13 programs of study which cover areas related to the built environment. So that would be real estate, building surveying, quantity surveying, architectural technology, very vocational degrees and quite often the end point is accreditation through a professional body, so the Chartered Institute of Surveys and so on. One of the core values that we have is sustainability. And I want to mention this because I think it does provide a nice character for the institutional worker and explains why I'm so proud to work at that institution. Stainability is a theme that runs throughout all our programs of study and it's in the way that we live and we work in our environment. Our building, I think, was classed as the most sustainable building in higher education in the UK. Our carpets are made from recycled fishing nets, we have solar panels on the roof, we send zero waste to landfill and we keep bees, which is particularly lovely. Sustainability is a challenge that our students will face when they enter industry along with other challenges such as housing supply. These are really tricky problems that we have to prepare them for. Housing supply, there are not enough houses and the houses that are around are too expensive for many people to buy. Health and wellbeing is another important aspect of the built environment. We need to design buildings and we need to design places so that they're good places for people to live and work. We need to think about air quality, we need to think about how we get food to people, we need to think about green space and preserving biodiversity. Health and wellbeing is also particularly important within the construction industry and the built environment industry at an operational level. Mental health illness has been called the silent epidemic of the construction industry. Men who work in the construction industry are three times more likely to commit suicide than the average man in the UK and it's now one of the greatest portion of illnesses we find in that industry. And again, sustainability, we have depleting resources in our planet. We need to think about the materials that we build our buildings with. For example, if we build 200,000 homes a year out of timber, that absorbs about 3.8 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a lot of issues that our students will need to be facing and think about in terms of urban growth and population growth. So in terms of our students, who are they? We only one time teach around 4,000 students. They come from 100 different countries. 20% of our students are on apprenticeship degree programs. Only about 3% of full time, the rest are part-time students and with the exception of our apprentice students, we are fully online university. Our apprentices have to come and do some workshops, but other than that, all our education is virtual. 90% of our students are over 21 years of age. The average age is 31, so we very much cater for the mature students. 30% of our students are female. 10% have a declared disability and we have 25% of students from BAME. But I do should mention there that 10% of our students are Chinese and we have offices in Hong Kong, so the remaining 50% is below what we would be striving for. But these figures very much represent the industry. And our students come to us from industry. Our relationship at recruitment is with employers rather than the student and the parent. So there's a problem there in industry that needs to be addressed and there's some great work being done by some of our trustees and some of the professional bodies we're working with to enhance that. So our students have a number of tricky problems that they face in their everyday lives. They have a number of commitments. They may have caring responsibilities. They're often in full-time work. They have to juggle work commitments around what they do. The construction industry is very stressful. It's a higher and far culture. And things like Grenfell and Carillion have highlighted the dysfunctional and unsustainable and stressful aspects of the industry that these people are working in. And I wonder how many of our students have one of these in their house. I know I certainly have one of these angels in my house. I'm harking back to Virginia Woolf here and she wrote an essay called Killing the Angel in the House. And the angel for Virginia Woolf was someone who was always present and telling you, don't do something for your own gains. Don't work on yourself. You have to look after your children. You have to look after your house. You have to put everything else ahead of you because you need to be a good, meek person. And Virginia Woolf, she didn't want that.  I had to give my angel a decent amount of concussion to come here this week because Alt is always held on the first week of term, that the schools go back in the UK. And I should be at home setting my kids into their new school year, but I had to stand up to my angel and say, actually, this is one thing this year I want to do. But this is something our students are facing every day. Full-time employment, caring responsibilities, mature students. They always have someone sat on their shoulder telling them they should be doing something else instead. So it has been proposed that scaffolding is a very good way to help students move through their studies and their online environment and to support them to stay within that environment. Now, when I talk about scaffolding in my place of work, people don't think about students and they don't think about education. I think about this type of scaffolding that goes at the side of buildings. But the definition is just as relevant to education as it is to the industry in which I work. Scaffolds are a temporary form of access used to create a safe working platform at height. They have to be the right type of scaffolding for the building. So it has to be the right type of scaffolding for the student. It follows a series of controls. We need to keep checking that that scaffolding is appropriate. We need to assess the risks and issue clear instructions to people who are working on scaffolding. It is the responsibility of a team to erect scaffolding. And we can also use ladders when required. So it's not just the structure. We'll move ladders around the scaffolding so we can get up to different levels. Now, in terms of scaffolding online education, a meta-analysis found that there were four main types of scaffolding used. Conceptual. This is where we scaffold students and explain to them what they have to choose what it is they want to learn, what's important to them, what are the important concepts. Procedural. This is very much about getting students familiar with the right tools and resources to be able to achieve the learning. Strategic. Which is about scaffolding our students to find alternative ways to solve complex problems and metacognitive, which is supporting students to reflect on what they have learned. Now, these types of scaffolding, they're all great. They're great for learning activities. And if designed well, they will work really well. But I believe that our students face more problems than actually getting to grips with their learning objectives and how to achieve certain skills and competencies and knowledge. Oh, that's kind of gone off the screen a bit. Well, the top quote is that actually online learners, we have much higher rates of attrition for online learners still than we do for face-to-face learners, despite all the scaffolding and all the research. And I know it's early days yet, but that level is still very high. And there's other research that shows that whilst online provision gives more access to education, and something we do at UCM, there's multiple entry points. Students can study as few or as many modules at a time as they wish we provide incredibly flexible educational moving barriers. But once those learners are enrolled in that space, they find that they can actually be more disadvantaged and that achievement gets widened. And this could be down to having to have an awful lot of self-management and tackling those other responsibilities in their life. At UCM, for about the past year or so, we have been working hard to transform our educational provision. We're a fully online university that basically took correspondence courses and put them in a digital space. Very reading heavy, not too much interaction, unclear reasons why students were undertaking the assessments they were taking. We've implemented a new learning design model which very much focused on students because we teach students, not content, and we call this student outcome-led design. It's nothing new. It's backwards design. We start with the learning objectives and then the assessments and we design all the learning activities to ensure they are relevant to meet those. We've been thinking a lot about how we can be more present for our students online and offering a lot more opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous discussion. So, going back to some of the things that Jesse said and Sue said yesterday, it's about being able to have reactivity in the online space. It's not too structured, being able to have a conversation and exchange and learn from each other and understand each other. We're also employing a lot more pedagogies in our teaching. So, largely they're participatory and active pedagogies, but we need them to be authentic. They need to be aligned to the workplace. They need to be situated so we can ask