Welcome to Kondo Insider on Think Tech Hawaii. Happy New Year, everyone. I'm your host, Attorney Nalan. As all of you are still working through our New Year resolutions, we're so honored today to welcome my former colleague, attorney Veronica Nordyke. She goes by Nika. Nika recently joined pro-service after seven years practicing law during her career as attorney. Nika practiced for five years with David Kealio Cup-Truck Haster's civil litigation dispute resolution team. From there, she served as a staff attorney providing legal advice and counsel to the chief judge and associate judges of Hawaii's Intermediate Court of Appeals. Through these positions, Nika gained a wealth of beneficial experience in legal compliance and advice that she brands as she leads pro-services, client training and development team. As we know, many of Kondo Media Associations also wear the employer hats and we always need to be aware of staying in compliance from the employment law side. So welcome, Nika. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. So before we start the legal update, Nika, would you like to share with us the HR services your employer, pro-service Hawaii can provide, especially for Kondo Media Association clients? Sure.  Pro-service is a local, old-service HR partner. Our goal is to give you time back. So you can save time and money to focus on your business we've measured and we can save business owners about 80 hours a month. And our clients receive a dedicated support team consisting of, among others, a payroll processor, benefits administrator, think healthcare for a wood-k, claims adjusters, think workers comp or TDI. HR consultants think risky terminations or employee performance issue, harassment or discrimination allegations, they're there to walk you through those kind of sticky situation. Oh, we've also got HR trainers with the team that I lead in our training practices and we train all your employees to perform their best as well as your managers to perform their best. We've also got CPR trainers. If you're an employer that they, you know, you need to meet certain CPR certifications as well as safety trainers to ensure that you're providing a safe and healthy work environment. So a lot, we'd like to say that we've got your back on every day from payday and in between. So that's just a little bit about pro-service. So what we do, we do have some condo association clients but we do serve businesses of all types and sizes. Right? So as we all know with the inflation and everything, nationwide the minimum wage has been rising, right? So Hawaii, where are we right now starting 2024? Yes, so we started 2024 with a minimum wage increase. So it increased on January 1st from 12 to $14 per hour. So it's really important that employers have ensured that affected employees who have paid rates have been adjusted as January 1st, 2024. And players should bear in mind that this increase also means that contributions to Social Security and Medicare contributions will rise in tandem with this rise in minimum wage. Additionally, we also caution our clients to be mindful of what's called wage compression which can be created when we see this upward adjustment to the minimum wage. And briefly, wage compression occurs and the pay of less experience of employees comes uncomfortably close to that and more seasoned counterparts or those in higher positions. For example, in a food and beverage setting, you may have a server, a head server and a banquet captain who are respectively earning 12, $13 and $14 per hour in 2023. Now as of 2024 when that minimum wage increase kicks in, there's no adjustments. They could all be, in theory, earning the same amount. So you can see that this minimum wage increase while it does affect the floor, it can ripple to higher positions and permeate through various levels of your organization. So we want employers to be aware of that. And employers can address this by maintaining those pay differentials or providing growth opportunities to employees. And we really encourage employers to proactively look at their compensation structure and consider making adjustments where needed. And these adjustments can be implemented all at once, for example, on January 1st or they can be faced in strategically depending on the business's budget. These are all just the types of things that no, we advise employers to be mindful of. Thank you. And as we read the newspaper headlines, we do notice the trend that pay transparency is also sweeping across the US and Hawaii has joined this wave. So what do Hawaii employers need to know about this new pay transparency law in Hawaii? Yeah, so yes, Hawaii has followed suit from other states such as, I believe California, Colorado and our state but a big city, New York city. So with respect to Hawaii's pay transparency law or Act 203, this is a new law aimed at reducing pay inequality by providing more transparency as it's called. So really the focus of this law is to create a more equitable and inclusive work environment where employees have a better understanding of their pay and feel confident that they're being compensated fairly. So Hawaii's pay transparency law has two primary components. The first is a disclosure requirement. And the second is an expansion of Hawaii's existing equal pay law. So just very briefly, I'll walk us through both of those. So first, Hawaii's pay transparency law requires employers to disclose the hourly rate or salary range in external job posting. So think late in indeed, et cetera. And these posted ranges must reasonably reflect the actual expected compensation. So you can't just post a range of a zero to $500,000 on every job posting and dust your hands and say, all right, I've complied with the disclosure requirement. I applied with the law. That would retifal the law. The basic expectation of this disclosure requirement is that the employer will pay at the advertised hourly rate or salary range. And deviating from that range makes expose the employer to some risk. So that is in brief the disclosure requirement. Next, you may be wondering, well, who does this disclosure requirement apply to? And it applies to all Hawaii employers unless you fall within three exceptions. The first are employers with less than 50 employees. So this carves out many small businesses and that may be a condo association employee and say, well, they're less than 50 employees here. How does this impact me? Well, it might because employees of small businesses still gain that visibility, that transparency that this law is seeking to provide so they can see what bigger businesses are offering. So while you may be a small business and you may not need to post the hourly rate or salary range in a job posting, this disclosure requirement could nonetheless impact your employees. So it's unfortunate to keep that in mind. The second carve out from this disclosure requirement is that it does not apply to internal transfers or promotions. So if an employer likes to advertise a job internally, they do not need to disclose the hourly rate or salary range for that position. And last, this disclosure requirement does not apply to public positions where compensation is determined by a collective bargaining agreement. And usually these public collective bargaining agreements are publicly available. So you could see the hourly rate or salary range in any bet, but it is a third carve out. So yeah, I guess I'll pause there now if you have any questions that is the first component of the Pay Transparency Act this disclosure requirement. In general, this is definitely a great news for all the job seekers, employees, right? But at the same time, you made a very good point about not necessarily if you're a smaller business with less than 15 employees, you won't be impacted by the first portion of the law which is the disclosure requirement because your employees will be more savvy, more information access to what their peers are earning at other employer places. In order for you to keep your talents, you will need to match up. So that definitely will impact employers across the board. And now we're gonna move on to the second portion of law which is the Equal Pay Law. And different from the first portion, as we mentioned in our prior discussion that this will apply across the board to all employers in Hawaii, right? That is correct. So the second component of Hawaii's Pay Transparency Law is an expansion of Hawaii's Existing Equal Pay Law. So Hawaii's Existing Equal Pay Law and this amendment to it applies to all employers regardless of size. And very briefly, just taking a step back, Hawaii's Equal Pay Law was passed back in 2019 and it is aimed at prohibiting pay discrimination based on sex or gender. So Hawaii's Pay Transparency Law amends the language of the Equal Pay Law to prohibit pay discrimination based on any protected class. So we're seeing a broadening of the protections under the Equal Pay Law. We're seeing an opening of the door to claims of pay discrimination based on other protected classes, think age, religion, citizenship, national origins. So more than just your sex or gender, now you have a broader protection for any of the protected classes. The Pay Transparency Law also amends Hawaii's Equal Pay Law to require Equal Pay for substantially similar work. So previously, Hawaii's Equal Pay Law required Equal Pay for equal work. So this change closes a loophole conceivably enabling employers to engage in discriminatory pay practices by making slight tweaks to work responsibilities and then discriminating against protected classes under the guise of slightly different work responsibilities. So the primary takeaway that we're seeing with respect to this expansion of the Equal Pay Law is that we're just seeing a broadening of protections against pay discrimination. Well, as an employer, you must be wondering, look, if I have these two employees, one is a high performer, the other is kind of just getting it by. So am I mandated by this law to pay Equal Pay for the same job position or am I still eligible or justified to differentiate the compensation or the bonus I'm giving to these employees? Can you help us clarify this point? Sure, and that is a great question. And in short, the answer is no, you do not have to pay all of your employees exactly the same amount if they're on the same level. There are legitimate reasons for differences to pay. And the Pay Transparency Act does include some of those. And so I'll mention legitimate reasons for pay differentials include seniority, merit, the quality or quantity of production, bona