Yn ystod, dweud i'r llwyddiol iawn i'r ddau gwlad gennym ni i gyd yn ysgolio'r dyfodol hon. Rwy'n gweithio yw'r gwlad yn teimlo chi'n gweithio ar y moddiol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio ar y moddiol. Ac maen nhw'n gweld yw'r sicr. Gweithio. Rydym yn Y Oxford University, ymddai'n ddau am Llywodraethorsiol a Llywodraethor, Roedd ymarfer ymgylchedd Wrth i'r unrhyw ddeall hyd a relationshipaidd yw fynd i'r unrhyw bwysig. Felly ar y cyfrannu o'r uniondiad o'r unrhyw ddeall, ac yn gyfodusol er ag ysgrifol yma, mae yna'r bwysig ar hyn a'r gael eu rheidiau gwirio. Rydym yn gwybod am gyfrannu ar rhan o'r dyfodol, ac mae'r ddau i'r gwirio, yn gweithio ar 5 o 5 o 10 o'r unrhyw peth yn Oeddol. GS Research has culminated in the Special Interest Group, ELY Sig, a which I'm currently chair of, which has about 1600 members at last count which is a national group of people interested in conducting learning experience research and looking at the outputs of it and making sure that has had impact.  Fy fryswp yw'r pryd yn y gweithio sy'n arweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ddweud a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y dyfodol. One is about understanding digital learning or online learning in a really holistic fashion. So we talked, mentioned e-portfolios earlier in the introduction. And when we've gone out and we've talked to learners and asked them about how they experience e-portfolios, they tell us how difficult it is to borrow dad's laptop or their son's laptop or the fact that it's got a crack in the screen or they can't quite work out how to sort out the virus software so that they can upload their own things. We really have to understand it in context. We have to understand how they experience online learning within the context of the discipline as well as the home and the organisation. So that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about was the holistic nature of learning experience. And the second thing I wanted to talk about is how it's really different for everyone. And it's something that we've struggled with a lot in the field is to say, how do we make sense of all the difference? Every time we go out and talk to learners, they tell us a completely different set of things. How do we try and organise that in order to make any recommendations about what to do on the basis of it? And then I said there were two things. Let's go for a third thing. And the third thing I guess is the historical perspective of how things are changing and how we react to that. So I'll get the book plugs in right at the beginning. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about is summed up in this pair of books. But it's also quite interesting how things have changed. So the first one, Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, was first published in 2007. And it was all about design for learning. And it was all about some of you nodding. She's great, familiar with it. And it was about how we prepare our courses in such a way that they prepare our learners for a digital age. And then the second collection, both edited collections, is about how learners are responding to all the design work that we've done. And that was quite a shift in emphasis and understanding for us. And then, of course, we had to go back and revise the first one, which is now in its second edition, in response to what we'd found out about learner experience. So a lot of it, if you want to follow up on any of this, a lot of this is represented in those two things. So I wanted to tell you about my granddad's piano to start. Unexpectedly, about 12 years ago, when my granddad died, I was left this in his will. And when it arrived in the van from Northampton, the piano stool was also with it, which was completely packed full of sheet music and old books and things. And after I had given away a lot of the sheet music and the books to people who could actually play the piano, I was looking through some of the things that was left. And I wanted to read you the foreword from this one. So this is called Music in the Home, and it was published in 1932. And the foreword is written by Sir Landon Ronald. And he says, statistics prove that the sale of music of every kind in description, excepting perhaps dance music, is so seriously on the wane that publishers are inclined to fight shy of bringing out new songs or piano forte pieces when they know there will be scarcely any sale for them. So why might that be so? Why is the sale of sheet music in 1932 going down so much? What has brought about this state of affairs? I fear there is but one answer, the habit of listening to music instead of performing it. This is to be so deeply deplored and is so damaging to the progress and development of a beautiful art that it is up to all music lovers to do what they can to prevent it from spreading. How did they do? Anyone got iPod, iPod headphones? And goes on to explain what's in the book and then at the bottom says, if this book assists to revive the desire of self-performance, which is innate in most of us, then the aim and object of this book and its editor will have been achieved. Fabulous, beautifully written, fabulous. Lots of interesting things in there. I need to find something about the advent of the gramophone and how it was going to be a wonderful, revolutionised progress. I'm sure there is a positive side rhetoric at the same time as that one. But there are different reactions to the progress that technology offers. So that's one thing to say. That's a real emotional reaction to what's going on. But the other thing that it says quite interestingly, and it doesn't mention gramophone at all in that forward, what it mentions is habits. It changes our habits. It changes what we do. And this is something we've talked to learners about an awful lot.  I can find it. When we go out and talk to learners about... So I've done a lot of work with the GISC over the years. And this is actually taken from last year's year before 2013, Summer of Innovation. It's quite a long video, but I'm literally just going to play you the first minute and a half also of students talking about how they experience the digital environment. I'm probably quite disorganised when it comes to keeping notes and things. Because I've put some on my tablet and I've put some on my phone and I'll flag up a few emails. I know I need to read, which I never read and then I read it again when I get the reminder email. I think it just differs from student to student. I haven't found anything that's sort of transferable. We have a moodle and we had a workspace at the university and these other online systems that they have. And I don't find any of them very useful. I use like mendeley, reference management stuff. It's like saving a lifetime. Software is incredibly useful, but you have to find it specific for your task. But I guess people have to be aware of what's out there to actually try to use things out. It's really interesting to talk to learners about what they do and the first one they're talking about, not about the technology, but about how they manage it and the kind of habits that they have and the strategies they have for managing their email. Coming back later, I don't know if you noticed and said, oh, and the institution provides all sorts of stuff, you know, moodle and loop and things that you've invested greatly in, but I don't bother with any of that. Well, that's not really important to me. So institutions are making massive investment in all sorts of technology and learner experience research is really trying to make sense of how do learners, how do we understand how learners experience all these infrastructure and services and systems that we're providing for them in ways that we can improve them. So what I think I'll do is I'm going to run you through fairly quickly a little potted history of the last 10 years or so of learner experience research just to make sure we're all kind of on the same page with this. And then I want to tell you in a little bit more detail about the most recent just project that I've been involved in. As I said, the FE one talk a little