students to go off and do something in the real world or the physical world, their workplace and bring it back to their online place and take things in the online place and take those into the physical world. We're introducing a lot more problem-solving activities and all these together create a student experience. But again, these lend themselves to the types of scaffolding I just mentioned. What we want to look at is how we put a framework around our educational model and help students support each other in an online space, work with their tutors as well, become part of a community and create a place, a virtual campus almost, because the thing about online education and our online education, you can't create an individual scaffolding for each student because it's got to work at scale. And some of our modules, we have 600 students enrolled. We can't spend a significant amount of time with each of those students. So, how do we create an environment and an opportunity for students to support each other with help from us whenever they need it and they feel they can ask for that help as well? So, our scaffolding is called care and it stands for kindness, awareness, reflective and engaged. Now, in my abstracts, I think awareness was accessible and engaged, was ethical and this has all changed over the past six months. It's still care, but we wanted to pull the things out that weren't present in our educational model and put those into the scaffolding. So, it has shifted slightly and I apologise that it's slightly different in the abstract. If you want to know more about accessibility I can talk to the ends of the earth about that and W3C standards and universal design for learning and all that, but that's a completely different talk. Okay, so it's clear we need to provide scaffolding that would provide support for the person, not necessarily for the learning, for them to be a person in the online environment. Our scaffolding models kindness to students, so we always start from place of trust. We trust that they're ready to engage. We trust them that they want to be there and we try and develop a sense that they can trust us as well of being open and showing our own vulnerabilities to them. To create cohesion, we support students to develop awareness. Now, if we think of awareness as in three spheres that kind of fit inside each other, the first innermost sphere is really about getting that self-awareness of your own basic needs as a learner and person in the world. Without this awareness, we can't manage our feelings, the way we work, our reactions and we can't practice kindness to ourselves which is really important when you're in an environment that is maybe not as human as one you are used to. The second sphere is awareness about those people in our immediate context that's fine about those people in our immediate context and that could be our students and our tutors and our academic facilitators. It enables us to support each other and when we link that back to our self-awareness, we call that empathy. The third sphere is awareness of the world around us and the people we may not have contacts with every day and it can include issues as well like caring for our planet, caring for our urban environment, our built environment, becoming more aware of the impact that our actions may have on a larger context. We are students to reflect on this and this is one of the key points throughout their studies and this awareness of each other and the industry they're working in will help them to communicate more with each other and become part of the community. And finally engaged, we want to encourage students to discuss this and we're implementing some quite innovative ways for our students to engage in our online provision going forward including which I know Matt has been talking about. I went to an interesting event a few weeks ago on that and we're looking at new ways that our students can collaborate, can feed back, can feed up and can act on feedback. There's all kinds of stuff happening in that engagement area. So I'm just going to give you one example because it's all well and good saying about this framework but I struggle to understand frameworks unless I can in practice and when I write my blog I'll put a few more examples up there as well so you can kind of see some of the stuff we're doing. Down the side here we have the steps of an online learning task. It's for our module digital technologies and this is one of the very first tasks called technology and you. We begin by asking our students just to brainstorm together everyday technologies that they will use. They then move on to do a record of their technology day. So over 24 hours they have to record how they engage with an interact with technology, what they use, where they encounter it. They can use whatever tools they want to do this and we give guidance and support around using things like Instagram or Twitter because of all the privacy issues but we want to make it as accessible as possible. They can do it as a word doc but the most important thing is that they will share it with each other at the end of their technology day. They'll choose another couple more students' categories and look at those, they look at what's the same, what's different, they become aware of how they encounter technology and those students may be in different countries so that could be quite interesting. We then ask them to watch a video which provides a model on how we can think about how we engage with technology and then they ask to create their own digital engagement map and share that and then that all feeds into an online seminar which is more of a workshop where we look at the maps and explore them in detail. So the care in that comes from helping students get started making it about them, making them look at themselves. The awareness is self-awareness, the awareness is becoming aware of their peers and when they reflect they examine why some things are different and some things are the same and there's an opportunity to discuss and apply it to the wider context and this task feeds into future tasks on digital footprints and privacy and data security so it's a good starting point for that. These are some of the other areas that we're looking at where we can implement our care scaffolding. Online seminars, not webinars, we're encouraging activities whereby students collaboratively annotate course syllabi and assessment briefs so they really engage with that from the very start and they understand why it's relevant. Many more integrated projects and team assignments are introducing e-portfolios and tools where they can reflect and they can engage and they can learn about one another. So just to finish scaffolding is a temporary structure but scaffolding can actually remain in place for years. It may be there for a few weeks and I would say that's the type of scaffolding that we use for online learning activities but we need a more permanent structure to support our online students become part of a community to feel they're part of a place that can support them and where they can grow as a person. It needs to remain in place until our work is done as educators and they leave us to enter the built environment and that connected networked environment. Thank you very much. For one question if there is none in the audience perhaps there was questions in VBOX we can have one. So Kate made your pick. Do you have any questions if you want to? If I could have a copy of these I can answer them in my blog as well. Do you find there are significant differences in digital literary skills amongst your students and how do you address these? That would be really good to know. We need to understand that. All our students are virtual apart from the apprentices who come into our workshop and we are starting a body of work at the moment to try and assess what those students' digital literacy skills are. We have a wide cohort and I hate the term natives and immigrants and I'm not going to use it. There's a wide variety of skills but I think the skills that we also need to be very mindful of aren't so much on how to use a computer. They are very much about things like data security privacy, how to be a community online and what the opportunities and the negative aspects of that are. But as I said, we're working with GIS going forward to do an assessment of our students. It's really important to look at how our staff digital literacy is as well because our staffs we're an institution where learning designers work on a par with academic staff and that's one of the reasons why I love it there. We bring the educational knowledge the academic staff bring the subject knowledge but many of them come from industry as well may not have any teaching experience or digital teaching experience when they join us. So there's a whole heap of literacies that we need to address and something about transforming our educational provision means that it's giving us a launch pad to do some of that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Last but not least is we have Sheila McNeil and Keith Smith presenting Imagining the Digital University a new contextual framework for university development. Let's go to the next building Keith's chair is presenting so we're probably going to go through this a little bit quicker than normal and we might not have We might not have time for questions but put them on there and we will try and answer them or tweet them or just come and see us