fide, occupational qualification, or any permissible factor that is not a protected category. So really the law is aimed at, you know, ensuring these protections against pay discrimination. It is not saying you can't have any paid differential. I guess from an HR training point of view, when you work with your clients, is it because of that is documentation for employers even more important for HR? Because, you know, when things go wrong, when there are disputes, it involves facts and documentation is always the best, you know, friend to really, you know, have your case right there supported lawyers like, you know, records, you know, always prefer clients keep good evidence to back up your claim or defenses, right? Definitely, yes. Documentation, documentation, documentation, always something that we really push for. Beginning from when you are, you know, creating the role and you're looking at, you know, the pay range that you're looking at posting and like the services that this employee is going to perform in that role. Starting from, you know, the very onboarding phase and then as that employee matriculates and receives raises documenting the reasons for that, the expansion of their responsibilities, seniority, obviously, you know, you'd be tracking the number of years that they are with the company. But certainly, yes, we prioritize and emphasize that our clients document everything from the Asian perspective. I heard there are also new protections afforded for workers who are pregnant or have unknown limitations or medical conditions related to childbirth. Could you please help us explain that to the audience? Yeah, and this is something, you know, in Hawaii, we are very fortunate that we have had a lot of protections for pregnancy and for nursing mothers that we'll talk about shortly. But this is at the federal level and it's called the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act and it went into effect in June of last year. And generally, it requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for a worker's known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions unless the accommodation would cause the employer an undue hardship. This act, in short, the PWFA is administered and enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in short, EEOC. And I just felt it was relevant to note at this time because recently the EEOC issued proposed regulations clarifying the implementation of the PWA, FA, PWFA. These regulations are anticipated to be published any day, but based on the proposed regulations, what we're seeing is that there are four specific accommodations that the EEOC has deemed in virtually all cases will be reasonable accommodations that do not impose an undue hardship when requested by a pregnant employee. And the applicant does not need to produce medical documentation to support these requests. So I just wanted to make sure employers were aware of these four, quote unquote, predictable assessments. And they are allowing an employee to carry and drink water as needed in the employee's work area, allowing an employee additional restroom breaks, allowing an employee whose work requires sitting to stand or vice versa, whose work requires standing to sit. And lastly, allowing the employee breaks as needed to eat and drink. So we just want to make sure that this act and these predictable assessments are on employer's radars, and they can make sure to revisit their policies and forms to ensure that the language that they have in their handbooks are consistent with the EEOC regulations implementing the PWF. Okay, and for nursing mothers who are in the workforce, there are also special protections in place now, right? Yes, and so, and there have been, but this PONT Act, or Providing Urgent Ritual Protections for Nursing Mothers Act, expands the protections for nursing mothers to exempt employees. And this is a federal law as is PWFA. Hawaii has a state law also protecting mothers expressing milk in the workplace. But with respect to PONT, it requires employers to provide reasonable break time for mothers to express work in a location that is not the restroom and it is shielded from view and from intrusion, from coworkers or the public for up to one year after a child's birth. And note, this applies to both remote employees and employees that are in the office. With respect to work employees, you think of situations if you're required to be in a Zoom meeting on camera, you need to make sure that you have accommodations to provide that nursing mother breaks and privacy during those breaks. And PONT is enforced by the Department of Labor. So it's got a different federal agency that's enforcing it, but that said, both PONT and the PWFA do overlap in the individuals that may be impacted by them. And both the EEOC and the Department of Labor collectively issued a joint memorandum of understanding, just informing the public that they would combine their efforts to address violations under either statute. So while they are separate federal statutes that are overseen by separate federal agencies, there is some overlap in potential investigations that could arise under them. There's some communication between the agency with respect to these two. And I think, just on that note, the takeaway here with respect to PWFA and PONT is really that we are seeing a strengthening of these protections for working moms, whether you're pregnant, whether you're nursing, as mom, myself, I think that these are really important laws that we do have as working moms. So it's nice to see it. I think that's just the takeaway that employers be mindful that these laws are out there. Make sure that your handbook is up to date and compliant with the latest regulations, both at the federal and at the state. Yeah, I guess even for the, we just discussed about the P transparency as part of that is the, you cannot discriminate against employees because of this expanded protected category or even for the pay. If you cannot justify the different pay for workers in similarly comparable positions, the EEOC could be the enforcing body and disgruntled employee could file a claim there, right? For our audience who's not familiar with this process, can you give us some general information about what would entail the consequences for employer who's fist away the EEOC claim or even adverse spinding in the worst scenario? Yeah, so just at very high level, I'll start that the EEOC, it's a federal agency. It's responsible for enforcing federal discrimination laws, including the PWF-A and they have authority to investigate these claims of discrimination. So the affected individual could initiate this investigation by informing the EEOC. And EEOC will conduct that investigation. If all likelihood, they will try to settle the charge and work with the entity. But if they're not successful, the EEOC has authority to file a lawsuit. And I believe that, you know, the types of risk exposure that an employer is open to is both compensatory and punitive damages for violation of these laws. So there is an investigation process, usually some back and forth settlement process. But at the end of the day, it's certainly a risk if the employer does not comply and just from a general perspective, you know, all employers should comply with the PWF-A. So yeah, and I would say just on that note, at a local level, we have the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission and Pro Service provides HR consultants on its staff that are there to hold employers' hands. If they ever, you know, receive a notice from the HCRC, which is, you know, the local level agency that does handle some of these discrimination complaints, we can work with those employers to respond to the complaints. And, you know, at some points, we do get third party legal counsel involved. Other times we can just be the consultant, the sounding board, you know, the HR consultant isn't your personal attorney, but they are very knowledgeable on the laws and they are there for any of our pro service clients to provide guidance and just information about what the laws are and the best practices are. And certainly, you know, if we are seeing these issues arise from a client perspective, you know, we also have our trainers on board. So we go out and provide training to the supervisor or manager to make sure they are at the state on the law and, you know, train at the manager level as well as at the employee level. So all these laws and regulations, you know, keeping up with them, knowing who's the agency that's overseeing them, they can get very confusing yet. But if you are one of our pro service partners, we really try to make it as easy as possible for you. We have a team available to help you navigate these waters. That's great. We've covered a lot of information. I guess for employers, you know, as the beginning of the new year, if you have not done so already, it would be a good timing to either update your employee handbook or revisit your office policies to make sure you're in legal compliance. So we have a few minutes left. Nika, would you want to wrap up or sort of give our audience a takeaway, you know, because these days our attention span is always short. It's always nice if, you know, if somebody doesn't have the time to go through our whole show, what would be the takeaways they can gather at the end of the show? Sure. Just in brief summary of the takeaways from today's show, Na and I covered the increase to the minimum wage employee, which increased on January 1st, 2024 from $12 an hour to $14 an hour. So please ensure that any affected employees' pay has been adjusted to meet this new minimum wage requirement. Second, we went over Hawaii's Pay Transparency Act. And there's two components to that, the disclosure requirement, which requires employers to disclose the hourly rate or salary range and external job postings. And this applies to employers with more than 50 employees. It does not apply to internal job postings, and it does not apply to public positions whose compensation is determined by a collective bargaining agreement. The second component of the Pay Transparency Act is an expansion of Hawaii's Equal Pay Law. So we're seeing a broadening of protections against pay discrimination. And last we went over to federal laws, which are expanding protections for pregnant mothers and for nursing mothers, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, as well as the pump. Thank you, excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Nika. Of course, thank you for having me. It's great to chat with you all today.


