So thank you all for being with us. We are about to start our webinar today. There are different ways of interaction. You will see that today it will be a very interactive meeting. This is Antonella Poce and I'm talking to you from Italy, from Rome, where I teach at Roma Trai University Department of Education Experimental Pedagogy. That's my field of study. I'm Eden Fellow and I'll be your moderator today. I've been working in distance education and in particular in the last five years in critical thinking, assessment and enhancement. That's why I'm very much interested, as all of you I think, in the topic today. You have the opportunity to meet our speakers today. Please be aware that you can ask questions and we'll try to have the most questions we can live with our speakers. You can put your questions in the question and answer box that you can find in the bar below the main image you are seeing at the moment. There's a chat and you are already using it as I can see. But the questions, please leave them on the question and answer box. You have also the streaming possibility on YouTube and we'll try to collect questions also from there. What are we going to talk about today? What happens when the communication of the 2000 Hancock pandemic generates a new wave of information overload? How can you help your students manage it? How can you manage it yourself? Recent research analyzed the level of this perception or misperception of facts due to the way they are told or narrated. Why do we tend to overestimate some information instead of others? Media tends to attract our attention for commercial reasons. News are not focused on the truth but on the viral power that they have. An infodemic of information is thus spread and this limits our rationality and the awareness of reality. It is difficult to make the right decisions starting from wrong points, of course. Moreover, such sort of information generates addiction. To understand how to cope with this kind of pandemic that has an impact also on health and well-being, I leave, of course, the floor to our remarkable speakers. Irem Katz, Senior Research Director of Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Francesca Amanduni, PhD student at Romatra University and newly elected member of the network of academics and professionals from the Eden European Distance and the Learning Network. Irem, let me say a few words about Irem Katz, who is Senior Research Director of the Cognitive Technology Sciences Centre at the Educational Testing Service, Princeton. Throughout his almost 30-year career at ETS, he has conducted research at the intersection of cognitive psychology, psychometrics and technology. His research involves developing methods for applying cognitive theory and the design of assessments, building cognitive models to guide interpretation of test taker's performance and investigating the cognitive and psychometric implications of highly interactive digital performance assessments. The Cognitive and Technology Science Centre that E-Direct comprises staff with a wide range of expertise who conduct research and development at the forefront of educational assessments serving the current and future needs of ETS programs and clients promoting quality and equity. Current research and development areas include simulation, game scenario and conversion-based assessment, training of human raters, theoretically-driven analysis of test taker process data, score reporting and cognitive models. So, I leave the floor to you, Irem, and I thank you so much for being with us today. After Irem's presentation, we'll ask a few, very few questions to Irem and then we'll leave the floor to Francesca and again an interactive session with her. Thank you so much to both of you. Please, Irem, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Antonella, and thank you to Antonella, Francesca and our colleagues at Eden for this opportunity to speak with you all today. Today, I'm going to talk about digital information literacy as a type of vaccine or inoculation against the infodemic. Information literacy, digital information literacy represents a type of critical thinking and I'll discuss a little bit more about what it is, the types of tasks we've used to assess it and therefore the types of instruction that might be used to teach these types of skills and I hope we'll have an interesting conversation about how to have students be more digitally information literate. There's a couple of takeaways that I'm going to return to at the end of the presentation that I'd like you to think about as I go through the presentation. First off, often when we think about digital literacy, we often think about just evaluation of information. Is this information I'm reading about on a website, in the news, or on a tweet? Is this real? Is this biased in some way? And I'd like to point out the digital information. What I'll discuss is how digital literacy includes is a full range of skills, not just evaluation. In addition, although digital literacy is digital and related to technology, certainly it is very much a cognitive skill. These types of skills I'll be discussing today have been discussed for years. They were first defined in some ways in the 1970s. Later there have been other developments in the 90s and then even more recently in 2000, 2010, they've been returned to again and again as a way of dealing with information and evaluating information and finding information in order to build knowledge. Finally, the other point I want to be talking about is that digital literacy, digital information literacy is integrated. Although I'll talk about various types of skills that comprise digital literacy, they should be thought of all as part of a single whole. It's not a piecemeal set of skills that you can be better or worse on. These skills tend to travel together. People tend to be good at the skills overall. Not so good at the skills or not so good at the skills. So although there are these different facets of digital literacy, you should think of them all as one integrated set of skills. So a key point that I want to make is that digital literacy is more than technology skills. Certainly nowadays students are very facile with technology. They're able to, they tweet, they use Instagram, Facebook for us older folks, email and so forth. Websites is a wide range of technology that is being used, but that's only one piece of the puzzle. People need to be able to judge the authenticity of information that they see. They need to be able to organize information and summarize and adapt information when they are, because people are not only consumers of information, they're also producers of information. So they should be able to communicate information effectively, disseminate that information, understand where to go for more information to get more ideas about what they might be reading. And you can think of all of these skills related to technology, but it's really a type of critical thinking that I think Francesca will be talking more about. So what is digital information literacy? What does it consist of? These seven skills on the right defining, accessing, evaluating, evaluating, managing, integrating, creating and communicating were defined originally as part of digital information literacy by an international panel, actually back in about 2000, 2001, and later refined by representatives of U.S. colleges and universities, primarily people involved in the library at U.S. colleges and universities. Librarians for many years, librarians have been the keepers of what might be thought of as information literacy, what makes good information, how to find reliable information, how to define an information need. This is all part and parcel of what happens as what librarians are trained to do. And we work with a lot of librarians from across the U.S. as well as other faculty members when defining these digital literacy and what it's made of. So what are some of these skills? The one that most people talk about and think about when they think about the infodemic is evaluating information. And I'll just go through a couple of these skills right now, but we can talk more about them during the Q&A. So evaluating information is determining the degree to which information satisfies a particular need. In this case, for example, finding out about current numbers, about testing for the coronavirus, finding out whether or not policies that are being implemented by governments are actually real. There's a lot of fake news nowadays. And so this is all part and parcel of types of evaluating. A key thing that I always think about when it comes to evaluating information, and Francesca got at this in her introductory remarks, is why is the person who created this information, why is this person communicating it? What's in it for them? In some cases, it might be an altruistic idea of providing information for the benefit of many people. In other cases, there might be a particular political or social slant on the information. That doesn't mean that the information is necessarily problematically biased, but it does mean that you have to think about who created this information. So activities that might be involved on everyday basis, evaluating information, selecting the best database or websites in order to find information, find reliable information. Someone might be ranking webpages, evaluating webpages in terms of their authority, their relevance to a particular research question, how biased they are. And determining also part of this is determining whether the information that you've collected when you're building some understanding of some issue, whether that's sufficient. Another important type of skill is integrating information. That is taking information from multiple sources and forming some type of summary or conclusions. For example, synthesizing information from a website into a tweet. And this is something we see a lot of where people might draw information, draw ideas from a number of different websites and summarize them somehow in 280 characters. Comparing and contrasting information from a variety of sources, news, social media, and so forth in the spreadsheet, just as one example to try to understand that we as researchers might do this to try to understand a particular issue. And then just drawing conclusions from all the onslaught of information that we get, whether it be emails, tweets, Instagram, webpages, or print, on particular issues and trying to understand that. This is another aspect of digital information literacy, integrating these pieces of information together. And the last one that I'm going to speak about, sorry, I was looking at the Q&A. A very interesting question that I'll get to near the end and I agree with. Communicating information, communication. People are not just consumers of information. They're also producers of information. They communicate. And understanding not only how to create TikTok videos, tweets, other video mashups, websites, and so forth, but how to communicate them appropriately to an audience, to tell them, to the audience, to tell them to the particular approach that you want to take. How you create a tweet and how you think about a tweet is very different than how you think about a presentation, for example. These are all a part and parcel of digital information literacy. So creating a graph that helps you think of, to help you make a decision or to understand better about some issue. We've seen a lot of that, particularly lately in the news. Adapting presentation slides to a new audience, I would present to a set of students versus to a set of colleagues would be, for example, very different. So I'm going to turn now to