bit more about that. So what do we know so far about how learners experience education in a digital age? So I started working this area in about 2005 on a series of projects that were funded by the JISC and Oxford Brooks was responsible for the support and synthesis of a number of funded projects. So we had the role of bringing the projects together, synthesizing their findings, disseminating the Miniseries of National Workshops, that kind of things. And these projects were great and really, really exciting at the time, partly because of the methods that they use. So one of the things that they did was give students video cameras to take into their bedrooms and do that kind of big brother audio video diary thing and these are some screen grabs from students speaking into their diaries. And they really brought to life a lot of stories that we had never previously heard from students. So the young woman at the top and remember this is in 2005, 2006 was a computing student and talked about what she got from her lessons but also was one of the very first users of MIT OpenCourseWare and was following courses from MIT as well. Young man in the middle was one of the many who said, I open my laptop as soon as I wake up in the morning, I just have to check my MySpace or Bevel social media, whatever it was at the time we had an awful lot of those. Without wanting to stereotype too much, we also had an awful lot of mature learners who just talked mainly about fitting in their life but really vivid, really, really vivid use of diaries and logs and made us think about technology use in context. So uncovering student voices we hadn't previously heard, forcing us to think holistically and in a way that was really contextualised to understand the services that we're providing for them and as we're all now well aware of, a powerful relationship, we were going out giving conferences at the time, we had this lovely quote about how much I love my iPod. A powerful relationship and emotional attachment with technology in particular with social media. Another series of studies after that took us a little bit further and this word habits again, which keeps cropping up in our work, which showed a great variety in what learners are actually doing with the technologies that we're providing for them and this is when we started to explore the concept of digital literacy as well as design for learning and thinking about that as a social practice and these two studies that Oxford Brookes ran, the Supporting Learners in a Digital Age, which was Slider, the institutional case studies project and INSTEP, which was our own internal e-pioneers project, introduced us to some of our most confident, agile digital leaders who were really experimenting with lots of technologies, really surprising us with what they could do, although they have told us since these two down the side, that putting E in front of any word, even pioneer, just makes it totally unpalatable to students. We started to run a lot of digital literacy workshops and think about the concept of digital literacy. At the time, we were really excited about this notion of e-pioneers or our most experienced learners, ones who were most imaginative and creative with their use of technology and what we could learn from them. Five years' time, this is going to be all our learners. We're really going to have to catch up. It hasn't really proved to be the case and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute. In terms of impact and impact for all, some of the things that this learner experience research and this digital literacy agenda has given us is an understanding that although we started going out and talking to learners about Moodle or WebCT or Blackboard as it was in the time and whether they were online students or blended, you know, are you on a fully online course? Are you on a partly online course? To them, it didn't matter. All learning is technology, technologically mediated. Learners are using their own technologies as well as those that provided for them right from school upwards to enhance the experience that's provided for them in an organisation. So, there's no longer useful to think about a distinction between online or blended or face-to-face learning. It just all includes technology. Another big impact, I think, has been the understanding of digital literacy as contextualised for the discipline. And in fact, when we've been going out and working with academic staff, when we started talking to them about social media, really difficult to get any kind of discussion or engagement about that. But as soon as you start saying, what does it mean to be a digitally literate chemist, geographer, historian? That's when you start to have really interesting conversations about what's going on and how they have to prepare their learners for being a historian in the digital age. Lots of frameworks, a couple up here, frameworks for staff and student digital literacy. Development have come out of this work, which are useful and you may know about. And really, it's been about how the services that we provide, if we understand the learner experience, how then do we target what we do at the learner needs that we've uncovered. And that's what I wanted to explore a little bit this morning, okay? How do we talk about difference in a meaningful way? How do we make use of some of the findings to actually make recommendations that can be useful to us? So I don't want to sound that it's job done. There has been a lot of work. It has taken us somewhere. This is the stuff that we know now. But there are also lots and lots of questions that remain and I've just put a few of them up here. And I really just wanted to concentrate today on this first one, although to acknowledge that there are lots of other things going on as well. And I wanted particularly to think about this notion of difference. And if all learning is technology mediated and learners experience it very differently, how do we provide courses and services which are going to meet the needs of all our learners? It's terribly complicated. What can we do about that? But there are these other questions that I know going on. I know Ron Barnett is talking a lot at the moment about attributes and 21st century attributes. So saying, well, we've talked a lot about skills. We've talked a little bit about practices. But really we need to be thinking about the attributes of successful learners. I think that's an interesting conversation. We have talked a lot with institutions about what are students entitled to when they arrive and what actually is an enhancement and nice to have activity. We've talked a lot about the learning line and is it different for every institution? And we're still talking an awful lot about research methods that we can borrow from lots of different disciplines and lots of different research philosophies to keep track of the learner experience because every time we go and talk to learners we find that it keeps changing and this is something we can't say we now know what the learning experience is like. What we actually have to say is this institution constantly monitoring its learners experiences because they keep changing. So with that in mind, sorry, that was a little bit of a race through of where I'm coming from and the research that I've been involved in and now I want to slow down a little bit and tell you about one particular project. It is from FE. We were asked to undertake it or bid to undertake it for the GISC. I think there's lots and lots of things that we can learn for all sectors of education not just from FE but I'll leave you to draw those own parallels yourself. And what I wanted to do was to think about this concept of difference and meeting all the needs of all the learners and how we can approach that. So the FE sector in the UK when we started working here is absolutely a wash with reports telling it what to do. I don't know if you feel like this in the sector that you work but there's a roadmap for this and a policy for that and a strategic initiative for something else. Absolutely a wash with reports about the digital environment and