throughout the conference. So again, thank you very much for having us. Some of you might be familiar with this work because this is something that Keith and I have been working on oh gosh for the last how many years seems quite... Yeah and all has been quite an important part in our work and as working with the community in what we're doing so we're delighted to be back here and kind of share with you what we've been up to in the last year. Oh Dan, you said yes. Nobody could hear me, could you? Can you see me though? That's the thing. I was going to sit down but that really wasn't going to work but it's quite taken with Jesse doing that this morning. So really just to give you some context of what we've been doing, we published a book earlier this year which has been the culmination of a lot of thought over the last sort of six or seven probably eight years and it's actually it's been really interesting it was a really interesting process in itself as writing a book always is but actually as we all know it's been very interesting times and as we were writing the book a lot of things changed when we started this work. It was a time before Trump, it was a time there was a time before Brexit so it's been quite interesting writing this and trying to keep something up to date but really we've been looking about what is a digital university what does that mean not in terms of finding an answer but actually finding ways to have some of the discussions and the things that Jesse was talking about this morning some of the critical discussions around what that actually means for staff and students and for a wider society and we really were trying to, originally we didn't set up about doing that but the more we were doing this we're really starting to try and find ways to challenge some of the neoliberalism that is all around us the context that we're all living in and it was very much a discuss of a reflective process and as we were doing that it became very obvious to us that critical pedagogy was the theory that was most resonated most with the work that we were doing and that really became our critical frame of reference we're also all quite passionate about open education so these were the kind of things that we wanted to bring into I suppose our narrative and our discussions so in terms of critical pedagogy obviously we have critical pedagogy of the oppressed but we actually looked to some earlier work by Freire about education for criticality I'm sorry I'm going to forget the name of the book here isn't that just typical when you're being live streamed but education for critical consciousness and some of the things that he was talking about there about the transformation of Brazil at that time from an agrarian to an industrial society really resonated with what we were seeing happening just now in terms of what was happening in our digital society about the digital giants that were coming in and in many ways I think oppressing us in our institutions and our wider society so we were very much looking at that and looking at what praxis really meant and kind of unpacking our own understanding of that and as we were doing that our own praxis as well but really we were looking at and I'm going to read this what do we mean when we were talking about praxis as a collective understanding that's derived from cycles of dialogue and experiential learning and a commitment to challenging and changing that which needs to be challenged and changed as we were exploring and researching literature around digital education practice and the notion of change within the curriculum, within learning and teaching within the university we came across this word transformation an awful lot and you find that that's kind of proliferates across the literature on digital education practice and change and we explored some of the literature surrounding some of the institutional initiatives around large scale change if you like but we also looked at what had happened with some of the major institutional and digital education initiatives of the last sort of 20 years and I've been involved in some of these we looked at some of the work of the Pew Foundation in the States sort of 15 years ago or so and one of the questions this raised to us when we talk about the use of digital within learning and teaching and within education the question that comes back when you look at this literature is transformation of what and for whom and as we looked closer we could see lots of really good examples within institutions, within cross institutional projects where there being real kind of enhancement to learning and teaching to the curriculum the emergence of kind of they're not new but the emergence in digital contexts of participant pedagogic approaches collaborative pedagogies and so forth however one of the things that struck us was that when we talk about this notion of transformation in relation to learning and teaching and significant change on more than you know a kind of isolated or local level of practice what we tend to see with some of the projects that have been undertaken in recent years is often there's a very strong legacy there's models, there's case studies there's rubrics there's things that can support ongoing change should we choose to use them but really most of what tends to happen is that there might be some continuing enhancement but there's no broadening out of change across a whole institution or across a number of collaborative institutions or across the sector to free area in this notion of educational practice challenging changing that which needs challenged and changed one of the things that we were most interested in as we developed this work was the role of digital spaces and practices in extending higher education as a public good democratising higher education and allowing wider society to benefit from higher education regardless of whether individuals were aspiring to be in higher education so really we were talking about the outputs of the curriculum the worker students undertake other aspects of what the digital helps the universities do and ultimately a big theme that came out of our work in terms of looking at this against the neoliberal dominantly neoliberal perspective was a focus on people in the pedagogy not just the technology and the managerialism so many of you will have probably seen this at all presentations before Bill and I originally started doing the work we came up with this matrix as a way to help us understand the main things that were happening in the university in terms of digital things so we chose these four quadrants won't go through them in too much detail but things that we felt that most people in the institution could relate to so we have curriculum and course design we have the learning environment the physical and the digital participation at that point there was quite a lot happening in the Scottish government around about that so again and then looking at the civic role and responsibilities of universities where they're situated and how they participate within local and global communities we very much saw information literacy as a high level concept as well we're seeing digital literacy as kind of a subset of that as well so that's where we started quite a lot of I think we got good traction we did the usual things we wrote some papers, went to some conferences wrote some blog posts that's where we connected with Keith and this grew but as we were doing as I said, realised there was much more to unpack so over the last year and a half as we've been writing the book this is what our model looks like now so we've added a layer of academic development and open educational practice and we've tried to make this much more of a three-dimensional tool if you like and we see this almost if you like as just a starting point for discussions that people could use to start questioning their own context within an institution and actually the wider political context that we all live in, Jesse mentioned many things about the kinds of technologies that we buy in institutions but also that doesn't happen just within the institution there's a wider political environment that we're living in there is a neoliberal agenda around about education and what people think education should be as a business, as a service that is driving some of these things as well so we need to be able to start questioning that and have that wider discussion with people so that we can start developing I suppose tools and frameworks and ways of working that are meaningful to us and our students and one of the things that we've come up with really in terms of academic development and roles of learning technologists as well that we see academic developers and learning technologists as a central part of any kind of digital transformation and actually again to echo that a lot that said this morning academic development itself actually needs to be much more critical in terms of what it's doing and it can be very central to any kind of transformation there's a lot of porosity between roles just now many people are you know if you're an educational developer, if you're an academic if you're a learning technologist there's a lot of crossover in everything that we do particularly around the use of digital technologies that's with our students as well and I think there's a huge opportunity to work more closely together but also to work in terms of giving some more bottom-up approaches to some of the strategic decisions