Okay, everyone. This is Karl Blythe, the Director of Coral. And I want to welcome everybody today to our OER Hangout. We've been having these kind of informal chats with people who develop OER, who use OER. It's very informal. We will give three presenters today an opportunity to share with you a little bit about their work. And especially today, the topic is on finding open authentic texts. So they're going to be sharing with you their tips that they have learned from their own practice with OER. And let me just tell you a little bit about the ground rules. The presenters will talk for about seven minutes each. We want to keep that fairly brief so that we can have most of the time devoted for Q&A. Because essentially, we found that it's better for people to ask their questions directly to the presenters. We have, there are three of us here at Coral. Sarah and Natalie and I will be looking, monitoring those questions as they come in. Okay, so let's get right to it. I'm going to introduce really briefly our speakers and then turn it over to, I guess, Shantel will go first. So Shantel is from the University of Arizona. She's an applied linguist who has interest in literary texts and using literary text and language teaching. She's also a colleague of mine in the language resource centers. There are 16 of us and so Coral is here at Texas, but she's the co-director of Circle at the University of Arizona. And next we will have Gabriela Zapata from Texas A&M, not too far from our campus here at UT. And Gabriela is also an applied linguist with special interests in multiliteracies and the development of OER and also for heritage Spanish. She has developed different materials for different populations and of course that's an important point of OER because they're adaptable. They adapt materials to suit the needs of your students. And she's working on a project actually with Coral called Trajectos, which you will be talking about. Shantel will also be talking about a joint project I think between the two of between Circle at Arizona and Coral. And that project is called the Foreign Language, Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday. And our third speaker Christian Hilchi, Dr. Hilchi is a professor here at UT Austin and he is the director of the check program. His background is in Slavic linguistics and he is finishing up a project called Reality Check. And he has all kinds of tips to share on how to find the good stuff because the question really now is you can find authentic texts, but we want to look at texts that are both open and then meet the needs of our students. And so I think all three of our presenters have a lot to tell you about that. So Shantel, I see that you've got, are you ready? Ready to go? So let me turn it over to Shantel. She'll talk for a while about her texts and then Gabriela and then Christian. And finally, I should also mention this one thing before I forget, Coral has an OER course that goes into much more depth. If you have questions about finding texts, we have an entire course devoted to that topic. Okay, so Shantel, you're up first. All right, thank you. Thank you all for being here and thank you for the invitation. When I started sitting down and thinking about this question of how do you find texts in general? How do you find authentic texts? How do you find OER texts? A lot of the examples that first came to my mind were the result of serendipity. They were things I stumbled across, just happenstance. And as much as I have a lot of love stories that I could tell about those texts and how I found them and how we've taught them, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it is a little bit like trying to explain to somebody how to fall in love because the right confluence of events needs to come. And so what I want to focus on instead of those serendipity texts is how do you go about finding texts when you have a real need, when there's something in your curriculum that's kind of pushing you in a particular direction, and then you have to go out there and try to, in the big wide world of language, find something that's going to work. And so the example that I'm going to highlight, or a couple of examples that are clustered together are, as Coral mentioned, from the foreign languages and the literary and the everyday project. And I think we'll have the link for you in the chat in a second. I'm mostly going to be working off of a PowerPoint because those texts are in German originally, and so I've translated them so that you can all access them. But I'm just going to quickly show you the website so you have a sense of kind of where I'm working from. I think you can all see that. Give me a nod if someone can see it. Okay, so this is the flight project, the foreign languages and the literary and the everyday project, and it's much, much bigger than what I'm going to talk about. But the example that I'm going to talk about comes from one of the German texts and from a lesson that we developed there for a German language curriculum in particular, a first semester course. And in this course, we take, we work with a textbook so we're bringing in these texts to augment the textbook and we take a kind of loose genre approach to how we think about bringing in authentic texts. So we're trying to find things that will very directly augment and supplement the kinds of communicative and literacy oriented goals that we have in the curriculum. So as I said, this example comes from a first semester German course. And I wanted to talk about this one because I think it's a sort of thematic unit that's probably familiar to many of you and different kinds of first year courses. So this is the chapter where students learn to introduce themselves, to describe themselves, to talk about themselves and others. And one of the frustrations that we had about this particular part of the curriculum and some others is that the communicative textbook tended to treat this as a very sort of neutral kind of activity, as if there's one way that we describe ourselves, there's one set of attributes. So we wanted to bring in something that reflect more about how we introduce ourselves in different kinds of contexts and different sorts of ways. And to also bring in some playfulness. And so one of the graduate student instructors at the time Chelsea Timlin who I think is actually here on the chat was the first one to bring the idea forward singles ads do all of the things that we wanted them to do in terms of the kind of in literacy goals. Somebody has to talk about themselves, introduce themselves, describe an ideal partner, describing others, and do all of those things in a very short text, and in a way that will feel very compelling attractive, etc to others. And so it became a really good genre for us to cluster this set of needs around. Now away from the website and towards some of the examples. So the process to this was slightly bizarre so once we had identified that singles ads were the direction we were going to go. What we did was spent a lot of time on singles websites, German language singles websites which is a very interesting way to spend your summer vacation. And one of the things that once we had kind of moved in that that direction of the genre that we noticed is that there are a lot of very typical sorts of attributes of singles ads which make them attractive for this. You tend to have a lot of cliche or kind of chunking sorts of statements that students can start to recognize things like I'm longing for you I'm longing for someone so particular terms of phrase that were new to students but that they could get their heads around. But you also had a lot of the things that we were looking for based on the textbook we're working with so things like people stating their age describing something of their appearance describing interests hobbies, what kind of person they are. For example, humorous honest, secure and loyal etc and describing these attributes but having to do so again in a way that they would signal to somebody else that they were a desirable other partner. But there were other kinds of ads to and patterns that emerged and this is why it became something that was important for the foreign languages in the littering the everyday project where we try to bring in this playful and creative language from a very early stage. Because there were also lots of ads, these singles ads that had a lot of metaphor a lot of language play a lot of poetics and a lot of intertextuality so one of the motifs that comes across a lot of ads is the fairy tale motif. So here we have someone who's not indeed looking for a dragon slayer, but is perhaps sometimes a dragon. And so playing off of this envisioned story world where where the person's going to find that romantic loving man who can love the dragon and her. Or taking another example. This individual who positions himself as the warrior of light who's seeking the spiritual elf, and creates an entire story world in which he's the warrior of the light looking for an attractive Arwen, a Lord of the Rings reference some great intertextuality, and then describes the hobbies that he had so there was quite a lot of higher level literary play in these very everyday sorts of texts that we could play with work with and exploit. So that kind of hits on a couple of the points that I want to make about how do we think about what kinds of texts, how do we maybe identify sorts of texts out there that we can narrow our search. And then what kinds of motivations might we have for example, wanting to bring in these critical perspectives in the play. The final point though that I want to make is about the question of what do we mean by authentic texts, because one of the things that we realized as we started calling through these singles ads is that we didn't want to take them directly into the classroom, in part because these were texts that we didn't have they aren't open text in the truest sense they we didn't have permissions for them they aren't published as pedagogical materials, and there are all kinds of privacy concerns that we had. And so what we ended up doing is viewing these as not completely open resources but certainly resources that are out there to be adaptable and remixing them some so the texts that I've shared with you and the ones we brought into the classroom are adapted. But I would still claim that they're authentic texts because what we what we kept was the meaning structures, we kept the basic sorts of texts that they were setting up and change some of the bits of details so that they would be hard to trace back. And we kept the meaningful context so these were texts that in their essence originated in a very real world meaningful sort of context. But it does sort of get at the question of what exactly do we mean by authentic. When we're talking about authentic texts which might be something that we want to continue to discuss. All right, thank you very much. Okay, thank you so much Chantel that was really interesting. And she, she raises many questions then about finding the text obviously depends on the goals of your program. So they were looking at that may be maybe emphasizing the notion as she mentioned of language play looking for playful language use in various texts. She raises also a really interesting question about what constitutes an authentic texts we've been talking about authenticity for a long time and foreign language learning and teaching. So, we are fundamentally about adaptation so an adapt to text may still be considered authentic that's an I think an interesting point. Since so much of what we are just talking about really is about remixing a meaning design so okay, thank you. You've given us a lot to think about. So our next speaker I is Gabriella Zapata Gabby I hope you're ready and Gabby is going to be talking about trajectory is her project and many of the things that she's learned over the years working on OER. So Gabby the floor is yours. All right. Hello everyone. Thank you for inviting me to be here and very happy to be here and what I want to share mostly is. When I started thinking about what I wanted to share is and thinking of you know our experience working with trajectory those I'm finding materials open materials. I thought about you know one of the things that the first things, one of the first things that we learned with our team and then is way to look for open materials. So what I usually I usually start with the creative commons search engine, which is that I always use the old search because they have a new one, and I really don't like it. So what I usually do is I type the key term or the phrase here in the search slot, and then I start always with Google. So you know, when you start with Google, you can find all kinds of you know images. You can