Hi everyone, my name is Sonja Burns. I'm from Perth, Western Australia and I'm here today to speak to Geraldine O'Neill about her national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning research fellowships, which I'm honoured to share the findings with everybody that Geraldine's got to tell us about. I've got over 14 years experience in higher education in Australia and I'm an active researcher in teaching and learning around quality with a special focus on work integrated learning and industry engagement, which is about authentic learning experiences for our students. The ultimate aim of the fellowships is to improve the quality of higher education and inform policy and practice in Ireland's higher education sector. So with that Geraldine, welcome. Thank you very much, Sonja. Nice to be here. So Geraldine, just to start, Geraldine, would you like to give us a broad overview of what your research is about? Sure, yeah, I'm delighted to. So it's about assessing work integrated learning. Work integrated learning is a term I think that many people struggle with because maybe not a term that's used very much in the Irish sector, but it includes all the sort of work based placement type stuff that happens off campus, but also looks at activities that happen on campus and in the curriculum. So just on that term, so work, assessing work integrated learning, that spectrum of assessing those contexts, particularly looking at assessing assessment and feedback because feedback being a part of the assessment. So I really wanted to explore this quite complex area of assessing work integrated learning. Initially, what I did was through a series of webinars with the sector, we asked people what were the challenges in this area. And interestingly, what came up was authenticity, which is like meaningful assessments. But also what came through was, well, it's okay to be authentic and it's great, it's authentic, but it also needs to be consistent, consistent cost placements, consistent across different assessors. So this was coming through. So therefore, I decided to look at developing, exploring this consistency and authenticity in work integrated learning. So what I did was that I can go through the methodology a little bit more, but very quickly, I did, you know, look at surveys, I did some workshops and I interviewed some researchers to develop an understanding of this. And one of the key aims was that I would come up at the end of this research, with some solutions to some of these challenges. So really, I want to interrogate, yeah, some solutions to these challenges. So just, if you, when you think of the term authenticity in terms of assessment, can you just give us some of the key themes that have come out around the challenges for people to both design and implement authentic assessment in a work integrated learning context? Yeah, it's interesting because when people talk about authentic, one of the things that comes through a lot is this idea of real life, real world, you know, very controversial terms when people don't like it, but students use it a lot. But it's the idea that it's meaningful and linked with maybe the students identity, who they think they are, but also who they, where they think they will be in the future. So whether it's, you know, a researcher or whether it's a particular discipline. So that idea, real world, and that is a term that's often used with it. But actually, it has a broader kind of connotation as well, because when you look at the sort of literature around it, it talks about things like, but also around student impairment, and then being able to self monitor and do other things. So that's another aspect of it. So it's quite a broad term. And I'll get into the findings a little bit later, because it's not always me doesn't always mean the same to everybody. But they're the kind of key things when you're talking about authenticity, this idea of meaningful, valuable, you often to the students, but it can be to others as well. And interestingly, as I'm talking about it, sometimes this can be in tension with the idea of consistency. Because it actually, because it's meaningful to the person, and it's meaningful and valuable to them, and it empowers them, sometimes them being consistent across context on things can be a bit challenging. So that's my sort of working definition of authentic, a term sort of, yeah, that is to say meaningful in real life is probably the most common understanding. But when you delve deeper, it has other other kind of understandings as well. Interesting, look forward to a more full some conversation at some date time. Tell us why you chose this topic. What interests you about this topic in particular and with a focus on assessment and authenticity? Well, I was involved in a national project around assessment and feedback for a year or two, I actually worked with the National Forum for a year or two, and I was involved in a national project around developing assessment and the understanding of assessment, what it meant. And but as part of that project, and my ongoing work in University College Dublin, and assessment and feedback have been that suppose my, my sort of, I don't know, the theme or that my key, I suppose, topic area. So I'm always interested in assessment, it's so complex, it's so challenging. But it's really, really interesting. And I do think that if you can crack assessment or enhance it in some ways, you can go a long way to enhancing student learning and to getting the policies right. So I was always interested, assessment has always interested me from, from lots, lots of different angles. And I also think it's a really important thing in relation to, you know, students employability. And that's why I suppose I'm very interested in this idea of employability.  But students are really, really valuable. An interesting research study done by the National Forum again on student success and what students felt success was in fact employability and being an employable graduate came up for students as a really the top, the top one. And secondly, interesting was, was kind of grading and assessment. So if you look at the student voice and this is what they're looking for, even if we feel maybe higher education has more kind of aspirational and sort of, you know, other kind of purposes. But you know, the student voice are saying, we need to do this and we need to do it well. Very good point. And I hear you loud and clear about the difficulty of assessment in our current higher education environment. Given that you just mentioned employability, and I get the word itself can be contentious, but that you need to assume there's other stakeholders involved then in the process when you you bring in the notion of employability. So can you tell us firstly what you see as the role or what's come out in your research as the role of the stakeholder in terms of employers or community agencies? Firstly, and secondly, given you just mentioned student agency, perhaps the role of the student in this process ensuring authenticity. Yeah, it's interesting. So what I found I suppose both in the literature and it was coming out in my own findings is the literature and authenticity, and I suppose even your own works on this, which is around the authentic framework, really talks a lot about the audience for authenticity. And so the industry partners are really, really key. And it also comes out in Rola at Jawe's work as well in relation to that the industry partners are really, really key for authenticity. And I suppose I know even from my own practices that my previous life was an occupational therapist. So I was actually involved a lot in working with sort of practitioners. I'm using the word practitioners, by the way, to kind of cover the idea of like industry partners, healthcare workers, that wider term. But they're really key in relation to because if you think that authenticity includes the stakeholders, they're really key in assessment. But one of the challenges is that we don't often support them enough, they don't often see that they're they themselves are employed by different systems. So the so we're expecting a lot