some examples of these types of skills and how they might look. I should say that these were created for an assessment that was specifically designed for use in the U.S. My examples are, I recognize them U.S. centric. However, the basic ideas behind them, I think if understanding the basic ideas behind them means that it's, you know, you'll see that with some small changes, you can make them more globally relevant pretty easily. So the first task is related to evaluating information. The ideas require students to think critically about information found on the internet. This scenario here provides the context for evaluating the information. For each of several websites, the students are asked to decide the usefulness of the site's information that's relevance, it's timeliness, the authority, point of view, and so forth. So here, for example, you're finding, you want to find unbiased information about global warming and as a research step, you've identified several potential promising sites. Now you need to decide whether these sites are reliable and relevant. So there are a variety of websites given in this task, and it's up on top and there's scrolling, and then down at the bottom you indicate whether the sites are useful, authoritative, not authoritative, potentially biased, and so forth. So just to focus on one of these tasks, one of these scientific panel funded by a consortium of state utility companies about information, about climate change, and you could say, well, this one, number one, it might not be completely current because it's about 10 years old or so, 15 years old, but also it's potentially problematically biased because of the source of the information. Another is the results of a climate change panel, but it was way back in 1995, although many of these issues are relevant, it might be that these are not, in fact, current and best information that we have nowadays. So you can see how you could adapt and develop new types of tasks that would be better suited to current issues, but still, and maybe in a different frame, but with different technologies such as tweets and Instagram and so forth, but still get at the same basic underlying skills of evaluation in this case. Here's another type of skill that's more along the lines of searching for information because when we receive information, when we're deciding, okay, should I believe this, part of that decision process, part of that thinking, the critical thinking about information is to go out and find additional information that either that might support what we're seeing, the conclusions we're seeing or to give us a broader understanding. So here's a very simple task where you're working, you're taking a class in history, the U.S. Constitution. Again, I said this was U.S.-based questions, but you can make this really about anything you'd like. And your colleagues or all have suggested ways of searching, alternative ways of searching rather than the search given right here, and the idea is for you to figure out what's the best solution, what's the best way of starting off a search on this particular issue related to the U.S. Constitution. Here are some I-messages, I-m's, texts from friends about some suggestions. What's important here is not that this is effectively a multiple-choice question, what's important here is that the different options result in broader or narrower ways of finding information. For example, a very broad thing was just adding, we should try searching this one in the lower right, we should try searching on history of the U.S. Constitution. That would get you a lot of information. And then there's the correct answer, which is to just put quotes around the specific thing you want to find so that you find those specific texts with those specific words would give you the most, and then the other two provide narrower, but not narrow enough types of results. And we're interested in saying how well people can rank order these different options. Interestingly enough, when we've used this assessment, generally people, even on something as simple as this, tend not to be good at these skills, and we found this generally with many of the skills. So in this case, the correct answer was found by about 36% of college students. And this has been replicated a number of different times, admittedly, not necessarily, immediately recently some people might be better at this now, but it's been fairly, fairly stable. So to conclude, let me turn back to my takeaways. First, digital literacy includes the Florian skills, not just evaluation. This is suggesting for you all that when teaching about digital information literacy, instruction should be broad, not just focusing on one or the other of different pieces of what might go into digital literacy, but cover a wide range of skills. Digital literacy is cognitive, not just about technology. Instruction should try to focus on the cognitive skills, not just on how you determined, for example, how you search for more information through Twitter or through Google or so forth, but actually try to look beyond the specific technology to the actual cognitive skills that underlie digital literacy. And finally, as I said before, digital literacy is integrated. It's not these piecemeal things. Often instruction tends to focus, when I've worked with instructors in the past, tend to focus on one or the other of these various skills to the detriment of some of them. The instruction should not only be integrated but pervasive. I've worked with faculty at universities who've engaged, who've worked with the library at the universities to help develop for a wide variety of different types of classes, appropriate digital information, literacy instruction, and assignments that would not only be integrated, not only focus on the cognitive, but work within, for example, a history course, a writing course, a speaking course, and so forth. So the biology course. Librarians have very good ideas about how information and literacy appears in a variety of domains and working with them to help develop projects and assignments that train digital literacy is a good idea. So just some discussion points that we might raise in the Q&A or for you to all think about. So digital literacy tends to be very difficult to teach, and I'm curious as to people's ideas about the type of instruction that best leads to the sort of skeptical eye that you want people to have in order to evaluate information. And then we recognize that it's really hard. We learn something in the classroom, but then when we're out in the real world, it's really hard to apply the skills that we've learned in the classroom. And so a question is for you all, how can we encourage, how can we teach in a way that helps the students recognize when these skills can be applied in everyday life? I'll leave my contact information down there. And with that, thank you very much. And I will, I'll turn it back to Antonello or should I answer some of the questions in the chat? So I'll go to the Q&A. Thank you so much for your presentation here. Yes, there are different very interesting questions coming from the audience. And I wish you could ask her to, yes, this question especially that is in the chat and I think you can read it. Emotional exploitation of literature through fake videos is a serious threat for political ends by anonymous experts how to evaluate it as a fake, conspiracy behind it and deal with it. I think this is really a relevant question and also what you highlighted related to the connection between digital literacy and what we got continuously on our personal devices is really threatening. So can you give us some advice regarding that? This is a really good, relevant point that we've seen a lot of lately, especially with the ability to create what's now been calling deep fake videos. One of the approaches that I've taken when I look at these is not only is to, number one, always look for the source of the information. How much do we know about who is either posting this or where this information came from? That will in turn lead you to, and if you can find the source of any information or there's no way to find out about the organization or what have you that created it, then you obviously need to doubt the information. But the trickier one is that what if we are seeing these fake videos that actually are showing things that we agree with. That's actually probably one of the cases where students need to think more carefully about they're seeing some video, they're going along with it and those are the ones where we're more likely to be fooled because it's agreeing with our worldview and those are the ones where it's most important to seek who is the author of this and what potential ideas that this person is trying to promote. Yeah, in fact, the issue there is exactly that the media are tending to focus on what can be viral and so they focus on not tracing the truth but going to find people's agreement so what's more popular will be most viral and that's the thing that we should look for in our way of transferring information to our students but also enhancing their critical thinking skills and we are going to learn more about that with Francesca's presentation. But I want to pick up another question from the audience and then we'll move to the second presentation but I'm telling the audience that we're going to answer we'll try to answer all of your questions also afterwards so don't worry if we are not going to ask all the questions to our presenters. Another question is that when from blood when digital literacy skills are very low it is difficult to protect oneself from the infodemic or fake or irrelevant news could you point us to a free online course for people who have low digital literacy skills or maybe a European will be difficult maybe for Irv to answer but we'll try to answer about that also with Francesca but Irv can you tell us how can we protect from the infodemic or fake or irrelevant news something you already told us? Well I'm afraid that I don't know so I'm more in the assessment world than in the instructional world although I've worked with colleges and university professors before but I do know that UNESCO at one point several years ago had developed a digital information literacy I think at the time they called it IACT literacy instruction I don't know what the current state of that is right I can certainly yeah I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for that but anybody else in the audience does but Francesca I'm sure will give us more information about that also different European projects developed to try to answer and to give some directions the last one and then we leave the floor to Francesca how would you differentiate digital literacy from digital fluency? Well really the words themselves are not I've heard these exact skills and in fact these exact skills I've discussed this digital fluency the words change a lot digital literacy digital information literacy ICT literacy the hard part and you could say the same thing about critical thinking which I believe is the topic of Francesca's talk it really boils down to not the label but how you define the specific skills are you focusing more on the technology and the facility with the technology do people use that digital fluency to mean that or are you focusing more on the cognitive skills that exist beyond a particular technology? Yes thank you so much here so we'll try to be back to both of you in the end if there will be time so to have the possibility to answer more questions but I'm going to introduce you in a minute Francesca Amindouni as I said she is a PhD student at Roma Trial University but newly elected member of the