Hi everyone, welcome to this video discussing ecological analysis as part of our larger study of critical media studies Really excited about this when I love ecological analysis. That's one of my favorite theories in the whole realm of communication studies So I'm really excited to talk about this now Ecological analysis may bring to mind thoughts of you know the environment Are we gonna be looking at things from environmental impact and not exactly that's not really what we're talking about not global warming and that kind of thing So well, but we are gonna be talking about an ecology in an interesting way Let's jump in here and see what we find out first of all ecological analysis examines the role of media ecology in the perception understanding feeling and value of an artifact So the key there is really media ecology and what do we mean by media ecology? We're gonna get into that but really we're talking about the entire environment surrounding The the channel and that the technologies and Around through which that communication takes place and how does that impact us as individuals and us as a society Our interaction with one another how does that impact our as it says perception or understanding our feeling in our value the value that we have of An artifact so all the things surrounding that but really coming back down to one thing in them Really so the major premises here that we're gonna be focusing on a media ecology is what's called medium theory It's grounded and what's called medium theory now as you may recall the medium is really just another word for channel So the channel is how that's being communicated So medium theory has to do with the technology how the technology or the or the individual medium of communication and that is that Indicates that the that the technology or the individual medium of communication is equally important to or even more important than the content of The media to understanding our social environment So the impact that the again that these that the choice of channel and that the method of Delivery of this media has and how that can be just as important if not more important than Then then the content of that media in the way that it affects our social environment and our Interpersonal communication the way that we relate to one another and the way that we communicate with one another So anyway, that's really what medium theory is getting at is that it surrounds the technology and the individual medium of that communication There are a couple different avenues. We're gonna explore here starting with there A couple different kind of phases of medium theory We're gonna start by talking about what's called technological determinism and then we will get into the more recent kind of definition of that area which is media ecology So before we do that though, let's just break down medium theory real quick again I just a little more direct way first of all when we think about medium theory There are really three principles involved here The first is that each medium medium theory says that each medium has a relatively unique and fixed set of characteristics So there are particular things that are true about a medium so if we're using the medium of You know just say social media in general. That's different than the medium of a post-it note Which is different than the medium of a phone call Which is different than the medium of smoke signals, right? Each of these has some unique characteristics and some fixed Characteristics that are there about them some things that are true about them some things that relate to them that are different from other forms And you can even you know if you want to get even more specific and dive into this they're different for example they're different characteristics and For the different types of social media if we got into the social media There's you know, we there's things that are different about Facebook than about Instagram and then about Twitter than about You know tiktok and so forth right all of these have different characteristics And that are that are unique about them and that are also fixed about them So every medium has a relatively unique and fixed set of characteristics. That's the first point of medium theory the second Is that those characteristics then produce a particular communication environment? So the way that we communicate using those things is affected and this is determined really by Those characteristics. Okay, so that those characteristics produce that particular communication environment They are influenced that by that and those characteristics and create a really unique and specific environment And then finally the communication environment that is created then has consequences for human consciousness and social organization So it's kind of a flow here a process and then all that comes back to effect is we're gonna see it's almost turns into a Circular thing here, but so each medium is unique and has different characteristics those characteristics Then create a specific communication environment and that environment then impacts how we relate to ourselves How we relate to one another and it creates that communication environment through which we communicate with one another Okay, so that's the the three principles the three points of medium theory in general So, let's take a look then at the one specific kind of Foundational area of medium theory and that's the work of a gentleman named Marshall McLuhan Who worked in what's called technological determinism when he called technological determinism? McLuhan was a psychologist really but but focused on communication theory and Interaction and the way that technology impacted that he said that his belief was that a Society's technology Determines its cultural values its social structures and eventually in overall its history Right that the technology that's used during that time them that dominates that time has such a tremendous impact on those areas that it really ends up affecting every aspect of human interaction and of human development and so he said that That's us that the society's dominant technology really determines all of those things hence the technological Determinism the name in the in the theory there He also stipulated that or postulated that social progress is driven by technological innovation that our society and our society's progress is really a Tied to or specifically connected to technological innovation and that's really not difficult to see in our modern times is it with the Rapid progression of technology and the way that that is impacted the way that we interact with one another and our society in general you think about I mean just our own personal use of social media and things like that how different it is from even just 20 years ago And how that's impacted our society But then you thought if you want to put it in a more specific context Recently we've seen the impact that those types of technologies are having on things like White supremacist groups. They are much more able to organize and to To coordinate from a distance even without really having to gather until they want to so I mean There's all kinds of advantages that that that social media and the internet in general have offered two groups like that so that really impacted social progress in a variety different ways some good some bad but So social progress has driven them by that technological innovation and then finally that the technological determinism this Exams the effect of technology on the nature of human relationships. Okay, so McLuhan said that the that human kind has gone through these different Phases of media history and the dominant technology at that time has really impacted the nature of human relationship So for example, if we just look at these individually these different aspects of media the periods of eras of media history First you have what McLuhan called the tribal age back before really predating even the written word where where History and everything was connected to to the orality of communication. Everything was was through spoken word So you really had this not only So you had not not only share a language, but you had to be in a geographic area that allowed you to To hear that language and communicate that line. So everything was really tied together In a sense not only did they live close together? You could go 10 miles and they'd speak a different language and you might not have any idea What somebody was saying so that would be very different. There's also the sense of connection in terms of Collectivism, you know people are living in close quarters and you really depended on that group for survival So really going out on your own was not an option as much So so you really were really connected and not only within this tribal group at home But then within the different groups within that tribal group. So really had this strong connections and we're very much Dependent and codependent on one another in the tribal age Then you have the literacy age where some people could start to read now We have the written word that would be the first innovation technological innovation that McLuhan sites is the development of the written word And so that then some people became literate and that allowed them to kind of move away from the group a little bit Could because you could still be a part of that group you could still communicate You could still gather the history and things and not have to be right in the same village necessarily It also allowed people that to communicate over greater Expanses of geography right you didn't have to be in the same area you could write things down and send it and have an accurate Communication and have you know the ways to communicate with people outside of just the spoken word So you have the literacy agent people see that people start spreading out a little bit there There's still a little largely a part of the tribe, but but some spreading out there Then you have the print age with the that was ushered in by again technology Assuring in a change a massive change in society that technology then being the printing press So then not only do you have some people who are literate but more and more people are becoming literate and can move away from the tribe Right and don't have to be centrally located necessarily they can move away a little bit and and still have that information Still have that connection still be able to communicate across large Stretches of geography and you start to see this in in for example in the in Western in our Western We call Western civilization here in the United States the westward expansion You could be out on the frontier, but still Have a book still be connected still get newspapers and magazines and still keep up on what was happening in the outside world without having to be right in the center of town and So so you know just even thinking about the print age in that sense Then you have more people who are literate and and literacy continues to grow and grow and grow more people had access to those materials And we're able to kind of decentralize again move away from the tribe a little bit Next you have the electronic age, which you know, I may have started with the telegram But really radio television those types of things You have the electronic age and and then you see people that are connected But now the communication really is spread out. We're able to really isolate We don't have to be around the other people to be connected to them right in a sense We can still get the news we can still get the same entertainment and not ever really have to be around people We you start to see this kind of isolation Obviously it has an impact on the way that humans interact and and that's really what McLuhan's getting at these these The technology determines kind of how we're engaging with one another how we're interacting with one another It's really was his major point in all of this and the different types of media He caused us to think differently cause our processes of thought to change and the way that we process information and gather information all of this changes So the electronic age you have, you know, that the tribe is shrinking and the necessity for that You know the dependency on that tribe is shrinking a little bit We have that kind of outward communication going but but we can see we're much more isolated We're much more independent Then we have what's been tentatively there's a lot of names for this this last one here. There's the third age There's there's all kinds of stuff, but we're just gonna call it a new media age