of them. The students end up with them and working with them and learning a huge amount from them. But we need to support them and to be clear, I suppose, in are they involved in assessment, you know, are they involved in feedback is and you know, as I get through to some of the findings as well. But but certainly we need to certainly involve them as partners in this in the assessment in this in this wider assessment process, because they're key in relation to to ensuring that the students come out with the competencies, learn like different things from being on their placement, but they're very much part of the assessment and in particular the feedback process. I suppose the other thing in relation to them as stakeholders is that if they are involved, I mean, they do also, you know, also get some opportunity to influence the type of graduate who's coming out. And so in some ways shape how they might contribute to the industry and in the future. So it's a two way process and they're a they're a key partner. Yeah, key partner. And the student. Sorry, the student. Oh yeah, the student. Well, the students, I would be always an advocate for the students as partners in this in empowering students. And I think, interestingly, we have a working definition in Ireland of assessment, which includes assessment does learning. And the student is very much a partner in that piece. And I think they have a role to empower be more empowered, particularly in the work integrated learning aspect, because they go into it with such unique identities and skills themselves, and they go with their own needs. So I think a really empowering students in the process is important for valid assessment. But I also think it's important for upskilling them in in empowerment and in self monitoring, and being involved in judging how well they are doing in this, it's a really, really key skill. If we can give students the skill to self monitor and to self evaluate, we're really setting them up to be judges of their own skills in the workplace. So I think that's one of the most powerful things to give students in this process is that they can self evaluate and know how well they're doing themselves. So it's really, really key, I think. Yeah, totally agree. I think there's lots of barriers to making that happen at the moment, but couldn't agree more. So why do you think this topic is important for and potentially impacts on the higher education sector, including those of us who teach, those of us who learn, and those of us who lead in the higher education institutional environment? Yeah, I might start with those who lead actually, because I think sometimes work integrated learning is seen as quite a binary in the curriculum in higher education. I think sometimes it's seen as that, you know, students do stuff on campus and then they go off on campus and it's like this other world and the two, you know, don't come together. So I think even the language of work integrated learning, which really pushes the idea that this is a spectrum of learning I think is really key for policymakers. So I think from this idea that the topic and how we describe it is really important. It's seen very binary at the moment, so that there's those out there and those in here. And I think that for leaders and policymakers is really in key. I think it's really important because I think certainly in Ireland, and I know internationally this is the same, that there is a real push, you know, for graduate skills and sort of employability. And I think, you know, so I think it's important from the kind of national level and the sector level, the policies that, you know, that we look at this in the curriculum. From the teachers in this space, I do think that there are those involved in placement and those types of things and they are very committed to it. But I think other, let's call them teachers, lecturers, whatever in the curriculum really needs to look at their work in relation to where they fit in with this. And I think your own, you know, Bosco Inference, that lovely framework that you're involved in, Sonia, you know, really kind of had a place, really strong place in this where you can look at curriculum and see what role you have in this in relation to your modules on campus, you know, and I think it shouldn't be seen as this binary of, you know, there's the workplace and then we do this theory practice divide as well. So I think it's really key in that way. And I think I've mentioned the students, I think, again, they have a key role in being involved in empowerment and shaping how this might look for them, I think. So they'd be the key things why I thought this topic area was important. Excellent. And did you have much of a base of previous research to build on? I know that their assessment is a particularly challenging topic for many people to work with. But did you find a lot from which you can build on for your own research? Yeah, no, there was, it's quite a well written topic. Actually, there was a lot of literature on it. There's quite a bit around authentic assessment. But that's really popular at the moment, I think, because I think that is actually coming from a base where people are looking at traditional assessments and thinking that, you know, the traditional exam is not working for us. How do we make it more authentic, more engagement? So a lot of this strong engagement and authenticity, you know, sort of, as I say, some of your own work. But also, there was a really nice study done by Villarro et al. And they looked at sort of all the literature on this. And they actually came up with the idea that when they looked at all the literature, they said, well, this idea of realism is coming through this real world is coming through in a lot of the literature. And this cognitive challenge is coming through in the literature. And also the idea of this evaluation of judgment, this idea that students, you know, judge, and again, Rola, Giawi's work in that space is three principles of authentic assessments. So authentic assessments are a lot been written about it. And not without its critiques, actually, because a lot of people like the word authentic.   But in essence, the idea of engagement and that a lot been written about work, integrated learning, a lot done on, you know, the idea of internships. So that, you know, so there's a lot of literature, Smith, Smith et al's work, you know, around kind of, you know, the critical issues in work integrated learning really bring I think one of the things that came to me a lot was the idea of the tension between in this space with assessment that's valid, you know, does it measure what you wanted to measure? And is it reliable? And from that, I thought, well, actually, taking that a little step further, you know, is that well, authentic is, you know, is it, is it kind of genuine and real and valuable, a little bit of extension of validity in some ways, with a little, little, little more, but also consistency. So I think that there's been some work in this space, but lots of work on assessment is very topical. Lots of work and feedback. Even the National Forum's work that I was involved in a few years ago around, you know, what is assessment, and a lot of stuff around, you know, internships and placements and medical education that, you know, Goverton and Van Der De Fluten, I think, did a lot of work around, you know, what is validity in medical education. I mean, so a lot of different disciplines are looking at this. You know, those that are, you know, the professional bodies and those involved, medicine and nursing and occupational therapy and social work, a lot of, lot of work in relation to work-based assessment. The core of different things, clinical placements, work-based assessment, internships, you know, field works, a lot of different language on this, but a lot of literature on it. So yeah, so lots to build on and coming out from different angles and things, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. So and you raised some interesting things though, because when you talk about validity and reliability, et cetera, of course important, but I still think we're driven