find also articles and newspapers and things like that. So I start there. But one of the things that I discovered is that this kind of search is not very good for videos, because sometimes you know when you, when you get to a video is not particularly open. So whenever I try to find videos. What I do is I, instead of you know going through Google, the web search, I go to YouTube. And, and so, in this case I'm going to show you a video how I found, I think is one of the most wonderful resources that I found for trajectory so far. It's a video on Mathe Mathe is the national drink of Argentina, and is part of our culture. I am from Argentina, and it's part of, you know, it says a lot about not just, I mean, our cultural background, and also how we view, you know, friendship, you know, relationships. So I wanted to focus on that particular drink in the chapter that we have in the section that we have on Argentina and trajectory. So I look for Mathe, I, you know, I enter first Mathe and then I found all kinds of things that had to do with mate, you know. So, and then I try another thing I said El Mathe, and then I found videos that I didn't like very much. And so I then I said, Well, maybe there's something that is more interesting. So I wrote animated. Okay, so this is what I did. And I found the first thing that appeared there was this animated short. And I said, Okay, let's try it. And so let me show you this video. And I hope you love it as much as I do. Why would it be that Mathe is a musical, I've only seen a few. And look what Mathe, I chose. Would it be that the tea is a little bitter? Even if each one takes it as it is, it is a family tradition. Could it be that no one understands how to use the bomb? It is the thing that everyone is so afraid of. And Mathe is a great companion. Now I tell you, the most beautiful thing is to be able to share it. Let me just stop it. All right. So I love this video and I hope that you like it too. Why is it that I chose it? So I chose it first of all because it's only it's short. Okay, so it's authentic being from Argentina help because it's, you know, first of all, the Spanish is authentic. And also it's the language is simple and it's complimented by the images and it is created is quite unique. And there's a lot that we can analyze. There's images that allow for analysis. Also, it is very interesting because it was developed by different artists from different South American countries. So you have artists from Argentina or why Chile, Venezuela, and it also complimented the material in the section that we have of preceptors. So let me show you now what I mean. Okay, let's see. So this is our textbook. Okay. And so this is the chapter that we have on Argentina. So we have different aspects of Argentina, you know, we start with, we always make the comparison between Argentina and the United States. We talk a little bit about how similar the two countries are. We talk to, we talk about the diversity that we have in Argentina in terms of languages, for example. The geography is very similar to geography in the United States. And we also talk about as aspects that are unique to Argentina. We talk about, we bring it, we in this chapter we focus on clothes, clothing and buying clothes and activities.  And so we talk about the traditional drink. We talk a little bit about what, how similar it is to tea and then how important it is. And then after we talk about all these, we bring the video, okay, which is another, another way of looking at this drink. And then in particular, we like to, because it talks about, it shows the social aspect of Almaty. And that's what we want to emphasize because we tie it to social aspects in Argentinian culture. So this is the way we use it. We didn't exploit it as much as we could have because of the level, the performance level that the students have in this particular volume. But there are other ways in which you can use a video like this. And let me show you, let me go back to my presentation now. And one of the things that you can do, for example, is to, I mean, this, I mean, you could analyze, you could have a multimodal analysis of the music or a discourse images and how these are connected to cultural aspects. The viewer, who the viewers are, the objective of the video, what is that the video is trying to convey. Then you can talk about the organization of the video and why different types of visual and auditory media are incorporated in it. You can create a connection to the cultural values that are presented in the video and you can ask students to compare those values to their own culture. And then you could also talk about why you have in this video different artists, who these artists might be and why they have decided to collaborate and to create this kind of video. So I think that it's a very rich resource and that's why I wanted to share it with you. And I think that's it. So. Okay, thank you so much, Gavi. That was really great. Great examples. I noticed from the chat already people are, are excited that they've learned something new. So CC search. That's a great tip for those of you who don't know how to search the internet for open content. There's a lot of great content out there but we're really interested in finding open text that we can use and integrate into our own OER. So that's a great tip for everybody. I also want to make sure that everybody realizes that everything that's being shown here is part of an OER which means it's open for you to use. Trajectos as Gavi was saying is now under development, but she was showing you what's already online. So we have in the chat, the URL for you to access that. And the same goes for what Chantel was showing that's the flight. That's available to anybody. Okay, so now it's Christian's turn. And Christian's going to tell us a little bit about what he has learned, developing his check materials he's developed a first year program in check that is very intensive in his use of open media.  So reality check actually interestingly enough the name came up or I came up with the name because of the reality style interview videos that I created there's about 240 of them on 12 different topics and they are divided into various proficiency levels. And this was a great title as far as I was concerned it was you know it really kind of captured what was about the book but the title itself actually started to have a lot, or you know, sort of take on more meetings and one of the things that was really important for me was to reflect reality. And so it was to go out and try to find as many authentic texts as I could. And it started out with me doing a lot of different searches and, and not necessarily being able to find a lot of great materials and then there was this epiphany movement where I started finding so much that I couldn't actually. I couldn't actually use all the materials that I was finding. And I'm going to go in a little bit about how I go about finding materials and I'm going to actually be focusing on videos today. So if you if you go on to the reality check site and you go into units right now the first five units are posted and then the the next five units are are going to be hopefully ready shortly. I'm going to be taking you into unit three so this is a text from beginning check at this point the students have been studying check for about five or six weeks. And I thought, you know, what would what would be more interesting than maybe a video on chocolate and I happened to find a video on chocolate that was one minute long. And so I'm going to go and play that for you right now. If only they had the worst bad luck. I'm not even happy with it. No, it would be bad luck so I'm happy with chocolate but it can't be bad luck. I don't have to have chocolate at all, I'd rather have a couple. It is also known that there are positive effects that have chocolate on our health. It absorbs a lot of vitamins as a rule against cardiovascular disease and brain disorders. It has a good effect on memory and improves your luck. It's all about what kind of sugar production is actually a thing. I like it, I like it in some kind of high quality, but in those I'm 10-15 percent. So I'm happy with a lot of chocolate. I like chocolate like white. I'm happy with probably the most white and milk too. When we talk about real chocolate we have... I think that's part of a normal class. And so the text in there, you probably heard even though you didn't understand any of it, you probably heard it went very quickly. And especially at the beginning it's almost paragraph length in terms of the utterances. And it's actually too difficult for our students to be able to actually understand what's going on in the text at that point. All the same, I actually did take a very small portion of it, just one sentence. I thought this would be actually a good activity just for the students to get an opportunity to read something that's at a much higher level, but that they should be able to get with a little bit of glossing. The main focus though that I wanted, and you saw that there were three women who came and were interviewed. This question that I asked the students that they can totally understand at this point, are you addicted to chocolate? And this actually asks about these three women.  So I asked, you know, who says that they're addicted to chocolate? And so the students get to first identify whether these women feel that they're addicted, and then they get to have their own discussion. And now in that kind of discussion, of course, they get to talk about some of the things that we've been practicing talking about in class. And this whole unit is devoted to food. And that's what we've been talking about food preferences.  And these are all the sorts of skills that we've been really practicing at this point. And they come in a very natural, very real, a very, very reality based context. And now they don't actually in this video just talk about addition to chocolate. But then there are four, or I think people who talk about what type of chocolate they like. So one happens like bitter or rather, what we say in English dark chocolate, milk chocolate or white chocolate. And so they get to state their preferences. And again, the exact same kinds of things that we are working on over the two or so weeks that were in this unit as a class. And so they again get to state their own preference for these. And so what was really important to me about this video and I should note that, you know, I look for videos. I'm not necessarily looking for something or video with something in mind. I'm looking for something that is on the topic and that is manageable. This happened to be a one minute video. So it's short enough that we can that we can we can we can tackle it in class. But rather I like to see the videos or the text that I find is guiding the class guiding the curriculum, rather than the other way around. And that was a really important moment for me. And in terms of, you know, all of these can be potentially good texts, how well can I use them in my class how well can I adapt them to to the needs of the students and this one worked out really really well. Now if it turns out though, I happen to find this video by chance, doing a little searching and I'm going to go into some of that searching, or some of those tips for searching. Because once you find one video from somebody on YouTube that is under an open license and there you can see that it is licensed Creative Commons CC by is I click on that on that user and it turns out this user posts lots and lots of videos. And so there's a ton of content for me to be able to use. Okay. Now, actually, the first thing that I did when I tried to started to search and I said, you know, before I was having this, you know, really difficult moment. Supposedly there are these open texts out out there. And supposedly, there were even these fabled open videos, but I couldn't find them. The biggest thing that happened for me was was was just doing this YouTube search and actually was looking through blogs. Now, blogs were really important. I'm going to just actually show you some blogs in English. So I'm just going to look up blog plus travel, and I'm going to set my filter here so I just clicked on filter. And then I go to Creative Commons.  