Things like the internet basically with the advent of the internet It's what we're talking about and really ushered in a different style of communication again When we think about you know the fact that we can bounce all over here You know no longer is it just coming from this one central location now? We are creators now. We are communicating with one another directly now and it's created what's called this What some people are calling the global village Right of you know this connection with people all around the world the world is shrinking in that regard No, that does not mean we know people better that we're communicating any better It just means that we are able to connect a little more to people outside of you know that that isolation a little bit so Not everybody's communicating with everybody obviously, but but we have different Path pathways of communication that are happening in the new media age and we'll talk more about that here in a few minutes but One of the just quick item from for McLuhan one of the famous things he said is the medium is the message and It's part of this quote the medium is the message This is the passage from one of his books the medium is the message This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium That is of any extension of ourselves which in his mind the medium Media our extensions really of ourselves as humans Result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by extension by each extension of ourselves or by any New technology, but what he's saying here's the medium is the message that the you know The way we choose to communicate that message says a lot about what we feel about that message says sometimes more than the content of that message itself When you choose to break up with somebody you're in a relationship you choose to break up with them face to face That's very different sends a different message than breaking up with them via text or via a post-it note or whatever right so There's the mediums there communicate very different Messages about how you feel about that person how you feel about that relationship How you feel about the content that you're communicating so in That's where McLuhan is coming in saying the medium is the message in many ways the medium Communicates something more than the content of that message So that's technological determinism then we then we you know continue to evolve continue to expand on this You have a gentleman named Neil postman right Neil postman comes up with this idea He expands upon McLuhan's theory and says okay beyond technological determinism. They have what we call media ecology Okay, so now we're starting to get in a more contemporary sincere media ecology and what what postman said about this is that media ecology really describes a holistic systems-based examination of The symbiotic relationship between humans technology and the environment The environment here being the context is what he's really getting at the context the environment the situation in which that communication takes place So it's what he called a symbiotic relationship. It's not a One that one exclusively drives the other but it's one where these three things work in conjunction in their evolution Right, so he also said then that the aim of media ecology is to increase awareness of the mutual effects That was his purpose in defining mutual media ecology Was to increase the awareness that people have of these mutual effects and that the the impact they each have on each other And finally you talked about how this is a dynamic process Rather than just technology as a singular driving force. So McLuhan's technological technological determinism said that technology Drives this and society then follows and that's it right. It's the technology that drives this but postman says no It's the it's really a symbiotic relationship, but so it's dynamic. It's constantly changing. It's not just a singular driving force There's multiple causality going in here We can we kind of compare this and you know the reason the word ecology comes into this is because we're thinking about the same Type of ecological system that you see for example in the Sahara. You have different animals that are all Doing their thing and not necessarily working together, but each of them impacts This environment right when you lose a piece of that ecology, whether that's you know an animal goes into extinction or becomes rare or You know one of the resources The water becomes very rare and you change the ecology of that situation. It changes that entire system, right? Everything is impacted and everything is connected. Everything is symbiotic so Postman was saying that's exactly what's happening with Media ecology with our relationship with this technology in the media as well so So where again? McLuhan in technological determinism said that technology evolves and then humans adapt and then technology evolves again And then humans adapt, but it's really technology Driving that whole process Polisman said that the media ecology cycle is a little different. He said first of all we have this mediated communication So mediated communication just being any communication that uses Technology right so we have this mediated communication whatever it is Whatever is presently in use as that mediated communication the dominant mediated communication is what there is Then you see though that new tools are developed So we have what's existing in that mediated communication, but then new tools are developed And then you have maybe the adoption of this new technology and not all of it's adopted But but much of the time it is you know So you see these tools that are that are adopted So who knew that Facebook was going to be become what it is right who knew that tech talk would ever be popular So we have the you know the adoption and then we have other you know types of social media and different types of technologies That are not adopted or that that are adopted and then go away You know my space is an example if you can recall my space, right? So some of us remember my space kind of a precursor to Facebook It was very popular for a short time and then it went away. It was supplanted by Facebook. It's nowhere to be seen now Right, so you see maybe the adoption of this new technology and when it is adopted though Then it becomes kind of normalization. I mean I'm old enough to remember when Facebook was new You know relatively new I'm able to remember when you had to have a college email account or a dot edu email account In order to sign up for Facebook. It was exclusively for college students Then it became something more than that and and then it became the normalization I can also recall when my mother joined Facebook, right? And as the time was in her 70s, right? And then I thought okay. Well, this is obviously becoming a Normalized technology. It's not something that's unique anymore for for young people when you got all people of all ages doing it It's become the norm now and it's become kind of the standard, you know, it's no longer that cutting-edge Technology that's that's sort of new right? It's no longer in erotic analysis. What we would call transgressive. It is now Just that the norm it's become the norm and then that becomes then the mediated communication Becomes the new norm right that becomes our mediated communication. Well, eventually new tools are developed Facebook was there and then Twitter came and then Instagram came and then tiktok came and so these things continue to develop these You know and it continues this cycle, but there's a symbiotic relationship people have a place In that cycle whether or not we adopt it whether or not we normalize it You know whether or not we use it and somebody's got to develop these tools right technology just doesn't develop itself So somebody's got to develop these tools. So we have the symbiotic relationship this you know kind of companionship relationship with these things so in in creating these so This is what we mean by media ecology then the symbiotic relationship between these different technologies and humans and our environment in which we We communicate the situation the context in which we communicate so Presently as I mentioned before we are in what's called the new media era and there are different names for but that's that's a very common Was the new media era to one take just a second and talk about what we mean by that So to define new media we just need to understand that new media means any media that uses computing technology to create store and distribute data So really anything with a microprocessor would be considered new media now That really kind of confuses and can get you know muddy because you know we talk about television as part of the electronic area Right well, but a lot of television is now run through microprocessors, right? The television itself as well as the streaming services that you might use to watch this So is it electronic age or is it new media? You know, it's really just kind of an evolving thing But generally speaking if it uses a microprocessor, we're gonna call it new media if it uses computing technology To distribute and create and store that that data then we're gonna call it new media And that's what we mean by a new media now There are a few characteristics of new media that we need to be familiar with The first is that it's digital we just talked about it uses computer technology computing technology to to do all those things so it is digital it's it's it's It's it's shared and it's it's created and it's stored in bits and bytes and and it is digital new media is Digital and takes advantage of those digital technologies then It's also variable. It's variable both in the sense that Of how we can create these things and the function of those things and the way we use this Technology and the way we use the information we get from this technology But also in the way that we can access this technology lots of times digital new media will have Multiple entry points for example, you don't always have to check Facebook from your phone You can check it from your computer. You can check it from a lot of these different things You can check it from your watch maybe now you can do you know all these different things so it's variable both in the way that we use and Function with that information and also how we then access it and things like that along those lines It's also interactive New media is interactive meaning. It's it's not just one way radio and television those are things that And that and that time you didn't really see a lot of Independent, you know creation of radio and and television programs and things like that It was all run through the system basically you were running through that that media Industry that the traditional media industry, but gosh, how many of you are youtubers now? Whether you I mean how many of you created anything and put it on YouTube or Filmed anything and put it on YouTube or written a blog or contributed in some way or interacted Have you responded or commented to one of your favorite stories or to a community or message board or things like that? New media is interactive. It is a two-way street. It allows us to be both Consumers of the media, but also producers and creators of media and engage in that aspect of it It is connective it does connect us now again that does not mean that we are That we have you know enhanced our relationships necessarily, but it does mean we are more connected how many I was joked I'm a Full disclosure. I'm not on Facebook anymore really so I don't do a lot of social media So um, but when I was I used to I used to look at my Facebook page sometimes and think How many friends do I have? How do I have this many friends on Facebook? I don't have This many friends. I don't you know people and I would call friends I know a lot of people and that that's really what this is that I these are people I know, but they're not my Friends necessarily, but I'm connected to these people. So I'm finding out what they're having for dinner What their kids were on the first day of school and so forth and and and it was fine. It was nice But doesn't help me necessarily know them any better or really, you know establish a connection But it is connective it does connect us to people all over the world People that we know people that we don't know and it does help us be more connected Again, whether or not that's a good thing or not May depend on the day, but we are more connected for sure It's also virtual even when you're talking to somebody, you know On the phone live face. I'm in person in person in real time in real life You're talking to somebody on the phone Even if you're FaceTiming them it's still on the other end of some technology They're being that you know their information their image is being sent through the ether Right through these bits and bytes that we talked about because it's all digital Which makes everything virtual has advantages and disadvantages to that so but we need to understand that New media is virtual every aspect of it really is virtual There are also a couple of key impacts of new media that we need to consider some things that That we need to bear in mind waste that is this has changed the way that we I couldn't as McLuhan said the way that we interact the way that we engage the way that we think It has impacted all these things even if it's if it's not just the technology developing as he would have indicated But more like postman said it's a symbiotic relationship But that doesn't change the fact that it has An impact on the way that we communicate and the way that we interact the way that we relate to one another and the way that Our society functions really so um first of all New media is what we call associational.  