by traditional perceptions of what assessment is and sometimes this stuff doesn't fit into all of that. It's very, as you say, complex. So given that really detailed background, which has been very helpful, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about your methodology and how you went about gathering your data and then interpreting that data? Yeah, sure. I suppose the three main methodological methods, I suppose, but I suppose the overarching approach I wanted to do was more participatory action research and it was an approach that I had done myself a few years ago and in essence, just to suppose to explain it a little bit, it's that you work with, you work with people in general to help them make changes to their own practice. So it's really trying to suppose, again, it goes with my philosophy of empowerment of students and empowerment, it really tries to empower. So a centerpiece, I suppose, in my work was working with disciplinary groups and I've been nine disciplinary groups who had a student, a practitioner and an educator in all the groups in the workshops, they were three hour workshops, working with them to develop solutions to their own practice. So the methodology actually, I'm quite proud of the methodology because it really actually worked with them to come up with solutions to their practice. So that was the key kind of center part. But before I did that, I actually looked at, I was lucky to have access to the National Student Survey data, which is a survey, a little bit like the, I think the Nessie in Australia, which is a student engagement survey. And it actually is a survey that asks students around their engagement. So I had actually access to the five years of that data. So I was able to look at the question, what could institutions do to improve, which again is around solutions, asking the student voice that's kind of fit him at the philosophy. And so I had 95,000 comments on that I was able to access. So I was able to look at that and then do my workshops, which came up with some solutions. And also I was able to, I had the, was able to talk to seven researchers before I did the workshops around their understanding of work, integrated learning assessment. And that was really very valuable to get kind of expertise. So what a nice mixture of student voice from these surveys, seven researchers who gave me great insight into what they were doing and the literature and what they thought. And then these, you know, three, sorry, then these nine workshops, which was around developing solutions to their discipline. And then I'm going to finish at the end of the year coming back to the seven researchers, just to sort of present it back to them and see how it could actually impact on practice. So given the range of participants and the different backgrounds, which I think is intriguing, I've got two questions, sorry, two questions in one again. The first is, were there any themes that resonated across all stakeholders, that is themes they shared? And were there anything that was particularly something that came from, you know, particular stakeholder and not necessarily another? Yeah, yes. Across them all, I suppose, they all, I suppose it was really particularly looking at the consistency and authenticity and things that came with it. Certainly what came across them all was it's really important to have clear expectations, you know, that this came through a lot, you know, we need to be clear, you know, transparency needs to be really clear. And in some ways that falls in the middle between consistency and authenticity, it is not clear, you know, like it won't be valid and it won't be authentic and it won't be so. So that came through a lot with everybody. The idea we should be talking about this and this interstitial dialogue came through a lot between across them all, you know, that it's, you know, we need to talk about it, we need to, it's not something that's solved easily and we need to make sure that we all get our voice heard and it came through. In relation to authenticity, the students, interestingly, the student voice in the large-scale data, the survey data, nearly a third of the comments of all the open comments were related to work and authenticity and real, particularly around the realism side. So the students are really pushing, you know, this idea, it needs to be practical, real, you know. And interestingly, the researchers also really felt strongly about that, you know, it's really important, it's authentic, in fact, you know, it's much more important. Consistency is great, we need to be able to stand over but you know something, if it's not real and if it's not kind of empowering and if it's not, you know, that's really important. But there was maybe a little bit more of a mix with the consistency piece in the workshops because the consistency in the workshops came through a stronger than authenticity, which was interesting. So there was a couple of common things, the interstitial dialogue expectations were certainly common, but when you start delving down into the weighting of authenticity and consistency, it was a little bit different among different stakeholders. And I want, I suppose that was your second question actually, wasn't it, the difference? Yeah, yeah. And in relate to delve into that a little bit more. So wondering, let's think about our university staff, our teaching staff are in the main hardworking, passionate group of people. And I think they believe in this, but what did they cite as key challenges for them in actually achieving ultimately an authentic framework for their assessment? Yes, they interestingly, they struggled particularly with authenticity when it came to work integrative learning. And when I say that more so than the practitioners and the students, they struggled with authenticity when it came to things like writing a report back in the institution, having done a placement, that they found they really struggled with the educators and the students a little bit also in that space. So there was a particular challenge with, interestingly, there was less challenge with authenticity and stuff where people were doing things like problem based learning on campus and project work. Everybody was delighted even that was on campus with authenticity where there was a little more of a challenge for educators and students a little bit too is the type of placement where they go off and they have an experience practitioners are not involved and they come back and they write a report or they write a reflection like posts, post placement. And that's when there was a particular challenge for authenticity, actually, that type of context. So when you're on campus, and you knew you were on campus, and it was better than the exams, it was like, this is great, because they're doing that stuff. But the report, even though they had been on a placement and came back, that was when the most interesting when educators were most challenged by the idea of authenticity. More so sometimes as I say, than the on campus one, that they weren't out of placement. So interestingly, and you might be particularly to Ms. Sanya, because the this idea that authenticity is a continuum from placement, so from from campus to placement isn't necessarily a very linear direct line. You know, you know, and actually, and in fact, it was interesting when I talked, I know you were asking about the educators particularly, but talking to one of the researchers, they were involved in quite really elaborate authentic projects on campus. And they said they had actually really great success with them. And they struggle sometimes with placements, where the practitioner wasn't involved. And they students came back and as I say, did a presentation or did a report or wrote a drop afterwards. And they felt that actually, it didn't feel that authentic. So I think, I'm not sure if quite answering your question, but that was really that was the most challenge with authenticity from the educators. Was that kind of context? Does that make sense? Yes, it does. Yes, absolutely. So were there any other I think you've highlighted some of the findings? Is there any