that need to be taken within our institutions and I think in terms of that criticality we also need to be challenging some of the structures that we perpetuate as well and looking at CPD that's provided looking at the metrics that we're providing back to people as well and we actually need to be modelling that kind of critical pedagogy notions of dialogue of discursive dialogue and actually getting people to realise that if you want to have transformation it's not just about buying a system that will solve everything because it won't it's as Jesse was saying it's about investing in people it's about having conversations with everybody and with our wider communities as well so in the work we explore the ways in which we might re-centre or refocus the digital in relation to our institutions our pedagogic practices the notion of higher education as a public good and one of the things that we kind of honed in on towards the end of our work was looking at the curriculum as an open and negotiated space and trying to move beyond conceptions of the curriculum as the kind of syllabus that we engage our students in or the process of development because hopefully it is also a process of personal development but we were really interested in the curriculum as something that we're all engaged in within higher education to some extent or another as a co-located space and place and what that might mean in relation to how we harness the digital and in probably quite a modest way we were seeking to try and extend if we could notions of the curriculum to a wider context that related to higher education being extended as a public good and which also dealt with or perhaps sought to reframe aspects of things like open education practice as well so we won't go through this in detail there isn't time and we're conscious to try and finish on 12 but we've put forward a model of the digitally distributed curriculum if you like which we've tried to make evidence based drawn on our own work and looked at things in the sector to try and arrive at this model and conceptualize the curriculum as a kind of negotiated and co-located space and place the way in which we conceptualize this is around values enabling dimensions and what we call instantiation and enactment the practical ways of getting this done so at the heart of the model we're talking about praxis participation and public pedagogy changing that which needs challenged and changed public pedagogy in relation to not just how we engage externally but how our pedagogies are negotiated with those in our wider communities and participation participation in the activities of the curriculum not just for our students and our lecturers our academics but participation in the activities of the curriculum for those beyond the institution one of the things that we were we thought was really important to this in terms of our enabling dimensions was co-location co-production porosity which she just mentioned and also open scholarship and we go into these in a lot of detail within the work itself one of the things I'll just draw attention to very quickly is around porosity and co-location and we felt across both these dimensions it was really important to try and move away from quite a dominant rhetoric really around in which we conflate open with the open online and open digital and we were seeking to look at how the open online might co-exist and intersect with the open on campus and the open in the community and for us there are lots of implications there around self-selected digital learning spaces the intersection between formal and informal learning communities and also our digitally rich spaces in the community not just our campus spaces but our libraries, our public spaces which provide opportunities to widen access to education formally and informally and to enact a more negotiated curriculum now we're conscious that we focus this on the digitally distributed curriculum we explain in the work that actually this could easily have been framed as a digitally distributed higher education or digitally distributed learning and teaching but there are particularly reasons why we sought to focus on the curriculum and we're looking to as we take our work forward apply this in various contexts and further develop these ideas and for anyone that happened to be at the session that Scott Conner and I did I don't think we've got five minutes if we want people to get on but we'll finish just now in relation if anyone came to session at Scott Conner I did yesterday we are taking this as a key point to frame the development of a new open education framework at UHI we are digitally in distributed university across a wide geographic region so the intersection of the open online open on campus and open in the community is something we want to use this to try and take forward Sheila have you got any concluding points I think obviously we're just running through this very quickly there's an awful lot that we've tried to pack in here but I think we just want to see that actually the support and the interest that we've got from the Oat community has been really valuable to us as we've done our work as we've written the book so we really appreciate the opportunity to come back and speak to you also there's lots that we have done there's lots that we haven't done there are many areas that we just didn't have the time or the space to put into the book so we'd be really interested in speaking to you more about this and having a longer discussion with you if you would like just come and see us find us over the next day and a half and we'd love to discuss this and talk about what we've done in our work and more about our thoughts please do find us thank you and I think there is no time because now it's 12 o'clock thank you we definitely keep in touch with Keith and Sheila and enjoy the rest of the conference future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with notable our Jupiter Notebook service our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better


The Watermark Arts Center in Bemidji held its grand opening this past weekend and the place was packed. The Watermark Arts Center has been a part of the community for 35 years. They used to be in the Carnegie Library building, but got this new property in 2012. The new exhibit features four different galleries, including one focused on Bemidji State University and another dedicated to Native American art. There's four galleries that people can come and experience work at and we also have an education room, which we've never had before. So the opportunities with the education room, the multiple galleries and the green space really provides us with somewhat unlimited potential of what we can do for the arts in our area. There are several hundred pieces of art in the Watermark building. Visitors can stop by weekdays 10 to 5. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


We are now going to discuss how one might go about monitoring draws and assessing their potential impact. So to do so we need some data. The data one might want to use here is naturally climate data or weather data, specifically for example recent precipitation. So let's pick from the weather set and the GFS, as the precipitation. So the idea would be we look for areas where in the recent past there has been generally low precipitation. And then we could add for example minimum temperature. Here the rationale being that you know if the temperature is high the effect of low precipitation increases the impact of this quite a lot. So now that we have these two data layers, let's pick an area. So for this example, let's pick part of Ethiopia where there have been draws in 2017. And now we can filter this. Okay, so let's add as a filter here the population density with the IDB in that you know in areas of low population density the effect of the draw is maybe not that problematic. We're interested in areas where there's more than five people per square kilometer as a density. Now that we like to select this filter, we should pick the time window. So today is March the 5th and we said you know let's go a bit into the past for the precipitation and a bit into the future for the temperature. And we can do aggregation here. So for the precipitation we pick the sum to get the total for the minimum temperature to take them mean is maybe the most relevant quantity here. So to say this again, we're now querying for areas in East Africa where there's population higher than a certain threshold and for these areas we're considering the accumulated precipitation from the last four days in comparing this against the mean minimum temperature forecast for the next three days. Okay, of course, here we actually approximate the accumulated precipitation by its forecast. So we submit this and as in previous examples, we've actually ran this query previously so we can take a look at the result immediately. So you see here now this is the population density. Okay, where we've scaled the color chart a bit so that you know right areas are sort of you know going to saturation at 250 and then you know you see here how some areas have been cut out where the population density is very very low and then we compare for these areas the accumulated precipitation you know we see there's been a very low precipitation in the western in the east and similarly we can compare this with the average minimum temperature you know which surprisingly is very high specifically by here in the east.