progress and what's going to happen next. I noticed coming to this slightly as an outsider so coming as an HE researcher into FE that firstly most of the reports all the reports I think were not research based there has been a real lack of research in the sector since about 2007 when some agencies like Bechtur and Elsis were shut down by the government and because it's not research based people are caught up with the rhetoric of the time and in particular in these to present learners all learners as confident, positive motivated about the use of technology and I think this is a tendency that we need to be really really cautious of so they said things like modern learners expect enough familiar with technology and global communication the biggest challenge for the sector is the underexploitation of learners skills devices and technical knowledge so lots of things like this are not based on any particular research so that was our starting point at the same time I have to say setting really ambitious targets for the sector about how to make use of technology in a short period of time so we came in and this project started about this time last year it just finished as in I just submitted the final project report Monday so hot off the press for you we started with some desk research we started just looking at what was around in the published literature and I put these figures up here for you because we found 23 sector reports that were really interesting which were about they were about this topic of digital learning in FA and despite a very extensive traditional academic literature search we found 8 peer-reviewed articles which actually looked at the learner experience in FA none of which was cited in the 23 sector reports we found hundreds of case studies of teachers practice hundreds on things like the excellence gateway very teacher centered not really exposing learners views particularly so we just picked 25 which we had the most learner experience and we had access to seven institutional documents so that's kind of institutional strategies or their own learning experience research that they'd done we were expecting more than that we didn't get quite as much as we were expected as in as in previous research in HE when we looked particularly through the case studies there's a great diversity in experiences and it's quite difficult to make sense of this we then went out and did some primary research so we met 220 learners in 12 focus groups in six general further education colleges over a period of a few months and we did kind of card saw exercises with them here we had a whole series of little cards and some of them were about access and some of them were about attributes some of them were about experience and we asked them what do you expect your college to provide which of these do you use sought them in different ways we photographed everything we weren't terribly interested in what they put top we were interested in the conversations that were elicited through this method it was a good way of getting the students talking and then we went out and ran a series of national consultation events with our draft findings and recommendations and get some feedback on what was needed in the sector and lots and lots of data arising from those as well one of the most interesting things that we found was a study called the learner in their context which was a Bechtre fund study one of the last ones to be funded was actually shut down early went back to closed which was run by Chris Davis down the hill from us and they over a three year period interviewed 132 young people including 35 home visits so they really picked up on this notion of holistic and contextualised understandings of learners experience and that was really important and if you're interested they published last year a book called Teenagers and Technology which is a really nice read which is about this project you can also read their project reports the learner in their context and they provided this spectrum of experience a way of understanding the experiences of all the different learners that they talked to a way of helping us to understand difference so what we did in our FE project is we took this spectrum and we mapped a lot of the case studies and things that we found onto it and we mapped some of our focus group data onto it as well to see if we could find some support for it and we did we found it to be a really useful framework to understand a couple of things to say and I'm just going to go through each of the bits in a bit more detail and tell you about what dominates the digital experience for learners at different points on this spectrum and how you can develop recommendations things to do differently within your institution on the basis of this but one of the things to say before I do that is what changed over three years so this project ran from 2007 to 2010 and they found a bit like us when we were doing learning experience research previously is that we were expecting the intensive specialist enthusiast group to grow over that three years but that isn't what happened actually they got more mainstream and the mainstream became even more pragmatic about their use of technology so for instance by year three they found that learners who had very plentiful access to technology talked about their use of technologies rather mundane as necessary I have to be on Facebook because everyone else is not because I actually feel any connection with it or because I really want to be that kind of thing so I'll take you through the minority ends of the spectrum first and then maybe spend a bit of time with the majority in the middle so we still have and I'm sure you do too a proportion of the communities that we serve who are unconnected and vulnerable and I'm not sure actually those two terms should be together I'll say a bit about that so the latest off-com data that I could find from 2012 91% to 16 to 24 year olds have web access at home that means 9% don't 71% have a smart phone 29% don't and they're still dealing with a small minority of learners who are unconnected and for these learners family and personal circumstances really prevent ownership or access to technology and make it particularly difficult and interestingly this group of learners if they're not having access at home when you look at who's using the access that's provided by college it's the people who don't have access at home aren't using it at college either and the provision of technology doesn't help this group and we met some learners like this in our focus groups and they said things like this quote that I've pulled out at the bottom here this is the group who are waiting to be told how to use it just providing Chromebooks nice easy to use Chromebooks isn't enough to actually get them to use it their experience so when you say what's the learner experience of digital learning for this group they'd say it's dominated by issues of access they're stuck on issues of access before they can move on and things that work are the kind of targeted solutions which take note of their issues of access use technologies that they're very familiar with lots of one to one mentoring lots of confidence building those kinds of things we found when we met learners who might be classed as vulnerable and particularly learners with disabilities they turned out to be some of our most sophisticated uses of technology very experimental very confident so I'm not quite sure about the wording of the spectrum here certainly unconnected, vulnerable I'm not sure let's go to the other end of the scale then so for the intensive and specialist enthusiasts so these are the learners the digital leaders who personal digital literacy practices very easily between the different contexts of home and work and study and college so they're able to negotiate that boundary land that border land between all those different contexts they don't need to keep them separate and they're able to transfer practices across now we found and the David Sess out study as well found this is maybe 10% of our learners pioneers as we used to call them 10% they present themselves as highly engaged