Network of Academics and Professionals Eden Network she studies PhD student in education culture and communication at Roma Trial University she has developed her expertise in the learning field both as practitioner and researcher at national and international level she carried out research on blended learning and her current PhD project regards semi-automated assessment of critical thinking short essays and open-ended answers part of her research has been developed at ETS Princeton where she spent a term period as visiting student funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research through the Leonardo Da Vinci Scholarship I can add also that she was one of the very very few PhD students all over the country to get this scholarship so we have to congratulate her for that and she has been working as a researcher in several European projects in the field so that's why I was telling you in advance that she's going to give you some feedback on where to collect information about courses related to digital skills, enhancement support and especially cross-sectional skills development so Francesca the floor is all yours thank you I will share my presentation you can see no sorry okay now you can see my presentation one moment okay thank you to be here with me today today I feel more than ever the responsibility of what I'm saying and I will try to share reliable and trustworthy information because I don't want to contribute negatively to the current infodemic so I will speak I will provide you a definition of what infodemic is and I also will try to speak with you about some research results of the current infodemic then we will speak about two antibodies for infodemic that I think that could be critical thinking and digital literacy and finally we will speak also about innovative methods to assess critical thinking and digital literacy so we know that the current pandemic is strongly related with technological progress for better and for worse one of the facts of the technological progress related with information is also known as information overload the idea is that with internet we receive more information than the information that our mind can understand and process when the phenomenon of information overload meet pandemic we are in front of what World Health Organization call infodemic infodemic was defined as an overabundance of information some accurate and some not that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it but why World Health Organization interested in infodemic the World Health Organization is interested because of the danger of misinformation during the management of virus outbreaks since it could even speed up the epidemic process by influencing and fragmenting social response here I'm showing you some picture of examples of fragmentation of social response that can create danger for singular individual but also for group of people the World Health Organization has been trying to monitor the spread of fake news through partnership with big information and social media companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook probably if you go on social media you see that social media give you advice to go to official website here I show you an example of my Twitter page if I write COVID-19 of my Twitter page, Twitter suggest me to go to the Ministero della Salute that is the Minister of Health in Italy despite the efforts by World Health Organization and social media platforms hundreds of thousands of people have consumed a reliable contents about the coronavirus on this platform also suggested by New York Time, UGOV and Economist Survey this infodemic phenomenon is so huge that epidemiologists are starting to find ways to ensure the impact of communication dynamics on epidemics so the idea is that infodemic and information regarding information spreading can be used as a variable to understand to forecast the virus spreading as I told you researcher are starting to work on research related to the current infodemic so I wish to present you briefly some results related to the content most common to the rate of information spreading and to our tendency to share our reliable information here you can see that some researchers nearly and colleagues through natural language processing techniques were able to understand which were the contents most common in different social media platform mainstream social media platform where YouTube, Instagram and Twitter and some as known social media platform are Reddit and GAB we can see that most of the contents are not very alarming however there are also some related contents for example something related Bill Gates Foundation simulation something relating biological warfare and in general contents related to racism people that study infodemiology also wanted to understand to find an index to measure the information spreading maybe you listen in the newspaper about R0 R0 is an index used in epidemiologists to say how many people can be affected after being in contact with a person that is infected infodemiologists try to use the same index to say how many contents are produced after someone is exposed to a content related to COVID-19 so that in different social media platform the number is between 1 and 3 this means that after being exposed to one content related to COVID it's possible that people in average produce 1 to 3 other contents related to COVID of course these contents are not for sure are reliable they can be both reliable or are reliable however we know from another study colleagues that people have a tendency to share a reliable information researchers ask the participant to consider a mixture of true and false headline about the COVID-19 outbreak when participants were asked to judge the accuracy of the statement they said that the fake news was true about 25% of time however when they were asked if they will share the headline around 35% said that they will share a reliable content 10% more than in the other condition so researchers suggest that even if people can discriminate between misleading information in a good percentage of the case when they were asked to share they are more prone to make mistakes what can we learn as educators from this epidemic despite the work held organization and government are tried to do the same we need to develop antibodies for the infodemic we think that these antibodies are critical thinking and digital literacy we learn also the methods that people that study infodemic use can be also adopt researchers and educators to study contents that for example students share in online discussion forums so as Dr. Katz said before I will speak a little bit more about critical thinking I want to say that there is not an agreement regarding what critical thinking is however researchers agreed with the idea that thinking is composed by both skills for example analyze, evaluate make inference and argument and dispositions dispositions means to be open-minded to be skeptical, to be inquisitive to be reflective but why we need critical thinking because much of our knowledge of the world comes from others rather than being the results of direct experience we need to analyze and evaluate critical information because information receive affect our belief and our belief as a consequence affect our behaviors and we are seeing that our behaviors in this case can be very dangerous for ourselves and also for other people so critical thinking as a role not only when we speak about citizenship when we speak about studying but for our surviving in this case nowadays a great amount of info change happens online especially in the case of the so-called infodemic so as Torkoff showed before there are similarities between critical thinking and digital literacy however according to Ox reading a text online require greater challenges compare reading a text offline why because of multimodality and because of links that create no-sequential kinds of text so we need not only skills related to text processing but also skills related to navigation now I want to involve you in a very short quiz and I ask the technical team if they can share the poll with the audience sorry ok this is the poll you find free questions and I will explain later more about this free question I read the question with you the first one is Emily's father has three daughters the first two are named April and May daughter's name June, July we cannot say none of this the second question is if you are running a race and you pass the person in second place what place are you in first, second we cannot say none of this the third question is a little bit more challenging because it requires you to go to the website you don't have to do it but if you want to challenge yourself you can do it you have to go to the data section of the official website and look for data relating to employment in the ICT sector ICT Employment I think part of the question was cut but I remember the question for too Natalie so it is which country has 4.7% of employment maybe I can write you in the chat so you don't have difficulties to remember ok ok I'm not ok let me see if I can go to the chat ok here is the chat 4.7% of employment which country I will give you another minute percent of employment ok let me know if all the questions are clear you can write in the chat I'm reading you especially with the third question ok all clear thanks I don't want to disturb you other few seconds I will explain soon the reason of this questions we cannot see the chat ok I think that we can go on and we cannot see the the card but are you are you speaking about the ox website or are you are not seeing the poll I don't know what you mean but I need to go on so maybe the technical yes because I will I will speak later this is about our digital literacy skills so with this the data from ox if you go to the website of ox you should see in the data section but maybe later I can show you the way to solve this task so I will go on we'll speak about this assessment method the first two questions were not aimed at assessing critical thinking skills but they were more related with critical thinking disposition the two items were taken by the cognitive reflection test that is open and if you want you can access on the publication watching the item and this test is aimed at seeing if we are able to evaluate our our fast and spontaneous answer for example in the first item about Emily's daughter the fast answer will be June because the item ask you about the Emily's daughter the name of the Emily's daughter were April and May everyone has in mind is June however the correct answer is Emily because of course Emily's father has three daughters one is April, May and the other one is Emily I'm sorry Francesca do you want me to share the results with the attendees of the poll maybe we can show it now yes we can show it now if you want yes okay in this case the correct answer would be none of this because the correct answer would be Emily the second question was taken both by also by the cognitive reflective test and the correct answer was second was the second so also in this case we ask ourselves to inhibit the fast answer and okay perfect the correct answer in the third question was Japan the third question is taken by the web trotter challenge that is a challenge realized in Italy to assess digital literacy of students in high school and this that question was aimed specifically at assessing the skill of navigating and a goal directed navigation so I hope that these examples could be used by you for designing your test however I will share the slide with you and you can find the reference that you can consult in order to design your assessment test I didn't show you assessment