And I can go and I can do something else. For example, blog Christmas. I'm talking about holidays and, and I can set the Creative Commons again and I get a lot of different videos that that that work for that and so vlog is a really, really good search term to use and that's actually how I found a lot of the users not necessarily all the videos from my users were vlogs, but they were, but but maybe those same users happen to create other content. You don't have to just search search blogs though you can just, you can just go Christmas. And then go to that filter for again for Creative Commons you have to set it unfortunately every time, and you get lots of different interesting content out there. Now, so we were looking at chocolate before. And so if we were to do that and again good creative Commons we have some chocolate videos as well. I also like to search on Vimeo Vimeo also allows here's a search for chocolate that I made earlier, and you can also put the license in so here I can search for CC by videos. It's a little bit more annoying on on on on Vimeo because you have to click through multiple licenses that might be compatible with your project. And, and as I've mentioned before this, you know you end up finding these users that post lots of comp content. So this is just you know one user that I've been I've been looking a lot a lot through her videos and in the current unit that I'm working on. Her videos happen to be really relevant. She she posts a lot both on LGBT issues as well as on things regarding stress emotions. Happiness, things like that. And so I just go through all of her content looking for things that are relevant. The same thing happened when looking at travel so I found this one couple that travels around and they've been to all sorts of different places. London Warsaw, Berlin, Rome, Palermo. And so, again, looking through their content I have all of this this this at my fingertips and it's way more than I can handle. And it just sort of started with some simple searches and then sort of jumping eagerly down the rabbit hole. And I've really embraced this so much so that I've even gotten together with them. So here is a here's a picture of me and Prague meeting with with some of these bloggers. And so they've actually been willing to help me and and and have even volunteered to create some content for me if I if I ask for it so there's a lot of opportunities that might be more sort of an extreme sort of distance that then most users are going to go. The point with all this is that there's a lot of content out there. And I think it just takes us a little bit of imagination into you know how can I adapt this this video that I initially showed you on chocolate. My students are going to understand it nor do I expect them to rapid fire speech some of the constructions are really complex and this is as I said five six weeks into their instruction, but we can get something out of this video. I really enjoy it and hey they got to talk about chocolate today. So, I'll end it right there with talking about chocolate. Okay, thank you so much Christian I mean everybody loves chocolate right so. I said a lot of different things there I just want to say that working with Christian I was there when he had his aha his epiphany moment like. Oh my gosh there is so much content so the question is not you know how do I find it but then what do I do with it.  So these are particular genres that are open by nature these are people who are creating content for the world, and they take you into their houses and they share all kinds of interesting details. I want to start off so now we're going to shift to our Q&A. I'll type your questions into the chat box but I'll start things going here with Christian you use the word reality, and I was kind of smiling because reality is a contested term these days like. So, so I was going to say, who's reality. Yeah. And I say that yeah I'm so well just let's start things going to stir the pot a little bit because typically in comer and commercially produced materials. They're generic by nature. And what you end up doing is kind of waiting perpetuating canonical content or stereotypes. So I'm going to talk about convergent situations. So check people are only going to talk about goulash. That's all they ever eat. And so I noticed from your content. Check people have a much more interesting life than I ever imagined because they travel to Vietnam and they don't always eat goulash and so it comes back to representations of reality. Yeah, that's cool. I didn't want to create a caricature of the language that was that was super important for me because that was the impression that I kept getting from everything, either I got this very sterilized version of of Czech culture or this very caricatured version of Czech culture and I didn't think either one was, again, very much real in the terms of the Czech culture that I experienced. You know, I guess coming from from graduate studies in Czech, everybody that I talked to was interested in Czech literature and check film. And then when I mentioned some of these short stories or novels or famous films to check friends. Some a lot of times they just have no idea. It's just not something that they're interested in, but they might have gone to a film festival, or they might that's something or they might go to chocolate festivals or they might do something else. And so I, I'm kind of aiming it more on the sort of the everyday interests of people. And so if I find it out there, and it seems seems appropriate, then I put it into that box of reality. This is, it's clearly real, at least for somebody. And so that's, that's, that's enough for me. Can I add something to that. The, because I think in addition to the kind of stereotyping cultural homogenizing one of the things that happens with textbooks. And I saw this in what Christian was sharing and it wasn't there and what I showed but it comes up in the singles ads is they also homogenize the potential identities of the students. One of the things that comes up often in the textbooks when you have things about looking for ideal partners or talking about these things is that they completely erase any LGBTQ identities from existence. So one of the things that was important to us in bringing in singles ads was also to represent the variance of that of those kinds of texts in a way that textbooks usually don't. That's a good point. So the one of, I mean, I've had this discussion also with Gabby recently about targeting different kinds of populations that are then relevant to our students. Yeah, so it works on both ways you're trying to represent more diversity in your materials. And then of course that touches on the diversity of the students themselves so that's a really good point. And also maybe ask all of the speakers. This is a question that really was started by I think Chantel she used the word serendipity. And it seems that all of you there's an element of serendipity and finding something in this all of finding the needle in the haystack or finding the perfect video.   And could I just ask you maybe to share your anecdotes about a moment where you found something but in this kind of crazy way because Christian was talking about using various search engines very important tip. You filter the content. It's important that people know that you can use Google search engine but you filter it or Vimeo or YouTube or YouTube. But can you guys just share something from your own personal experience and you found a really great piece of open content and you came across it in a strange way, or just how did you find some of this more concrete. How again did you find those those personal ads, Chantel. Well for those I went out and searched for them because it was driven by by Chelsea's idea that this might be a good genre but one of the, when you talk about serendipity one of the other examples that from the flight project that comes to mind is a lesson that we have around memes and and how memes are used and the idea for that came because there was this whole case where at a German university, a door was broken on a university building a very banal kind of experience. And they posted a sign about it being repaired and then students sort of trolled it by posting printing off memes and posting it around there. And it became this entire saga and has now continues to have an entire Facebook page devoted to the single door at a university building in Mainz Germany. And so sometimes it's also just random stuff that comes up and you realize okay there's something here because once we started playing with the meme as a genre. It got into all these questions of intertextuality and how do we cite and what do we cite and became a really fun lesson for a more intermediate advanced level. Okay, what about the rest of you guys, Gadi or. So, for example, I mean the, the activity that I created last week about data, you know, founder.  And that's how I found, I wasn't looking for anything in terms of you know pedagogical terms I was just reading and then I found this video. Anything that from democracy now is open. So you can use it in your materials. And, but you know you always listen to their English, you know, broadcast and also read their articles in English. But then I found this, you know, interview. And it was an interview to, you know, they were interviewing an activist, a young activist, and she was speaking Spanish. And I was just like, Oh my God, this is perfect for an activity, because I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something that had to do with activism, you know, I've been working with activism and in Hispanic community in Texas. And I am so interested in, you know, this young woman, you know, Greta, I mean, I think that you know, because, well, first of all, she has autism like my son. So you know, to me it's very, very close in terms of you know what she is trying to achieve and also because of autism. So I just found that video and I said this is perfect. I cannot lose this. So I decided to create an activity around it, and I may use it for preceptors. And that's how, you know, sometimes I find also sometimes things on Facebook, people post things and I go to, you know, the particular site that they mentioned and it's open and then I start thinking about something that I can do. So, yeah, that's one thing. Yeah, so Sarah is telling me that there are a couple of questions in the chat chat area. Go ahead, Sarah. Okay. So the first question was from Jim for Christian, although I think any of you can probably answer this. He was wondering, do you ever encounter the problem of building a whole activity around a video, and then in a later semester the video has been deleted. We've had to, we've had that problem in French and we've had to redo whole activities. Do you have any suggestions? Yes, I can go ahead and start. Yes, I have had that problem. And that's why working with open videos is really important because those are still us that we can retain that video for ourselves.  You know, if you shall not download any content content, unless you're using a download or similar link displayed by YouTube on the service for that content so technically speaking that is against the rules of YouTube. What's interesting is that if you look at this by marking your original video with Creative Commons license you're granting the entire YouTube community the right to reuse and edit that video. So, YouTube kind of has two different stances on this, this issue and they don't really work together and it used to be really easy YouTube had this YouTube video editor and then they took it down a couple years ago and so you used to be able to just import content straight into that but it is. It is no longer available. So yeah, but I do download it. I have actually been in contact with with bloggers before as you saw just from my picture that I did meet with some and so I actually did go that extra step although the license doesn't tell us that we need to they've already licensed it so that we can use it. And they did go the extra step of saying hey I really would like to use these videos and in my curriculum. How do you feel about that and they were, they were ecstatic. So, that's a can I that's a very important point that open content is created by somebody who wants it to be shared. And so they it's probably a really great idea for you as a materials developer to contact the person to be in touch with the person, because they then become a resource for you so it's a great tip for people to think about. Don't be afraid to contact people who have created the open content for you. What about Vimeo though you just talked about YouTube is it easier to download open content from Vimeo. I use the same clip grab software. I mean Vimeo has, it does allow some users to have a premium account and so they can actually provide direct access. I've rarely encountered a download link that that premium account would allow. The last time I looked through the license of Vimeo or the terms. I didn't see anything explicitly prohibiting but it's been over a year so I don't know for sure. But yeah the same software works for for getting videos off of there. And yeah it's a pain when content I just had that happen actually open content that was taken down that I didn't