highly adaptable users of technology they often have a personal interest in it, they're taking IT or audio, media courses something like that they see this as a way forward for employment interestingly a number of them said their parents and careers advisers have often tried to talk them out of it but they saw this as a personal interest area when you say well what's the learner experience as if there is one learner experience but for learners on this part of the spectrum their experience is dominated by the extent to which they are allowed, encouraged, supported to transfer their practices across social and work and study contexts so they find some things particularly challenging so if the infrastructure isn't reliable and robust for instance it's really challenging if they're not allowed to bring their own device if they're kicked off the wifi after an hour of inactive use or something all those things they find really challenging and they're really interesting group to study because they learn from each other rather than from the teachers they learn more from each other and they develop practices in one context which are really purposeful they have really good ownership of them and then they'll take them into their classes the majority then the ones in the middle I think the naming of these even is really interesting mainstream certainly 80% or so of our students but these are the pragmatists good access to technology not particularly enthusiastic about its use see technology as instrumental in achieving the goals that they need to now when you talk to these say all sorts of different things but I've just picked out this quote here which was from an A level student who sociology teacher was doing the flip class from thing so that's what was going on in this case so the lessons rolled around using YouTube because the lessons were on YouTube and then you'd see that outside of school and you'd bring it in and then you'd talk about it that's what was going on and for these learners when you say what's the learner experience for them it is dominated by the issue of pedagogy it's institution led it's without creative teaching these pragmatic learners use technology in rather superficial uninteresting ways they use technology for research by which I mean they Google it they use technology to improve the presentation of their work publisher, PowerPoint and not really for terribly much else so there's obviously very clear recommendations particularly for FE on building capability and confidence of teachers in using technology in order to have any impact on the experience of this group so putting that all together where does it get us then so this is the spectrum that we picked out from our desk study which I've just shown you this is what we can say about how they experience the digital environment and I'm often asked for one answer what's the learner experience like in the 21st century well I can't give one answer because it's different and maybe this is a framework that helps us understand how it's different for different people so for the unconnected it's predominantly about access for the majority of our learners it's predominantly about course design actually and for the intensive and specialist it's primarily about what they're allowed to do and what they're banned from doing or what they find difficult to do and so what we did is we took these kinds of findings with lots of examples of case studies out to the consultation events and we asked people to think about what supports and what challenges these learners okay so if you think about learners at different points in the spectrum and we get them to kind of think about when are these learners best supported and I've got a lot more than just a few that I've put up here and when are they challenged and this is an exercise which I think it is really useful for institutions or course teams to undertake for themselves okay so if you take anything away from this talk it's probably this slide this framework and the idea of thinking about okay where's the difference in my learners so this is a framework you might be able to use but you might have your own notions of difference and actually for these learners on the left when are they most challenged when are they best supported what should we be doing about it when we were talking to the learners in the focus groups they talked a lot particularly the unconnected the ones about access about we had initial induction and then we had nothing else so there's certainly something there about ongoing support ongoing assessment of skills for the mainstream pragmatists well actually their experience is very tutor led at the moment but we'd like to move them on a little bit from that and to be a little bit more self-directed so talking to them about developing self-management skills and criticality skills and things that they can help them transfer their practices from one context to another is something that's particularly interesting and for the intensive and specialist enthusiasts they talk a lot in the focus groups about some of the things that they bring to the classroom being devalued or dismissed and so we need to turn that around and say well how are their practices valued how can we not be so scared of some of the stuff that they're bringing in and be a bit more open about the conversations so there might be something here you can do like an audit within your own programme team or an audit within your campus or your institutional level or something like that and I don't expect to read this I've got it blown up in a minute but this is the kind of structure that we used in the consultation event so we started at the top here with learners of challenged when, you put in your columns the different we had the different areas of the spectrum and then get people to generate ideas so I've just all I've done is just expanded one of these columns so that you can read it but all the documents I'll show you on the website in a minute so I've just picked unconnected and vulnerable so this is unconnected and vulnerable are challenged when now I'm not saying this is the way it is I'm saying these are the kinds of things you need to generate so within your context within the types of courses that you teach the learners that you have what can you say about what challenges your unconnected and vulnerable from your own studies that you've done and your own conversations that you've had with your learners what can you say about this we had a very interesting conversation about online assessment across all three of the levels so for the mainstreams they really like being able to submit from home for the Intensive and Specialists well their files are all too big and in the wrong format to be able to use it and for the unconnected and vulnerable it just makes them want to give up completely so you take a service like that that we think we've been really good in providing and actually try and map it across the needs of all learners so how do you provide a surface like that in a way that it meets the needs of all learners then we did the same again learners are supported when again I don't expect you to read all of this but I'll show you where the files are but I just picked out the other end of the extreme here the right hand column the Intensive and Specialist Enthusiast and I think one of the most interesting things here was about they said in the focus groups particularly that these learners were best supported when their lecturers weren't afraid to learn with them the lecturers didn't not think that they had to be ahead of the game all the time and then teaching the learners saying to the learners what do you know about this and how can we work together on it and certainly one of the key themes that arose from the 220 learners that we spoke to in the focus groups was this thing about don't make assumptions about what we can do and what we can't do we want to work with you we want to work with the lecturers if you can just ask us what we need there was a real willingness to work collaboratively with the teachers and lecturers that I think we weren't expecting so these were some of