method to assess critical thinking skills because they are larger and more require more efforts of course because critical thinking requires effort so let's go on how can we develop digital critical thinking skills research that social interaction and language are fundamental tools for the development of higher or their cognitive skills and when we speak about language we don't speak only about verbal language but also mathematical language artistic language so the critical activities could be deep reading not only about texts especially literary texts because they are more complex but also pieces of art and I would suggest you to look at the massive open online course realized by National Gallery of Art in Washington DC because they created a very beautiful educational resource to understand how to develop critical thinking through art another exercise that you can use is writing exercise especially essays and thirdly dialogue both online and offline from a Socratic tradition the good news that are working at the moment online is that online dialogue and logic interaction could be even better than offline interactions and this because online interaction allow more time for reflecting and allow people during their argumentation for example to use more references compared to asynchronous discussion however if you have big classes of students and you want to have more discussion forums it can be challenging thus recently educators with cognitive scientists and computer scientists are working together and they develop a new research that is named learning analytics and educational data mining there is a growing number of attempts to automatically analyze critical thinking related skills through which processing techniques and professor Poce and her team in which I include the work on this and however this is a new field and we need more research and our goal is to support teachers in the future providing them tools to monitor critical thinking of their students in discussion forums and for this reason at the end of this presentation I will put in the chat a link that would contribute to my PhD thesis research so I would be very grateful if you can participate in my research at the end of this presentation and there are someone that will put the link also on YouTube to sum up the current info dynamic is making more evident that citizens need to develop critical thinking skills and digital skills critical thinking digital literacy skills could be developed in a learning environment combining deep reading writing activities and dialogic activities and we can learn from info dynamic some methodological tools to assess critical thinking and digital literacy in a learning platform in the same way that researchers work on social media platforms I want to let you with a provocative thought by Tobelli that wrote an essay that I suggest you to read that is named avoid news go without news cut it out completely after a while you will realize that despite your personal news blackout you have not missed and you are not going to miss any important facts if some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community you will learn it in time for your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see when you are with your friends ask them if anything important is happening in the world the question is a great conversation starter most of the time the answer will be not really this is a provocative thought I'm not suggesting you to not read the news but I suggest you to read the essay from Tobelli and thank you for your time and I hope that it was interesting for you absolutely Francesca thank you so much for your presentation comments are coming in the chat congratulating you so thank you so much I think we have a little bit of time for at least a couple of questions for each of our presenters I wanted to start with Irv and then we'll come back to Francesca with a very interesting topic that actually has a true impact on F and well-being we need to really understand the relevance and the importance of such an issue like infodemic because the relation with health and well-being is very strong and it can be really ample Irv my question to you comes from from the audience of course and is related to the topic of metacognitive skills how are they associated with digital skills and if they are associated in what way can you widen a bit the concept that was there in your presentation but maybe we can give more details about that so metacognitive skills skills about knowing what you're thinking about and being more self-reflective are an essential part of digital literacy in fact is something that the committees that I've worked with that have defined that we're defining these skills talked about a lot it's not specifically put anywhere because it pervades the entire sets of skills number one so for example just in evaluation you have to be reflective about what things you are being persuaded by and therefore what things you need to be skeptical about sorry excuse me but importantly and this was a point I raised all the way at the end of the talk how do we apply these skeptical critical thinking digital literacy skills how do we recognize this is a situation where I need to think hard as Francesca pointed out it's very time consuming and cognitively exhausting it can be to engage in these types of activities so we're going to be a little bit I wouldn't say necessarily lazy but let's say careful about when we look at this you have to have some awareness and self reflection about the situations in which you tend to be fooled and the types of things that you tend to find compelling and not compelling in order to improve your own digital literacy and critical thinking this is and what about assessment you mentioned assessment of course in your presentation and some some examples were given but do you think that we should work on different ways of assessing certain skills in order to support and enhance them I know that there are different problems in especially in reliability and validity of course but can you tell us which could be the direction assessment could take also to help the enhancement of certain skills well when it comes to when it comes to when it comes to assessment one of the things that when we were developing the assessment that the examples I showed during the presentation we obviously were ETS so we paid very collateral attention to validity and reliability issues but I think the important thing is that the assessments and questions need to reflect scenarios and situations that people come across so that when they come across these things in the real life they hopefully would see the connection of course assessment is just a measure and we're measuring how well people can recognize these situations they do know that it's an assessment so that that means that it's they might not apply the skills in the real world but instruction should focus on a wide variety of cases and situations and ideally bringing things from the person's own own experience and life so that they begin to see the connections between what they're for example learning in the classroom and what's actually happening in the real world with ideas but when it comes to digital literacy and critical thinking they're important because recognizing the situations in which you need to apply these skills is critical absolutely I agree with you so Francesca can you give us I have lots of questions but I would like you to expand on the relation that deep reading and relevant cultural issues could bring to critical thinking enhancement I mean relevant cultural references could be in the literary world could be in the hard and heritage world so which is the relation that you could see and how we could exploit the availability of heritage resources in order to expand to support critical thinking skills thank you for the question I will start with the literary text and then we can explore what's happened with pieces of art literary text especially classic one are characterized by complexity so when you read a classic text usually you can find very different layers so you can read read again and train in this way your ability to analyze and evaluate so this is one of the reasons why literary text could be exploited by teachers that want to develop critical thinking in their students and in the same way pieces of art could be used to develop for example inquisitiveness so students can focus on details presented in pieces of art and try to make inferences, hypotheses regarding why that element is presented in that kind of painting what is the reason why the artist put that element in that painting so these are some reasons why literary text and pieces of art could be used and in relation with pieces of art we have a methodology named visual thinking that has been showed to be very useful for the development of critical thinking thank you thank you yes that's why we need to increase cultural heritage fruition in different ways so there are different reasons there are lots of other questions I would like to ask you by the time is really running we will have the opportunity to answer your questions also interestingly there are questions related to projects going on on our topics and we are going to to give you information related to those projects we have many going I would like to remind all the audience that we are going to have to go to give you other opportunities to participate in our online together initiative the next opportunity will be it's very very very close because immediately next next Wednesday we are going to have a webinar promoted by Eden through the network of academics and professionals that is due on Wednesday May 13th and the title is very intriguing again teaching online competencies debate in a post-confinement scenario with Alfredo Soheiro Eden EC member from the University of Porto or Daniel Ehlers Eden EC member Co-operative State University Baden-Buttenberg, Germany and the webinar will be moderated by Francesca Amenbuni as newly elected network of academics and professional steering committee member the next Eden online together initiative webinar will be on May 18th always at 5 Central European summertime the topic is education in time of pandemic practical tips for learning design with Joyce Snydker sorry I can't pronounce the name Jared Evans Open University UK Jilly Salmon UK academic director at online education services and will be moderated by Fabio Nascimbeni I ask you so to don't forget and register to those participants I also recommend you to visit our website and get information about our annual conference that will take place online this year hosted by University Politecnica Timisoara and I can tell you that some missions are still open so it will be a good very good opportunity to share our ideas our projects our project results and have a further interaction together I think it's all for today I thank you again our presenters Irv thank you so much for being with us today I am confident that there will be more opportunities to talk about critical thinking development and assessment thank you Francesca for your very live present and interactive presentation you will have the opportunity as NAP steering committee member to promote more your research and your findings thank you all thank you to the criteria that hosted the meeting and we are anyway available for any further inquiry thank you all