In Kempo, we have strong symbolism with the tiger and the dragon. The tiger embodies physical and earthly strength, while the dragon signifies a higher level of being, awareness, and discipline. We learn how to become the dragon so that we can control the tiger. But what we're going to discuss today is, sometimes you have to keep the dragon in check too.   We all know about how you're going to get better memory and how you're going to get better intention and all that. That's ingrained in us as we train. But today I want to talk about more of a few things that, if you're a beginner, some things you can look forward to and stuff to keep in mind, and also stuff that might be easy to forget even once you get experience. So the first thing is, understand the material better. This to me is paramount because why train if you don't understand it? If you are a new student, don't just memorize what you're being taught. It's not a matter of just learning the motions, learning the movements, and then repeating them. You have to break them down. So, and that's a big mistake that a lot of beginners make is, oh, my instructor told me to do this. I'm just going to do this. If you're allowed to ask questions, I know a lot of traditional arts are not allowed to ask questions, but a lot of modern day ones you are, I encourage asking. Understand what you're doing. If you're not sure why you're stepping a certain way or why Akata has this move or why you're doing this grab, ask. Ask for a breakdown and be mindful of it. So as you train and get more moves, see how they relate to each other. So as you continue, it's just like in school, if you're just going to memorize a paragraph for a test or memorize test answers, you're not going to retain that information. You want to understand it. So and my instructor always used to say to me, too, is you don't really understand the technique until you can explain it to somebody else. So that also rang true, and that helps when you're teaching. If you can teach a technique to somebody else or at least explain it, then that gives you a better understanding of it versus just memorizing the motion. That also applies to if you're experienced, you know.   A lot of systems, it's not just you do A, then you do B, then you do C. There's layers. Kempo, especially, I'm going back to my earliest material, and I know people, other arts, they're going back to their wipeout material, and they're finding patterns. They're finding things, even little tiny things they didn't know before, and it's kind of reinvigorating them. I'm appreciating the material much better because I'm seeing the relationship better. So even if you're experienced, go back to your beginner stuff and see if you can find more. Or how can you, if you figure it out, how can you apply more meaning to it if you don't find it already built in there? And this even applies. I know I said the word cotton.  This doesn't help you fight. This applies to all martial arts, in my opinion, even MMA and sports fighting. When you learn to be a better fighter, are you just memorizing how to throw a jab or punch, or do you work strategy? There's always a better way to go back to material and make it more efficient, make it more effective, whether it's speed or less damage to your body, whatever. There's a lot of ways you can still go back and refine. And on that note, I do want to recommend a channel called Hard to Hurt by IC Mike. He's an MMA fighter. He's got a lot of fantastic tips. He takes a lot of basic fighting tips, and he expands on them, and he kind of breaks them down, and he shows you a lot of great insight. So basically, this topic relates to all martial arts, whether you're in it for sport, whether you're in it for self-defense, or you want it just for kata or mental health, whatever. You can always find a way to improve what you're learning. So the martial arts are great for stress relief and focus. Well, why? Well, there's the obvious reason. One, exercise is known to help you with blood pressure and help you kind of focus on what you're doing. To me, and a lot of martial arts I know, it just feels good to move sometimes. When you get into a groove, when you're focusing on your motions and you get your body and mind working together and sink, sometimes that feels amazing. Stress is sometimes feeling like you're out of control.  You get overwhelmed. Martial arts, and when you have that mind and body connection, you're in control of something.  So I think that puts something in perspective, and I think that helps in terms of stress relief and that respect. And that's one really good application for kata. A lot of people poo poo on kata. I think there's a lot of good reasons you could do kata, and it's not always just for self-defense and fighting, but there's a lot of good knowledge in them. And look, me personally, I have a really busy mind. I work all the time, way more than I should. We do the channel on top of that. I should meditate more. I'm working on that, just to kind of silence and slow down and be in the moment. To me, the martial arts in kata is kind of like my form of meditation in a certain way. I find peace when I start to review techniques. So sometimes I'll do reviews. If I'm really trying to be academic, I wanna break something down or I wanna study and analyze. Sometimes I just wanna move. If I haven't had a rough day or if I'm kind of feeling overwhelmed, I'll take a break or go in the backyard and I'll just do a kata or I'll just do moves. I'll just focus on the movements themselves. I find peace in just slowly doing the movements. Meditation is focusing on breathing. I like to focus on movement. And it's just me and my movements and my body and mind working together. That to me is my form of meditation. And sometimes I like to take it up a notch. And if you like to work outside, I'm sure a lot of you do too, is the environment. And I personally love working out in the rain. If it's raining, I love going for a jog or just doing a kata or just doing movements. Like the sensation of water hitting my skin, it makes me hyper aware of my presence and space. So just going outside, just doing like just certain katas and slow moves, feeling water or winds on my body helps me kind of focus the sand, the dirt under my feet. If you're out in the snow, just the interaction with the environment to me takes me another step out of everyday world and overwhelming feelings, just at least for a split second and just kind of be one with yourself and your motion. So I definitely highly encourage doing that. To me, it feels great and it helps me but I'd be curious to know what you guys do. What puts you in the moment? I want to go back to self-esteem for a second. Yeah, we all know martial arts helps with self-esteem, but what does that mean? I mean, there's the generics. You see that in every marketing flyer, everything on the school, each self-esteem, what is that? Well, for beginners, I think it's important because it gives them a sense of accomplishment. People join the martial arts for a reason, whether it be for health or they want to protect themselves, they want to feel safe, they want to just be in better shape, maybe they want to learn culture. They have an objective. They've got a reason for joining. So any achievements helps them towards that. It builds your self-esteem because they're learning. They're starting to work towards a goal of theirs. Children is a little bit more special case because it gives them a feeling of not just accomplishment but more of ability because kids learn, they have so much stimulation with them all day between school and friends and they don't understand the world just yet. And I think the martial arts helps them lead to problem-solving skills. The more they learn what they're able to do because you build that kind of confidence in the kid. When the kid learns that they are capable of doing something that they can accomplish a task, that's going to set them up for a life that have these problem-solving skills. And whether it be martial arts or any other daily tasks, that's just going to help improve them as they grow. Even advanced students, there's still some self-esteem because it's very easy to get to the point of complacency where you're just like, okay, yeah, I noticed, yeah, I've done this. You can still reinvigorate yourself. It's easy to become stale but find a new perspective, find a new way to try something, maybe set new goals, maybe if you've done something, okay, you've got that cod, you've mastered your board with it, do it backwards, do it on the other side, or do it outside. Find something, find challenges for yourself. Always set new goals because if you reach the point in your training and you're like, I've accomplished all of it, then it's time to ask yourself, have you really accomplished all you want out of the martial arts or did you just kind of hit a corner? Definitely goal setting helps even the most advanced students can still build self-esteem. A concept that comes up with a