And it's really rare for me to be allowed to introduce these two wonderful speakers in person. We usually just meet online. So it's a nice opportunity for us to be here all together today at the annual conference. And this session is called Developing Data Analytics for ETECH Support Planning. And Helen, Karen are going to be introducing themselves properly in just a moment. There's also a Q&A element, so this is a very interactive session as well. But for now, please do just put your hands together to give a warm welcome, and then we'll get underway. Thank you. Thank you for that welcome, and thank you for choosing our session to come to you this afternoon. So Karen and I are senior members of Imperial College Faculty of Natural Sciences ETECH Lab. I'm the data analyst within the lab. So I'm Helen Walkie. I'm Karen Cobley. I work as a learning design manager. We were just having a little chat about what we were doing 30 years ago, and I was studying here at Warwick and wearing things like green dot martens and men's M&S cardigans, neither of which I have any more to wear to the garlic dinner tomorrow. And Karen was talking about experience of ETECH from 30 years ago. What? That was much harder than it was. It was probably not much, but yeah, I was just thinking about gaming in Nintendo and things like that, so yeah. So at Imperial College, there are strategic initiatives to develop business analytics across the university for different functional areas, and education is just one of them, and also to embed a data culture within the university. So we're gonna talk a bit today about how we've translated that to our own ETECH function. So we are part of a faculty-based team. We have 11 or 11 and a half people. I'm strictly speaking at the moment. We support five academic departments who have 4,400 or so students, undergraduate and postgraduate taught across about 100 programs. And in the sphere of learning, teaching and assessment, there's been a lot of rapid change over recent years, and for us, that's been down to the reasons that are shown on the right-hand side of this slide. So some of it's pandemic, some of it is due to other things. And we're finding that there is a growing support still for ETECH, growing need for ETECH support. And we want to use business analytics, data analytics to help inform how we respond to that change in need. So when we kicked off this project, we, the first phase of this project, as we call it now, we thought we'll better off having some aims and knowing what our output's going to be. Some of it is obviously trying to address the needs from faculty and monitoring the support requests that were coming in to help us to respond to those queries or those requests. Also giving our team a better chance to prepare for those requests and adapting to the changing needs and the supports that were being asked for. And in that sense, providing the leadership that you should probably be giving in uncertain times to the ETECH team, having a bit of a transparent discussion around what's on kind of workload level. And in terms of college-wide or more strategic decision-making, financial decision-making, with our data analytics would really support every argument that we kind of have, which is, yeah. Yeah, you do that, because it doesn't want to work when I cross it. So Imperial College uses Microsoft tools like lots of other institutions in higher and further education. There are other similar tools out there. We, as Kieran said, this is our first phase of development of analytics and reporting within our ETECH lab. And we've chosen to work with Power BI as our business analytics tool. Outlook we use for our communication with departments. We use Excel for more static data sets so they could be con-separated value files, but we just describe them as Excel spreadsheets within the team. And SharePoint as a repository for storing those static data sources, so the stuff that's in spreadsheets. And we don't use a purpose-built ticketing system for our service requests, so we thought a good place to start would be developing reporting around those service requests. So what we use instead is a shared Outlook inbox. So we encourage staff in the academic departments to contact us that way and we respond to their requests that way. So with that shared inbox, we can make a connection, a data connection, from Power BI to an Outlook exchange server, pull in lots of data about those email communications, add in some other static data sets. So one of the things we have in Excel, for example, is a lookup table that matches staff email addresses to the academic department they come from. So we're not interested so much in the individual members of staff for our reporting. We want to know their department, so that's a way of getting rid of some identifiers. And then we organize all those data into tables and then again into a data model that allows us to build efficient reporting from those. So all that modeling is done within Power BI within Power Query that sits in Power BI. And then we're in a place where we can start building reports, report pages with visuals and things that are meaningful to us and going to be meaningful to some of our end users. And we're then able to share those reports some of the time just as static pages as PDFs and some of the time we will publish the Power BI apps so that end users can access them in the Power BI service which is the web service for Power BI and then they can really use them as they're meant to be used so interactively. And we've used this method because we had all this historical data sitting in our shared mailbox and it's allowed us to look back over a number of years and it's a method that we can use in the future as well. That's the great benefit of doing something in-house. You've got much more control over the data, how you clean the data and actually what parameters you use to evaluate the data as well. So I think compared to maybe something like a ticketing system that gives or piton holes you into certain parameters, you got kind of like the full picture. And yeah, that's one of the great benefits, the flexibility and the control of the data that you've got. Thanks, Kieran. So this slide shows an example of one of those pages from one of our reports that we've actually shared when it was used as a static page as a PDF. So this was used in some discussions with our faculty operating officer about resourcing. So it was giving a bit of evidence of the change in our service requests over time. So on the top left, it's just showing by academic year how the number of emails that we've received and responded to have increased, generally speaking, and then fallen off a little bit in academic year 21-22. On the top right, it shows that split by our academic departments so we can see for each department how it's changed over time. And on the bottom right, it's looking at proportions of service requests from each department. And this is just a sample of what can be produced. But the graph in the bottom right really highlights how understanding your context is important. So you can produce all the graphs you like, but you have to understand your context as well. So we know that the departments that have got a small share of that email traffic aren't necessarily the ones who don't use technology-enhanced learning very much or the ones that might be more self-sufficient in using technology-enhanced learning. It's all to do with the numbers of programs that they have within the departments and the numbers of staff who are responsible for communicating with us about their ed tech needs. So sometimes that's a smaller, dedicated group of staff within a department and sometimes it can be any of the teaching staff. Other aspects that we've investigated include looking at the text in the emails and doing text filters to pull out mentions of specific tools. So we can see whether there's a change over time in how much support requests relate to particular ed tech tools. We can also look at peak service requests, like peak volume of service requests throughout the academic year and look at things like emails in terms of the conversations that they were in. So we can see if an issue was a quick fix within a day, a couple of emails, or whether it took place over a longer period and with a bit of to and fro between us and the academic department. So we can categorize things that way as well. And we've done a bit of work looking at trends. So this is just an example of a couple of ways that trends could be looked at. On the left, it