Please welcome to the stage Nancy Gibbs, Nabiya Syed, and Martha Minow. Good afternoon folks. Empty coffee cups, full bladders, but you're still here. If you are at all interested in how our information ecosystem has become what it is, then you are going to love the next 30 minutes of your life. I am so thrilled to be here with two of my personal heroes. On my left I have Nancy Gibbs, who is the director of the Shorenstein Center and the Edward Murrow professor of practice here at Harvard. And on my right I have Martha Minow, who's the 300 year anniversary professor at Harvard Law School, also former dean, which means that we have a perspective of what's been happening with media, what's been happening in the law, converging in the thing that we call our information ecosystem. I don't know about you, but I don't look at our information ecosystem and think that it's working perfectly. I think that I have notes, I have comments. But just to set the table a little bit, when we think about our information ecosystem we're talking about where we get information, where we come across expertise, where we get context for what's happening in the world. And for many, many years, journalism, media institutions were the ones that were the gatekeepers for a lot of that, right? They were the ones who had surface information, who had surface context. They weren't the only ones, but they really captured our attention in doing that. The promise of the internet, sort of the question that Jay-Z began the day with, the thing that made people excited, was that there were gatekeepers who had emerged in doing that kind of work and what the internet provided was an opportunity to remove some of those gatekeepers, right? Get perspectives of people who had not had a seat at the table to provide more information, more context, more expertise. And that seemed great. That's when I came online and I was very excited about it. But here I am in 2023. And I think that dream is maybe a little bit of a nightmare sometimes. So Nancy, I want to turn to you and talk about sort of the role of these historical gatekeepers of the folks of the sort of the media and what's happening with journalism. We've talked a lot about news deserts, right? About how so many are underserved and their information needs. At the markup, so hi, I'm Nabi Haseyid. I'm the CEO of the markup. I didn't introduce myself. I was too excited to be here with them. We talk about news mirages, areas online that look like you're getting information, but it's not verified. It hasn't gone through any of the standards and processes we'd appreciate in journalism. And so I'd love it if you could just talk to us a little bit, frame for us how technology sort of radically changed the media, not social media. We'll get there, the media space. Well, if you start with the idea that however imperfectly the press traditionally defined had a constitutionally protected role for a reason, which was a belief that some sort of independent accountability function was essential for a free society. And however imperfectly that role was performed, I think that was a very important idea. And however narrow and and unrepresentative those gatekeepers were, we saw, especially through the 20th century, the development of standards and rigor and practices and ethics around performing that role, which the arrival on the power of the platforms made dramatically harder. And I would say for three main reasons. One, as Larry pointed to, they completely blew up the business model. And it wasn't just that eyeball started moving from print newspapers and magazines to digital. It was that advertising moved not from print to digital so much as print to just the platforms, so that fairly quickly, just Google and Facebook were soaking up about two thirds or more of the advertising dollars. And every news organization of any kind was left to divide up the rest. That meant a lot of things. For one thing, performing that basic accountability function costs money. It takes resources. It takes boots on the ground who are going out and reporting the stories and finding things out. You know what costs a lot less than doing that? Having an opinion. And so there were many reasons why even as opinion tended to drive a lot of subscriptions and engagement, which was profitable. It was also cheaper than the hardcore news reporting, especially in the places we need at most, especially in war zones, which is dangerous and expensive and hard to do. And you know what? Audiences aren't often as interested. So you have all these downsides that go with the important public interest focused kind of information creation against the cheaper, easier, more engagement driving. And so to the extent that these trends, you know, some of these reflect human nature and what people care about. But the fact that resources were drained away from that core function, that is the reason the independent press was protected in the first place, the platforms had a lot to do with that. And then, of course, the larger context of that is the extent to which they drove an attention economy. I mean, those gatekeepers had the luxury, if you were the anchor of the CBS Evening News or the editor of Time Magazine or the New York Times, Time competed with Newsweek, The New York Times competed with The Washington Post, CBS competed with NBC and ABC. Pretty easy field of competition. You were not competing, not just with thousands of networks and Netflix and the streamers and Fortnite and video games and every single influencer and creator on TikTok. So even if you were willing to spend the money to do the work, to gather the information, to serve the public interest, good luck getting people to pay attention to you when you had so many other alternatives. So there are so many things we could talk about, but to me, those are some of the core ways that even news organizations that continue to this day to try mightily to perform that essential public interest role are facing headwinds that the platforms have a huge hand in providing. Wonderfully optimistic. I want to take us to another time in history where there was a cacophony of voices, right? And that is, we imagine this golden era of media, right? This golden era of this institutional journalism where it is the Time Magazine, the ABCs, like the big networks. But there was a noisy time before that too. And I would love to bring you and Martha and hear a little bit about how government policy sort of helped build the media that we revere and respect and feel that we are losing. What role did government policy play in sort of creating that era of golden journalism? Well, thanks so much. And probably it was never gold, but it was better than now. You know, the founding fathers of the United States believed that the press was essential. It's the only private industry mentioned in the Constitution and is treated as if it existed. Because it did exist. It is a private industry. It has been a private industry. Throughout the 19th century, it went through many changes. There was a period when the political parties were the major funders of major newspapers. So there was also a period of what we call yellow journalism, where it was basically about scandal. It really wasn't so different than what some people are critical right now. But the consolidation of certainly national media, but even in regional and local, occurred with the rise of technologies. And the technologies of telegraph first then radio, then television really provided a predicate for government policy, government policy to regulate scarcity, the scarce access to the airwaves. And in so doing, actually, the United States government believed that there was a public interest duty for anyone who received a license. That was true for broadcasting. It actually carried over to some degree, even with cable when scarcity was no longer the same problem. But government also has shaped the entire industry with the use of antitrust policy. Where is competition required? Where not? Changing rules about whether the same owner can own the television and the newspaper. Different periods of time, different attitudes about that. Government is all over it. Government also has been a major funder in the development context. Government, after all, paid for the development of the algorithm behind the Internet. Government paid for the development of public media, public broadcasting. Government creates the tax code that has enormous impact on this entire industry. So the government's fingerprints are all over the situation. I think it's so powerful to remember that government can set those incentives and not only think of regulation as something that can whack a mole the bad things. We live in a time where we observe a lot of harms online and the impulse has been to say, well, we need to regulate misinformation. We have to do something about this. And I wonder, and this is for both of you, but I'll start with Martha, about how carefully we should tread when we are entering into a realm of someone should do something about that with the law. And I would love some context too about what's live right now with talks about jaw boning and some of the cases in front of the Supreme Court. So the United States is on the extreme end of the entire planet and all of history with a protection of freedom of speech against government action, notably against government action, not against private party like platform action. But with that attitude, we should tread normally carefully. We have a Supreme Court that is completely embracing the most extreme version of the extreme version of a libertarian First Amendment. That said, the traditional activities of the government and, for example, antitrust policy. The Supreme Court is upheld the use of antitrust. The Supreme Court has actually also supported the free speech rights of the private editor, of the private moderator. So there are lots of roles for the government to actually reinforce a much more positive ecosystem. You know, I can't help but remember that when there was a violent video game case before the Supreme Court, there was only one justice who'd ever seen a violent video game, period. I think that there are more justices now who have some knowledge of technology, but these are not experts. And they've been ducking cases. We'll see, because I can't quite duck the cases that are now before the court between coming from Florida and Texas efforts to have content regulation, I personally think it'd be much more successful for government to go the antitrust way. Why not, why not require that there's competition on the moderating function? Why, where is it written that this is bundled content, bundled activities, that do not violate the antitrust laws? Looks to me like it violates the antitrust law. If there was competition around that, that's something government could enforce that would make a difference. I also would advocate for treading carefully, but it's also around, as concerned as I am around mis-and-disinformation, as serious as problem it is in our context of First Amendment concerns, that in some ways the content that I'm also really concerned about when it comes to the health of democracy doesn't have to do so much with mis-and-disinformation, but the platforms play a really critical role. That is the extent to which I think they distort our understanding of the state of debate in this country. We know that something like 87% of people who identify as sort of center right and 77% of people who identify as center left say they never post about politics and public issues online. The middle of our public sentiment space just don't want to be in this conversation online. The result is that the people who are talking and posting and tweeting and what we see and hear and what shapes our sense of the state of our political discourse is wildly distorted by more extreme views. We end up thinking the country may be more divided than it actually is, that our political opponents are more extreme