lot, especially in traditional martial arts is the concept of the four Zen states of mind. And we're going to go into each one in much more further detail later because there's a lot we can break down with these but let's just review them really quickly. The four general states of mind in Zen. The first one is Shoshin, which means beginner's mind. This is the frame of mind that you're in when you're eager to learn. So you're keeping your mind open to new ideas, you're letting go of any preconceived notions, drop any prejudices and be ready to learn. So when you're beginning the martial art, you're going in there with an open mind, ready to learn, except new ideas. So you're not judging yet before you do. So that's the beginner's mind, Shoshin. The second one is Mushin, which means without mind. That is literally being in the moment, not distracted by other thoughts, you're free of worry, consequences. It's like if you're meditation, you were actually focused on the one task, you're in the zone. That's when you like get so ingrained and so involved in something that you've blocked out the rest of the world, your mind is focused and laser sharp. Mushin without mind, without distractions. Next one is Fudoshin, the immovable mind. Having focused and not letting anything derail you. So you see your goal and you keep going forward to that goal. You're in full control and full discipline.  It also kind of reminds me of a scene from Rocky Bobo. One of my favorite movie speeches was, you know, life is not about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep on going forward, keep getting up. You know, the expression fall down seven times to the end of eight. Nothing derails you from your goal. That's Fudoshin, the immovable mind. Then we have Zanshin, remaining in mind. This is full awareness of your surroundings and your environment, what's going on around you. So it's actually kind of a two-parter. It's being aware of what's going on around you in the moment. So noticing any suspicious activity or perceiving any dangers that might be, or you know, if you feel like there's a threat, how many people are around you, it's just being aware of your surroundings. Also, the other part of it is, part of it applies to when you do a technique. So say you do have to defend yourself, being aware of your follow-through. Just because you defend yourself, okay, I'm done, I go home. No, still be aware of what's around you. Is there more threats? And it's just doing that. There's some styles, well actually, and there's some tournaments that when you score a point, you're supposed to stay in your stance and be ready to attack. It shows that you are aware. If you dance around or you're like, oh, you should celebrate your point, sometimes you don't get it because they wanna see that you've got that discipline in your mind of saying, hey, look, I did the task, but I'm still aware of what's going on around me. Almost do like a fifth one. I wanna expand on this concept of Zanshin a little bit. And this is a big part of being the dragon and this is an easy pitfall to fall into. I wanna kind of talk about the state of mind in which you can project consequences, be aware of consequences. A lot of people wanna act in the moment and growing up, there's a lot of times that I could have been in some serious fights, but I didn't because I mean, they thought of what's the consequence versus what's the gain. Sometimes pride is a big problem. People will stand up for themselves because they feel like they've been insulted or you have to kind of think about consequential actions. For example, I was in high school, it was my senior year. Two weeks before we were graduating, table next to us was trying to start trouble. They were throwing fruit, they were throwing apples at us and it's like, and it got to the point where we all stood up and we're starting to face off and my thought was, what are we doing?  It's an automatic suspension for two weeks. I'm two weeks away from graduation. That'll drop my attendance down. I'm gonna fail, am I gonna fail over that joker? No, we just got up and we made the decision we're gonna just move because it wasn't worth the consequence. So I think a big part of being aware of your surroundings in the situation is being able to at least give an educated perception of what consequences might be of your actions because yes, there's living in the moment but you also have the consequences of what you do in that moment. So that's a big pitfall and like I said, pride. Pride is a big pitfall sometimes that people fall into. It's okay to be proud, but don't make harsh arrest decisions because you're proud. Pride is good, but it can also be a fatal flaw if you let it be. When you come into class, you come into the dojo, leave your day outside. We all have bad days, don't bring that with you inside the school. This is the time to reset. Remember, motion, be in the moment, give your mind a mental shower.    And related to that note, never, ever, ever take your aggression out on other people. We all get upset, we all have frustrations, we all have bad days, but you not take your frustration and hurt somebody with that because you're mad. There's healthier ways to deal with stress but never take your aggression out on another person who didn't deserve it. Martial arts also should provide us with an outlet and yes, there's all sorts of psychological ways you could deal with stress, everybody is different, everybody has drawn different methods. To me, again, martial arts I think is great as an outlet. If you feel overwhelmed, go work out. On a personal note, I experienced this not that long ago when my father was sick, this was a long ongoing thing and of course life derails, okay, work was in the back front training was so on the back runner, it wasn't even funny. The last few weeks, when it got to the point and when we really realized he wasn't gonna come home from the hospital, I went home that day, I went in the backyard, I was letting my dog out and I just saw the bad and I just hit my wave master. It felt good just to hit something. I hit it again and again and again. I got so focused in the moment, next thing I realized it was about 40 minutes later, the wave master was halfway across the yard and there was a trench dug in the dirt. I just got so locked in the moment and I had just so much outlet to get out but it helped. Did it help situation overall? No, of course not but in that moment it was just a way for me to get my anger out. It's just sometimes you just have to let the energy out and I think the martial arts are a healthy way to do that as long as you're not doing it to another person and if you have a wave master or a pad I know a lot of you can relate to this so I would like to hear your stories too of how you handle stress and frustration with your martial arts in a healthy way and related to that too is I think martial arts are good for finding your sense of balance and your center again. I did. When the dust settled, when he passed and we kind of dealt with everything and life was starting to kind of get back normal, we're trying to focus on work again it's like I had to do something and I actually went back to the martial arts which is about when we started this channel. I started studying again I started really getting back to the material. I had to focus on something that I was familiar with and that meant something to me my whole life and again going back to it feels good to move it feels good to connect your mind and body again and a lot of us forget that and I think doing the martial arts if you kind of go back to your roots at the beginning of your training a lot of us can reset even if you've been doing it for four decades I don't care how long you've been training it's a good way to balance yourself and get back to your center find your route get your mind and body working together again and then from there that gives you a foundation that you can now problem solve with with whatever else you have to deal with. So in our recent Black Belt episode we talked about the Black Belt is all about being a better you so make it happen not just physical we learn the tiger first and then we ascend to the dragon but it's a cycle because a healthy dragon will raise an even stronger tiger so keeping the perfect balance between them is what it means to truly master the arts. So thank you guys so much for watching I know this is a little bit more of a personal episode and I'm sure it resonates with a lot of you out there and I would love to hear from you how you use the martial arts to kind of help build yourself mentally and what your experiences are with that so please like this video, subscribe and be sure to click here on our Patreon link we're going to be releasing the History of Shodokan soon so our Patreon members will be getting early access to it so if you want to see it first please be sure to support us there it's a thank you to all of you who have helped us so far thank you guys so much and we'll see you next time.