You move from a to b to c you read a book from a You know from page one to page two to page three all the way through right now when I was a kid I love choose your own venture books and have you hop around a little bit, but for the most part Our learning was linear We listened to albums and cassette tapes in a linear way because that's what we had available We listened that you started the beginning you go through to the end Everything was very linear and that's how our mind worked then right in a very linear Fashioned okay, what what do I need to get from a to b to c and so forth? But with the development and one of the impacts of new media is that it's very associational Which really implies that we're very non-linear Right as you can see here. It's no longer a to b to c now It's a to wherever you want to go think about the difference between reading a book And and and getting on the web right like I said when I read a book when I was when I was you know Or even today when you read a book you start a page one you go through all those different pages Right you move through this page. It's a very linear process And so our our mind works that way our mind is is is fashion in that linear way And I mentioned when I was growing up and I listened to cassette tapes I wore out my copy of Metallica's injustice for all and and all their other Stuff, but I loved injustice for all and I listened to it all the time But I listened to it From start to finish and jump around first of all because it was a pain to do so in a cassette You would add a fast forward and you could never really exactly get to the right spots He was fast forward and then rewind and get to the beginning of a song or whatever But um, so you just listen from beginning to end and bands knew that a lot of times They made an album with that in mind right that you were going to listen to it from beginning to end So there had to be a flow sometimes there was a story to it But I listened to that I'm from beginning to end I didn't jump around Or anything like that and now even I have a cd I have the cd that I listened to quite a bit still when I'm working or doing whatever I still listen to it from beginning to end because my mind is very Linear in nature because that's what I grew up with that a to b to c But compare that linear nature with surfing the web You know how many times have you gotten down the rabbit trail right or gotten pulled down, you know like Like alice in wonderland right get pulled down that whole of you get on to do one thing on the internet And all of a sudden you're clicking and you read a paragraph and then you find another like oh Let me click on this and I'll go over here and I'll go over there. It's not linear You don't start on page one of the internet and go through to the end Right you you start where you're starting and then maybe you get to the end of that and go to something else But maybe you just skip around You know I have this issue in youtube all the time when I'm going there for something specific I'll go there looking for some information on something or how to video on how to do something and then All of a sudden I'm watching videos of soldiers coming home from you know and surprising their family Or I'm watching you know cute pet tricks or I'm doing you know things like that I just get pulled in all these different directions. It's it's associational We have the same thing when I get when I was growing up when we watch tv You waited until the next program came on right you didn't have the opportunity to jump around now We can watch what we want when we want and in fact we get pretty frustrated I know I do even though I didn't grow up with I get pretty frustrated when I have to wait What do you mean? There's only one episode out a week What is wrong with you people just put them all out at once and let me watch them when I want And how I want and so forth right if I want to watch it on my tv or on my phone or if I want to switch Halfway through and you know I'm tired of watching it on my phone. So I'm gonna go watch it. I want to be able to do what I want That's what we mean by jumping around here Like there's no linear process anymore to all this stuff with new media We can jump we can go wherever we want and you may get from a all the way to to g Without ever going through b and c you may not have any connection to b and c at that point You may not have to so there's all kinds of things that we do differently and our mind works differently now in that regard Our mind works differently And and people who've grown up with this have grown up with this associational kind of impact And so we need to keep that in mind That's one way that new media has impacted us is that it's very associational It's it's much less linear than traditional medias It's also contingent right everything is contingent now Again when when I was growing up you basically had books and and magazines and things But if it was printed in a book It was it was pretty solid. I mean that was pretty much it that was considered sort of the gospel Right's considered sort of the end all be all right, but now Anybody can print anything right not just in book form but on the internet and you can find information now like you couldn't before I can't imagine how we ever Got along without being able to just pull something up on google immediately and have an answer to something my friends He's just and I used to argue about stuff Constantly who's the lead singer of this band or whatever and we We just have to wait till somebody got the cassette tape and we can look in the liner notes, right? We didn't have the instant impact, but so now everything is contingent Right everything is is you know, it's maybe maybe true. Maybe not true Maybe true for now. Maybe true for you But then I'll go out and find this other information, right or at the very least I'll go out and hit hit refresh And have some new information to share with you based on what I found on the internet So everything is contingent now. They're very it's very hard to find an absolute truth In a in essence, right? It's very hard to find an absolute truth in the age of new media because somebody I'll just come and Make a statement about something different or put something else out So it's very different to find an absolute truth in the age of new media New media is also what we call prosumptive Prosumptive, right, which is a combination Of two different ideas, right the idea that that that media is consumptive We consume media. We are consumers of media, but we are also as we mentioned We are also producers and creators of this media. So producers and consumption Consumptive prosumptive new media is prosumptive It is both something that we consume and that we produce We're very much producers of new media Just this video, for example, is a production of new media that I never would have imagined 10 15 20 years ago really wouldn't have imagined that I would be doing something like this that people might view it At some point that that never would have occurred to me. That's not something that I Would have been able to do I didn't have the facilities to do that. I could there's no way I could just do it sitting in my home right here I have all the technology that I need To be a creator now But and and everybody does really at this point, right? If you've got a smartphone, which it's pretty much everybody, right? You can be a creator. You can be a producer of new media Everybody virtually has that opportunity In in this society in which we live here in the United States virtually everyone has the opportunity To be both a producer and a consumer. So new media is then prosumptive And finally it's effective Affective not effective, but affect effective Meaning that it has an impact on a really on our body on our physiologically. It impacts us in a way, right? It's much more Intimate new media is much more intimate and personal than old media would have been so When I was in college, for example, if I wanted to listen to music And I had roommates all through college But I had to consider those roommates, right? I had to consider that, you know I mean, I had headphones that I could use and things that you know big over-the-ear type things But who does that and I was limited in range and things so you never do that So instead you just pick music that you know your roommates are going to like Fortunately, I like a wide variety of music. So that wasn't as much of an issue for me But I always had to be mindful of, you know, well, I can't really listen to my Hardcore metal if my roommate's here and doesn't like that kind of music So it's it's less personal in some ways. It's less Intimate because it's more of a shared experience and more of a generic experience in that regard But new media is very intimate very personal. We put in our headphones We put in our Earbuds and we and we have our phones out and we're consumed by this, right? But it becomes much more personal it becomes much more Intimate in that regard we can be in our own little world And and it does affect us physically not only in terms of what we're hearing and what we're listening to And what we're seeing but the fact that it does kind of Close us off how many times you run into something or tripped over something because you've been On your on your phone or listening to something and not paying full attention to what you're doing It it is affective. It affects us in a very physical Very real way then my new media does much more so and it's really become more about Not just what we think but what we feel about something how we feel about something has become much more important Than than what we might think about it. We go with our gut a lot more on these types of things It's really just thinking again about the ecology the environment that this new media Has created and continues to create the different medias that we have and how this changes The way that we connect with one another the way that we relate to one another the way that we communicate to one another The way that we see ourselves and communicate with ourselves All of these things the way that this impacts our society and in big ways and in small ways Media ecology is Everywhere and so it's something that we need to to keep in mind and consider as we as we really focus on That critical aspect of media studies I hope this has been interesting to you. I hope you've Understood now ecological analysis a little bit better that it's not really just about the environment At least not you know again a sense of global warming and recycling and things But but more about the environment in which we live in the environment That's created by the media and and then establishes our society and really influences our Society and has an impact in that regard If you have questions about this or about ecological analysis or about any other aspect of critical media studies Please feel free to email me. I'd love to chat with you about this via email and answer any questions that you might have In the meantime, I hope you'll get out there and really have a renewed understanding Of the impact that the different medias have in the way that we can communicate with one another relate to one another engage with one another and and and again positive and Potentially negative ways all the way around and and just the impact that the media has on us Has in ecologic in an ecological sense