than they actually are. When Larry talks about our need to learn how to talk to each other again, like in order for us to succeed at anything, to solve any problem, to address any of these issues, people have to feel like it's okay to express their values, their point of view, their starting point, someone can disagree with them, you can have an argument and it's not going to destroy you personally or professionally. In an environment where it is so easy to destroy people personally and professionally for an argument they make, are we really surprised why people might be reluctant to engage in any of these conversations and why even our technologists who have left private companies are reluctant to speak out about content moderation practices or trust in safety issues because they don't want to come under the crosshairs too and so that I'm really, I'm concerned about censorship, I'm concerned about self-censorship and I'm concerned about the way this environment we're operating in gives people lots of reasons to self-censor. I want to stick with that because I think there's something really important to underscore there which is we so often look to social media as something as oh this is causing the harm, this is causing the ills but in what ways is it like any technology a reflection of the society that we're in and other mechanisms, other spaces in which we might be bonding with one another and having that sort of connective tissue isn't happening and it's too noisy online to really figure that out and I'd love to hear from both of you and to what extent are we trying to pin this problem on social media when it's a much larger cultural one? I think it's hard to separate online experience and offline experience in these ways but to pick up a topic that is near and dear to Martha's heart the news organizations that were hardest hit economically by the rise of the platforms or local news organizations and as it happens they are the most trusted so we can least afford to lose those and they are most missing if you sort of look at the maps of news deserts and the maps of where political power is concentrated in this country it's the same places like you all know because you're students of how the electoral college works and how the senate works that a voter in South Dakota is way more powerful than a voter in California by orders of magnitude and yet that voter in South Dakota is also much less likely to have reliable access to relevant local information and so this is where I feel like if we don't at least start with rebuilding our local news ecology I don't see how we work up to a healthier broader public square well I couldn't agree more and if you don't have local news we have pretty good research that shows private corruption goes up government corruption goes up accountability goes down voting goes down so I for me this is a top of mind how do we build local news so I'm the chair of the MacArthur Foundation which is a part of a coalition of 21 foundations and philanthropists that are trying to invest we've committed half a billion dollars to rebuild local news but in addition I'm interested in initiatives like at MIT the center for constructive communication which is bringing people together initially in public libraries but also using technology to allow people to hear trusted conversations from people that they don't encounter in their daily lives I mean I think that the Nancy made such an important point the narrative that we have that we are polarized is self determining it's self fulfilling when in fact most people don't like what's going on and most people want rather similar things they want decency and opportunities for their families so I think that if we could have more the face-to-face conversations as well as more bedrocks in local communities and regional communities and build back trust I think that would be in my view that's the most important thing to be working on related to that sort of creating those spaces of us speaking to one another I want to pick up a thread from the earlier I think the first panel about this desire to have sort of different forms of content moderation the different ability to engage with platform in different ways and while there's some part of me that's very interested in give you know devolving that kind of control about your experience I do wonder about how that might challenge our ability to have shared realities with one another the useful role of the news whether you liked it or not is that it generated consensus around what the parameters of debate were for something about what was actually happening in the world and it's not clear that anyone's really stepped in to in a centralized way have that role we have small pockets of shared realities rather than consensus and we have a minute and a half left so I ask you a big question for that but I I wonder about how you especially as we're heading into 2024 what is the role of technology and helping us create that shared reality there's the other work that we should be doing to create that well the problem is larger than the technology we have rival media companies that use even old-fashioned distribution systems that tell completely different stories about what matters and about even if it's cover the same things different versions and this is before we have the deep fakes that were discussed in the last panel I think that trust actually is not something you can accomplish with a magic wand you have to earn trust and building trust with trusted navigators is going to be I think the only way that we will make it through how who are those navigators I don't know but it's I wouldn't look to the government actually as the navigators we actually are launching a new research initiative at shornstein around news influencers in the belief that we have to look beyond who considers themselves a journalist to who is actually performing the essential functions of journalists whether they identify as journalists or not and and what is fascinating is if you if you ask people whose primary news source is tiktok snapchat or instagram they trust individual influence influencers on those platforms more than they trust news brands it's not true on facebook and twitter where you know news and institutions are trusted more but on the platforms that younger viewers attending to use the trust relationship is with individuals and so we're what I want to study is not just engaging with influencers around sort of journalistic best practices around rigor in fact-checking it's for journalists to learn from influencers about building trust about building audience about the connection that they are making because I think addressing these problems is going to take real humility and curiosity and a willingness to expand our definitions of who we're engaging with and and who constitutes the the various entities of this ecosystem far beyond what we might have traditionally thought of trust feels like the right way to end a day of fascinating discussion and to applaud the launch of a new lab which is very exciting that will help us navigate how we trust institutions how we trust the technologies that mediate so much of our life and how we ultimately trust one another so thank you everyone for a wonderful day and a wonderful conversation thank you thank you please welcome to the stage faculty co-director of the applied social media lab professor james mckins thank you thank you all right well let's just give one more final round of applause to our distinguished guests and the great conversations that they set up also i want to give a special shout out to the president who couldn't make it here we hope that he feels better and by the way in a very nice gesture he actually called the green room before a couple minutes before this event was to start and he got on speakerphone and in a very nice gesture he you know said he's sorry that he couldn't show up here so we we do hope that he feels better now by the way in that call the only two things that i said were hello mr president and feel better soon but in just having a speakerphone call with president obama hundreds of my relatives can now go directly to heaven okay there's nothing that i will ever personally do that will surpass that i believe in my lifetime except possibly run for political office president obama did you hear something special on me during that speakerphone call did you see a hint of leadership let's form a coalition of two okay have your people call my people i don't have any people okay i can maybe borrow some of your people okay that's how you get people you want to get in in this building at the ground level it can only go up or stay the same because i don't have people but anyways i always leave my grass so i hope that um like me you came away from this event i'm feeling both sort of a sense of optimism but also a sense of grounding in the challenges that we're going to face so we heard about a lot of the problems that technology can cause for society we heard about how misinformation can corrupt our our democracy we heard about what happens when social media companies like twitter cut off api access to great tools like block party that help to safeguard of romable users online we also heard about some very positive optimistic things so we heard about for example from a larry lezick about how we can actually use technology to create online deliberations that strengthen democracy and that bring people together instead of pulling them apart so like i said i came out of this with a renewed sense of cautious optimism i hope that you feel the same way i hope that what we've seen today is that technologists don't always have to just be the problem they can actually be part of the solution and that if they work with other people if they work with other users if they think and reflect about what they're building then we can actually start to build technology that actually serves the public good and i'm going to take that message to michigan to ohio to pennsylvania okay coalition of two you were here when it started okay so before we conclude i want to offer thanks to project liberty who provided some generous funding for the lab as we're starting to ramp up we look forward to working with project liberty and other partners in academia and industry and out in the world to work on this difficult but but important challenge of creating technology that works for the social good i also would be remiss if i did not mention the new website that the lab has set up let me read from here to make sure that i get the url right the url is h t t p s colon forward slash forward slash asml.cyber.harvard.edu as we can tell only the best and fullest urls for these amazing people in the audience so we've just launched the website there's not a lot up there right now because we're still in the process of spinning up but over the next couple weeks as we start to ramp up as we start to hire you'll see a lot of interesting stuff up there and as a final note to all the technologists the engineers out there who are interested in building for the public good go to the website we've got JD's up we are hiring so with that thanks i hope you have a great day


The accident investigation burial has dismissed rumors of a plane crash involving air paste. There was incident, there was an incident but the AIB clarified that it was not a crash and that the aircraft had been released to the airline. No investigation would be necessary according to the AIB. Air paste on this part explains that there was a minimal tire burst while the plane was taxiing after landing. The plane flew from Mabucha to Ilore on Friday. A plane belonging to the airline had the same issue in January 2019.