shows the percentage difference to the previous year. So it's another way of just seeing the differences year on year and where you've got increases and decreases. And on the right, there are two curves on that graph. So it's partly showing that you can put two pieces of information on the same graph with different axes and there are cases when that might be relevant. So this was looking at resources versus volume of email traffic. So don't worry too much about what the resources one says, but the email traffic, we then wanted to make some predictions into the future. So there are ways of easily doing that and using scatter plots in Excel and getting it to fit a trend line and it offers you different methods to do that. So there are ways of highlighting trends and making predictions that are quite easy to do. So we've spoken about the data. We also need to talk about the human aspects and very much skills. In terms of data management, we needed some upskilling. I mean, I haven't worked with data management particularly. I've run reports from different vendors and just done Power BI reports but didn't have to be responsible for building those kind of reports and didn't really understand the structures and the needs of that. And likewise, several people in the team, everyone thinks they use Excel, they're comfortable with Excel and they have their own ways of using Excel. So there was some kind of transition I think is still happening. People like color coding, for instance, that becomes completely useless information if you're going to import that into a Power BI situation. So there are things that practices ways of working that we had to look at and are looking at to support better data management. And then when it comes to the main tool we're using, Power BI, it was not a tool that I'd used before and not an old key ring, very much. So we've both developed skills in that area and we are now starting to do that with other team members as well. And we couldn't do that without a dedicated team who are with more expertise than us in our IT department. So we do have a business analytics group within IT and there is also a community of practice where we can ask each other questions and get answers. But IT need to do the bit when we want to publish apps and share them with users in an interactive fashion. We need pro Power BI licenses to do that and they have a whole sort of checklist to make sure that we're adhering to GDPR and data security and all the rest of it before we can actually publish an app. So we rely on them for that. We couldn't do it without them. And whatever we produce, we realize that actually our end users necessarily within our team or the education office don't necessarily understand our outputs. So we had to give some training or guidance around that as well because Power BI being interactive. Things like drilling down on data, understanding what it really stands for was something that we need to provide as well. And we foresee having to do that when we increase our engagement with our different stakeholders, whether it's academics or senior management. So end user training is going to be part of that cycle. Thank you. Moving on. Sorry. So this is the time for a little interactive session. We've talked a lot about data. So we wanted to hear from you guys really about what your data collection methods are. And I think it should come up here now. We've got a couple of Vbox questions there. So this is the first one. So we'd like to know what tools you use to monitor your own support requirements if you're supporting, if you have that supporting function. Shared inboxes. Yeah. Comments. So email and our service now. Yeah. Well, the ticketing systems, spreadsheet magic. I like that. It can be magical spreadsheets, depends how you set them up. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, so a lot of commonalities with the emails and ticketing systems of various sorts. Powerware I mentioned in there. And various other planning, or tools to aid planning. I think you send X somewhere, somewhere. Yeah, we moved away from that. So next question is how do you use the insights from data? If you want to answer that, we're going to keep this as an open question and you can come back to this during our talk as well. Yeah, so we'll come back and look at some of the responses you've put in towards the end. So. Trends. Nice. We'll leave you adding. Okay, I'll move on. So what are you doing? Sorry, can you help? Yeah, you will. Just looks different here, sorry. So the importance of data. So we talked about the importance of data, but there are elements that we also want to mention which kind of makes, gives us the full picture and also how data analytics can help us lead. We were thinking about it in three different levels really. So at team level, we're thinking that, you know, it creates that culture of visibility and also support in terms of capacity making and going beyond, you know, coping your day to day and actually have a chance to plan and think about your workload. So that's kind of like a team level. For academic departments, we believe that using data analytics, we provide insights to identify the areas they need more support with or could, you know, actually ask themselves why they don't need more support in that area and actually just mostly use as a conversation striker where you can talk about different level of tech support. In terms of college, we think that college-wide we support the wider evidence-based kind of culture that we have and research that is needed around data and yeah, supporting good decision-making which is kind of an excellent idea. So yeah, with leadership, decision-making is kind of similar things but operating at that level, we think, again, team will be well-supported in making those decisions. So it just gives them that empowerment to do that. Go ahead, backed up by data and for academic departments, again, it gives them a clear indication of where budgets are going, where resources are going and for college-wide, we think we're supporting, again, the influence of the data structures so they know how faculty statuses are with data and we can kind of inform each other what college data is required to support faculty and vice versa. So next one is, oh, there it is. This is another visual. This is another visual we've created for a slightly different purpose so Imperial has a, it's just to give you another example. Imperial has a focus at the moment on assessment load so one of the things that we've been doing to help departments in their decision-making is to visualize or provide them with a way of visualizing where their assessments fall. So this shows all the modules for a particular program in the spring term and where the numbers of assessments fall in time for those modules and because it's interactive, it will, oh, I didn't show you that bit. They could hover over if they had the interactive access and see some details of those three assessments that fall for a particular module in the month of March, for example. So those were some examples and as I said earlier, data in itself is seldom enough and there are limitations and therefore we rely heavily on other avenues and there'll be conversations, feedback from surveys, consultations, observations going into actual lecture halls and seeing how a techie's being used and workshop outputs. So I think hard data is only valid if it's placed in our context, as we said. There's so much that we know because we do it day in and day out and it's that translation we're trying to work on and developing in terms of communicating that outwards in combination with the feedback and everything else does kind of give us a richer picture, a better picture of what's actually going on and working forward, we're hoping to drill down more on tools. So we've worked on our service request, now we want to kind of know, yes, you know, 80% of the academics or actually 100% of the academics use Turnitin but are they using rubrics? Are they using peer marking? Are they, you know, really comfortable with the quick marks? We're hoping to drill down and what data does Turnitin already give us? How do we complement this with our own data? So that's kind of where we see our work going forward. Yeah, so definitely to develop that, bringing in other data sets with complementary information and build up a better picture. And then continue some of the work that we've been doing to like the heat maps of assessments to offer that as a service to our departments. And it also has the benefit of being