Welcome to the K-12 online conference 2015. I'm Dr. Deverey Rogers, and I'm sharing with you what's virtually possible through online professional development. What's virtually possible in high quality, free online professional development. So that you can know who's sharing information with you, I've had 20 years of experience in education at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. I've also been an education administrator. I'm Google certified, a master Intel instructor, and a leading edge certified administrator. If you'd like to find out more about me, you can use your QR code reader to go to my website or simply type it in, DevereyRogers.com. And feel free to tweet me throughout the presentation and even afterwards as you become part of my professional learning network. You can tweet me at d underscore educator, at d underscore educator. You can find this session at the K-12 online conference website as well as this promo link. You can find our back channel for this session at this tiny URL. I encourage you to open up another browser, window, or another tab in order to access this back channel so that you can pause your video every now and then and be able to respond to some of the questions that I have throughout the presentation and also so that you can share any ideas, comments, or resources that you might have in regards to online professional development. And again, don't forget to tweet me. So today, I'm going to cover the what, the why, and the how of online professional development. What is PD? Why do we do PD? And how we can do PD through professional learning networks, both traditionally and virtually. I'll speak about all of these learning modes and the way that I will present it is by going deeply into one site that I have for each of them or one organization that I have for each of them and then providing you with the links for other recommended sites. First, I'd like to tap into your prior knowledge. What do you already know about online professional development? I'm using AnswerGarden at this URL if you need to pause the video so that you can get to this URL and be able to answer this question. What do you already know about online professional development, any PD sites and any supports? Once you type in your 20 character answer here, you'll submit. It works like a word cloud. You'll be able to see your answers and other people's answers popping up here. And then if you decide that you agree with one, you simply click on it and then the number changes and then that particular word or phrase becomes larger and larger so that we can see what other people already know about online professional development. So when we define PD, professional development may be used in reference to a wide variety of specialized training, formal education or advanced professional learning intended to help administrators, teachers and other educators improve their professional knowledge, competence, skill and effectiveness. The research says that teachers who receive substantial professional development, that's at an average of 49 hours a year, can boost their students achievement by about 21 percentile points. I know that we don't teach towards the test, but when we assess students learning, that is a great growth point for people who receive substantial professional development. A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating the PD into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection, meaning that professional development that we get is not necessarily applied to the classroom. Maybe sometimes because they're given one workshop function, maybe because the learning that we have as teachers does not necessarily go in an inquiry cycle so that we can see how it is applied to students and if that's actually working to come back and talk about that. You can read more of Gusky's research, who is right now one of the gurus around professional development for education. The research also says that international evidence suggests that educational reforms progress depends on teachers' individual and collective capacity and is linked with school-wide capacity for promoting pupils' learning, again, what you learn and what's going on in the school and how it's supported. Building capacity is therefore critical. Developing professional learning communities appears to hold considerable promise for capacity building for sustainable improvement. Online, we can build professional learning networks, so that's something that we're going to talk about. Essentially, professional development equals student success if it's connected and collaborative. So again, use our back channel in order to respond to how you can use this knowledge. How are you then able to use the knowledge that the research is sharing with us in what you will be doing in your own work environment? This is our back channel, simple Google Doc. Or again, you can tweet me at The Educator. So a PLN, a personal or professional learning network is a potentially promising pedagogical approach for both integrating formal and informal learning using social media and supporting students' self-regulated learning. A PLN, theoretically, is using connectivism because we're able to connect with one another and share our differing perspectives. It's the power of we instead of me. I might be an expert in a particular field, but when I connect with you and then we share our thoughts and our agreements and our ideas and our practices, then we have an exponential power building. So we're sharing within this community of practice. All educators are experts in something. So then we're able to share those things with one another. A PLN is basically do-it-yourself mentoring. So as a network teacher, you may use some of these digital tools that I'll talk about. But then we're also using our family and local community, popular media, our colleagues, and curriculum documents that we're very accustomed to. So as long as we're connecting, we're building personal learning networks. So now I'll begin to talk about some of the, excuse me, some of the online professional development that you can engage in with your colleagues or by yourself. But nevertheless, if you're doing it by yourself, that you connect again online so that you can build that PLN. Of these, there's K-12 online. All of these are linked so that when you access the presentation that you can click on them yourself. There's K-12 online, Google Education on Air, Smithsonian online conference series. This is Teacher Leading Teachers Conference, the Arts Online Conference, the 14 virtual conference out of the University of Michigan, Global Education Conference, and then the CO. This is CO-14, but for year 2015 it'll be CO-15, CO-16, etc., etc. I'm only going to focus on one and I've decided that I'm going to focus on EdCamp Global. We all know EdCamps for being unconferences. And if you don't know about EdCamps, by all means Google Unconference. But EdCamps are usually held face to face. 2015 was the first year that they held one online. So again, an unconference is when teachers come up with the topics that they feel that they want to learn about and then facilitators or even the teachers themselves are the facilitators of those sessions in order to share out. So the schedule is presently being built for the 2016 conference and I just want to show you basically how this works. So in any online conference you should be able to access the schedule to see what you can learn and how you can learn it. So you can learn these through Twitter chats, Google Hangouts, Voxers, Periscopes, Google Classroom, Google Docs and Slides. Those are the ways that you can access the learning. And you can see as the schedule is building up that you have someone teaching through Google Classroom, excuse me, through the Twitter chat about global classrooms and the power of social media. You have someone teaching through a Google Hangout about sharing French as a second language in poetry on the elementary level, etc, etc. So there's always something for each teacher in any online conference. Again, you can access any of these from this particular presentation on this slide simply by clicking on it. When we come to Webazines, Webazines are basically your online magazines. Online magazines. I suggest these sites and then you can always make your own Webazine through paperly or through scoping. Again, I'm just going to go into one of them and I've decided to go into Education Next. As you can see, it's an online magazine.  The reason that it's a magazine is because it has the ads, it has the articles, it has videos, it has multimedia embedded into it. This is a good way that you can get a lot of different types of media coming at you for lots of different topics that affect educators. I might want to go into multimedia simply because it's an online magazine. And then here, if I don't see something from this week that I want to focus on, so they're focusing on strong K-12 leaders from within their book club, the last conference they had, I can always go to the video archive.  So again, once you access this presentation, then you can link out to any of these. But then there are professional organizations. Our professional organizations are basically what disciplines we have decided to focus on and then what national or state organizations there are to support that. So I have the disciplines listed on this side and then I have some of the national umbrella organizations on this side. So I've decided to focus on, I believe that is ASCD, curriculum and development. Yes, the Association of Curriculum and Development. As you can see, when I go into any of the national organization sites, they basically look the same. So they have books and publications somewhere, they have things around their conferences somewhere, then they have professional development. I think books and publications are professional development as well. I think when I go to any conference, any face-to-face conference or online conference, but even from the face-to-face conferences, they have some sessions recorded in which you can access, but then there's also professional development. Some professional development you have to pay for and then some of it is free. So depending on what organization you go into, the formatting may look a little different, but all the information will be there. And then you can always gather professional development, clicking on a video, looking at some webinars, web series, etc., etc. Or again, you can come to my presentation and you can click on any one of these in which I've linked directly to professional development pages. So again, I would like to have your feedback and I think that it's good for building a professional learning community if you were to go to the back channel. And the back channel again is just asking you what your thoughts are around what I'm presenting and if you have any other resources, comments or ideas around it so that we can build learning together. And again, if you can tweet me, next we have podcasts and vodcasts nowadays webinars. So you have your podcast that you basically listen to because they're audio files, you have your vodcast which are video broadcasts and those are equivalent now to what we're calling webinars. Usually though with the webinar, you need to register in order to watch it. And yes, discuss it in some manner. So usually there's synchronous so that you can log on and have discussions online while the presenter is presenting but if not, they're always archived so that you can get your professional learning that way. So we have a lot of different sites that have different types of podcast, vodcasts, webinars. So EdWeb for instance has lots of different webinars that you can choose from. WestEd focuses on research around education and what they found that works. This is the government site of webinars and what they found works in education. Ted, of course any Ted talks that you have are very inspirational. Some of them are research based but nevertheless those are video podcasts or vodcasts. Center for Learning has webinars in which you can look at regarding different disciplines. EdWeek, I know that we saw that in the webzines but then they also have lots of webinars that you can learn from. The county offices, one of them I'm going to focus on now but each public school district is within a county office and most county offices have webinars around different learning that you can look at and textbook companies. Textbook companies may be a little biased but nevertheless they have lots of webinars associated with the books that they