other findings that you have initial findings that have come out that you haven't that you would like to tell us about today? Yeah, I mentioned that authenticity was a challenge in the that type of placement with, you know, where they weren't assessed in placement and they came back. Interesting, although I think one of the interesting findings is that although the student voice with that national survey came up as realism and authenticity been really important, when it came to sort of placement types, and this was from a lot of the workshops, the student's biggest challenge was consistency when they were out in placement. And I thought I was surprised that actually this and in fact consistency came up in the workshops as bigger challenges than authenticity. Can I just ask consistency in what? So consistency in how the students were assessed. So things like, you know, they and this linked a little bit some of the findings with how they were graded. Consistency, for example, when they might go to one particular placement and if they were graded ABCD or percentages, but often ABCD, that if they go to such and such a placement, you know, they give all As, whereas if they go to another type of placement, you know, they don't do As, they only give Cs and Ds. So this type of inconsistency in context. And then within the sort of placement, and these are probably more in placement, some of these examples, that within the placement context that, you know, Mary would mark easily, and, you know, if they had Peter as a kind of a kind of a therapist or as a kind of a co-worker, you know, that they marked, you know, harder. And so this kind of inconsistency and that was often linked, I found in the findings, and this came up quite a lot in the idea of the grading scales. So if they use like a more pass fail or competent, not yet competent, they actually, there was less challenge with consistency, they were allowed to kind of just relax a little bit. So that's why consistency was coming up, I think, in a lot of placements. And that did lead to one of the some of the findings in relation to competencies. This came through a lot again in the workshops and in the interviews, that in writing competencies, you know, for a placement, so this is like, say, for example, the form that they use when they go out with placements, if this is a long list of competencies, there was a huge challenge with consistency, because people, sometimes people didn't even an opportunity to see things on the list, that came up, you know, there was a very interesting comment from one of the therapists actually in one of the disciplinary groups, and they said, we were making up scenarios, so we could actually tick a box, you know. So this came through as a challenge. So one of the kind of findings, one of the key findings is that there's manageable sets of competencies, and that they're not this kind of like, you know, 95 competencies, that there's some sort of a manageable set of competencies. And linked with that, I think another thing that came through is, if you have this manageable set of competencies, and then you could empower students to self-regulate and work with partners in industry, then you can actually take those broader competencies, but bring them uniquely to the context. And I think, again, this has come up in the literature before, but this was coming through as a lot of solutions. So yeah. So when this to me brings us back to our traditional notion and model of assessment, and it actually doesn't work. So, Jordan, it's intriguing. And as you know, one day, let's hope we work together because I can see that we're very think very much alike, and have done similar sorts of research. But to finish off, what do you think your findings have? What impact potentially have they got for higher education policy and practice locally within Ireland and perhaps even globally? Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing that I would say is that we have to recognize in our policies and practices that employability things are very important to students. So I think we do need to make sure that our policies support the development of these skills. Another thing I think that matters, and I think this maybe is in an Irish context. And I think in some ways Australia and Canada and some international are ahead of us in this way, but I think the language matters. And what I mean by that is I think we need to start using terms like work integrated learning, which I know have been used a lot in Australia and Canada, but not probably everywhere. And I think this, it's really important that we start using this in our policies or the reason I think that is that there's, again, it takes away from this binary in policies of, well, we've got placement officers over here. We've got the education staff here with the students here and we've industry here and they don't mix or they don't meet. So I think in the language it's important that work integrated learning suggests a more integrated curriculum and staff and people and that dialogue. And equally, I think assessment language matters when it comes to the word assessment. When we talk assessment, we need to also understand, as in the Irish definition of assessment, that this includes the graded piece, the feedback piece and the self-monitoring piece, the self-evaluation. That when we talk assessment, we're talking that all foreign as learning and I think that matters. The other thing I think that is really important in policy is we need to build an interest stakeholder dialogue into our practice and policies so that we have opportunities to meet. We need to build in forums that get these people together in the room and looking at that we need to look at how we actually progress that kind of dialogue. We need to empower students in the work integrated learning processes. I know students as partners is coming into a lot of institutional policies but we need to look at make sure it's coming into the work integrated learning pieces. Competencies need to be manageable. I think this has implications for professional bodies and across the world. When they're really looking at their accreditation piece, when we're looking at quality sharing processes, we don't need a long, long list of competencies. I think we need to look at how we get the right amount of policies and the right pitch for our competencies. I think institutional grading schemes need to be seriously looked at in relation to how we grade in this space and how we actually, many of them talked about when we're using the grading scales because it's in our practices, our institutional policies and therefore, but we really would prefer to use, you know, like pass, fail or competent like incompetence. So with the institutional grading schemes, we seriously need to be looked at and how we value different types of evidence and transcripts with different types of evidence. I think this would be a really transformative change and I think that many internationally would probably feel the same in that space. And I think that my last point of this is practitioners, if they're involved in assessments, which we do want for them to be authentic to that practitioners are involved, but they need support in this space. They need to be resourced. They need to professional development to this space. We can't just land them into this and expect them to do this consistently and be authentic, be involved authentically. So I think resourcing and professional development for this broader group of practitioners is really, really key. Otherwise, we can't have consistency and authenticity. I think this is where it would fall down. So there'd be my key suggestions for a kind of policy and practice. Well, Jordan, it sounds like a very interesting and certainly important part of research in higher education and it's definitely of global interest. So we wish you luck in bringing this to fruition and we look forward to seeing how it all comes out in the end and reading the final report. So thank you for your time today. Thank you, Zanya. Thank you. Thank you for your time as well. It's great talking to you. Thank you. You too. Bye. Bye.