the main overall findings from the focus groups and I think the thing about assumptions about our skills levels continue giving us feedback all the way through not just at initial induction and engage us in a collaborative exercise so that we can work out how to make the best use of technology were really important things so finally then I just wanted to hint at some of the other findings from the study so I've just given you one little strand through our findings just one little thing which is about learning a difference and hopefully a kind of framework or tool that you can go away and have a think about but I'll just put up here our kind of main set of findings which you can find in our project report because there are obviously some other things there that you might want to think about the if you're interested in knowing any more and I'll put that slide back up again in a minute if you go to the FE digital students site in fact if you just google jisk digital student you'll find your way there to this project and you can see all our project reports and those support and challenge documents that you can find as well there's the teenagers and technology book that I've referred to and there's also some other information there on communities that I'm involved in and I will put these slides up on the slide share later today so you can find that as well I'll just lead that up and take any questions I suspect the general concept is not that different that we need to think about meeting the needs you know when we think about designing a course or providing a service we need to think about all the different needs we really expected going into FE to find more unconnected and vulnerable that was our assumption but actually it really wasn't when we've done other work to look at how expectations are formed and things at school is such an important determinant and whether you go through to FE or HE you have that common grounding of school so how technology is used in school your previous educational experience I think is what kind of grounds your approach that you take to technology Okay Yes Say when You see that third on the college culture Yeah That is where we're going so orientation towards mobile Are you seeing that as a general trend as well? Yes definitely and it's partly the financial reality of not being able to provide enough kit to keep up with learning we can't keep the IT labs we can't keep them upgraded as frequently as the students would like them so it's partly a financial reality but also it's about people have really personal connections to the technology and they like to use the technology that they're familiar with and the software that they're familiar with and it's giving people just a little bit more freedom about that it's about developing learners supporting learners to develop their own personal practices that they'll take with them you know through into life and work that's what we really need to be concentrating on Briefly How do you see that translating back into the actions of lecturers? Yes yeah well it's the mainstream isn't it the lecturers are most important for the mainstream 80% of the learners okay because at that stage if you remember the learners are fairly pragmatic fairly instrumental in using their technology so they might come in very familiar with technology but not really thinking about how they're going to use it to support their study and that's where the lecturers can really come really have an important role to play to say well this is the role of technology in your course in all sorts of ways it's transactional it helps you to book a time to see your academic advisor that kind of level but it also is transformational in terms of connecting you with a global community of people within your discipline for example and learners tend not to have that understanding of how technology can be transformational without a creative teacher to help them


Because all animal products mean animals have to get killed all of them. You can't you couldn't name one that animals don't have to die for She's not she's not coping very well is she? Creating awareness and we're trying to educate people on How they use yeah So if you do challenge 22, they help you go vegan. They do it all for free on Facebook Yeah, they can help you for 22 days. It's free 22 days what do you got to lose I knew about the dairy You found the right crew on there and I just thought you know what why am I still doing this so thank you so Happy to help. I'm glad you found the right vegans on YouTube. You can't get protein from plants Really, I know I know a fair few vegan bodybuilders, brother You know when I first went vegan, right?  That's the thing we don't do it. You don't have to do it It's not a necessity. We don't need it for health. So we don't need me. We don't need meat to survive, bro Obviously, we've got each industry eggs fishing dairy meat all animals obviously dying every industry they get killed At a fraction of their lifespan, okay, they're all enslaved even if you think of the most humane way of Farming these animals and where there's no cruelty on the farm. They all go to the same slaughterhouse They were bulked under the head have their throat slashed open and chopped up into pieces So from the animals perspective all these industries are immoral and you know as vegans we look for look at it from their point of view and It's unnecessary We have plant foods. We've got burgers cheese ice cream. We don't need it for health. We can get protein You can do weights. You can be an athlete. I just did a video on my YouTube channel for for vegan bodybuilders, right? Bigger than anyone here Athletes benching more than I've ever bench pressed in my life and they're all vegan bro. So four years ago, man like Well, I got out of prison and I was doing weights and I was worried.  I was like, I care about animals, but where am I gonna get my protein from?  I went online. It's a whole community of vegan bodybuilders And I was like boom that takes care of that Understood what happened to animals and I started living in alignment with my own core values And that's all it is Have you ever been to a chicken farm? Yeah Stop bro, even the free range ones are seen on the news. Yeah, what they do they Keep them in really dirty conditions Yeah, that's cruelty, but we're talking about use using animals at all Even if they're in good condition the fact that we cut their head off and pluck their feathers and eat their bodies That's where we're like, well, it's not necessary. You can reverse heart disease with a whole foods plant-based diet It's better for the environment. Okay, so let's um land use less water use The rainforest is being cut down to grow soybeans to feed to cattle. So it's actually the leading cause of rainforest deforestation Yeah, and that's basically it well, it's more for the animals here A lot of the time the electric water doesn't work and they yeah, like it's crazy Do you think it's necessary bro? Like if you like your you were saying well, you can't be healthy as a vegan That's fair that's fair enough if you couldn't be healthy as a vegan then it's it's kind of justified But let's just say you could Like and I'll show you evidence that we can and there's science behind it that backs up Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the Okanawans sweet potatoes and yeah Rice and vegetables bro the healthiest foods on earth But um, what do you think about that? I don't know Yeah, yeah, why's that you know, it's just it's too difficult right now. You don't know how you would be able to What about that death was that happy to So you know that breaking the fun No No, I'm not one of them people. Do you think that's wrong? So you think there's a difference between something that's legal and something that's moral Like slavery slavery was legal. Yeah, was it moral? So just because there's laws protecting industry Doesn't mean that what they're doing in there is moral, but what is that you have empathy? Yeah?  