are offering to districts. So again I'm going to go into one of the county office sites. So this happens to be for the start portage area but nevertheless technology integration because that's what I do but then like I said you can always go into any county office site and they have things for English, math, science, social studies, physical education, etc. etc. But as you can see that I've accessed, excuse me, I've accessed the site that has all the archived webinars for this year. The archived webinars so it's basically just clicking on it being the webinar comes up. I suggest sometimes that when you do webinars you can learn for yourself but to share with others and to give a little accountability you may want to have a LAN party and play the webinar with your colleagues so that you can have a discussion around it together. Next up are the blogs and wikis and websites because lots of teachers or educators nowadays have websites in which you can access lots of professional development. And then so the difference between blogs and wikis are here for you because I run into that a lot with my adult students around what's the difference between blogs and wikis but nevertheless I am going to go into edgy blogger so up here with edgy blogs and edgy blogger in order to find out what edgy blogger is and some of the professional development that they offer. So edgy blogger is not the only place that you can set your blog site by all means don't think that and I'm not necessarily recommending edgy blogger over anything else like blogger or WordPress or anything like that. I'm just stating for professional development edgy blogger has some on their sites so as you can see a mistake apology a lesson on feedback right because we need to give feedback to students in order to close up the inquiry cycle how to blog with students how to celebrate certain days that are not necessarily widely celebrated in education but how we can make it educational etc etc how to embed Pinterest boards on your blog so there's lots of different videos and blogs around what to do in education and then I chose some blogs and wikis just so you can see how some teachers are using it in their classroom so again if you access my presentation then there are direct links to pages in which I thought would be helpful for you to see some of their pages and how that can be professional development for us then there are online communities so online communities that we're accustomed to are basically your social networks excuse me and I chose all the most popular social networks right now and then I decided to focus on the hashtag community so if you look at these social learning networks that they are all social networks but you can also have professional learning communities within so I didn't necessarily like needing to the google plus site so much as how to have uh how to build community within google plus how to build community within facebook how to build community within twitter most of those are done through hashtags so that's why I wanted to share that most of them are done through hashtags so when you think of hashtags you know sometimes you come up with it yourself because you're thinking this is dessert this is food this is about first grade second grade etc but this is a pretty good article um around hashtag communities how they're used on instagram and it basically applies to how it's used on twitter how it's used on facebook etc etc so hopefully that will help you to build professional learning communities and again I'd like to know how are you thinking of using this information in your classroom tomorrow and you can tweet that to me as well and finally we have social bookmarks and social bookmarking is defined here but then these are popular social bookmarking sites they work they all work the same yet differently like dgo and delicious are pretty much the same pretty much work the same excuse me symbol works pretty uniquely yet it has the same features as as pinterest and stumble upon um evernote works uniquely as a social bookmark but yet it has the same features as other things so nevertheless I've decided to show you around symbol specifically this particular site shows you 11 ways to use symbol in the classroom symbol is basically a visual site that holds links to different websites I thought that it was important um to show you how one student um presented how she's using her symbol welcome to my personal learning environment I've been practicing networked learning in my seventh grade science class I spent some time at the beginning of the year learning how to find information online and how to pull it all together on a personal page as you can see there's lots of stuff here some things like my facebook account and the blocks across the top are not for school I organized all my school work along the bottom row every morning when I come to class I visit the science agenda to see what we're doing for the day sometimes there are videos to watch for other work to do other times I decide what I need to work on next so did you see how she clicked on her website on one of the blocks within symbol and then it went to a particular website that's exactly how the social bookmarks work she's able to share those bookmarks with other students in her classroom just like you'd be able to share any of your bookmarks with other educators and other educators are able to share their bookmarks with you we find a lot of sites that we favor it a lot but why should I find sites about edtech that I love and then you have to go find them all on your own when I could share them with just a click so then they're finally they're learning series learning series are basically different places that you can go to learn in a sequential order and then possibly get certification afterwards like google certification the mie the microsoft teacher academy those certifications and finally open courseware I decided to go to google and just to search open courseware so I can show you how you can find any of these types of online professional developments but nevertheless I'm looking for open courseware um mit I just popped up first so that's the one that I'm going to but you can see how you can find learning through here because you can always go to any of the courses that they have like I'm going to go find a course by topic um I'll go for humanities I'll go for language and I'll go for ESL and then you can see the results that I get down here and I can simply click on it view the course and then all of a sudden I have learning that I can take myself through take myself and my colleagues through take myself and my students through online learning is at your fingertips so again I'd like for you to tell us how you're going to use this in your classroom tomorrow any questions comments ideas or resources that you might have for online professional learning and what your thoughts are around the research around it and how they connect so when we think of how we're bringing this all together you want to start small reach out yet limit the number of pools that you dive in initially because you will have cognitive overload organize your learning by topic or job function so I might organize oh I only want to look for things that have to do with um my english narrative essays or I only want to look at things that have to do with me as an education technologist etc etc you want to prioritize these learnings because that will help you from getting um cognitive overload you want to scan some of the materials some things you need to engage in and some things you only need to scan so that you can see if it's useful for you and your pl n can grow temporary limbs sometimes you may need to reach out on twitter and on instagram in order to find out something and sometimes you'll find oh I don't need that particular outlet anymore I can learn from web zines and social book smarts a little more you want to realize that your network is much larger than it seems so you're not just reading my blog you're reading all the blogs that I read and all the blogs of those bloggers etc etc etc so again it's exponential learning you want to invest time but don't fret that it will take up all your time and you don't need to engage in dozens of online activities to learn skill-based things instead just conduct a youtube research a youtube video search or a google blog search in order to come up with some of this information thank you for being with me on today I'm asking that you tweet how you can use this in your classroom tomorrow and you can tweet me at d underscore educator and also because we're in the k-12 online conference at k-12 online again feel free to join our personal professional learning network at our back channel and if you need to connect with me here's my information again the presentation can be found at this website I'd also appreciate if you can give me feedback on this presentation at this website I look forward to hearing from you and how you're using online professional development


At different times in your life, different things may mean a lot to you. Today in United States, tattoo removal is a huge business, it's a bigger business than tattoo. Well, I tell you, my experience with tattoos, if you really want to get a good tattoo, Kentucky. So, Sadhguru, I love tattoos. I have a lot of tattoos. And I'm sure a lot of people in this room do. So, when I got my first tattoo, there was a lot of clash of opinion between me and my parents. We fought a lot. Why did you get this? So, my question to you is, is getting a tattoo something which looks unprofessional or is it something which lacks gravitas or why? Why is this clash of opinion? Well, the question is, at different times in your life, different things may mean a lot to you. At that moment, if you have yourself marked permanently, and today in United States, tattoo removal is a huge business, it's a bigger business than tattoo. All right?   It better be something that matters to you for the rest of your life because after one or two years if it falls off, then you'll have to peel your skin. Plus also, see everything that you are need not be written on your face. When you want to do work in the world, when you want to do things in the world, it's not necessary everything that you are is all upfront. You must have what to expose to whom, isn't it?  If you're wanting to live a very simplistic life, it's okay. If you're looking for a more complex involvement in life, it's better people are not able to mark you in any particular way. Shall I tell you my experience with tattoos? No, I don't have any. I'm too dark for the tattoos, what to do? Is that a white color tattoo? Okay. I was… you know, we've been working in the prisons both in India and United States. This moment is called Inner Freedom for the Imprisoned. It's a… it's a very touching moment. So when I was in Kentucky Correction Center, it's a high security prison. There there was one guy who's a tattoo maker. He makes tattoos. So I was doing a ten-day program there for this prisoner, so they got really pally with me. Then they revealed, I said, where do you get these tattoos? Within the prison. Everything is searched, okay? Even from your body offices, everything is searched so that nothing goes in. But somehow this guy tattoos everybody at a tremendous price, okay? And he showed me all his tricks, how he tattoos. He breaks off one little thing off the fork and sharpens it and sharpens it and makes it into a needle. Anything little plastic he gets, bits and pieces of plastic he gathers, melts it out. And different colors, you should see the prisoners that tattooed from head to toe. This decides which gang they belong to. You know, it's like a… They… a particular type of tattoo means you belong to this group. Wherever they go in there, this thing, they have a lingo that this is where you belong. And it also tells them what grade of criminal are you. The really high grade or low grade criminal. Literally entire torso is always tattooed for most of them and this is the guy who does it. And all these people, they have made a this thing that they owe him. When they leave the prison, if they ever go back, they owe him how much it is, thousands of dollars they owe this guy. He's keeping accounts of all that, writing it on his arm, accounts. So, it was an incredible thing to see. I told him, you show it, how you do? Well, the guards were there. He said, I cannot show it, but he explained to me how he does it. It's just ingenious, within the prison what he is doing with these tattoos. If you really want to get a good tattoo, Kentucky.