Oh, not everyone. Sam here with latent sports cards. Rippin', 21-22, Penini Flawless Passable Hobby, one box break, number four. Random left side, serial numbers. We've got our results right there. Thanks again, you can find these on the website under the results tab, as well as the link in chat. All right, let me get these organized by a number for myself. And these are how they came out of the randomizer. Yeah, that's what everybody's saying. Hard to go back to the Rockets. I'm in on, dude. That's cool. I love Rockets Jantorn. That's nuts, nuts. Let's go. All right, we've got three of 15 going at three spots. Tyrese Maxi, game used three color patch. Miles, let's go Miles. Miles with the Maxi. Nice one there. We've got 21-25, Kevin Johnson. Nice one there. 21 spot, Phil Kay with Kevin Johnson on the distinguished signatures. Some signing trade. Going to the seven spot. D.W., we've got two colored RPA, that is. Kessler Edwards. Nice one there, congrats on that. Nice Kessler. Yeah, I'd be in the box. Yeah, I'd be in the box. This is pretty sweet. Going to 13 spot with Paul T. 13 of 25, Jason Kidd. That's J. Kidd for the Mabs. That coach there now, that's weird. That's Eerie, that's Eerie. That's him as a player, but he is also the head coach of the Dallas Mavericks. Let's go Joe picking up a tiered spot.  All right, we've got 11, Eugene B. 11 of 25, Earl the Pearl, Earl Monroe. Let's do it. Let's do it, Joe. 11 of 25, Earl Monroe. Ah, you can make this next one. It's going to be four. Going to Lee Won-Wai at the four spot. Four of 15, two, three colored RPA. That is IO Dasunmu. Congrats on that one there. IO at the four spot. Congrats, Lee Won. Going to Philip H. Do you have the question? Because I've got the answer. Oh yeah, I've got the answer. Two of three, Allen Iverson, baby. Let's go, you like that one? I like that. I've been perfect in that one. Two of three, Allen Iverson, A.I. Congrats on that, Philip H. That's nasty, dude. Legendary scripts, Allen Iverson. My God. And then 15 of 25, Steve Nash. Let's go into Andrew O. At the 15 spot, Steve Nash. Nasty. Thank you, Robert, for taking the spot. More Bowman U spots coming in as well. Very nice, thank you guys. Down to three and peered at number two. All right, four of five. Going to Lee Won-Wai, Jamal Murray. Jamal Murray on the Emerald.  Good time to get this one. What was his final stat line? I wanna see that was, I think he had like 32. 37, hit 37 last night, dude. Four of five and then, I mean, we're just, I mean, this is just, this is, this is just nutty. Second one, dude. Four boxes. Going to the two spot, two of 25. The chef, baby, Steph Curry. Draft gem signatures. Oh my God, that's two curries and two cases right there, baby. Let's go. That's a young Steph. That's a young Steph, right? That's the We Believe Steph right there. That's O9 Steph, baby. That's O9 We Believe Steph. When he hurt his ankle and everyone's like, yeah, he stinks, man. Yeah, he stinks. No, we're good. Now, yeah. All right. Empty briefcase. Thank you all again for getting this filled up. We're on to number five now, everybody.


What's up everybody Jason here for Jasper's case breaks.com 2022 tops chrome black baseball to 12 box case break pictures number 33 sold out and Here we go There's a customer names there But I'm serious. I mean obviously I don't I hope they don't delay it as long as they did this one, but I mean You probably have to wait another two years probably I mean unless Unless what they do is that they release cup obviously like they're doing it now in February And then they go back on schedule and release it again like November December how they usually do it Obviously they can make up a lot of time doing that That's not a given but That's my hope Obviously, this is a great class that we're gonna be working with 20 21 But obviously for me being a Kingsman, I kind of want to see 21 22 With Quinn and by Phil. Oh nice save by quickie. Good luck with that No, that's not probably stuff. I just I just can't trust it. That's all It's fun to joke around but it's kind of sad inside, you know Six copet are card updates blunders updates and cup nice He scored a pretty sweet goal today right now Not too long ago that copet are my man. It's producing pretty good this year They I mean by foot obviously supposed to be the next center But they haven't playing the wing with Kempe and copet are and They're all just getting points right now. Kempe has like eight goals in the last four games You're asking the wrong guy Rex You know I love baseball, but baseball is like at the bottom of my list when it comes to sports. I watch early on Whenever I can watch a Dodgers game if I'm not breaking and then postseason Not young players and prospects in rex. I don't have time to worry about that honestly I'm not wired that way. I'd rather I'd rather do a lot of other things they would my mind Todd difficult question Mike. You're coming out with the most hardest questions tonight. I Probably would want to see an Oregon national championship But I would love to see them all Eagles are probably bringing the most joy honestly but I Think Oregon not winning one is probably on the top of my list I got to see an Eagles in my lifetime. I got to see Kings a couple times in my lifetime. I Probably would love to see Oregon Suzuki Ben attendee It's for $1.99 But I'll let you know how he is that when I go to spring training next week Rex out of $1.99 Nolan Arnauto out of 50 Bobby Witt and then Cal Lewis Cal Lewis, of course now on the Diamondbacks, right? Freddie Freeman. I Will still see him Rex They play the Dodgers like the day I'm going Joe Adele showtime out of 75 And they play the Dodgers. Let me see. I Already have my tickets in my wallet comes the Dodgers the V-skill and a 99 On the accrues Gavin sheets out of $1.99 Well, there you go. That's a nice CJ Abrams I know the Nationals don't really have autos but CJ Abrams Nice for their 99 you got Alec Bohn. I don't think so rex I think he's gonna be out for the majority the whole year if not the whole year because doesn't Tommy John take like a year plus If he got it late in the season last year then he's gonna be out this whole year and probably a little bit of next year Christian Yelich and Marcus Simeon to 150 But isn't it like a year plus deal? Although he'll probably be pitching faster than he ever has right? I feel like people that have Tommy John now Just come back pitching like two three miles more than what they did I think it probably takes like almost two full years probably if anything especially for a pitcher Will Clark to 150 Marcus Simon For the Rangers so will Clark as Giants, that's Ryan Texas Rangers that is Howard Louise Gill that is Yankees Richard Reed Detmer's for the Angels that's going to mark Carl Delgado blue jays edition of 99 Toronto blue jays as Joshua Tommy John speaking of the guy. There you go 45 out of 99 Yankees that's going to Richard again Andrew Vaughn for the White Sox Steven with that one Andrew Jones for the Braves it's going to add Rusty Contreras for the Pirates That's going to Joe Christian and then Colton Welker for the Colorado Rockies. That's Steven Bobby Delback to 99 for the Red Sox that's Todd and The last one here is a achille Badoo super futures 22 out of 25 For the Detroit Tigers, that is James So there you have it folks. That was Pikachu number 33 the 34s in the store. Joshby's case breaks calm guys. Thanks