very good when they're assessments that require support from us, from us clearly knowing what's happening when and that's, we've tended to be quite reactive, I think, within our team rather than proactive when we're thinking about when things fall. Understanding there's peaks in events and letting our team understand there's peaks in events as well just to have that more forward planning. But we feel we've scratched the surface and that's made a start on this so much more than we could do. So it's exciting for us to have worked on it and continue to do so. We'd like to thank a couple of our colleagues who've been heavily involved in this work along with us. So Ellis Taylor and Moira Sarsfield, who's the director of our tech lab. We've got a list of some relevant reading which will be useful when you get access to slides. But we'd like to thank you for listening and hand over to you to see your responses to our second question and any other questions that you have for us. Thank you very much. So I think we can still see the responses coming in. Do you want to pick these up first and then we'll switch over for general Q&A? Yeah, what stands out to you, Kiran? Produce support material and current topic questions, yeah. I think that's something we want to aim for as well. If there is something that's constantly coming up as a support need, maybe we need to look at the help guides that we already have in place. Are we lacking something? So yeah, that's a really good one, I think. Yeah, I think all of these are familiar to us in some way or another. So like we've just said, we've been fairly reactive to service requests in the past and we do want to map our demand a bit better and be more proactive in the future and developing those support materials and interventions as they're needed is also really important. Prediction improvement. Yeah. Yeah. Good improvement, all sorts of others. Thank you. That's really useful to see what you're all doing. Well, we have a few more minutes for final questions. So maybe if we could switch over to general Q&A and give you all an opportunity to raise any additional points so that we can have any questions or comments are also welcome. So we'll give you a couple of moments. I'm gonna just jump in with a first question. You mentioned at the very beginning, this was phase one or the current phase. So I'm very curious to hear where you're hoping to take this next. We were hoping we'd sort of said a bit about that at the end. So it's, there are lots of different avenues that we could go in. So within EdTech we're very interested in how we can use reports and data that we can get out of our tools. So we're discovering more and more that there are admin reports that we can't access that our IT department can access that tell us, give us more of an overview of how many modules are using the discussion tool, discussion board tool that we have at the university. And it's sort of, we want to work out the best way of setting up data pipelines so we can incorporate that information to complement what we already have through our service requests. But also this work around assessment load and making better visual reports for our team so that they're better prepared to think about what's coming up particularly in the turn ahead. Yeah, things like that. Okay, we've got quite a few questions coming up. I think we're gonna, and there is a couple of more technical ones and then there is a couple more sort of about culture change. So maybe if we start for one about the culture change about senior management, because I think that's something that I'm sure many people in the room are interested in. So the question is, what engagement do you get in the data from senior management or is it primarily used to inform your training and guidance approaches? That's a good question. Shall I start? I don't know if I can chip in, Karen. So we did, another driver for looking at reporting in the first place was so that we could have more informed discussions with our faculty management and heads of department because we have quite a devolved structure at Imperial. So a lot of the money sits in faculties and departments. It's not from the center. So we have to win them over and encourage them that they're receiving, ask them whether they're happy with the service that they're receiving from EdTech and whether we were asking them whether they wanted more of the same or they've got further developments to give or less or they're all, oh, yes, we're really happy. We want at least more of the same. But being able to show some graphs and give them some figures to go with that was really helpful. And having an evidence base and data-informed discussions is really good and we found our senior management have really appreciated that. I think no one was questioning in the sense if we're needed, but as you said, the funding structures are first. Some posts are linked to certain projects or certain departments and things like that. So I think it really gives everyone a bit of a transparent picture of how they are being supported. And I think that's one of, as you said, one of the drivers. So it was one of the reasons we kicked off the project to kind of back up what we were saying. It's not kind of enough for senior management to say, oh, the volume's increased three-fold. We actually needed to show that the volume has increased three-fold. Well, thank you. We have quite a lot of questions coming in. There is one, it's a little bit further down that we had around embedding the process so that this happens every year and making sure that you can then analyze kind of the trends. I think we're just getting that up on the screen. And hopefully, yes, this is the one. Thank you. So what has been the main challenges to embed this culture of data analysis within team to ensure the same collection happens year on year allowing trend analysis? Yeah, well, the beauty of looking at our service requests is that most of the data have just come from Outlook. So it's not required the staff to do anything differently. We just have these odd lookup tables that Kieran and I can look after to ensure that we get the information that we want. So from that point of view, looking at service requests will continue. We just, we have a refreshing pipeline of data. So that's easier. That's the flexibility we had. And we could go, so even if we didn't start collecting this data pre-COVID, we could go back. And that was kind of like the beauty of it all that we could actually go back and see pre-COVID levels during COVID and after. Was because we were kind of basing it on data that already existed in Outlook. But when it comes to, so one of the things we talked within the team about doing is having more progress trackers for things. And I guess it's in those circumstances where people are maybe using their color coding in spreadsheets, which works really well, as Kieran said, when it's just that one person or a couple of people who need to look at it. But if we're pulling data from different sources and wanting to produce tracking reports from different places and show, give them the same look, then they need to all be, what's the word I'm looking for? Formatted in a certain way. And that's the work in progress. So we've been able to show to our team how it's easier if something's set up a certain way and get them to then use those spreadsheets to make their own updates and refresh the data and see how that changes the reports. So it's gradually. Well, we had a recent away day where we actually are getting input from our staff members to see what they prefer as well. So thinking about creating maybe templates where we're also very conscious about people don't want to be tracking the work they're doing. They just want to do their work and we're thinking about how can we automate these processes as much as possible so it doesn't feel like an additional thing that someone's doing. But it's just part of your flow, of your workflow. If that's already there and that's what you do and it works for both purposes. So I think we're trying to be super clever. What was it? Magic spreadsheets. Yeah, we're trying to create those magic spreadsheets. That doesn't create more work for anyone but it helps us to create reports. Well, I'm afraid we're coming to the end of time. There are a lot of questions and comments and I hope that you continue to be engaging with Helen and with Kieran via Discord and online.  Thank you so much for sharing that with us today and please do give our authors a round of applause. Thank you.