Welcome back to our question of the week Let's move right into the question today, we're going to hide our answer choices until we read the full question and to do some sort of an answer and As always we're going to begin with the last sentence or the question of the vignette before we read the rest Which of the following is a potential complication of this treatment? This tells me that all I'm looking for is what the treatment is and the rest I probably don't have to pay much attention to Let's go ahead and read the question a 30 year old patient comes the physician due to a bump in her neck Physical examination reveals a solitary thyroid nodule laboratory studies show an increased serum calcitonin level and a pentagastrin induced rise in the secretion of calcitonin a Biopsy confirms the presence of a carcinoma the patient is scheduled for a total thyroid ectomy Which are the following is a potential complication of this treatment? So we're telling being told that the patient will be having a total thyroid ectomy. Sometimes these questions may not give you the Choice that they're having a total thyroid ectomy They may have you deduced that the total thyroid ectomy is occurring and then you have to find out what the Complications of the treatment is so you can't just ignore everything But in this case we're told there's a total thyroid ectomy. What are some potential complications with the total thyroid ectomy? Well, we know there are nerves that run alongside and close to the thyroid So if we do a thyroid ectomy, we can lacerate some of those nerves I know the pair of thyroid sit around the nerve of around the thyroid as well And some other structures in that area muscles and whatnot So let's remember those things and we'll take that into consideration as we check our answer choices All right. A is acromegaly B is cretinism or cretinism C is hypertension D hypo parathyroidism or E renal osteodystrophy Take a minute come up with your answer and write your answer in the comments below Well, right from the start. I'm seeing D as a potential answer here because we mentioned parathyroid as we were Working through this question, but let's go through and try and eliminate some of these options So let's start at the top a acromegaly Acromegaly, this is an excess of growth hormone mostly going to be in in adults their growth plates have already fused there's no association with a thyroid or a Thyroid ectomy in this situation. So acromegaly. I know is not going to be my correct answer So we'll mark that off the list Cretanism cretinism is it is a hypothyroidism, but it's a hypothyroidism of a fetus Okay, this is going to be due to problems with the Thyroid functioning and the thyroid Developing it's not going to be something a 30 year old patient will find Due to a cancer. So cretinism to me is not going to be a good option here as well See hypertension while we know hypertension can be caused by a lot of things Taking a thyroid out is not going to be a cause of of hypertension. So that's a bad answer Let's skip over D for just a minute and go to E renal osteodystrophy. So renal osteodystrophy Comes along with patients that have renal failure. We can see a lot of the signs that are associated with something that could have been caused by Removing the thyroid But I don't really think we're going to have a lot of issues with This being caused by removing the thyroid So in turn my answer is going to be D hypoparathyroidism and that is our correct answer D So what we're seeing here is the Parathyroids sit on top of the thyroid. So if we're removing the thyroid gland you have to be very very careful To not remove the parathyroids and oftentimes it's still pretty almost impossible to do that so we do have a potential to have a Secondary hypoparathyroidism due to that total thyroid ectomy What will be some signs and symptoms that will see the patient having when they have that total thyroid ectomy that? Affects the parathyroids well hypoparathyroid can lead us to hypocalcemia and then on top of that We can have hyperphosphatemia So what is a hypocalcemia symptoms tingling on the lips tingling in the fingers muscle spasms? They can have a positive Chavstex sign So if we tap on the facial nerve in the cheek that will cause a contraction of the facial muscles And they can also have a positive trousseau sign Which is when you occlude the brachial artery in the upper part of the arm It's going to cause a carpal spasm down in the distal portion of the arm Now as we mentioned renal osteodistrophy that Can give us some signs and symptoms that would be similar to hypoparathyroidism However, this is a completely different mechanism that's causing this hypoparathyroid signs and symptoms It's not due to the actual removal of the thyroid. Okay


Welcome to a new week of the rundown. On this episode, changes to advancement exam readiness reviews, the Navy Surgeon General's message to the fleet, and the end of a CD-ROM-based program. Effective January 1st, the responsibility for recruitment and selection of fleet subject matter experts for advancement exam readiness reviews will be the responsibility of type commanders and rating sponsors. This change will allow for TICOMS and rating sponsors to become more engaged with recruiting experts and select panels that are closer to the deck plate level. TICOMS will be responsible for nominating SMEs for their rating under their purview. This will allow for the development of advancement exams that more clearly address each ratings priorities. Read Navadmin 229-17 for more information. Navy Surgeon General Vice Admiral Forrest Faison released a message to sailors addressing the recent incident involving members of the Navy's medicine team posting offensive photos on social media. Vice Admiral Faison said, this type of behavior is inconsistent with our Navy Corps values and medical ethics and has a negative effect on mission accomplishment and good order and discipline. Read more of his message on the Navy Life Blog. The Navy War College will no longer offer joint professional military education or JPME courses via a CD-ROM program through the College of Distance Education. The JPME CD-ROM program is being phased out to provide more modern options that will allow students to access colleagues and teachers more quickly and effectively. Students currently enrolled in the program will have 20 months to complete their course before the termination of the program on May 31st, 2019. No new applications for the program will be accepted after September 30th, 2017. Read more details in Navadmin 233-17. Finally, congratulations to nearly 4,000 sailors who joined the Chief's Mess. Check out stories and videos of pinning ceremonies from around the fleet on Navy.mil. That's all for this week. For any questions, send us a message at usnpeople.fct and navy.mil. For the Chief Naval Personnel, I'm MC2 L.J. Burleson. Thanks for watching.