They're getting killed You know what I mean? Dairy industry about five or six years old They're suffering for a lot longer the only diet proven to reverse heart disease The only one there's only one is a whole foods plant-based diet Whole foods plant-based diet. Well, the thing is that Australian culture They like me. Do you think culture is the same as morality? Do you think if it's cultural makes it moral? Doesn't make it moral I mean if it's your colts ain't me, but you're still firing chickens But it's just unnecessary we don't need meat for protein Well, I've got mates there Ben's pressing more than anyone here No, they're huge and they're killer and they're fit and healthy so we can be fit we can be healthy and We can get junk food as a vegan you can live whatever lifestyle you want without hurting animals You know I'm saying so it could be like just because something's cultural doesn't make it a moral does it?  Do you think that's moral? It's cultural.   Yeah, do you know much about what happens to these animals? You've seen that yeah, did that make you want to stop eating chickens. We've got dairy free alternatives But we're not just here for dairy We're here on behalf of all animals that are used for their bodies and used for their skin and their flesh and Free range doesn't really mean much for the animals Yeah, you can still keep 10,000 chickens in a shed free range You can still they all go to the same slaughterhouse free range pigs get stuck in a gas chamber Yeah, it's horrible, man. Hey We're all vegans here. You know what that is.  You can get vegan versions of everything They cost twice as much The cheese might be a couple of bucks more. You're right, but it doesn't cost their lives It feels good not knowing that you're not contributing to it But if you eat potatoes rice pasta beans Avocados those foods are fruits and vegetables.  They get killed for beef Yeah, so this is why as vegans we don't use anything from an animal Might as well why not there's no ethical difference. There's no moral difference. I'll get I'll make a deal with you You obviously care about animals right and you want to reduce your meat consumption because of it I'd never advocate for that because if you eat 10 animals a year that's still 10 lives taken for no reason and Knowing how easy it is. We've got this resource here. It's called challenge 22, right? I'll give you some information here, bro. See this this movie here.  You can go into the scientific literature yourself. What do you think about that? I've got this card right this has got information. Okay, that's all it is just some information But on the back It's challenge 22 and you just do it for 22 days and see if it if you basically get past that three weeks Whether you choose to continue with it. This is a vegan challenge 22 days They're meant to you for free, bro. If you and this is challenge 22 They've got registered dieticians on there they fully support you for 22 days if you want to go vegan and They take care of all the hassles and it's completely free. It's all free man. There's they don't want no money We do it is here trying to Our incentive is this they'll help you for the whole 22 days and then after you finished you could be like, oh, wow That wasn't too hard. I can do that. So you don't have to hurt animals in your food anymore It's like a little challenge thing and then after it you're like well now I've got the tools and if I choose to I can continue on with it or I know it's too hard I blocked my hair fell out and I died of protein deficiency Which doesn't happen. This is our motivation. We just want people to stop Contributing to this. I've seen so much of this footage man and you know been in farms myself and Been outside of slaughterhouses and seen animals crying on their way in and just terrified and covered in in their own feces and They don't call it the best speech you ever hear for Nuffin A. You can sign up on Facebook. It's really easy Are you gonna you should sign up together make it a little thing you do? awesome But 22 days man like give it a go you like why not like you've got nothing to lose What do you think about that? Pumping a lot of information into you. I'll let you go but give it a give it a crack man. Hey, don't worry Yeah No, thanks. I appreciate that. I really know it's important to you because I just want you to be it's all the time Give us another hug


Hi everyone. I'm Sonia Kulcher and I'm a software engineer at Microsoft. I work on the Azure Container Upstream Team, which focuses on a number of open source projects, and I specifically work on Open Service Mesh. Today, I'm here to talk about how we added logging to Open Service Mesh using FlintBit, and how you can use it to create a really customized logging experience for whatever product or service you're working on. Real quick, I'm going to give you a little intro to what Open Service Mesh is, and then talk a little bit more about why we chose FlintBit as our solution. Then I'm going to dive deeper into how we actually integrated FlintBit into Open Service Mesh. Finally, I'm going to go into a number of demos, a three-part demo, to show you just how much you can do by changing a few toggles in FlintBit, and hopefully that'll give you some insight into what you can do in your project. Just to start off, what is Open Service Mesh or OSM? Think Service Mesh but Open Source. Open Service Mesh is written in Go, and it's a CNCF Sandbox project, which is what it has in common with FlintBit. It's also super lightweight and supports the SMI spec. Now, if you're not familiar with the Service Mesh, what basically happens there is if you onboard a number of microservices onto your Mesh, you can then control ingress and egress traffic as well as access-based control between the apps in your Service Mesh. In our case, we use an onboard-based control plane that can inject an onboard proxy into every pod to enforce policies and routing rules. Why did we choose FlintBit? FlintBit is a lightweight solution, and that really aligned with OSM's goal of keeping things lightweight. But more importantly, it's super customizable and pluggable, which means that we're able to offer our users a pretty vendor-neutral approach to logging because there's so many inputs, filters, and output plugins available in FlintBit that users can really configure to their own customized logging experience. There's also tags and matching that allow users to control how data flows through the logging pipeline, which means they can send logs to various outputs and change the nature of the logs in their pipeline. It's also important that FlintBit is cloud-native, which made integration very seamless in a Kubernetes environment. And then most importantly, it's governed by CNCF. So as I mentioned before, Open Service Mesh is also a CNCF project, and so we can offer our users a commitment that both projects are vendor-neutral and quality-gated, so they will uphold the same standards. And we can also rely on long-term supportability because of this governance. And so those are some of the reasons we had when we chose the solution. But now let's go deeper into what's going on under the hood. Like, how did we plug Open Service Mesh and FlintBit together? So we have, FlintBit exists as a side card to the OSM controller, so it's basically added to the OSM controller deployment. In the pod spec, we've added the FlintBit container, and then also outline a number of volume mounts that grant FlintBit, the FlintBit container, read access to the log files. The bigger piece in this is really the FlintBit config map, and I would say that's where the magic happens because this is where users can change a lot with really minimal onboarding from their end because it's really, really easy to configure all of the different parts of the FlintBit config map without spending too much time on the actual configuration focusing more on just figuring out what pipeline is best for them themselves. So let's take a quick look at what the controller deployment actually looks like. So as you can see here, this is just a piece of the OSM controller deployment, and this is just the piece that adds in the FlintBit container. So the first line shows you that we have FlintBit as an optionally-enabled sidecar, and that value to enable or