So, the idea here with this project is that at least in Missouri, there are a lot of persimmons seedlings on whether it's farms or just property of any sort, in fence rows or in corners of big fields or in drainage areas, they tend to be naturally planted by livestock, I mean certainly by livestock, by wildlife. And so, the other thought was if you could graft those to improve varieties, you could create some value because while these native persimmons tend to be well adapted to Missouri, they tend to produce very small fruit, very seedy fruit, whereas the improved in varieties have much larger fruit and fewer seeds. Due to work on pecans and other species, we know that bark grafts probably should work on large seedlings, like two to four inch seedlings, but I couldn't find any work directly on persimmons. And then the other thesis, the other concept is that if you do that, you have an already established tree, it may be a 10 year tree, that now you put a desirable top growth on and you get much faster growth than you do when you start with a very small seedling. Next slide, next slide please, okay, thanks.  And that should reduce the damage to the initial tree or to the seedling you're using. And so the idea was to demonstrate you could actually do bark grafting, that I would document the survival and growth measurements and do a preliminary economic analysis on grafted seedlings already on your property versus going and purchasing new trees. By the way, I think both of those are important ways to produce persimmons. So it's not one or the other, it's just to confirm that you could use existing seedlings on your property and graft them and make them work. And then share findings with other growers, which I think is what we're doing today. Next slide please. Okay, I'm not going to spend time on this for lots of reasons, but the bark technique I use is called an arrowhead. It's very much used on pecans, and I think in my experience has been it works fine on persimmons. Next slide please.  I doubt that you can see the references I put on these slides, but we can provide references to if you want to actually look into this technique. Next slide. When you do the grafting, this is what it looks like after you have grafted, because this is about a two, two-and-a-half inch tree that I've cut off maybe two-and-a-half feet above the ground. You can see that there's no limbs, I've left no vegetative growth at all on this one. Sometimes I do.  This is like an hour after I did it. Next slide please. If everything works well in about a month or less, you're going to have, depending on how many buds you left on there, they're going to start to leaf out, and that's what's happening here. Sometimes a lot of people when you use a bark grafting technique will put two scions on each side, and I do that sometimes when you use a very large. This is about a five-inch tree, very big, and because I thought the success would be low because you're exposing so much tree tissue, I wouldn't have put one on each side. In this particular case, both of them sprouted, and that tree actually has done very well. Okay, next slide. So let me just stop here in the presentation. These were my thoughts after, so you do most of the grafting in May. So in June or July, I sat down and said, what did I learn so far? Well, the first thing I would suggest is because you're doing bark grafting, I would suggest you, if you're going to do this, that you get a bark lifter or a grafting knife with a built-in bark lifter in it. Because it's really important to be able to pry the bark away from the tree itself without tearing it, and that bark lifter really, really helps. I bought mine on Amazon for $7.50, not a big investment. In my case, because I'm not 25 years old, I found my back having trouble with bending over so much. A stool or chair makes a big difference. When you're doing bark grafting, as with any grafting, but especially with bark grafting, it's really important that you shape the scion to fit in the place you're putting it in the seedling. And if you're not real good with a pocket knife or a sharp knife, you might want to just practice on some twigs and some other non-important tree limbs to get comfortable with that. When you're all done with bark grafting on large diameter trees, one to four inches, it's really important that you cover up the exposed tissues for the first month or so. And I would suggest aluminum foil first, and then a plastic bag over the top of it. Some people use wax or grafting compound, and I've done that too. Everything you can do to keep that scion and the rootstock from drying out. And depending on your age or your genetics, tendonitis can happen in your wrist. It happened to me. Next one, please. Okay. So, again, this is just a picture to illustrate what I thought would be the case, which is when you graft a really vigorous, very small scion onto a tree that's already established. This is about an inch and a half tree here. And if you make a good connection, you are going to get terrific growth that first year. Way more growth than you would get on a one inch scion. And this is just a picture to demonstrate that. And that is not, I didn't pick out the best tree. I had many, many that had that much growth. I'm sorry to kind of go fast here, but I just want to make sure we stay on time. So I can tell you that bark grafting does work on persimmons. And this is just another example. And I love this picture because on that right, you can see, keep in mind that all I did was stick a little pencil or smaller size scion on in a little slit I made on each side of that two and a half inch tree. And this is probably taken in September. And that's how well they all fused together and became a pretty sturdy tree. So I can tell you the bark grafting works. Now I've got a bunch of data to prove it. But this slide, it just shows you what I want you to understand from this slide is that I did, I did this grafting in three different locations. Two on my Camden County farm and one on my Montau County farm. So I'm not saying this is research, but I did get a lot of, I didn't just graft a couple trees in my backyard. You'll see in a minute the number that I've done and how I split it up between sizes. The next slide has the summary, which is a better slide to talk from. OK, so this is the summary. So I broke broke up my work into four groups, those those seedlings that are less than an inch in diameter at about two and a half feet tall. Those that are one to two inches in diameter, those are two to three inches, those three to four and over four. So actually five groups. And what I learned is and you can see the number of trees that I grafted that year that in 2020, it was a busy spring for me. Covid had set in, so I had a lot of time and that worked out pretty well. You can see that it from one inch to three inches, the success rate is over 80%. So that means that eight out of 10 times in September of that year. The the graph that I made had a very. Healthy top growth and then the bigger ratings I took from one to five. You'll see they're similar. You could you could argue that the they're even a little bit stronger with with the larger seedlings and then the the amount of growth makes total sense and it demonstrates that the bigger the seedling is, the more growth you're going to get and then any over four inches, the percentage drops significantly. And I would not wreck. Well, I would only recommend those if you if you don't have any other choice or if you just want to experiment. But it does drop because you're just cutting a very large tree and leaving exposed to the elements. Next slide, please. OK, again, can't cover this in great detail, but I also use many, many different varieties.  