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Well, it's another exciting Wednesday here at Think Tech Hawaii, I'm Chris Leetham. The show is called The Economy and You, and today we're going to be talking a little bit about technology stuff. Hey, don't, don't, don't leave, we're, stay here, because this is going to be a kind of an interesting conversation. What we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk a little bit about how do you take a seat of an idea and germinate that into something like an application or a software idea or something that you can turn into some kind of a business for your livelihood. Because, you know, Hawaii is all about small business, and today's guest is somebody who's actually accomplished all of this. Today's guest is Gabe Mott. Gabe, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, and thank you for coming to The Economy and You. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, you're welcome. And you started a company called, your latest venture is called Houdoku. Yeah. It's an application and it's built, what kind of technology did you use for that? So it's, it's built just for iPhones and iPads. So it's on iOS, and so it's built all natively using Objective-C. Objective-C. And so my partner Dave codes, and his, you know, his, his, his best code is Objective-C. Now you can code in Swift for, for iPhones and iPads. That's right. We're still, we're still using what we, what we already built this whole thing and moving forward with it. And, and there's also a platform called Xamarin. Xamarin. Xamarin. Yeah, I've heard of Xamarin. Okay, Xamarin is for all those Microsoft. .NET guys that want to be able to write iPhone apps, but we can't, we don't have it in us to learn Swift. So we have another platform called Xamarin which allows us to develop applications for the iPhone as well. So that's kind of a cool platform. But, you know, Gabe, I really wanted to talk to today's show, talk about this whole thing about where do you start? Because, you know, I had a great conversation with somebody for a couple hours last night and they have an idea for something. They have no programming background. They've never developed an application. But, oh, hey, I've got an idea that's going to make me buku box. And, you know, that's a, that's a much easier said than done. I, I mean, there's got to be as many ways to start as there are stories of starting, you know what I mean? I mean, I think, I think it, it all, it, I guess for us, like, it was an idea literally sketched out on an app in our first, our first project. And then it was talking to kind of anybody who would listen to begin to formulate the idea and asking for resources and not expecting them to do anything for you. They're not going to, you're not going out asking for help to have them do it for you. You got, you're just doing research and then you're getting online and you're getting a key word of something you heard from somebody and you're learning this stuff to figure out what are the next steps. And for us, the first kind of break for us was finding the perfect online forum of coders around the world who are willing to help because they like the idea of the project. So it was getting sort of buy-in into the project. Yeah, I think it, like having the passion about it, getting people excited, wanting to, and wanting, people, people like to help. Yeah, yeah. But they're, they're, they're unlikely to help finish as much as they are, help you just, you know, a small step along the way. Yeah, yeah. And so it just takes a lot of perseverance. So now how long did it take you to, to develop your first app, your first application that you worked on? What was the timeline on that? Sudoku's timeline was funny because my friend Dave is a developer and he at one point had said, hey, I can code anything. Do you have any ideas for an app? Let's do that. And I was like, well, yeah, here's the idea. You know, we had been working with color for about five or six years at that point and had an idea for this idea that you could make the Sudoku for color. And so I showed it to him what the idea was. And then like a few months passed. And one day out of the blue, I get this email and I can download on my phone the basic, basic version. So, but that was interesting because the basic, you know, ours is a color puzzle, like Sudoku. And the puzzle right off the bat, the funnest thing was it's an idea and then you get to play it. You get to see the thing in action. But that first step, even though it looks cool, I mean, you're not even close. No. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like that first layer is so easy, but every layer you add just gets more complicated. And like they say, the last little bit is just the longest and toughest to get through because you now have complicated code. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing about code is it sort of exponentially grows. Yeah. Yeah. The problem, of course, then is that when you write more code, you start to use more resources. You use more resources as things start to slow down. Things get, you know, you end up writing redundant code, doing things over and over and over again. And so you're looking for ways to sort of mitigate all that from a programming perspective. But just even the idea of coming up with an idea, sometimes I think it feels like it's a shot in the dark. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You have some idea and you're just going to throw it out there to the world and see what happens. And I think you really need to be creative and try different things. I mean, if I was starting right now, every month or so I get on one of those courses like Code Academy or Treehouse and I started making sure I'm kind of like up to speed on a little bit of code. But I think you can learn a lot of things. Yeah. And then this was like, you're an applicant here. This is essentially what you started. So September 20, I'd have to look at the year on that. But it was probably four or five years ago for this project where you see a little picture down in the corner there. I had an experience with design and arts and wanted to create an experience that everybody could share. And I imagined a room you walk into where you touch colors on the wall and the whole room changes colors. And I had no idea how to build that. I had no idea. I knew it would involve a projector, I assumed. But then to make things touch responsive. And it was literally, I think, the biggest piece of advice I could put out there is just make something. Just get it up and start showing it to people. Because let's say you have this idea for how it works. And you think you know the whole thing and you hire all this design team and coding team and they build it. But you could have put up one screen, in our case, had people walk in and start trying to interact with it and find out immediately that you've thought of something wrong. So that's kind of the philosophy we're doing is like the agile, iterate fast, release, test it, test it, get that cycle really sharp where you're putting stuff out and you're getting feedback on it and can make changes. And that's a very different design approach than say somebody who comes from my background, which is there's already established business practices. Like I've developed software for companies, businesses. I'm trying to figure out ways to streamline their business processes, reduce redundancy, figure out how to make their business more efficient. I'm operating at a very different level in terms of software development. So there are those types of platform, that type of development where a waterfall approach is more consistent with achieving results. Although at some point you do end up in sort of an iterative state. But in the beginning phase of software development, if Zurich will bring that slide back up again, is you start with requirements, gathering and analysis. And I've underlined it because that's really what today's topic is about. It's about that sort of gathering the ideas and putting things together and doing your homework.  We were doing surveys through MailChimp, literally tabulating surveys. We were doing, we would then release mechanical Turk. You can pay a small amount, and Amazon runs a system where they'll put up, you can get user testing. People will say, I prefer this screen to this screen. We had a focus group. We were in the blue startup of Six-Celerator, and we had one of our mentors was Wanda, who was this incredible marketing person, and she led a focus group for us. And that was part of getting our requirements and that documented. And I think for someone who's new at this, it really helps to understand that like, when you show your friend an idea, they're gonna say, that's cool, right?   And they say, oh, where do I push? And you gotta like, not, because what happens is you explain how to use it. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't do it. Yeah. But it's a lot harder than you think. You think, oh yeah, I can do that.  But like we were saying earlier when we talked on the phone, I think it's more revealing what they don't say, right? And how they behave, interacting with it as you're kind of building those requirements, you know? And then the thing is, how do you make sure that you're not doing testing that's sort of vanity testing or you're asking vanity questions where you're sort of elucidating a response. Because you love the answer you have and you want to get it to say, yeah, that's right, yeah. You really want this feature, right? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Now, so what kind of like when you started learning to sort of figure out like how to sort of take this idea and germinate it into something beneficial or useful, how many iterations do you think you've gone through so far?  And we got up to 0.99, like way before, we were ready for 1.00, so I mean hundreds. We've got hundreds, we've got hundreds of builds. Yeah. Okay, so it's an ongoing process. Yeah. Now how long have you been at this working on Hudoku? From the original C probably two years, you know, but then I said like it was like about three or four months before, and I even knew that, you know, Dave was actually building it and had something to start with, but then we started it in Maui, you know, and we were doing other things and we kind of like started, you know, building this on the side, and then a few months later, we had a chance to kind of show it to an audience at an event and we had 500 people kind of play with it, and we're like, oh, this is, this could be something. And then it was like, it took all that time before we were like, oh, we're gonna actually make a startup and incorporate and try to like bring this out to the world. So now, two years, that's a lot of time on a software application. Yeah. That's a long time. Yeah. So how do you maintain your energy? Oh, that's a great question. I think the thing about what any sort of startup gets into is you realize the lows are really low. They're really hard. Nobody else cares about you anymore. And you're on this like vacuum. It's not feeling any low. You're just going along. But then the highs, we went to Europe to launch our beta of this newest app two months ago at StartupFest Europe. And because we were like from Hawaii, they were like, what are you doing here? And we stood out and we got to meet with like these world-class museums. Like the Prince of Holland got us connected to the museums out there. And so those highs are just like really high, much more thrilling I think than an regular job for me. Wow, wow. And so let's go back and sort of focus in on what we're talking about, sort of the getting this going. So I would like to have Zuri bring up the next slide if you don't mind Zuri. Okay, so one of the things that we use to try and help us sort of map our ideas is something called UML modeling. And we use things like case diagrams, which is basically a graphical depiction of the interactions among the elements of the system. So in other words, this is sort of what the user's doing, you know. So a user is sort of an actor and you build a use case scenario and you talk about the things that the user's going to be doing with the application. Now these are tools that also help you to sort of define your ideas and also communicate them with your developers, right? So and one of the reasons I wanted to bring this up is because these are tools that if you're going to develop software, I feel help you get your point across, make your point, lay out your ideas and your concepts in a meaningful way. And so I don't know, Zuri, could you bring up the diagram of the stick, the little people, the one that has a couple of characters on each side and all the bubbles, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a use case diagram of somebody going up and walking up to an ATM machine and using the ATM.  