Griffin Bass with gomustangsports.com. I'm here with Stevenson Women's soccer head coach, Coach Taty Corba, after Stevenson's 1-0 win over Marymount. Coach, it came right down to the wire, but how do you feel about securing that second win of the season? Yeah, you know, we just told the team today's one of those games. We just were not overly satisfied with how we played. It's, you know, we ventured away from our game plan and shifted things around. And Marymount, you know, battles. And we were able to play kind of the way we wanted, but we were still able to find the win. And so really, that's what matters. And I think great character from everybody to step in and make the adjustments that we had to make. And so, you know, at the end of the day, what we care about is the win, even if it's ugly, which today was. You did out-shoot Marymount 14-6. Was that part of the offensive game plan coming in? Yeah, for sure. You know, we've done well, I think, in the past couple of games generating attack. But I think need to be much more clinical in our finishing and really don't know that we created enough really dangerous chances tonight, so that's something that will definitely look to improve. Senior Cassidy Butler, two goals on Wednesday night, a big assist today. What have you seen from her so far this year? Yeah, she's been playing great. She's a fifth year for us and, you know, takes our corners and we made some adjustments at halftime on what we wanted her to do with our corners. And she did exactly that and we were able to finish. But, you know, we've put her, she's kind of moved all over the field for us in her career here. And she's generating a lot and just working hard on both sides of the ball. How about that save from Wyza-Calsy at the end? Yeah, that was, that was, I was shocked when she came down with that in her hands. Just an outstanding save and she's been playing well. I think that's the kind of save you need to really kind of continue to propel you forward. Thanks, Latko.


So, my name is Adivik Reit and I'm going to talk to you about G-Streamer for tiny devices. G-Streamer, so who am I first? I've been working on G-Streamer since 2007 at Collabra. I spent the first five of those years doing VoIP, so Voice and Video over IP, using a framework called Farstream that was built on G-Streamer back in the day. We used telepathy, which was instant messaging framework, and this is all in the past. In the last couple of years, I've been focusing exclusively on G-Streamer and we've been helping our clients at Collabra do a lot of embedded projects using G-Streamer and we gain collaborative expertise to make it fit in the devices. What first? What's a tiny device? It's a device which has little flash storage, maybe a slow CPU, maybe a little RAM. It's not a PC, it's smaller. Small devices, we all know what they are, it's an embedded conference. G-Streamer, I know how many of you here know G-Streamer? Show of hands. All right, everyone knows G-Streamer. I'm going to do a short introduction first. G-Streamer is a complete multimedia framework that provides you with what you need to build applications that do media processing. It has a core, which is media agnostic, which contains base classes, which contains media type abstraction, plugin system, data transport, synchronization. But the core doesn't know anything about audio or video. So there are some people who use it for other kinds of streaming data. For example, everyone I like to plug, the people who won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, they use G-Streamer to process data from their experiments. So this G-Streamer core can load plugins that do actual useful things and these plugins come in all kinds of variants, either protocol plugins that read from files, read from network servers, write to network servers to files, etc. All kinds of media-specific sources, audio, video capture, network, TCP, UDP, etc. We have plugins that handle specific formats to create files or to parse them, AVI and before, WebM, whichever is the format of the year. We obviously support codecs, plugins support basically every codec on the planet. We have a bunch of filters that transform something into something similar, but different re-samplers, scaling images, using either hardware or plain software. And we have a bunch of syncs, which display or output the media either to a network or to a file or to the screen or to the speakers. So if you look at my slide, this is a really old slide, a picture that I keep on using because G-Streamer has been along for a long, long time and we've perfected it and we have a whole wealth of plugins to handle almost every use case. And on top of that, you can build applications. These applications use this framework to use the plugins to actually do useful things. So how do they do that? They do that by having what we call a pipeline. So a pipeline is a series of elements connected in a linear fashion to process the media. So this is like a super, super basic pipeline, like a file source, an MP3 decoder and also saying to output to the speakers. So like this is basically kind of the most basic pipeline and surprisingly a lot of embedded pipelines are not more complicated than this. Applications talk to this pipeline. So the pipeline often lives as its own thread that do all the media processing that's independent from the application and the application talks to this pipeline using some APIs, some are metal calls, some are sending events, making queries and they can also receive asynchronous messages and the pipeline will automatically handle different things for you. So the media synchronization, the clocking and it has states. There's a pretty good documentation these days online so I'm not going to spend too much time saying how to write the Gstreamer application. We have good tutorials. That's a well-covered topic. So yes, pipelines. Gstreamer, it's really good for embedded. We have a bunch of features that were really redesigned for embedded in the last five, six years. The previous versions were very much designed for a PC and when we tried to do this in embedded, we found problems, we found issues and these were largely fixed in the Gstreamer 1.0 API where we changed a bunch of little things that made it a lot more easy on ARM devices, embedded devices that have hardware support for different operations. In particular, Gstreamer has everything you need to create a zero-copy pipeline We have full