Now I've done Lena three years in a row and I will tell you that for whatever reason, I don't have as much success grafting Lena as I do some of the others like I 94 or early golden. But these are for those of you who are familiar with persimmons, you will recognize these varieties for those of you who aren't.  But the first several you see there are American persimmon, American improved persimmons. And then the last three are Asians. Itchy and Saio are 100 percent Asian. And then the one below that is a is a hybrid.  And I'll talk a little bit about those at the end. Next slide, please. OK, again, just a very rough comparison and it makes sense. If you happen to have a three inch persimmon tree in a corner of your property, let's say you had 50 of them and you wanted to graft them and have fruit in the two or three years, you can. It's going to, you know, the scion probably won't cost you much. If anything, the the maintenance costs, what I mean by that is, you know, mulching it or keeping the weak and weak control there so that it doesn't get choked out or maybe protecting it from from wildlife. You might have eight dollars in in cost if you don't if you don't charge too much for labor. If you purchase a tree, it's going to cost at least 30 bucks, could cost as much as 80 bucks, depending on the size and the kind of seedling you're buying. Then you've got to plant it and then there's cost to maintain it. And so you're talking about, you know, eight dollars versus fifty dollars. Don't believe the absolute numbers here. That's just to give you an idea. Yes, you can save money by grafting trees. What is the disadvantage? Those trees aren't always going to be exactly where you want them. And so both of these ideas or approaches make sense if you're interested in producing persimmons. OK, this is again, this is a tree that I use bark grafting on in 2018. This picture was taken in September of 20. I think this is a Elmo variety. It's an American. I hope you can see the fruit on there and the color and the size.  But just an example of how quickly you can get fruit. Now, I don't want to mislead you. This was this was the exception. In other words, it was two years. I had a few that did this. Most take three to four years to have after you grafted to have very much production. OK, conclusions. You absolutely can use the bark technique and grab and cut off a very, you know, pretty big native seedling if you have it on your property and you can have a successful grafted persimmon tree. One to three inches is probably the sweet spot that I would recommend. So if you've got seedlings in that range, I think you can go right to it if you want to. My thought was that the extensive root system would would result in quicker growth or faster and better growth and early fruit production. And I believe that's true. There may be economic benefits. Again, I'm using this approach as opposed to purchasing trees. You're not misunderstanding me. I am not against purchasing improved varieties from from nurseries. But there's a place for both approaches. And there's a whole bunch of work on persimmon production that I'm interested in, like pruning, fertilization, varieties. So someone mentioned that persimmon would be important for you in the future. I'm good for that. I hope that's the case. If so, we still need a lot more, a lot more research and and more people trying it to understand better. OK, just some real quick pictures of some of the fruit that I've all this fruit you're going to see here was raised on my farm. Some of it is from those same trees I did in 20. Most of them are not. Most of them were trees I either bought or I grafted in 16, 17 or 18. On the left, you've got I-94, which is one of my favorite American varieties. It's red, it's large, it's tasty. Elmo is more orange right next to it. I like this picture on the right because it shows. You know, the real reason to use improved variety. So most native persimmons are going to be about the size of what you see there on the top left hand corner. And then celebrity is an example of a much bigger American variety. And then the two below it are Asian American hybrids, which are even a little bit bigger and sometimes don't have seeds. Next picture, please. This picture didn't. I like this picture because this is in the seat of my gator. And I just stopped at the tree and picked up these I-94s right off the ground. And I really like the contrast on the black seats, but it kind of got distorted a little bit. But the point is there's American persimmons you can use. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. Or you can also use Asians, either straight Asians or I would I would recommend Asian hybrids, which are, again, half Asian and half American. There's some examples of Nikita's gift is a gorgeous, large, red one. Zima Karma is about the same size, but but more orange. Rosayanka is maybe the most popular one around its orange, very productive. And that's an American celebrity, just to give an example. And there's some Zima Kermans. Again, all these are off my place. All these pictures were taken this fall. You know, again, we don't have time to go into the applications of persimmons, but we like to eat them fresh if we can. And I like to line the grandkids up and give them one and they eat them. And then we have a spitting contest. That may not be popular with everybody, but I kind of enjoy that part of it. But you can eat them fresh or you can dry them with the dehumidifier. You can make there's all kinds of baked goods you can make out of them. You can make smoothies. So there's a lot of applications. You can make wine from persimmon. OK, so I know I rushed, but I wanted to make sure I didn't use up any more time than I was allotted. And and maybe Tom, if there is time, we can we can handle questions. Yeah, I think we've got just a few minutes for questions if people have them. Anybody have questions here or in the chat? If you've got some out there, you can put them in the chat. You got one here.  Raccoons, poxons, deer. Yeah, in my case, everything is already. And that's really the point of this is that you've got animals who are moving around already established already. Genetics that like where you are, like I'm in Central Missouri, but wherever you are, if you've got persimmons growing naturally, these are these are rootstocks that like your soil and like your area. So no, there's nothing. These are all it all been planted by wildlife. I'm assuming using or putting down seeds from trees, nearby trees that have already been adapted to your property.