So this is sort of defining what the user's doing. Now, in the use case diagram like this, so you may have a security system that's doing some validation and checks to make sure, one, it's not a stolen card. Two, that maybe you got actual money in the account, you know, that you're taking out and if the card is stolen or something like that, that it would take the card. And also, now if the card isn't stolen, of course, when the transaction is over, give you your card back, you know. So this is an idea of what a scenario, what that kind of a scenario looks like. Now, for your software, okay, you have probably from the user's perspective, you have a lot more going on, there's a lot more interaction. I'm curious if you do this too with enterprise stuff, but like for us, it was really important to take the use case, let's say an art teacher in the classroom, that's a use case. She's gonna teach some color concepts to some students. So that would be one use case and that would be a designer who wants to help some clients brainstorm on colors. Two different uses, but our app fits both of those. And so I don't know if you guys did this, but we would take that example of that teacher and we would literally create a persona. This is a woman in her 40s, she does this in the classroom and try to like really understand everything she does outside of the app and then we put the app in her hand and we try to draw it, illustrate a story. Like what story are we telling with her and how does the app need to best respond to her? Kind of like earlier you said, we have our own preconceived ideas that we should do, but we find out she wants just that one button right there, not all these other features here. Yeah, it's called feature adoption. So yeah, so we're gonna take a quick break. We got a one minute commercial break that we're gonna take and we're gonna come right back. And that's actually a very interesting point. So we're gonna talk about that more here at The Economy and you and we'll see you in just one moment. Aloha, this is Reg Baker with Business in Hawaii. We're a show that broadcasts every Thursday at two o'clock. We would love to hear from you and you can reach us in several different ways. We have a hotline that you can call in at<PHONE_NUMBER> or you can email us at thinktecawaii.com or you can tweet us at thinktec-hi. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you on our next show. Aloha. Hey everybody, my name is David Chang and I am a new host for the show, The Art of Thinking Smart. I'm really excited to be able to share with you how to get the smart edge in life. We're gonna have awesome guests in the military, business, political, nonprofit world. So no matter what background you're from, we have something for you. Please join us every other Thursday at 10 a.m. at thinktec-hawaii.com or on the art of thinkingsmart.com. I look forward to seeing you. Yeah, and we're back. Hi, I'm Chris Lietzman, this is the economy and you thank you for watching. We're talking about developing software, developing an idea and converting that from the napkin and turning it into a code or turning it into a computer program that people will actually get a chance to use and sort of what that's like and what it takes to get involved in that and get started. And today's guest is Gabe Montt. Gabe works with, has been developing a software called Houdoku, Houdoku, let me say that right, which is an iOS app that works on your phone. And I guess it's a game or is it like with objectives? Well, we see the idea of color, like the color perception, understanding color, like we see that it actually is a really important thing for people now that everybody has iPhones and smartphones and screens and is producing imagery and the power of the image as a means of communication as everything more powerful than it is today. Like it's always been true, the image is worth 1,000 words but we believe that people don't actually know how to sort of have much visual literacy and speak color grammar, so how do they see color? So our app is a tool that helps you do that, but it also right now, the new app is a photo sharing app. Where you're probably on Facebook, maybe I don't know if you know people that are on Facebook. Yes, I would deny it though, I'm not there so my daughters don't can keep posting stuff, sorry. And they put Instagram and your daughter's probably like, how many likes did I get? How many likes did I get? We sort of think people are looking for a deeper experience of photo sharing. Like, did you really look at my photo? Did you actually spend time with this photo from my trip to Madagascar? Did you look at it? And so what I would do, I would take a photo, wrap it into a color puzzle, send it to you or post it on the feed and you have to solve the puzzle to get the reveal which is the photo. And so we're positioning this as a way to engage deeper, to slow down, relax, get color therapy and also see it as a brain cognition tool. Well, that's interesting because we stop reading, we now we scan, right? We now don't even read stuff and if it takes me more than two seconds to read it, yeah, I start to wander.  I don't like to read, I just go to video. I mean, don't you think, it may be it's going to get worse but I think almost all of us that have our little phone devices, I think we all have that feeling of we're on it too much, we have this addiction to it, it's this technology, it's making us even less and our attention span shorter and shorter. And that's it, we're becoming less engaging, I think, in communication and in conversation. With each other, yeah, yeah. And I sort of think there's probably already but there's sort of a backlash against that of like people taking a weekend off of a screen, there are apps, there's an app called Calm that I use, it's a meditation app and it sets up like every day, five minutes and it's funny because it's using technology to try to be more engaged with the world and yourself but we sort of see Hidoku in line with those kinds of apps, we're not trying to make you sort of more of a digital addicted being but you step back and use color therapy. See, I went and joined Zen Monastery when I was in my 20s, it's been a year there, so I'm like, that was my way of getting away from the world and but now we've got an app for that. You're Zen Monastery, they do have one called 40 Years of Zen and you get your 40 Years of Zen, they measure your brain waves and tell you the same results from this like one month program biofeedback. Somehow it just doesn't feel as deep and meaningful. It doesn't sound like it, yeah, it doesn't. So let's get back to what we were talking about because this is really when we, I wanted to have this show because I want to encourage folks out there, if you've got an idea, don't be afraid to step up and engage and find resources and talk to other people about your idea. You may have some, and I hate to use this word, paradigm shifts as you go along and realizing that maybe your original idea didn't have enough, it didn't have a lot of legs to it. Maybe it sounded really good but maybe it didn't have a lot of legs and so sometimes what you're doing is you take that original idea and you pivot into different directions and maybe you go into a different direction but also one of the things that we talked about is as you're developing the app, as you said, you wanted to get feedback from the users. One of the issues early in cell phone or smart phone marketing was feature adoption. In not just in terms of all the things that you can do with a phone, I mean most of us don't use everything that's on our phone. And if we're developing an application, what parts of that application are being adopted? Which ones are easy to use and which ones require a little more thought and maybe need more effort in the design? That's funny, I had a meeting with some younger guys that were applying to our program and they had this really cool idea for an app and they were like, how do we get a developer? And they were so fixated on how do we get a developer? And I was like, God, once you find a developer, you still have a lot of work to do on your end.  All the possibilities. What happens if they close the app right now? And you need to draw those out like the chart you're talking about. You can do that. You can start learning how to do that but it's just logic and steps and a lot of work, right?  Is it gonna be used across multiple platforms? If it's only gonna be work across a phone and it can all be self-contained, great, that's great. But if it's an application that's gonna be used across multiple platforms then you have to sort of have all your business logic as a separate platform and then whatever interface that you have is gonna connect to that. But basically it's a separate development environment. My co-founder and I would have these battles where I don't know if this is at all true in the enterprise software world but with the app you've got lots of SDKs where third party companies have built the automated, small piece you can put into your code and he just fights me. No more SDKs, no more SDKs. And I'm like, yeah, but this one's gonna tell us how many of our audiences coming back and will segment them. Yeah, except the next build that they have breaks your code. That's exactly what happens. Don't do that to me. I don't want you breaking my code. Because then you, so here are the things that sort of the weird and the wonderful about and the exciting thing of software development is that you've got all these people out there doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things that you can go and grab and use but you also have to remember that you may use it in a testing environment but you're not gonna wanna release in your release code, you're not gonna wanna have that in there. Right, right. Well, I'm not gonna let him watch this show. Yeah. It is funny, we probably have like 10 different SDKs in there and that's his thing.  But what happens, one of them fails and it's like that brings everything down. So yeah, that's a thing you gotta consider. Yeah, yeah, because you know you need to know one of the things of course with your right application is that it's got some way of handling those issues. If something fails that your application has some sort of dependency on, can you get around that? If you can't get around it, it brings your app, it's a chain of events, it brings you down with it. So these are all sort of the exciting things. And of course, if your applications are data driven and you've got data back in, back ends to these things, of course, is that connectivity is an imperative? What happens if you don't have connectivity? Will it still work? Will it allow you to do certain things and then when it gets connectivity, sort of push out or go back and retrace some of the stuff that it's done previously. And we have two of our sort of heaviest users are on the airplane all the time and they loved our first app because it worked offline. The new one is all cloud-based, all getting these live puzzles and it doesn't work. And we've got to balance these people that are putting a lot of pressure on us to make the offline version with how much work that is and is it worth it for the other users? How, where does that rank on the needs from our user base? So how do people find out about your app? I mean, one of the reasons I asked you on the show is so you could tell people about Hudoku and where do they find it? How do they download it? Is it available? It's available now. We have on the App Store, you can just go to the App Store for, totally for iOS, right now, not Android. Okay, just for the iOS right now. You go to the App Store and you just type in Hudoku, H-U-E-D-O-K-U and we have another one called Same, Same or Different. It's a game about color relativity. You can kind of like pick whether these colors are the same or different and it kind of tests your vision.  I know it's funny, we have a button. You can, people with a colorblind can filter and see just puzzles that they can solve that have red and green removed from those. Is that right? Okay, cool. But the funnest one, if anybody's actually into this, likes color, wants to hide photos and share them behind puzzles, sign up for our beta. And that's Hudoku.xyz and then you can get the beta version that's actually live in Holland and you can see what all the Dutch are doing right now. Okay, very cool. Well, it was great having you on the show, Gabe. And thank you so much for coming on. I mean, one thing about this show, we don't always know, we have one person that may have signed up to be on the show, but somebody else gets them before you do and so I'm glad you decided to come on today. Absolutely. It was absolutely fun. Pleasure to meet you. And I'm Chris Lethem. This is The Economy New and I hope to catch you next week right here on OC16 with Think Tech Hawaii. And I'll see you all next time. Ha ha, thank you. Cool, that was fun. Yeah, yeah.