negotiation not only of the media format but also of the allocation properties, the stri, the alignment if you need to use some kind of special memory or special memory layout that you can have different elements talk to each other and figure out a way that they're compatible. Gstreamer's memory is all reference counted so we don't do copies. We just pass around a reference debuffer with a reference counter so that we can reuse it once it's over. We have a buffer pooling to not have to reallocate memory. We have a whole framework for synchronization to synchronize between the writer and the reader but also synchronize against clocks. So we have all of these kind of things really built in the framework that makes it really, really easy to build embedded applications. And I said we have loads and loads and loads of hardware-enabled plugins. These days, most associative vendors will provide you a Gstreamer plugin which are getting really better by the year. A couple years ago, I would have told you don't even look at what your hardware vendor is providing you. It's useless but now it's a lot better. So now we have stuff that actually not only works once but works for an application for a product. And Gstreamer, we have tools like JSC Launch to do very, very fast prototyping to see if you can do it, if your hardware can do it on the command line for all of these simple applications. So I'm going to give you one example of a device that's a tiny device. It's a security camera. It has 16 megs of flash space and most of it is already used by the kernel, by the application from the vendor. But that's a lot of RAM because they have a ring buffer of captured memory. So there's a lot of RAM but a lot of it's already used. There's an RTSP server because that's what security cameras are these days, mainly an RTSP server and it's a small ARM 7 chip. So nothing very special. On this camera, we want to add a functionality. We wanted to take the RTSP server and upload it as mp4 files to the cloud. So what we do is that we create a very simple Gstreamer pipeline, just an RTSP source. We remove the RTP payloading and the RTSP transforms the transfer data in RTSP packets. Then we parse the H264 streams. This is to be able to find the keyframes because the next one is called SplitMuxSync and that will split your video stream into a series of equally sized files. Then we have a separate application just take these files and upload them to a cloud. In this simple pipeline, we have almost no code to write it. How do we first start this project? First, we wrote a very, very simple prototype, which is one command line. You can play around with it, see what works, see what parameters you need, make something work. This is the least step one. For someone with a bit of a Gstreamer experience, it's very short. Even with not so much experience, you can play with it and in a couple of hours you can get something that works really well. This took me five minutes, I've been doing Gstreamer for a long time. So how do you run this on an embedded device? First idea is that I'll just run Build Gstreamer and put it in the device. So just to do this talk, I built a clean Gstreamer with almost none of the dependencies. Only the required dependency, no optional dependencies. My build was 287 megs and 82 megs of these were dynamic libraries. All right, that's a good build. And then I stripped it because we're down to 17 megabytes. It's not so bad. But it's not incredible, right? It will not fit on my device. So the next step was I'll take this command line and I'll make it to a C program. And this C program is exactly equivalent to the command line we had before. So I take the parse launch line, which is exactly what the command line would do. Oh, yeah, there's a difference. I put the max size time too so that at every key frame it will create a file. But that's basically the only thing. Check this. If it's not a pipeline, we error, set the state to playing, wait for a signal, right? Most simple Gstreamer application you can make. And then with a simple make file. So let's cross compile. So I set the sysroot, I set the cc, the package config path, and I compile and link it. So it's very, very basic stuff here. And then I compile the application. It's 13k, strip 5.5k. That's pretty small, right? Plus 17 megs of libraries. Damn it. So we're at 17 megs. Okay. That was not so useful. So maybe we can make it static build. So if I statically build Gstreamer in it, maybe I can have something that fits. So I compile with lib tool, with static lib tool libs. So I can compile a Gstreamer library statically, but not the libc that's already on the device. And pkg config that's static to get the right dependencies. Then I get a binary that's shipped at 1.5 megabytes. All right. That fits. That sounds like we're done. Then I threaten my device. I put it in the flash. I run it. Oh, there's no element. There's an error. Why? Because I never copied any of the plugins. Ah, it's missing the plugins. Annoying. So what did I do? I copied the plugins. All of them? Yeah. 17 megabytes. That's a lot. Oh. So then I use a little trick. There's this debug thing. When I run it on a PC, it tells me exactly which plugins it has loaded. So I copy all of these plugins to my embedded device. It's not so bad. It's 1.7 megs of plugins. So we're still at the 3 megabytes kind of acceptable size. But then I run it again. And oops. I get an error. All these plugins, they need libraries. And then to actually make it work, I need to copy back all the libraries and back to 17 megs. So not really great at all. So I decide that I should actually statically link the plugin so that it will bring in all the libraries. And I will. So you use plugins in GCMUR. They don't come with a header file. So you have to put a declaration, a static declaration like this. So this little macro, static declares, static register, the GST in it, when the C file. And then we have something that we can build. We use the right linker command. So we actually need to link with all the plugins. So the dash L's there. They're basically the library names of all the plugins that we have found previously with... They're the same plugins that we have linked here. So it's actually these plugins. So we link them in. And we have a real static memory that's 28 bags. It's a trip to 4.7. That actually works on the device. So we're getting somewhere there, right? We have something that works on the device. It's just a little bit big, 5 megabytes. I'm thinking, how can I make this smaller? Because, you know, 16 megabytes, if I take 5 megabytes just for this functionality, it's a lot. So I have the compiler for help. I thought the compiler, it has a trick. Compile it OS. Very disappointing. It's exactly the same size. I thought, all right, it's not that useful. But maybe I can strip some functions that are not used. Because the compiler, it will take each C file and transmit them into an O file. And this object file will contain all the functions of C file. And it will all be linked in even if the functions are not used. But there's a trick. If we use these parameters, then the compiler will create an object file for each function, for each data object. And then when we link it, then the linker will remove all the ones that no one's used it. So that makes it a bit smaller. 