students also benefits all of our students and so we do see that within the guides of universal design there and that second question can you repeat that part again yeah that was about the participant group do you have a group of students that stand ready for studies and focus groups is that how is it organized or incentivized yes we do so the UX strategist at the University of Arizona Libraries Rebecca Blake a Senate I have developed something we called a participant pool which inspired by other university libraries that have that so this is a pool of students who do stand at the ready to participate in sort of lightweight UX or assessment studies and it is a worse word right now we're doing an audit of what does the diversity of that pool look like but we do have undergraduates graduate students across a variety of disciplines and we do not have them there tagged as tell eligible or not that could be a sort of an ethical consideration there so we do have them at the ready and that's who we've surveyed a little bit from that pool thank you so much it's got let's try again can you hear me now am I coming through yes okay so in what spaces do we see the continued discussion of values happening how much of this is in local institutions and how much is national organizations I think that's a great question from what I've seen a lot of it is at the local level so there are assessment teams or assessment departments that are developing their own local value statements to help guide their own practices so when they do encounter a situation that that is a moment of pause and ethical reflection they can turn to their own value set that they that they know is relevant for them and their context and so I think that's really powerful way to do this you know the ALA core values is a really high profile point of reference but you can even get started just just with yourself you can identify what values are important for you and what values do you want to bring into the world through your assessment practice and then just yeah I feel like you were in week two of my academic library of course when we do so very good all right so thank you all I want to thank our presenter and of course you our audience PowerPoint slides session recordings and papers will be made available on the conference website our next session will be held on Wednesday November 18th on the topic of assessment programs and organizational issues and with that we conclude have a good day everyone


In entertainment news now, the dress worn by Amy Winehouse during her final stage performance has sold more than $243,000 at a auction of items from her estate. The singer-songwriter wore the Hota main dress in Belgrade in June 2011. Among the four her deaths at the age of 27, it sold for 16 times its original estimate. More than $4 million was raised from about 800 items. All proceeds are going forward or towards the foundation her parents set up to help young people with addiction issues. Winehouse was one of the defining stars of her generation known for her soulful voice on songs she wrote such as Rehab, Back to Black, and Love is a Lose and Gain. She died from alcohol poisoning at her home in Camden, North London in July 2011.


OK, so today I would like to talk to you about how you can take the values that are already in your heart and your head and make them part of your work and how that can make your work better. So all of us have value systems that guide how we behave in the world. And they may be consciously chosen or unconscious values from our upbringing and our surroundings. And groups of people aren't any different, even if a larger organization has formal values or a formal mission. Informal values bubble up in a group of people who work together. Let's see if I can figure out. No. How do I make the notes smaller because I can't read them? There we go. Yes, there. OK, sorry, my bad. All right, so when you don't talk about your values, you can't know if they're what you all really want together. None of these people are talking about what they care about. And you can't tell if you're being true to them. And when you do talk about your values, you can make better decisions and help others understand your choices. So I want to share some ideas about uncovering, setting, and communicating your values. So but before I go on, my name is Elaine Nelson. And I work at the Evergreen State College. You may know us from such stereotypes as the hippie college or the hipster college. Or there was a piece earlier about nirvana and the birth of grunge and how that was in our norms. And I work on a small team of web folks. I wrangle back end code and words. Justin pictured here. Wrangles front end code and pictures. And if anything about this presentation looks awesome, it's because Justin worked on it. And Susan wrangles projects and people. And together we make Evergreen's public-facing website. So we went through a process a lot like this when I'm going to talk about about two and a half years ago. And we came up with these four core values. So user-focused, data-driven, simplified, and iterative. And so where did they come from? How did we decide? Why did we even bother with something like this? So the college, of course, has a mission statement. And it has principles. And it has all of these big fancy words, none of which are here. And if you work for an organization that's been around for a while, you probably have plenty of fancy words to choose from. But that wasn't what we were looking for. We were just trying to find some ways to manage our overwhelming to-do list. So we held a retreat. And retreat, we found a room that had comfortable places to sit and lots of whiteboards. And we picked a time of year when there weren't a lot of people around. So a college in between Christmas and New Year's, great. And what we meant to talk about was the next few months of work, what we were going to actually do. But we ended up talking about why we wanted to do things, what we would use to make decisions, and to explain them. We did this super by accident, totally ad hoc, but you don't have to. But that is a great place to start. So gather a small group of people who work on projects together. And find a place without mundane interruptions. And start talking. And then keep talking, even after you're done with your little retreat. We started with at least a half a dozen values, lots of nouns and adjectives. And realized that some of them didn't match. And some of them were duplicates. And so we narrowed it down to ones we could all say without even looking them up. And when we looked back at the whole process, we came up with some questions that you might want to consider as you work out your team's values. And here they are. Here are these ideas. So the first one I think of is the zero step. So what do you care about most in the work that you do? And then the other questions help the team bring together your personal values with what your work needs to be doing. So what will help the organization achieve its goals? What can you learn from things that went wrong? And what motivates your boss? So first of all, what do you value? And personally, I, whoa, that's a microphone. Hi. I care about using a certain amount of scientific thinking in my work. And that means that I want to have reasons for doing what we do. And I want to be able to experiment with things. And I also value making sites that are designed and written for real people who are complicated. Susan cares that users can do what they're there to do. She craves consistency and simplicity. And she wants her work to be sustainable over the long run. And her frequent quote, if it's better than what we've got now, then go. Justin wants design to get out of people's way to be invisible. But he also wants his work to be unique and fashionable. And so we talked about all of those things. But we also have a common belief in trying and learning. So being iterative underlies almost everything we do. So I'm missing some notes here. Hi. Oh, right.  