have a copy of. It wasn't a big deal I wasn't using it for anything, you know, more than a very short formative activity. So, you know, nothing, nothing major lost. Yeah, I think that the problem is really with video because you can download texts and images still images much more easily but yeah, when a video disappears that's a problem. We had another question for Christian about how long that lesson took was it just for one day. And it might be interesting to hear from Gabriella and Chantel about this too just how long of you spent with those texts with your students. Mine, the chocolate one was maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes. It's a portion of an in class activity. So part of the part of the days. Okay, thanks. Thank you Chantel. For ours. That's about a two day lesson and it builds into a writing task that's part of why the genre consideration was really important for us is that we want them using those as models for for what they're then writing so we spend a couple of days talking through the texts and then modeling the texts and then having them start to brainstorm script their own version of it for a fictional singles ad not for their own personal singles ads. Thanks. And how about you Gabriella. The mutte video did you know what I haven't used it because I mean I just, you know, I was part of I have developed it for. Okay, you know, but I would the way I envision that whole lesson is for teachers to either. Pick and choose you know, or I think that you could you could direct you could do that activity in 10 minutes 15 at the most. So yeah. Okay, thanks. And then someone else asked for more tips about finding blogs, such as key search terms. Christian do you have anything I think the key search term really is vlog. It's crazy but I'm really I mean I have just put anything travel blog dessert blog. Name your holiday blog. I mean, I truly have gone. But I don't just use blogs. I really like to be able for students to have a glimpse into the target culture from the very beginning, even when we're just learning vocabulary items in the first unit. For example, use time lapse videos you can find a lot of open time lapse videos of your own city of, for example, in my case I found them prog or but I know or all of us various check towns. And so even though they don't know a lot. I mean at this point my students really don't even know a verb yet. They just name things on the screen but they can go and name things that they see so a time lapse of a random say a prog and they're naming buses and people. And, and they're saying that's water and that's a river and those are trees and things like that. That's another genre that really works works well. It doesn't just work at the, the novice level. I mean you can you can create activities off of a time lapse that go all the way into the superior level. You know, how do you feel about the ubiquity of cameras in today's society right that's a different question, but you know people are making these time lapse videos where all these people are captured in them so that's a, that's sort of a natural prompt that you can go into. So, I mean I think there's a lot of a lot of room to work with these kinds of these kinds of text. The idea is then you use the genre as the search word, so a vlog or a time lapse video. Yeah. So could we just, could you tell us a couple more of those kinds of genres because I know in your work you've got other kinds of videos and I learned from you that, for example the unboxing genre. Yeah, let me actually. So, because these are all like gold mines once you hit a gold mine you think oh my gosh there's so much open content. Yeah yeah yeah there you go. So, and these are actually international words so even languages that don't use the Latin script. So, if you have a question which uses Cyrillic, they still will write vlog, or time lapse in English. Next to us these are these are internationalized words. So vlog is the one that we've talked about so far I just mentioned time lapse haul. I have found lots of haul videos these are videos where somebody maybe buys 30 dresses, and they go and try on one dress after another and give their opinion on it. You might buy, you know, 10 ties or something like that and try every tie on unboxing. This one I haven't actually used in my curriculum so far but somebody buys a new iPhone and then they show their process of, of opening it up and talking about it and just impressions. Room tour is a great one, another international word so you can get people to give a room tour, or an apartment tour etc and so then you get a lot of very simple, and this is my this and this is my that here's my here's where I hang my coat, etc. So those are those are the five main genres that I've discovered and have done a lot of searching and had a lot of success in terms of finding really good content. You raise a another important question and that is do you search always in English or do you search in the target language and, and I mean, when do you decide how do you decide, or does it make any difference at all. I guess that really is for all of us, but I'll start I searched in the target language but with these international words, a lot of times at least as a start. And that oftentimes is how I find the users who are creating the content that are creating other content so I searched through their, their, their, their playlists or their, their, their repository of videos and, and, and then find the worldwide. How about Chantel and, and Goddy do you do you search in English or in German or in Spanish or both languages. I would search in German and, and I think kind of this goes back to the serendipity just real quick because a lot of the curriculum building I do is in collaboration with graduate students and I'm always a little bit nervous sometimes to send them out searching too far because I'm very nervous at the same time, but I think something that's come up and all the talks is also if you search a little bit you find things you can subscribe to, and then you stop, and then you don't search as much in some ways the content comes to you because they're in your Facebook feed or you're subscribed to their channel and so some of it is also about figuring out ways to search less by identifying the right spaces. I do other questions for people I don't know if we'll have time for all of them but a couple of people asked about flipping so do any of you ever have the students watch these videos at home and then talk about them in class and how does that work. As in flipping the classroom. Yeah, I can speak to that just briefly because we're teaching a lot of hybrid courses now and so some of the things like the kind of things that Christian shared blogs and videos we use those a lot in the hybrid portion of the course. But the kind of text I shared I would not use in a flipped course in part because I think once you start trying to really foster more kind of a critical awareness that tends to work better in the classroom in my experience. In my, um, what we do is like usually we start with the previewing pre reading you know all of those activities in class. And then students watch videos at home and then we do the comprehension they do the comprehension. And so we sometimes we check the comprehension but we do we do the interpreting in in class. It's kind of like, you know, we buy but they usually don't unless we want to show them something in particular want them to analyze a particular, you know, multi model section. So, then we show that but that's it. I should just say for participants that Gabriella and Chantel are developing materials that are inspired by kind of a multi literacies framework so there's a lot a heavy emphasis on critical framing and interpretation and I agree with both of you I think that kind of activity is best done with input from the teacher. Right. Any other questions Sarah. Yeah, there was one. Well there was an interesting comment from Amanda who said my students are doing a lot of work with using corpus tools to collect and analyze authentic texts. They collect them by topic or genre so that's another suggestion and then Tina had a question. Do you ever train students on how to find open materials as they go out to develop personal projects for presentations for example. And if so how much time do you dedicate to that and how does it go. Exactly I mean everything that my students are doing in class that is multi model. They need to use open resources. So what I what I usually do is I spent part of when I give instructions I spent part of the time in class in class I mean just showing them how to find materials, and then how to cite them. So we talk about attribution and what the different licenses need also have a you know I create a document that I post online and they can resort to so yes. So folks I see that we are coming up on the hour, and I want to thank our presenters. Chantel Gabi and Christian you guys have so much interesting so many different different tips.  And we typically end here by telling you as I mentioned at the beginning, our course so please visit our OER course we have a lot more information including information that you heard about today of how to use the CC search engine, how to search for particular genres and so forth. And to encourage people to join our learn community these are these are open educators using OER or making OER, and you can get badges for your different kinds of levels of participation. And finally, since these we need to tell the federal government, those who are funding all of this, what we're doing and how, and what you think about it we have a very very brief survey that we'd like you to answer. If you click on the URL, which will be given to you in the chat chat room, you can take that survey it only is a couple of minutes, and all that information goes back to the federal government. So, thank you guys again. Thanks everybody for joining we had a really good participation over 30 I think about 35 participants today. Thank you all.


You often hear the famous phrase, you learn something new every day, right? Well, what if I told you that your mind warps new ideas to fit with your older beliefs? Now, don't get me wrong, you are learning new things every day that help shape you as a person. Sometimes you feel confident in these new things you've learned. However, we can't avoid sometimes falling under the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias. Not sure what this is?  As an example, have you ever walked into a classroom the day of an exam with an unprecedented sense of confidence, despite not having studied a lot the night before? Or perhaps you were just the opposite? You studied all night long, but upon sitting down to take the test, suddenly you feel as if there were things you might have forgotten to review. Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's Lie Witness News segments further exemplify this. The segment consists of a crew asking random pedestrians questions that have false premises placed in. For example, asking people their opinion on a band that doesn't exist. The lengths to which some people go describing how much they love that band that doesn't really exist is breathtaking. That's just one example of the Dunning-Kruger effect said in motion. It makes sense if you think about it.  And the confidence we pull out to make us seem knowledgeable on something we know very little about can be very convincing, even to ourselves. It's easy for our brains to say, I understand this based on the clutter of meaningless information stored in our head. The connections made in our mind sometimes even managed to fool ourselves into not recognizing our own ignorance. This meaningless information can often consist of misconceptions that we've gained over time. These misconceptions never really leave us, even if we know they're wrong. In fact, we can often bend or outright forget new information to make it fit with previous information. So, how do we recognize, and more importantly, avoid falling into the Dunning-Kruger effect? Well, we should all strive to educate ourselves as much as possible. After all, it isn't a bad thing to learn theories and ideas.  This means you won't always be 100% prepared for situations you might think you learned how to deal with. And that's okay. You aren't expected to know everything after just learning the basics. In fact, you're encouraged to keep learning, to keep questioning, and to consider how your own thinking can be flawed or misguided. Coming to terms with the things we don't understand is the first step towards clearing up misunderstandings and learning new things. As Socrates said, true wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. Thank you for watching, and don't forget to subscribe to Psych2Go!


