Racism in America, guys, it strikes me, is the worst of its kind anywhere in the world.  But racism is different around the world, and I think it's worth us knowing this and talking about this as white people. Racism in America, it seems to me, is monolithic in nature, because it's completely complexion-based. I saw an example of this recently when I read something about a white woman in a city in California, and in her white middle-class suburb, she saw three black guys leaving a house across the street from her quite early in the morning. She called the cops, the cops came and arrested them.  Cops arrested them. Turns out they were using the house as an Airbnb, and leaving early to fly elsewhere. And turns out also, none of them were actually American. One was Canadian, one was French, one was Afro-Caribbean. It didn't matter to the white lady that they may be from a different background and nationality than what she assumed. It didn't matter. They're black equals called the cops. In Europe, racism is actually more nuanced and more geographical and nation-based. For instance, in France, you'd experience less racism as an African-American than you would as an African. In England, you'd experience more racism as a Pakistani than you would as an African-American. Because in Europe, we tend to be more racist towards people that come from nations that we feel threatened by for some particular reason that we feel threatened by them at that stage in our history. As I said, this isn't to minimize anyone's suffering that suffers any kind of racism, but it is to say something that makes us aware as white people that racism varies around the world. And I think it's good for us to educate ourselves about this and to realize that America therefore has a version of racism that is particularly insidious and entrenched and evil and deeply, deeply embedded in the white American psyche because of its monolithic, complexion-based nature. And I'm saying this to calm her, to keep this discussion alive amongst us as white people. Because as I said, this fades in our minds, but it will not and cannot fade for black people who are still shouting. It's still racism over here, guys, to us white people who may move on and forget that we must continue to have a voice and a part in all of this. If only to be curious and keep learning a bit every single day is what I keep appealing for to us all. Anyway, sending love and blessings to you all. Hope you all well in whatever you are doing, whatever you are in the world at this time. Love and greetings to you all. Thank you.


Thanks. So in line with the INCF shift towards standards and best practices, I just thought I'd like to share some work we've been doing in Australia to create a national standard for neuroimaging informatics. So this work came, was proposed in a project by the Australian National Imaging Facility, which is a sort of national body which through what a lot of the funding for infrastructure, imaging infrastructure in Australia comes through. And so there's a number of different nodes. Most sort of imaging centres in Australia will get funding through National Imaging Facility and so it's a good place where to sort of coordinate these kind of efforts. So in this project we had four universities who were contributing and looking at two MRI systems. So one is a small animal, sorry, yeah, small animal Brooker 9.4 MRI and the other was a human semen scourer just as two sort of starting points to begin this process. So kind of the aims of the project were to basically to give users the enough information so they could determine whether the data that they were, data in these repositories is fit for their purpose. And we also want to sort of future-proof this so that someone who wants to come back and use this data in 10 years time can come back and go well is this data of sufficient quality for depending on what I want to do with it. And so to do that we need to make sure we're storing the appropriate metadata and we've also sort of started to standardize some quality control insurance which is particularly important for the sort of small animal side of the project. And so yeah on top of that we by working together to come up with best practice hopefully we can improve the quality and reliability of the data that is being generated from our facilities and also through the project promote the fair principles and maximize the utility of the data. So the project, it was a fairly short project for like the the sort of scope that we're dealing with here so we're not saying that we've got the the final you know this is the way that everyone needs to do their acquire the data and store their data and you know keep all the provenance or anything but it's just sort of a starting point of framework with which we can sort of gradually sort of build up best practices within within the national imaging facility. So we have some documentation how to you know certify the data as meeting these standards some of the process we've documented some of the processes for acquiring the data and ingestion how we sort of store the data in these repositories and then we've sort of come up with two exemplar systems for both the human and the preclinical scanners that we're working with. So on the the certification of the data so again we're not trying to say that this data is of a particular quality we just want to say that there's enough metadata enough you know a link to quality control data so people can make up their own mind whether it's fit for their purpose. So we you know make sure that you know there's unique identifiers sort of tying the the data to the instruments involved cross-reference to quality control and then also again this is more sort of critical for this the small animal data which is typically less standardized than your clinical systems but so make sure that there's the always access to the raw data with all the acquisition protocols and so you can be you know you can do whatever you need to do with the data but then on the same on the other hand have conversions to open data format so it's as widely accessible as possible. On the sort of acquisition ingestion sort of procedure we were looking at sort of sort of saying that we need to have an automated process for this but then you know in some situations that's not possible so we as sort of a lowest common denominator we say well at least the the process needs to be documented but automated where possible. All the instruments that the data is collected from get registered at this central research data Australia website so you can know exactly the the model of the the instrument where the data was collected so again this is not so it's probably and at the moment the data is collected it's not such a big issue but if we're looking to store this data long-term then you know in 15-20 years time someone may not know whether this instrument that Mono's biomedical imaging was of one particular model or the other so it's really trying to make sure this data is as useful long into the future as possible and you again have a regular poly control schedule and do some sort of very basic quality assurance just to make sure the data is complete and it's reconstructable it's not there weren't any sort of errors in the ingestion process so that also look to formalize the way that the data is stored so we have a this idea of a data repository service not really a not a particular repository because we want to be flexible just say if new technology comes along you want to switch your repository to something else but this service is guaranteed for 10 years so this was part of the project and it kind of forced us to sort of go and get some from all the different universities go and sort of say look we've got this part of this project we want to make sure this data is you know preserved into