It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Spark Technology Center at 425 Market. I'm really excited to be joining this next segment by our guest, Rob Thomas, who's a VP Product Development at IBM Analytics, welcome Rob. Thanks Jeff, great to be here. Thanks for joining us. Absolutely, so last time we saw you personally, I think was at Big Data SV in San Jose around the Big Data Week and Strata. So a lot's been going on there and then we had Hadoop Summit and then we had Spark Summit and we had the IBM Apache Spark event at Galvanize. So you guys have been busy. We have been, it's been a crazy time. Yeah, I think we sat down right before Hadoop Summit. We talked a lot about how Hadoop is changing the landscape and enterprises and lots happened since then. We had some big announcements during the week of Spark Summit and I thought today we could talk about some of the updates, what we've done since then but we're really moving faster. Yeah, absolutely, well George Gilbert, our analyst from Wikibon says this is the biggest change in software in 50 years, really moving from systems of engagement or systems of record to system of engagement and really moving closer to real time and as much as we've seen with Hadoop, it seemed to really get ignited with all the activity around Spark. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we view Spark as the analytics operating system. So we've had all these things that we've wanted to do with data forever but we were either limited by access to different sources or we were limited by the speed of how you could access it or how you could turn it into something actionable. Spark is the answer to that. That's why we call it the analytics OS and we think that clients, that message is starting to resonate as clients, think about how they can use Spark in their environments. So why don't you give us a couple updates? What's happened in the last couple of months since all the announcements? Yeah, first, let me tell you a story. I want to tell you about a guy named Fred Rice and he's one of the first employees here at the Spark Technology Center and Fred was long time at Berkeley, did his PhD at Berkeley and he started working on, as he came into IBM, who became part of our Spark Technology Center, the backend of Spark, how we optimize that around what we're doing with System ML which is the technology that we're contributing and when you sit down with Fred, it's amazing the passion that he has of, Spark is not about solving just a few problems for large enterprises. This is about how we change how anybody can leverage data at any scale and it's amazing to see guys like Fred here at the Spark Technology Center and he's represented the kind of people that we're bringing in that see this not as an opportunity just to go support big enterprises but this is how do we bring Spark into the mainstream really to become the backbone of data and how we're using them. Let's dig down into the developments in our little bit which is why we wanted to come up here and follow up from Spark Summit. We're here in downtown services, go right on Market Street, obviously IBM's a big company, been around for a long time, you got facilities all over the place. Why the Technology Center here? You have to be in San Francisco. That was actually a fairly easy decision because we wanted to be at the epicenter of where Spark is taking off in the market plus you got obviously a number of great clients and innovative companies in the area. So it's a great place to bring in a team of people to work. We've got IBM Research in Albanyn, we've got our lab in Silicon Valley as well so you've got this great corpus of people who are kind of converging on what we think is a defining technology for the next 10 or 20 years. So that's why we're here and that's paid off. We've got, as you saw downstairs, we've got 20 students that are here with us this summer from Lagos in Africa who are working on Spark to solve traffic problems in Lagos. So we've got all these innovative projects going on with students, with PhDs, with people that we're hiring and it's a unique time for us here in IBM. Yeah, we couldn't film downstairs because the room was so packed, there's stuff all over the place and all the development boards and post-it notes and there's a lot going on and then there's a workshop going on too and we checked in downstairs, a lot of people coming in for a workshop so you're really making the most of this location. We are, we're trying to do, so we do all the engineering here, we also do design here and if you remember as part of our Spark announcement this is about where data meets design as well which is why you saw a lot of the graphics and that stuff and we also do a lot of briefings here and we're starting to host community events here as well. We really want this to be a place where anybody can come that's interested in Spark. If you want to work here, that's great but if you just want to come work with us in the community, this center is all about open source for us. Our only focus here is on open source and what we're doing in the community so we're welcoming anybody that wants to participate in that way. So that's a great segue into open source. The open source movement continues to grow and we're actually going to be at LinuxCon in a couple of weeks and Linux was probably the first kind of enterprise adopted open source project but now we see it obviously with a dupe, you see it with Spark. There's so many open source projects out there. Talk a little bit about IBM's desire to work with open source, how you guys have adopted open source not only for building your own things but really in supporting customers engagement with open source types of based products. Look, we have got to be a key part of what's happening in open source which is why we're doing what we're doing here. It's why we did what we did with Linux a number of years back and really kind of led the charge there because at the time it was about how can we build a core technology and knowledge around Linux but then use that to help our clients solve problems. We think we're at a similar juncture but now on the data side and that's the interest in the community. So one of the big announcements that we made back in June was around contributing our system ML technology into the open source and we've been working closely with our partner Databricks on that and they're helping us through that. I can announce today that we're actually going to put that technology up in GitHub and it'll be by the end of August. So anybody in the community can go out there and play with it. We've been taking a couple of months just to get it right to be in the community but we're going to put up in GitHub end of August. Anybody can go out there and use it and then we'll continue to work in the community with companies and partners like Databricks to continue to move that. I think ultimately our vision is that it starts to merge with ML Lib and what you have then is you've got a tremendous programming model with ML Lib combined with an optimizer and an engine of system ML. That is going to change the face of machine learning and enterprises and that's where we want to get to. And then that begs the question and we've got all these cool posters behind us of different solution set based on industry and you guys again have been around for a long time. So obviously you're probably building industry based solutions on top of these open source tools that leverage your knowledge and well as experience in these particular industries to come up with solutions as opposed to just software. Yeah, it's ultimately for the clients we serve it is about solutions and business impact. I'll give you one example. We've done work for the last few years with nice systems that we've talked about before. They are a software company focused on call centers. So how they make call centers and customer interaction more effective. The first project we did with them was actually moving them off of a traditional database onto a Hadoop platform with the IBM open platform with big insights. And you look at what they're doing in terms of how they automate and make call centers more intelligent. And then you bring something like Spark. It totally changes the game for customer service interaction. Suddenly they can access all the data, real-time insights. So you're talking about you're on the phone with somebody and you're making a real-time decision in the moment in terms of what you should do next with that client. That is how Spark really changes the game because before they had a great solution. Now they've taken that solution and they're delivering huge business impact. So when you asked about solutions that's the kind of thing that comes to mind for me for how Spark drives a different level of solution in the enterprise. Are there any kind of cutting edge use cases that you see out here of clients? Because some part of the problem of being in Silicon Valley is we're so into it that we forget that there's other parts of the world and sometimes we're a little bit too far ahead maybe we're not as far ahead as we think. But what are some of the use cases that you see that customers are putting in place beyond the one you just mentioned that they see the benefit. This is something we really want to get behind because we know there's huge business benefit. So the first one is certainly what I mentioned around entity knowing your customer 360 degree view. I'd say that's probably the major one. Second one is around fraud and how you look at do you know who your business partners are, your customers are. It's this whole idea where security meets trust and we see a lot of those. We're doing some work with Ernst and Young that we talked about publicly where we're helping them through their FIDs practice, their financial investigations practice, look at broad data sets and identifying patterns of fraud or suspicious behavior. And it requires I'd say the flexibility of a Hadoop type system. But again, you bring Spark, you bring machine learning to an environment like that and suddenly you're able to automate what used to be very manual. And so it starts to change the outcome around fraud as an example. What's interesting, we were talking a little bit before we came on air and you said that there's still some customers out there that just don't get it. They don't see the benefit of streaming data. They're just kind of locked into their old paradigm. And I hate to overuse Uber, but it's such a powerful example that if somebody can digitally transform the taxi industry, which none of us thought was possible before that happened. How do practitioners kind of start to think in a new way of there is value, there is new applications, there is new ways to approach things that this enables that they just couldn't do before.  