Hello everyone welcome back. Do you now all know how to publish papers and you're itching to get back to the hotel to start? Well welcome back. We have one more session before lunch and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We're switching gears a little bit and we have, and I know I say this a lot, but two of my favorite people, and this is actually a true one. We have two excellent facilitators right now for this session on successful communication with reporters, policymakers, and funders and David Hosansky and Rachel Hauser will introduce themselves a little bit and say what they do here at UCAR and NCAR and I invite you to really enjoy the session and play with them. I'm pretty sure they have some activity for you prepared. They'll make you work hard, but enjoy and please welcome Rachel and David. Hi everyone. I'm David Hosansky. I oversee media relations here at NCAR and UCAR and Rachel Hauser is a communications expert and she focuses on partnerships with different organizations, foundations, nonprofits, and others and we're here today to talk about communicating with different audiences. We're going to focus, as you could see, on reporters, policymakers, and funders, so we're going to kind of blather at you for about 12 minutes or well, I'll blather. You'll be imparting wisdom for about 12 minutes or so and then we're going to give you a little exercise and if we have time maybe talk about that a little bit. So I'll start and I'm going to talk about communicating with reporters and by the way, one thing that you'll notice in this talk is there are some techniques in common for communicating with all these audiences and there are some techniques that are specific to the audiences. So let's go to reporters and the first question is why talk to reporters and the answer to be honest for a lot of scientists is there is no good reason or no reason good enough and we have plenty of scientists at NCAR who've spent their entire careers not, you know, not really talking with reporters and that's completely fine but there are some advantages to talking with reporters and I guess we'll highlight these. You can see the first couple of bullets, more frequent citations, new collaborations. So research has shown that studies that are highlighted in the media tend to attract more citations and that's because more people know about them. I mean we all get information from the media. Collaborations when we put out a news release, almost invariably we'll hear back from the scientists later that he or she heard from potential collaborators in the US or overseas who found out about the research through the media coverage. So it's a good way of getting more attention to your work and potentially it could generate additional research directions. In addition, supported by NSF, so NSF and the other funding agencies like it when there was media coverage. In fact, even if there's not a lot of media coverage, even just having a news release about your work is something that can elevate, get some attention at the funding agencies. We do have stories. There was one about a year ago of a reporter who was doing work funded by NASA. The news release went to NASA for their approval and the response to the program officers was, oh, we should get more money into this. This is actually getting a lot of attention. And then increased scientific literacy. That's scientific literacy among the public. So a more general goal here is the more the public knows about science, the more they support science, the better it is for taxpayer science. With that said, you'll see the blue in the bottom says, but remember the risks. There's the risk of being misquoted. There's the risk of your research being not quite characterized correctly in the press. Typically what we'll see in that case is it's overstated a little bit. Maybe it's somewhat incremental and it comes across as groundbreaking. And I, I'm not even a scientist and I have had issues. I was kind of, my comments were taken all out of context a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times on an issue relating to turbulence. But bear in mind that we all know that the media gets things wrong sometimes. So if your colleagues see something that's not quite right, you could always say to them, hey, the reporter got it wrong. And, and that's true. And I used to be a reporter. There are great reporters, but we all know reporters make mistakes. So to minimize the chances of being misquoted, there are some techniques to use. So this is a longer talk that I'm boiling down. I'm just highlighting three techniques here. Magnify two to four key messages. Before the interview, think about the key things that you want the reporter to know. What's unique about this research? What's special about this research? What tools or techniques did you develop to, to do the research? How does it benefit society? How does it relate to society? Folks who have not talked to reporters much have this view that when they do an interview, they're just going to kind of sit there passively and answer the questions and it's the reporter who does all the work. In fact, what we stress is it's the opposite. That you should go into the interview prepared. You should know what your key points are and kind of help to guide the interview. You have to respond to the reporter's questions. But once you respond, bring in a key message. The second technique I want to talk about is jargon. So jargon, try to stay away from it and when you're preparing for an interview, think about the terms that you should, that may not work. Reporters typically are not going to understand terms like boundary layer or aerosols or tropopause. At best, they won't understand it. At worst, they'll think they understand it and they'll get it wrong. And this was actually a problem a few years ago with an IPCC report that was previewed by a London newspaper that got a look at it in advance and the reporter saw the word aerosols and what came out was a connection between spray can use and climate change and it sounded like if only enough for spray cans, global warming would not be an issue and it took some time to kind of reeducate people around that. Finally, answer the last question. Most interviews end with the reporter saying, is there anything else you'd like to add?  Don't do that. That last question is like a gift to you and use it. If there's a talking point that you haven't brought out, then now's the time to do it. If you've covered everything, then what you could say is, let me just emphasize again, here's the key thing about this research. It's amazing how often the last thing you say is what appears near the top of an article. That's often what makes the most impression, biggest impression. At the bottom, it says help them by meeting their deadlines and being concise. Reporters are very deadline driven, be mindful of it. The more concise you can be, the more focused, the better. I'm going to now turn it over to Rachel, who's going to talk about communicating with policy makers. So I want to talk to you a little bit about talking to elected officials. You'll have an opportunity throughout your career to talk to elected officials, whether it's at a state level, a local level or federal level. And just as a heads up, they are going to be excited for the most part to see you. I haven't experienced yet one who isn't. The catch is with these guys, you're going to have to speak quickly. And so you're going to have to have your phone, your message, know what your story is, do your homework and know what their issues are because they are going to be on tight deadlines. They have a lot of meetings. If you're lucky, you're going to get 10 minutes with them. And oftentimes, you will not be talking to an official, you'll be talking to a staffer. And typically these guys are in their 20s. They are very smart. They're very eager. And if they're interested in what you're doing, it's really important because they will then run it up the flagpole to their boss, sorry. And so you can get potentially an advocate for your researcher for whatever your ask is. So let me just, I guess, tell you a few things. Yeah, so frame story by its relevance. So know what the legislature's agenda is. Know what bills they're sponsoring. For example, your senator might be working with the farmers in your area or in their voting district on trying to prevent flooding and drought issues and sort of finding an advance. So if your research tags onto that, make sure you talk about that in terms of, you know, with regard to what your research is and what you want from them. Also critical, who do they care about? They care about their voters. So it's also important to know what's going on in the region where their district is. So what are the voters interested in? Whatever interests the voters fascinates the legislator. So it's a good thing to consider. I think whenever you talk to anyone, whether it's the media or whether it's an elected official or whomever, if they're not a scientist, really think about how does your research fit into the societal picture? And then frame it that way. So how is it relevant to the public and how the public's concerns are? How can you enhance safety? How can you enhance the economy? That sort of thing. Be concise. And this really goes back. And so this is another thing that David was saying, but in this particular sense, it's really, it's about that 10 minute timeline. You've got just a quick opportunity to impress them and you will. But just know that, you know, you've only got that little bit of time and to try to use it as well as you can. And the last thing is go in with an ask. So what does an ask an ask is basically, these guys are there to help you. And they're fine with helping you. They expect you to ask them for help. So your ask could be something as general. Well, it'd be great if you ask if you supported NSF to fund the atmospheric sciences, or it could be, you know, you could specifically hone in on your research and say, this is a research project that would be terrific to be funded. And we're having some problems getting the funding. And here's how it would benefit you, your agenda, your your voters. And then the last thing to just mention to you is, don't be afraid ever all the universities and most organizations have a government relations person as does you car. So if you're if you're stuck come to you car, and we're happy to help you. But go to your government relations people for help, they can do the introductions to legislators, they can help you prepare your your 10 minute talk to legislators. They can give you great guidance and really good feedback on on the conversations that you can have with these folks. So yeah, take advantage of that. With that, I'm going to turn it back to David. Thank you, Rachel. You're welcome. And I just want to piggy back on something the last thing you said, which I always forget to say, which is when you land, excuse me, when you land at a university or another organization, if you want to reach out to the media, get to know their media office. Media folks are very