They're not something that's imposed from on high. And so now that you've got that sense of yourself and your team members, you look outwards to what else is around you. And we came up, this was very much a collaborative process coming up with this presentation, some examples of other organizations, and some guesses that we made about what they value based on what we see of them. So you're asking, the next thing you might ask as you establish your core values is, what will help your organization achieve its goals? And so one of our inspirations has been the World Wide Web Consortium's Priority of Constituencies. And in fact, looking at the Priority of Constituencies was part of how we started talking about our core values. So who comes out on top when there's a conflict? Because in an organization that has many different stakeholders with conflicting goals and interests, they need something like this to give structure to decision making. Because they've put end users ahead of everything and theory after everything, we can guess at a value of utility, usefulness, standing behind that system. So oh, this has lots of extra animation that I didn't know about. Cool. So I'm just going to run through it because it's not critical to this. Oh, it's super slow. You can, for a commercial site like Hotel Tonight, we can see at least one of their values in their design, speed. You can see from the number of clicks from home to book that they care deeply about how quickly you can book a room. So that matches their business goal of getting just getting a person to a hotel room right now versus building a relationship or thinking ahead. So that's speed. Being user-focused and choosing the prospective student as our site's primary audience connects our decisions to the need of the college. Every piece of content has its user, and for our site as a whole, the most critical user is the prospective student. And so that connects our wish that the people be able to do what they want to do with the need of the college to recruit and retain students. So other values that might arise from this question could be actually found in those fancy words that nobody usually reads. What is your organization's mission or strategic plan? And which of those aspects speaks to your team and its daily work? If you don't have a larger organization's goals to connect to, what does your work need to do to be successful? So next, what can you learn from past mistakes? Before Wizards of the Coast, switching Dungeons and Dragons to a rule set with too much focus on grid combat and not enough character detail, open them up to competition on both the detail side and on the story side of role-playing games. The introduction of a new addition shows a rededication to a value of fidelity, rediscovering a field that entices back longtime players. While they may not say with words that they went in the wrong direction, the changes speak for themselves. So fidelity creates a streamlined game that new players can learn and old fans can love. So on our team, we've all three of us dealt with overly complicated systems and useless duplication, both at the college and in our previous work lives. So simplifying is a core value for us because none of us want to make that mistake again. I love this picture I spent in the morning searching for Rube Goldberg machines. They're fun.  What did you do wrong? Don't do that again. And finally, what motivates your boss? By this, we don't mean pandering to them. We mean it knowing what their values are in the same way that you know the rest of your team's values and find the common points. So that connection makes it easier for them to become an advocate for you when you're not there. And by a boss, that can mean whoever is next up the chain that wasn't in the room when you were all talking. So it might be a senior manager, a VP, member of a board of directors. So, and it could be that attention to craft is something that your boss cares about. For the chain mail makers and other creators who are part of the Lord of the Rings movies, dedication to craft was a shared value from the tiniest link of rubber to the arrangements of fast armies. So we get craft. Without giving away too much, we do work with people for whom numbers are particularly persuasive. So we too are fans of data, so being data-driven was an obvious core value. You don't necessarily figure out what your boss's values are by asking them outright.  You watch other people try to convince them and then see which arguments work. When you know what values you share, you can integrate those into your team. And so now you have your core values. As a team, you've all decided on them, and this is where you use them to filter your decisions and to have meaningful guidance under pressure. So I have a few examples for each of our team's values. When we redesigned our primary navigation, we didn't wanna hide links behind a hamburger menu, so there were only room for five things. But of course, everyone wants to be included, so we had to have a way to prioritize. When we looked at our old list of links and we asked questions about it, but not questions like, should this link be in the primary nav? Does it this link contain good content? Will a client be mad at us if we take their link out? Whoa, hold on. So those are ones that focus on the product or the needs of the content owners. They're not about the students. The kinds of questions we did ask, whoa, I went too far back. There we go. Does, do prospective students need this information? If not, who needs it? And how could that change its placement? And does our audience need info that's not currently available? And so those are focused on the user, not the product, the author, or the organization. And so in being user focused, we were able to more efficiently prioritize this massive amount of content and all of these content changes that we get on a daily basis. So when somebody approaches us about putting a link on the homepage, they have to concede that the needs of the prospective students, the user, outweigh their personal convenience, their ego, or some tiny slice of the site's audience. So that's one way we demonstrated. So here's another example. All of these content changes that write a new tagline, it turned into a committee debate, which is always terrible.  And so I suggested, well, actually Justin suggested, trying a split test to see how actual audiences would respond to the taglines, which of them would get more clicks? The one that was written by a marketing professional or the one that was written by the highest paid person in the room or which one? And so the marketing professional is the one at the top and everything else did quite a bit worse. And so the lesson, I guess, is to trust the professional but then verify. So we look to the data when we're unsure of the answers and the data can provide valuable insights into how well we're doing or where we could do better. And prospective students found the message compelling so we're tying our core values back to what brings value to the school as a whole. So earlier I mentioned how simplifying was a core value that came from past mistakes. So when prospective students come to a college website, they wanna know really quickly, what can I study? How much does it cost? How do I apply to it? And this information was scattered all over our site. Sometimes it was hidden. Can you get there from here? No. Sometimes it was duplicated and it didn't match up. And then there was a separate admission site that had its own navigation system and everything was out of date. No, that's not the right link.  