Hi, it's Megan with Oxmore Toyota. I just wanted to send this quick video greeting just to personally introduce myself. It has come to my attention through one of our business partners that you're interested in trading in your 2006 Toyota Tundra for a new 2016 Toyota Tundra. When you can, go ahead and give me a call. You can reach me directly at<PHONE_NUMBER> and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Bye!


Packing for a trip where I'll be flying and also may get a chance to do some astrophotography is always a difficult challenge for me because I like having lots of options and backups for everything so it's hard for me to pair it down and still have room for clothes or anything else that I might have to bring on a trip or vacation. My system though is to bring everything valuable like cameras, lenses, trackers, and so on in my carry-on luggage and anything else that won't fit or is easily replaceable like a tripod or clothes or toiletries in my checked bag. But in this video I just want to show you what I keep in my carry-on luggage which is this guy. It's the Pelican 1510 which is the largest rolling case that Pelican makes that will fit in the overhead compartment as a carry-on bag. Inside the case I opted for the Pelican's Trekpack dividers which I believe are the most expensive option but I love them. They're more durable than the pick and pluck foam which I can't stand for some reason and they also take up less room than the typical padded velcro dividers that I sometimes use. The best thing about them is that you can cut and design them however you want and they come with these little pins that makes putting them back together into different configurations really easy. Exactly what I bring is a little bit different for each trip but here's what I'm bringing this time on my trip to Wisconsin. I have two cameras here. This top one is actually a stand-in for the Canon ESRA which I'm filming with right now. I also have a backup camera. This is a modified Canon T7. Underneath the cameras in these compartments I have a case for my SD cards and a manual air blower which is always handy to have. Up here in this top corner I have a bunch of stuff. I have a lot of batteries. I have holders for things. I have intervalometers. All kinds of little accessories. Lots of backups of different accessories that might fail. Down in this little compartment I have a 3D printed Badanov mask. I have some electrical tape and I have a little gray card slash color chart that I always just have with me just in case I need it. Here are the lenses I'm bringing. Again this is something that changes every time depending on what I hope to shoot on the trip. But on this trip I have the Canon RF-85 that I rented for a week just for this trip. Roking on 135 and a Sigma 40 millimeter. Below the lenses I have a little Petzl headlamp. I've had this for a long time. Works well. And then finally over here last thing I have my full Skywatcher Star Adventure including the counterweight and the counterweight shaft and the declination bracket and everything. It all fits fine. The last thing so basically I have everything that I need here except for one thing which is the tripod and as I mentioned at the beginning of the video this goes into my checked bag because it's too big to fit in here. If I really wanted to go light I could maybe get like one of those travel tripods that could fit in like my second carry-on bag. But I like having the full size tripod. I'm using an i-footage carbon fiber one and so I just put this into my checked bag and wrap my clothes around it and that works well. And again the strategy here of putting all of this in this carry-on bag is this is all stuff I don't want to replace. So I want it securely with me. I don't want it to end up lost somehow. So what am I missing? You can tell me in the comments. You know sometimes I bring a laptop but honestly a lot of times I bring it and then end up not using it because on a vacation or a trip I'm not going to process my photos until I get home and yeah if I brought a computer of some kind I could then use an auto-guider and all of this other stuff and I could dither and possibly get better data. The thing is though my strategy here is to have backups for all the important things and have not such a complex setup that there's possible points of failure where I'm not going to have all the stuff I have at home to fill in. And if so if I'm out for a week without any stores I'd rather have as much stuff in backup as possible and keep it as simple as possible. So that's my strategy with packing for a trip like this one. Hope it made sense. This has been a 5-minute Friday. Next week I'm going to be in Wisconsin but I'll be back for the next 5-minute Friday hopefully next week. Till then this has been Nico Carver at NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies.