disable FlintBit is tied to a CLI flag that we added. So the OSM CLI has control over whether FlintBit gets deployed or not. Next up, we have the environment variables. So this section is really great because firstly, it allows outbound proxy support. So we were looking at a scenario where if a customer is running FlintBit behind an outbound proxy server, they should still be able to send their logs wherever they wanna send them. And so FlintBit makes it really easy to do by just defining these values in a secret and mounting them as environment variables for the container to have access to. So these HTTP and HTTPS proxies can be, proxy values can be set up with their URL and optionally also a hostname, a password, and a username. The other piece of this is if you want to export any other or set any other environment variables for your config map to have access to, you can set them right here and then reference them. And we will see more about how those values are used when we take a look at the config map. The most important piece of this are all of the volume mounts. And this is where the FlintBit container actually gets access to the pod logs. So these are a number of volume mounts that are required based on the different clusters that this could be deployed on. There could be different sim links to the log locations. And so these are the volume mounts that we have defined. And I haven't shown this, but there are the corresponding volumes to these volume mounts also included in the controller deployment. So now going into the section that I said holds all the magic, the FlintBit config map itself. So just to note, I am not going deep into the service and the parser sections here. Those are two other sections that aren't as customizable because they're pretty much set up to what we want them, how we want FlintBit to function in this situation. So I'm going to focus on the sections that users can really plug in and out. So firstly, there's the input section. The input section in our case is the tail plugin. And so that tails a custom bot in the Kubernetes pod. So here is also where you tag the logs with a certain tag. And that really defines what their journey is. And I'll show you what that looks like in just a minute. Next up, there's the filter section. And the filter section is really great because this is where you can decide what goes into your logs. You can add or remove keys, you can modify the logs that already exist. And the best part of this is that you can really stack filters together. And that allows you to do a lot more with your logs than the information that they naturally contain. You can also refine whether or not you want to forward a particular log. And then again, you can use the tags that match the tags to match the tags you set in the input section. You can also use the tags to reroute where the logs go, which we will see in our demo. Lastly, there's the output section. And there are a lot of outputs. And as you will see in a minute, this really speaks to how truly vendor-neutral Fluentbit is because there are just so many available output plugins. And that list is consistently growing. So in the outputs section, you define one or more outputs that you would want to send your logs to and then use the tag matching to route your logs to the different outputs available. So this is just a quick look at the Fluentbit config map. I'm not going to spend too much time here just because we will be looking at this for quite a while in the demo. The two things I do want to point out, however, are that the path is picked up in the input section and this is where the log file actually resides. And then, and this is based on the volumes already mounted in the OSM deployment. Secondly, there is the environment variable piece. And so right here, you can see the modify filter is adding a key value there with the environment variable that we had set in the OSM deployment. And this is absolutely optional, but we just, I just wanted to show that this is possible to do. So now let's get into the demo. So just to go over what this demo is going to show you, there are three pieces to this. Firstly, we're going to take a look at a very basic pipeline. So here we're going to use a simple input that's just the tail input. We're going to use one filter that adds one key value pair. So that is the modify filter. And then finally, we're going to output our logs to the Datadog plugin. And so I have set up already a Datadog instance to send these logs to. Just wanted to stress that these, this is not the only route possible. This is just one of many possibilities, but it does give you a basic demonstration of what you could do with your data pipeline. After we've done that, we're going to add a little spice to that pipeline. So we're going to add an additional filter that adds a bunch of Kubernetes metadata and then also sends the same logs to a second output. And then lastly, we're going to make things even more fun. So we're going to read out a certain portion of the tags to a different output plugin. So if you wanted to look at two examples of a data endpoint versus one where, you know, you can send messages, Slack is a good example of that. So I'm just going to get started with the demo and we're going to make things more complex as we go on. So before we dive in, I just wanted to take a quick look at the Fluent Bit documentation. And right here, you can see that there is the data pipeline that shows you all of the available inputs, filters and outputs. As you can see, there are a lot of available inputs, but we're going to be focusing on the tail one because that is what's most intuitive and makes most sense in a Kubernetes environment. You can feel free to explore any of these based on your use case. Next up, there's the filters and it looks like they're with your filters than inputs but these filters are very, very powerful and they each of them have a lot of functionality within them. And then there are, like I said, a lot of outputs and this really shows how vendor agnostic Fluent Bit is and we're going to look at three different output plugins in this situation. So let's get started with this data dog pipeline that I had shown you in the slide. So like I said, we're going to use the tail input. We're going to add one key value there. So this is the type. So imagine our type is a test data versus you may have production data. And so that kind of just delineates the type. So let's take a look at our Fluent Bit config map and keep our documentation up with us at the same time. So like I said, there is the service section. All I'm going to point out here is that we've turned daemon sets off. And so one other alternative, if you wanted to set up Fluent Bit in a Kubernetes environment is to use a daemon set. And we decided that it made more sense to stick to, we decided that it made more sense in our use case to use, to tail logs from just our one controller pod but you can actually get logs from every single pod if that's what you need. The next thing I'm going to point out is that there is a tag being set here. And so this tag, this coop start tag basically, it is used as a map with a matcher in all of the other sections. And it is effectively like a regular expression that includes the entire path that the log is actually coming from. And then the path referenced is from based on that volume amount. So now let's take a look at this modify filter. So the modify filter just requires, in our case, there are quite a lot of things you can do with the modify filter but we're just going to add one key value there. And so the key here we're going to add is type and then the value is test logs. And then next let's move on to the data dog output. There are again, a lot of defaults already defined that we can continue to use but there are three values of interest to us that we need to set for our instance. So one is the API key. That is something you can get once you set up data dog. It's automatically kind of set up for you when you enable logs. And then there's the data dog service and the data dog source. These are just human readable values, extra keys to add on