good. What we do here is anytime that we think scientists can get a lot of calls, we'll sit down with the scientists do some media practice, do a practice interview, and that could be really helpful. So I'm going to talk briefly about talking to funders. You may, in the course of your career, find yourself reaching out to potential funders, maybe from the private sector, or foundations. But in this case, I'm going to focus on agencies, NSF, or other funding agencies, and specifically on program officers. And really, this whole slide, the one bullet, the first bullet, stay in touch is the key takeaway. I was talking to an NSF program officer last week, and she said one of her big regrets when she was in academia was kind of keeping her head low and not bothering her program officer. She thought, you know, she didn't want to bother everybody. People are busy. And now that she's a program officer at NSF, she realizes, hey, program officers want to hear from scientists. They want to know what's going on. So don't be shy. You know, if you're in Washington, you can get a few minutes with your program officer. As with everything else, be concise, be mindful of their time. You know, a 15 to 20 minute meeting is plenty to talk about your research and your aspirations and that sort of thing. Learn about their interests. It may be that your program officer, once upon a time, was engaged in research quite similar to yours, which would be a nice connection. Or maybe their research is different than yours, but that's a good thing to know about. It could help you explain your research. Checking in about possible proposals. So if you have an idea, particularly if it's a little bit different than what you've done before, it's a good idea to let your program officer know. They're going to be limited in the feedback they can give you. But if it's kind of outside the area, they can say, you know what, you should probably talk to this other program officer, or they can just kind of give you some general guidance on your idea, some helpful feedback. And finally, provide updates. When agencies are funding research, they want to hear when your research gets published. This is particularly important for field projects. I mean, we in the communications office, here from NSF, hey, you know, there was this field project a few years ago. Do you know there are papers coming out from that? So when there's that kind of moment, do you let your program officer know? Because that's a nice moment. That's kind of a win. So in conclusion, just summing up here for successful communications, think about what your goals are, why are you talking to this person, why are you talking to this audience? Decide on key messages in advance, kind of do your homework and think that through. Know your audience, whether it's a policymaker who's got constituents or particular issues they're working on, or a reporter who's writing for a particular audience, or a funder with research focus. And be concise and be clear. Just think about the jargon. So that concludes our brief slides. We're now going to pivot to an exercise which involves creating a one-minute elevator speech. And Rachel has been working on hers. We've worked on it together. Yeah, it was an interesting process. So we're going to, she's going to give an example, and then we're going to explain how we'd like you to kind of take it away from there. So, Miss Houser. Mr.  Are you going to the 20th floor? I am going to the 20th floor. Well, we've got a minute then. Well, fabulous. Let me tell you all about what I'm working on. So I do relationship development for the Engineering Proclimate Extremes Partnership. And that is a program that is run out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It's a pretty cool program. It's very unusual. So what we do is we bring together academics and we bring industry folks and we bring indigenous groups and other NGOs as well as government organizations. And the goal of this group is to try to develop tools and applications for decision makers to help them plan and manage around extreme events. So one of the examples of an application that we're developing is we're getting information to insurers that provides more information on hurricane damage potential. Another one is we are taking climate scenarios, which are usually really tough to use by an ordinary mortal. And we're taking those and we're providing them to urban planners so that they can look five, ten, twenty, a hundred years into the future and then that will help guide their infrastructure design. So what we're looking for at ESEP is we're looking for new partners. We're looking for great ideas for things to do in terms of the next steps. And then we're also looking for funding for applications. And so ESEP, the Engineering for Climate Extremes partnership is the goal is to strengthen society's resilience to weather and climate extremes. Thank you. Very interesting. So the key takeaway here is whenever you go into an elevator, have your speech there. So this was actually an interesting exercise. I actually one time was in a class and we're supposed to make elevator speeches and I really was lousy at it, which was quite humbling. Which surprises me. Well, I don't know. But anyway, talk a little bit about the challenges here. There were a number of challenges. So first of all I'm a writer and so when I write I tend to, there are far too many words. Like I fall in love with the words and so this was maybe a three paragraph long speech originally. Secondly, I rely on the fact that I speak very quickly. And David, this is actually relatively slow for me. So David reminded me, okay slowly, slow it down, see if you can do it in a minute. And you know, with all the extra stuff it took me about, it was close to two minutes, even speaking quite quickly. So that was interesting. I think you got it down to a minute. Then I got it down to a minute. Speaking more slowly. Yeah, and it's interesting. By taking out the words, so you saw that that last phrase I really have a hard time with. I always have a hard time with that. So I need to translate it into my own words and I was able to do that with everything else. And that was one of the benefits of taking away some of the words. So with that, David's going to tell you. Well, yes, go ahead. You're bringing me back in. Yes, that's always a good practice. Yeah. So I also just want to say one more thing about Rachel's elevator speech, which I thought came out really well. Not to overanalyze it, but elements in it that were good for elevator speeches is kind of an overview of what the program is. Some specific examples of what it does. And this is universal, whether it's a particular research area or Rachel's case, a program that's more applied. Yeah. Third, kind of what are the societal implications? Fourth, an ask. I mean, you said looking for new partners and whatnot. We're looking for money. We're looking for money. So this is not an end. I don't mean to say when you do your elevator speeches, you're going to say, Hey, you know, can you spare a dollar or something like that? But even if your research is more esoteric, elements of, you know, why are you excited by it? Why is this important? If there's any kind of societal tie in, it's worth mentioning. If there's any kind of, here's what would make the research even better. So your ask might not be money. It might be, you know, I would love to find collaborators. I would love to find experts in this particular area to make connections. That sort of thing. So what we're going to do is we're going to give you five minutes. Okay. So basically you're going to create your own one minute elevator speeches. We're going to start with you just getting your heads around this, maybe jotting some notes down where you could try to explain your research.  Yeah, I was going to get to that. We fight all the time. And then so five minutes on that. And then we're going to ask you to, we'll tell you when the five minutes are up and then we'll ask you to pair off. Ideally with somebody you don't know and I don't know if you all know each other and you're sitting with friends but if you're bold enough to maybe find a stranger and you'll be kind of practicing these elevator speeches for about ten minutes. One of you will go, the other will provide feedback, the other will go, hopefully have enough time for each of you to try it twice. Did I, is that good? I bet that there won't be enough time to try twice. But yes, perfect summary. Okay. So should we start the five minutes now? Start the five minutes now. And then we'll give you a heads up. We have a couple questions. Yes. That's really excellent. Oh, that's a good question. Man, that's a good one. We need to think of that. I would, I would create your audience, whatever audience you want to direct it to. Yeah, who do you care about? Right. Yeah. And I would say that elevator speeches, the idea of this exercise is to explain your research succinctly and in, in relatively everyday terms that resonate with a wide degree of audiences. So yeah, it's a good idea to say this elevator speech is geared for this particular audience, but ideally it won't have to be reshaped too much to, to work for other audiences who are not specific in your field. Any other questions? Okay. So guys, you've got five minutes to just, I know this is a very compressed presentation, but five minutes to get some thoughts around an elevator speech. Sounds good. Yeah. Can you get the tie run? I actually can. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah, 11.41. So that was fun.  Yeah, cool. That's a good one. That's a good one, right? That's a good question. That was good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, as you said, it's amazing succinct. It's so ambide. I know. So we put a new question in here. I know. That was huge. His door was closed at the front. One here is closed, and the other is closed. I mean, that's the kind of, that's what I made for, where you have to do, you know, a cute, enthusiastic person who's got all the time you can help a little bit, and really get something out of it. It was, it was right, right? Like once a year, once in 18 months or so, all of a sudden, I look at it for my own personal, I mean, it's, it's great. Yeah. Sorry, but just working on your own, are they? Yeah, just working on your own, and then we're all, you think people know each other? Yeah, I'll also announce it. Go ahead, David. I think there is. Well, so everybody, just to clarify, we'll tell you when those five minutes are up. So for now, just working on your own to draw up those elevator speeches, and then we'll guide you to the next step. What? Maybe we'll be able to guide you? Yes. Rachel will guide you to the next step. You've got about another 30 seconds or so. We're slave drivers. Usually you are. Okay, let's try pairing off. So if you could find a partner again, ideally, somebody who you don't know, I know that could be hard.  One of you will give your elevator speech, then if the partner can give feedback, the partner goes, you give feedback, that kind of thing. So are we good? Okay.