There are a number of ruins on Earth which are either located atop nearly impossible mountaintops, or on the ledges of desert hilltops, making sanctuaries from masterfully cut stone temples, and Masada is of no exception. The first official funded excavations in the area took place from 1963 to 1965 and was under former IDF Chief of Staff and Archaeologist Yigal Yadin. The dry desert climate allowed the preservation of classy frescoes and organic remains belonging to the rebels who once called the sanctuary temple's home. However, it has long been claimed that the archaeological team were not given full access to the site and have repeatedly noted that they are aware of the site's secret underground layers, yet were not able to fully explore it during the 60s. However, recent changes to attitudes toward historic sites has secured funding for a full exploration of these as yet unexplored underground tunnels. For the first time since 2006, a Tel Aviv University team headed by Roman period archaeologist Guy Stiebel have launched new excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, examining previously unexplored areas of the legendary fortress. Quote, this is the next generation, Stiebel told The Times, adding that his team planned to excavate new sections of the dwellings as well as a garden constructed by Herod. He further noted, quote, our intention is to further explore a mysterious underground structure that was detected in the earliest aerial photographs of the site in the 1920s. Yet, alas, the building's underground layers have remained unexplored. Dr. Stiebel, intriguingly, although seemingly aware of the void's existence, was reluctant to label its past uses, stated that it was possibly used as a hideout or escape route during the Siege of Masada, although he made it clear that he is unsure at the moment of the original purpose of the underground systems. Dr. Stiebel exclaimed his excitement to return to the site after an 11-year absence in statements to the media, quote, a lifetime would not suffice to get a glimpse of all the hidden beauties of Masada. Its magic is not just in the equipment, it is also in small things, end quote. Even though several experts believe that more than 95% of Masada's total size has already been explored, Stiebel believes that its core is yet to be discovered. We will, of course, keep you posted on any controversial or intriguing discoveries made during the excavations. It is a place which we find highly compelling. We have, in the past, explored, although I'll be it briefly, the astonishing, perplexing, and as yet unexplained ancient ruins that can be found within the ancient city of Aksum, located within modern-day Ethiopia. One of the main reasons we have repeatedly touched upon this exquisite site, a place located so far from the academically claimed civilizations, who some daring academics would even attempt to claim as the builders of such. Its remarkably remote location alone could be seen as a smoking gun in regards to a conspiracy regarding the chronology of man. However, what we find even more incredible regarding this site, the fact that the site is renowned for its obelisks, often named in mainstream reports as the site of a singular obelisk of Aksum, instead of the accurate, plural obelisks of Aksum. Aru's mystery history suspects is due to the toppled obelisk. Not only are there many obelisks at the site, so sharing it online as merely the site of the quote, Obelisk of Aksum, is not only inaccurate, but we feel clearly an attempt to stifle people's discovery of this toppled obelisk, which has been estimated to have weighed hundreds, possibly upwards of 1,000 tons in weight, once carved, transported, and erected at the site. Located in a place now known today as Aksum City, it is located within the northern regions of Ethiopia, found within the northern Stelae Park. Furthermore, the obelisks alone contain even more evidential features to indicate that these structures were not only built by a lost civilization, but the same civilization, possibly responsible for the Great Pyramid's construction and many other ancient ruins throughout the world, for these perplexing false doors permeate the world's ancient foundations. Any ancient site which we come across during our explorations of antiquity, adorned with false doors we know are extremely old ruins. False doors permeate nearly all ancient sites and ruins throughout the globe, and their true purpose for being remains a complete mystery. Additionally, if the fact that false doors indicative of the ancient pyramid builder's architectural signature and the toppled obelisk weighing hundreds of tons is not enough compounding evidence to convince you that the site was once the work of a lost civilization, the underground chambers at the site, actually created using polygonal masonry, should be the final nail in the investigative pursuit for all, thus directly connecting polygonal builders to architectural signatures found throughout the globe, most notably ancient Peru, even Giza, and the Great Pyramids. Who were these elusive builders? Obelisks are clearly indicative of an ancient Egyptian construction, yet regardless of the reality that this is a rarely shared factual lead connecting Axum to the pyramid builders themselves and indeed the makers of the false doors, and the additional polygonal masonry is an incredibly interesting link, due to previous research we know particularly regarding the casing stones in Giza. The polygonal casing stones upon the pyramids were of a significantly younger age than the highly eroded sandstone pyramids, yet here it is in the same build which displays false doors, a feature which does in fact date from the same era, a perplexing enigma to unravel. It is a mystery which we find highly compelling. We cover many structures on our channel which often contain features and characteristics that the academically claimed constructors were simply incapable of achieving. Enormous megalithic blocks, some weighing far into thousands of tons, yet there also exists many other ancient structures with equally baffling features, such as extremely refined stone cut architecture, seemingly only capable of achieving with advanced technology, or enigmatic buildings with as yet unexplained ages and origins. One such structure is known as the Maidens Tower, the oldest structure within the city of Baku in Iran. Many legends surround the origins of this structure, with vastly varying claims to its age. Some believe it is a mere 800 years old, while others attest to it being far more than 2000. Many supposed specialists have examined the structure, yet interestingly they all seem to come to different conclusions regarding its original purpose. Some say that it was a lighthouse, some say it was a fortress, or a burial chamber. Yet the most interesting explanations of its origins are found within the legends found within the local community. It is said that an ancient king once fell in love with his own daughter and built the tower due to his strange, incestuous devotion for her. He promised his daughter that if she were to marry him, he would give or build her anything if she were to agree. So she requested he build the tower. She supposedly visited the build regularly and consistently gave advice and her opinion on how she wanted the construction completed. Once it was built, it was the most reinforced, strongest building in all the land, yet instead of keeping her promise, she climbed to the top of the building and threw herself into the sea, presumably to escape the proposition given to her by her father. Yet regardless of legends, the mystery as to the true origins of the tower, or indeed its age, remains a complete mystery. I feel that upon close examination of the structure, it has been masterfully reinforced and renovated at numerous times within its long life, with the original stonework being of a tiny scale, yet much of the structure has been reinforced and built upon, most likely for several different strategic reasons throughout the millennia. It is indeed possible that the original structure is many thousands of years old, yet due to the reconstruction seen upon it by numerous groups using numerous techniques, it has predictably resulted in the many specialists who have examined it, coming to different conclusions as to its original purpose. Interestingly, academic geologists have argued that it was constructed during the 9th and 15th century. This was due to the receding of the Caspian Sea, making it possible for the town to grow around it. Yet could the legends of the king's daughter plunging into the sea be true? With the tower originally having been built upon the shores of the sea? It seems we may never know. However, there are many other towers which dot the earth with origins that are equally enigmatic. Some in particular are found deep within the Himalayas. Known as star towers, and for obvious reasons not only is their construction a baffling ancient feat due to their geographical locations, but the original purpose of these towers is a complete mystery, escaping explanation, baffling of all who have ventured to them to study their build and characteristics in depth. Mostly located in Kham, Qingtang, and Kongpo, which are provinces of pre-modern Tibet, they were first described during the Ming Dynasty, around 1368. With carbon dating by Frederick Deragon apparently showing they were built approximately 500-1800 years ago. Yet these datings are so vast and vague, I postulate that they too may have experienced several conservation efforts, and have been reconstructed or reinforced on several occasions throughout the eons. Actually being relics of a lost civilization whose original purpose has become lost, just like the civilizations who use them. Who built these mysterious structures? Why did they build them? Are they, as I suspect, far older than academia would ever admit to them being? In reality, being consistently regenerated relics of a lost civilization that throughout their lives have fortunately been reinforced and renovated throughout antiquity? We find such structures, their unknown age, and indeed their mysterious origins highly compelling.