to tell you in your output where these logs coming from. So something you want to do behind the scenes is replace this API key with my API key. I obviously don't want my credentials out there but that's something that you shouldn't know is happening in the background and I will be replacing. So now let's go and check out our data dog instance. As you can see, there are no logs there and we can get started with the OSM. So let's just install OSM and enable fluent bit with the config map that I just showed you. So now that OSM is installed, let's see what is going on back in our data dog log viewer. And so right here you can see pretty quickly all of the logs have started flowing in and all of the keys and values that we had defined including the original values like the message and the log level as well as the file that the logs came from. All of that is visible here. And then all of the extra stuff we had added like the source, the service and then the type key. Those have been added here as well. And those really make it easier to query your data once it's already in the log output. So now let's get back to work pipeline. What we saw a second ago were pretty simple logs and so what we're saying now is we want something more robust. We wanna add Kubernetes metadata to our logs to know more about the pod that these logs are coming from. Secondly, we wanna use a second output plugin. So we're gonna be using the log analytics output plugin to just show you that the same data can be sent to different places. Right now we're not rerouting or anything, we're just using a pretty straightforward pipeline with a second stacked filter. So coming back to our config map you can take a look at the Kubernetes filter documentation. It is actually pretty in detail right here but we can rely on the default values that are defined in this documentation. There's a lot more to learn from the Kubernetes documentation including how exactly this filter is able to pick up the information it needs from is able to pick up the information it needs from the logs but we're just gonna add the defaults for now. Secondly, there's the Azure Log Analytics output. This is actually pretty simple. It only requires four values to be defined by you and two of these are actually just values you need to pick up from Azure portal. When you take a look at your agents management in Azure portal you should be able to get your customer ID and shared key. So right here I'm just ensuring that my matcher matches the tag that I had set in the input and then I'm going to add in the customer ID and shared key. So these correspond to the workspace ID and primary key in your log analytics workspace. Again, I'm gonna make those changes offline because I don't want my credentials on the internet but definitely make sure to get those and add those in here. So now that we have that set let's just take a quick look at our log analytics instance. Right now we don't have any data appearing there. It's pretty empty but we're gonna just go apply that config map that we just created and that should have the data flowing pretty quickly. So I'm gonna apply that config map and then the other thing I'm gonna do is also delete the existing OSM controller pod so that it restarts and we can make sure it picks up all of the changes in the config map. This is not necessary but it's a good safeguard just for the situation. And as you can see now the logs that are in Datadog are a lot more robust. They have all of this Kubernetes information that has been added on as an annotation and you can learn a lot more about the environment that these logs are coming from. So these logs just got a lot more useful and then as you can see the original key value pair that we had added with the type is still a part of this. Let's now also go check out log analytics and run that basic query again. And as you can see all of the logs have shown up and all of the Kubernetes metadata that we saw in Datadog is also present here. Cool. Now that we have that going I wanna envision another scenario. Now looking back at Datadog you can see there are some errors and emergencies and warnings, some different logs. And so what we wanna be able to do is say if we have error logs we want to alert someone whether it's yourself or somebody on your team you want somebody to know something's wrong. So let's branch out our existing pipeline. So what we're gonna do is if normally this poop star label existed we're gonna use a rewrite tag filter that will allow us to check for a certain condition. So the condition we're gonna check for is the word error. And then we're gonna re tag that as a page or a pager tag and then send those logs to Slack. And I just wanna note that this doesn't stop those logs from being sent to log analytics and Datadog but it just gets sent to three places instead of two. So coming into the rewrite tag bit the really important piece here is just the rule. So the rule has four parts. The key, so it looks for a key then it checks for this regular expression as the value. It then rewrites the tag to new tag and then it asks you whether you want to keep the original tag data and send it to the original outputs or whether you just wanna discard it. And so we're gonna stick with keeping that data so that we're not getting rid of anything that could be used in our databases as well. So let's quickly add that rewrite tag section right here. So it's a new filter, it's fairly basic. All we're gonna do is add name. We're still gonna match the same poop star tag and re-emit these tags, these logs with the new tag. So now let's take a look at the Slack output. So the Slack output plugin requires you to set up an incoming web hook for your Slack channel which I already did, it took me three minutes because of great documentation, we love that. And so all I need to do is add these three lines and I will be good to go. So I'm gonna add the output and then I'm also gonna change the match. And so we need to make sure that we're now matching the new label which is the pager label that we just set. And then again, behind the scenes, I'm gonna change this web hook to the web hook that I'd already created for the Slack channel that I have set up. Let's go through the same steps again, apply the config map and then delete the pod. So now let's go back to DataDoc. Oh, actually let's check out Slack first. We can already see some of the logs coming into Slack and you can see that they are fatal or contain the word error in them. And we come back to those in just a second but let's check out what's happening in our other outputs. So we still have output coming to log analytics but how do we know that it's a correct output? I'm just gonna quickly check using the metadata that we already added. So as you can see this pod identifier matches the pod identifier in log analytics and let's take a look at DataDoc and you can see now that the metadata is pretty useful for making sure you're getting logs from the right place. Our Slack channel is now pretty full. We have a lot of logs flowing in and probably somebody getting really disturbed if they're the person who has to deal with all those logs. So coming back to this pipeline, as you can see, we were able to both stack the logs and send them to a variety of outputs and change the root of the logs along the way. So looking ahead, I hope you were able to gain something from watching this talk today. What I will say is that there are so many output plugins constantly being added and the rapid development cycle of FlintBit really make sure that the new features that we have needed along this way have been consistently added. A great way to engage with what's going on with FlintBit is to join their Slack. And if you wanna know more about what's going on with OSM, we have a monthly community call that you can definitely join in on. I've also included links to the OSM and FlintBit docs so that you can also take a look at some of the code I referenced today. And just wanted to say thank you for watching today and definitely feel free to reach out. My Twitter handle is included at the bottom of these slides and this has been fun.