So it was clear that we needed to simplify and we needed the site to stay simple over the long haul. So that was part of how we got to that core value. And so we found and consolidated all of these duplicate pieces of content and we removed things that made it more confusing and we made it clearer, we scheduled audits. And every time we simplify something, our users respond positively and when we do usability tests, people find things more easily. And then content owners find themselves having to do less work to keep their site up to date, which means they can focus on other things that they need to be doing. And finally, oh, yes, this. So an earlier team spent two years in a vacuum. This is iterate, an example of how we needed to iterate. It had spent two years creating this fancy, fancy admission site that had all these crazy sliders and when they launched it, it was two years behind all the design trends and it had taken so long to get out the door that it even wasn't what was needed and it had left behind the rest of the site without a plan to bring everything together. Well, it was better than what was there before. It made, this is me, it made learning about the college really hard for the audience we were trying to serve. There we go, nope. So for our next big update, we decided we weren't going to just keep it locked away in a tower with like, we were going to do it iteratively. So putting out little bits of a new site a little bit at a time. And so this is kind of an example of one of those pages. This is how it started. And then we're like, oh, let's tweak this piece and then let's tweak this piece. And so that happened gradually over time and we can continue to keep iterating and it makes it better. So we were able to get in fresh new pages in front of prospective students without worrying about it.  So that brings me to the last step, and I don't remember, which is communicating those core values. You have them on your team, you're doing them in practice, but you have to tell other people what they are too. And we gave several versions of a presentation about our work on the website that was kind of about the website, but it always included our core values and explained how they influenced our decisions. By presenting this to other staff, we made the process more clear to them and the openness built understanding and respect. And we also rounded up some guinea pigs so we could keep trying things. We invited a few of our clients whose sites were essential for recruiting prospective students. Some of them already trusted us and some of them we expected to be a little bit more pushback. But the temptation of getting in on the ground floor of a redesign was a great way to get some of them on board. And we made it clear that not everything was gonna go smoothly at first. So we tried things out on them. We iterated our values and our process on them together with them knowing what would happen and that created a portfolio of success stories. And the communication and the demonstration works hand in hand. The more we showed how our values worked, the easier it's been to get people to understand how our process works. By showing our wins to the senior staff and explaining the reasons why they worked, we've built trust and turned them into advocates for us. So we had VPs who were being our advocates. Our process for establishing victories and filters down to the staff and the base of advocates grows. And that means we get less angry emails in our inbox when big changes happen. And this bedrock is, this process is the bedrock for our success. We go back to it time and time again when we're approached about a change that we don't know how to handle. Like the email that you get that you start writing two sentences and then you just wanna start yelling at everybody, we know what our values are and we can ask ourselves how this thing that we're dealing with stacks up against our core values and make a decision from there. It's a big point of pride for us to be able to do that. And so we ask, is this good for the user? Will this get good results? Can we test it to see if it works? Is it just the right information? Does it make things more simple? And is it better than what we already have? Putting the core values into action won't stop someone from getting mad at you, but it creates a good starting point for dialogue. It's a conversation. And I love this slide. I didn't make this slide, but I love this slide.  Because with your val... Okay, let's just go back and appreciate Captain America guinea pig for a second. So with your values in place, you can better do your job. Unifies your direction, it supports your strategy. You have better relationships with your coworkers and you feel like you're being true to yourself. So determining the core values will help surface what's important to the team and you've seen some strategies about that. Demonstrating them will allow you to work with more integrity and show your coworkers how the core values inform your strategy and communications will set the expectations and bring more people over to your camp. So thank you so much for listening. You can find me on Twitter at E-Personae and on my blog at aleynelson.org. Thank you. Thank you.


Trini girl natural hi youtube you wonder why i'm coming to you stalking web i wanted to demonstrate the five met washington girl because a lot of people now seem to think that it's a myth so this is how i do washington girl and i need to do a really fast one so first this is my hair without any product in it and now i add my even so to do this i usually do like a rinse out conditional something really moisturizing because i you know i don't want until we drive their dry spots and stuff like that so the first step is just kind of working in your leaving and you want to work fast before your hair dries out so i'm kind of going to work fast just getting it on and then i'm going to work it in so and for this you can kind of the key which means that after you do the after you add the conditioner you can um you know relight your hair after that so oh by the way i'm using a new she sent it papaya rinse out conditioner so i never used it before but i can pretty much trust she said it will have the she said a conditioner that moisture and slip to it it is a little bit running like most of her condition now so that's why i'm like staring at my palm so that it doesn't like um run out just making sure i got some on the back on my ends for sure making sure i get some on my ends on the other side so i don't really section but i can't do my whole hair anyway without you know i wouldn't say sectioning but without doing it in two pieces let's say whether i section or i don't so now it's in so i'm just kind of squeezing it in if i need to re-wet it it actually does seem pretty okay without re-wetting it so i won't re-wet it so i'm just doing a little bit of raking it just lasts at the time because i might have the time there just in case to make sure and now you're seeing it live too this will be faster at it since i'm not editing the back of my hair let me make sure i got some in the back i can't guide it but just in case so that's it nice to leave in i just spray some aloe vera just some skipping a re-wet step because this aloe vera just can pretty much be the re-wet step next step you just plumb down a little bit of gel so again if it's a fast washing tool you don't want to spend time fighting with your gel so just use this cheap like get the job done you know gel it it's gonna just kind of slick down my hair without any fuss or mess should i get my edges and my crown for too much it now i need some more aloe vera juice because this gel these kind of gels to me just kind of suck all the brush out of your hair like eco-styler and stuff like that you right after dilute it or add something after so that's it re-out of the water now i'm just trying to do a quick re-true with the gel but it's a just so my last step is just to shake it out that's it i'm done so i did it in five minutes yay i wanted to show you kind of all the sides of a washing go like how quick it can be and the result when it's quick so it's nothing to be afraid of i would say let me freeze you from our long washing goes or just how long you take to do your washing go a thumbs up if you enjoyed it