Streaming has been slower to take off than we may have assumed. Early adopters were things like telcos who said call data records has to be done, analytics is done with streaming or oil and gas companies doing exploration. Those were logical use cases. But when you start to get to retailer, bank, insurance company, it's funny.  And so what it takes is a lot of coaching and working with them to say, well, you get these insights today. What if you continuously got these insights? What if you weren't relying on somebody to go bring a different data set? So to us, it's really the consultative process to show them that there are people doing this in industries and a way that they can lead their industry is going to be the first to figure that out for their industry. And people are starting to get there, but there's still a ton of ways to go there. And the other piece is leveraging your proprietary data that you have that no one else has, but then contextualizing it with new third party data and structured data. So are you seeing the uptake and the customers figuring out and maybe that's where they get started that why don't we maybe integrate public weather data or we integrate Twitter data or we integrate some other type of data to start to see, let me get out of my silo with what I've been doing forever on a batch on my own proprietary transactional stuff. Yeah, what's interesting is the IT industry, it's funny how these things evolve has always viewed structured data here, unstructured data here. That is not the future. And we've started envisioning this idea around an X generation platform that accesses unstructured structured data together at the same time using Spark as a basis. And it really kind of breaks down, I'd say the traditional silos for how data has been managed in organization. And I think as companies start to see that and apply those use cases, they'll realize that it's a lot more powerful than some of those traditional approaches because unstructured data right now, I mean still, my estimate 90% is unused in an organization from an analytics perspective. But when you start to integrate that into their normal business processes, you can change that. Yeah, well the other interesting thing David Floyd talked about a lot from Wikibon is almost like a nuclear half-life in terms of the value of data. That when it's live, when it's real, you've got X value and it falls off precipitously over time. And again, if they're not even grabbing it real time and they're just getting in the batch that they're missing out on potentially tremendous value in that data that they never even use it during that timeframe. You're right. And I'd say the one challenge in organization that kind of underpins that point is a skills challenge. Think about how much technologies changed in the last five years. If the skills haven't changed that fast in an organization, then the organization struggles to adopt these types of use cases or to come up with them. So the other part of our commitment back in June was we said, we're going to educate one million data scientists. And our view is by doing that part in education, we can help organizations be more aggressive about how they think about use cases and then apply them. We did a hackathon and education session through Big Data University in Brazil last week. Tremendous turnout. I mean, companies, employees and companies are dying for this education. Key thing is how do we get it in their hands and our Spark Fundamentals course on Big Data University has taken off. And it's because people are dying for this. And I think the use cases back to your question a moment ago will be more obvious as the skills get up to date with what's happening in the market and in the open source community. And you're working both sides of the equation because you're not only working the data science side, you're also trying to get the lines of business people much more engaged and active in using this data in running their businesses and kind of get it out of the data science side a little bit. Absolutely. And I think one thing that the line of business has always been gated by is what they believe is possible based on what IT has told them, which is sometimes somewhat limited. And so we are encouraging the line of business to be more aggressive. Think about a streaming use case and how that would apply to you. Think about if unstructured and structured data was all together in one place and you could seamlessly access that data. And if you do that with a line of business person who understands that data is important and there's data assets that can be tapped into, you can start to have that impact. But yeah, we're focused on data scientist, line of business, data engineer, application developers. They all play an important role in delivering these use cases and we got to be a part of each of those. So running out of time and I appreciate you taking some time out of your day I know you're traveling all over the place. It's been a busy six months since we first were at IBM System Z event which was funded. Mainframe also has a play here. What are we going to be talking about a year from now? Machine learning is still in its infancy and it's one reason why we're so interested in the technology that we contributed. As you and I have talked about before, machine learning is the only competitive mode left in business. Economies of scale is no longer there in many cases. Distribution is no longer an advantage. It's about machine learning. So we do partnerships with people like the weather company and Twitter. Access to those data sets applied with machine learning on top that can change the face of a business. And we do that with the own data that we collect in IBM and you mentioned like the mainframe event. There's some interesting things in Spark in the mainframe happening right now and I think you'll start to see technologies like the mainframe that are mission critical will evolve into the Spark world and deliver a different type of insight. Rob, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. Appreciate it. Yeah, Jeff, great to see you. Absolutely, so I'm with Rob Thomas. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE and we are at the IBM Spark Technology Center. Got it. Thanks for watching.


We know that phenols can be prepared by several methods. From aryl halides, from disinium salts, from benzene-sulfonic acids and so on. In this video we are going to see how to prepare phenols from cumene also called isopropyl benzene. Now this method is not discussed in details in many textbooks but it is important to understand this because this is the industrial method by which phenols are primarily prepared and not just that. This process also generates another commercially important chemical called acetone as the byproduct. So let's go ahead and see how we can prepare phenols from cumene. Now to give you an overall idea this is what happens in the entire reaction. Cumene or isopropyl benzene undergoes catalytic aryl oxidation to give cumene hydroperoxide which on treatment with acid gives us phenol and acetone. Now if you look at the products it is not intuitive as to how we would arrive at these products from the starting material right. Looks like something more is happening here and we are going to figure out what exactly that is. Now we arrive at this important chemical which is cumene hydroperoxide through a free radical mechanism and as we know free radical mechanism involves initiation propagation and termination steps correct. So we start with HBr which reacts with oxygen in the presence of a catalyst to form bromine radical and hydroperoxide radicals. Now the actual radical mechanism begins when this bromine radical abstracts this hydrogen atom from cumene that is we have a chomolytic cleavage here and this process generates a hydrocarbon radical and HBr. Now in the propagation step this hydrocarbon radical reacts with oxygen and generates this particular radical. So here again the bond breaking happens and we get another radical. This radical further reacts with HBr regenerating the bromine radical and look what we have here we got our cumene hydroperoxide intermediate. In the termination step all of these radicals combine with each other giving us a myriad of minor products. Now this cumene hydroperoxide is treated with acid to give phenol and acetone. So let's go ahead and see what that mechanism looks like. When we treat cumene hydroperoxide with acid the lone pair of electrons on the oxygen atom abstracts a proton from the medium and here we have a protonated intermediate. With the loss of water molecule we get an intermediate where oxygen atom has a positive charge. Now this is quite unstable because oxygen is highly electronegative and an electronegative atom like oxygen having positive charge makes this very unstable. So through a phenyl shift the phenyl group gets attached to the oxygen atom and the positive charge gets transferred to the carbon atom as you can see here. As this bond gets broken we get a positive charge or a carbocation. A nucleophilic attack takes place next where the water molecule attacks the carbocation and in the next step the lone pair of electrons on the oxygen atom abstracts a proton from the acidic medium. So this is kind of a reversible step. In the last step the oxygen atom forms a double bond with the carbon atom eliminating this particular group. The eliminated group here is nothing but phenol and the side product we get here is the acetone. So this is how phenol is prepared commercially from cumene.


Hey, it's Katie Neal from NashFM 94.7 and I'm gearing up to host Hack and Sack Moridian Health's third annual women rock event at Convention Hall in the Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, New Jersey on October 14th. The day kicks off at noon with interactive exercise and dance demos. There'll be cooking segments, spa services, art projects, career development, volunteer organizations, and many more activities that align with the five pillars of integrated health, which are sleep, activity, purpose, nutrition, and resilience. When you learn how to rock your five pillars, you learn how to truly rock your life. We'll even have a man cave if your guide decides to tag along for the day and be sure to swing by the Paramount Theater for inspirational talks from our womanologists, including my moderated conversation with supermodel turned super mentor Tyra Banks and her mama, Carolyn London, about their new book, Perfect is Boring.  Register you and your girlfriend and your mama for this fun free event by visiting hackandsackmoridianhealth.org slash women rock. I'll see you there