4 megabytes. So we saved a little. So that's pretty good. And then we want to dig into it a bit more. To find 4 megabytes, that's a lot. And my program was not that complicated. So there's a tool called bloating make bloatface from Google Guy. It didn't work for me. So I thought this is exactly what I need. Compile it. Cross compile it. Rebuild it with debug symbols. Crash at that start. All right. Not very useful. So in the end, I used object dump. I used a Python script. I looked into the binary to see which functions are there. Did the bit of scripting to find where are all these functions coming from that are taking all this space? What's taking space in my binary? And then I discovered it's glib. Because gstreamer is built on a library called glib. Which is a library of utilities to make C applications. It has a bunch of things that are really useful. Link list. An object abstraction, et cetera. That we use everywhere in gstreamer. And then it has a bunch of things that we don't use. In particular, it has its own plugin system. And when you load the library, it loads all the plugins. And it calls into functions in them. And that means that all of these plugins get statically compiled in. Even though we never call them. But they just get called by the initialization code. So I'm a bit aggressive. I just removed them all. Edited glib. There's a really nasty patch there. So I removed gsettings, the configuration. I removed gdbus because we don't use dbus. I removed the app info because it's not an application. G application. I removed the notifications. We're not allowed to stop.  So I can make it a bit smaller. 3.8 megabytes. Just a little smaller. So next step, I got really angry. I was like, I need something that works. I need it now. So I cheated. I used something called upx, which just compresses the binary and decompress that start type, just like people do for the kernel. So it's cheating, but it's good cheating. And then bang, 2 megabytes. And this is where I stopped because it fit. So this is basically the core of how you transform this giant gstreamer thing that no one can use and then smallen the device to something that fits small enough that you can use it.  If you look into the information from object dump and everything that I got earlier in Glib, there are also giant UTF-8 tables because all of the g object, glib genome ecosystem, is localization friendly. And UTF-8, you have these huge tables with half a meg in there that we could remove with a bit more effort. But I didn't do that effort because I was happy. So basically, at this point, it's diminishing returns and a lot more work. But I was happy. So that was the end of my efforts. Thank you. So that was basically how to make gstreamer from big to small questions. Yes. Yes. This is before compression. If you have a compressed file system, then the last step is not so useful. Sorry. It was saying that on many embedded systems, people will use a compressed file system, which is probably a good idea if you have so little space. And obviously, UPX, in this case, we didn't have a compressed file system because it came from somewhere in China. And they was a bit terrible. And we couldn't really modify the device itself, so we had to just add it. But if we're on a real device, maybe the UPX step, you could manage that on a quality device. The UPX step, you would skip and you would use squashFS or something similar to BIFS, one of these. Yes? Yes, you in the back. So how long does it take to loan the compressed library as a question? Yes. How long does it take to boot it? So in practice, on this system, I did not see a difference because the CPU was not that slow. But on many systems, we've seen that it actually goes faster because the flash is slower than the CPU. But it very much depends on your device, this kind of thing. There's no magic. Yes? So, though, the question is if you have multiple shell scripts calling pipelines, the first thing, you should never use GST launch with shell scripts in the real product because you don't get any of the errors. So the error handling in GST launch is not meant for a product. So you shouldn't do that. What you should really, really do in this case is just write a small C application that calls your pipelines and link it all statically if size matters. So you're asking if the pipeline changes, whether the file name changes. So in this case, my problem was very minimal, but obviously you can put all these objects of properties that you can modify and see. So if you want a really, really, really dynamic pipeline where you can actually change the behavior of the program, then if you're in a small embedded system, you need to figure out all the use cases and figure out all the plugins that you're going to need and write a little bit of code to make that happen. This really fits very dynamic. It's probably easier in code than in scripting. If you're, obviously, otherwise you're stuck at the second step I had before I wrote a C program where I just had the list of the right plugins copied to the device. But that doesn't give you that's false. Anyone else? Yes, there. Sorry. I did not try compiling with Clang. In this case, all these experiments, as I mentioned, I used the latest in our tool chain. So this is kind of the first trick of especially embedded systems from China where they have a compiler that's from 2009. Sometimes you just replace it with a newer compiler and it's just better. But I'm not sure if Clang would make such a difference for this kind of thing. For some other platforms, we use Clang and it's not like maybe you save 5% or gain 5%. Maybe the ARM compiler would do better. Maybe it would do worse. It depends how much effort you're going to put into it. Yes. In this case, I think it should be... In this case, really, it was so fast I didn't see a difference. It started. But since we skipped the linking stage, the dynamic linker, and we reduced the amount of... Maybe we read from the flash in linearly, it might actually be faster. It should be faster. And we still link dynamically because of the lib-to-static-clips trick, we actually link dynamically against what's already in the platform. So the only thing that statically link would bring in for the specific application, which is the Gstreamer framework. We really tried to link in only what's new and not duplicate what's on the platform. So for another one, we ported something to OpenSSL because that was the platform instead of new TLS that GstreamerNet natively used. Any more questions? Well, thank you then.