the future it was sort of a good good way to have that discussion with the university and get the funding guaranteed for a longer period wanted to make sure that we have institutional authentication so we know we have sort of a link to a real world person for all the data that was collected and yes sort of identify whether the data in the repository is doesn't meet all these the metadata standards that we were setting and so once we'd sort of set up this sort of documentation again it was just we're just looking at the sort of bare bones to start off with but then hopefully over time this sort of matures into something more useful so we looked at the each node looked at the setup that they had and did a self-assessment against the this core trust seal certification which is set up by the world data system and the data seal of approval organizations and so it's basically just a checklist of about 10 or 12 points we get to sort of see how your data repository matches up with these you know this certification which is basically based on the fair principle so it's a good process to go through and explicitly find out where the weaknesses in your repository or system may be and yeah again like look to sort of formalize commitments for guarantees around the data access so so yeah we worked on two separate exemplars for each modality mainly because a lot of the data that comes from the clinical is in daikon format and so a sort of specialized repository such as X that makes a lot of sense whereas from the pre-clinical side of thing you have it's much less sort of structured so so yeah we basically we worked from X that just because it was a good starting point and we've you know we worked we developed some plugins to allow open ID connect access or authentication with X that so we can hook into this national authentication federation worked on ways to sort of upload the raw data and then you developed a few pipe simple pipelines for extracting quality control metrics and quality assurance and yeah likewise for the pre-clinical exemplar we use this use the different repository this my TARDIS which was developed at Monash University is a bit more general and again you worked on some posts in just filters for data validation and QC analysis but I'm so I suppose one of the the key products of this project which I think will have some real benefit to other nodes within the national facility is we developed a docker compose scripts for both these exemplars so those who aren't familiar with docker compose it's it's sort of a script which instantiates a bunch of docker containers and links them all together and so you're with like once one command you install docker on your system install docker compose and with like one or two commands you can pull up a data repository like X that example and so yeah we're able to pull out very simple sort of one-page set of instructions to you know go to the relevant sort of so the Australian research data commons which has virtual machines and data storage so how to apply for that storage and then install docker on it and run it and get up and running with the data repository so sort of like a starter kit that other nodes which maybe don't have this kind of level of informatics support can adopt very easily and yet the the benefit one of the benefits within our you know context is that if everyone's sort of using the same configuration then we can sort of help assist each other a lot better and sort of sort of unify out the sort of national imaging facility even though the nodes are quite simple yeah so just in future like as I said there's just a basic framework at the moment but I'm where you look to really sort of push the ability to publish data yeah work on some getting the identification into the ingest procedures and making it very simple for users to publish the data and then you maybe and also look at some sort of more in-depth quality control and assurance as well so yeah so this was a joint project between University of Western Australia Monash University University Queensland and University of New South Wales and it was involved thanks let's say you wanted to be interoperable with the bits of format and your infrastructure how much work and what kind of work do you think you should be done well I suppose you could be I mean you could be using the tools which well hopefully there will be some easy ways to export from XNAT to bids for example and then I mean there will be should be a easy to create a pipeline wrapped around QTConf maybe or something like that which could then export to bids and then users can download and run bids apps on it something it shouldn't be too much work but yeah I think it does yeah yeah I think it's it's quite good I mean we worked with the Australian Access Federation on there and to have open ID support so basically means anyone with a institutional log in Australia can log into our into it any of the repositories I mean you can also then hook up to Google or something like that which you know simplifies the from a maintenance point of view at least and you know is a nice way for people to access these repositories


Feel welcome to be here for the next one hour and a half with us in this conversation. We welcome you to our Apeiro conversation. A future skills Apeiro conversation with Jilly Selman. It's a relaxed afternoon. If we would sit together, the chimney fire would probably be on now. And we all would have a glass of something champagne, I would say today. And why champagne? I will tell you later. And we would clean glasses and would engage into a discussion into a conversation, an Apeiro conversation. It's a relaxed, it's a chilly conversation. It's really something to explore, you know, to explore and to engage and to expand and to really go in all directions. That's exactly what we want to do today. And my name is Ulf Elas. I'm from a university here in the southwest of Germany, a large university. And with me, my colleague Laura. Hello everybody. We are the two hosts today and we have our guest here. Our guest, which is Jilly Selman. And I think I do not really need to introduce Jilly in a long way, actually, because Jilly is very, very well known in our scene here in our community of the European distance and e-learning network. We are very, very happy to have you here, Jilly. Jilly, you have been innovating e-learning for, I don't know, actually, as long as I can think in my professional life, I was able to, you know, follow the different developments and steps and models and ideas you were bringing out, actually. I was starting with the activities, the five-stage model, which many of us might be familiar with, which were really groundbreaking ideas, groundbreaking in that way, that I just recently, together with Laura, actually, discussed how can we actually, you know, in this pandemic now, when we always do online teaching in our university, how can we work on this issue of digital social presence, you know, to be digitally social present with everybody and feel presence. And I came back to this five-stage model again, with the socialization of the different stages into technology, but also into the learning environment and into the learning situation and become autonomous and so on. So you can see, Jilly, that was very influential. And I also remember very, very much, I think, that was when you had just founded the Beyond Digital, Beyond Distance Alliance, that was. It might be, I don't know, 15, 18, 20 years ago. When I was in a workshop, I think it might even be, it might have even been an Eden conference somewhere in Spain.  You had such a spirit together with this group that back then, when I was a young research associate and doing my PhD, I was always thinking, ah, later on, when I am, you know, also having my research group, if ever that happens, but later on, I would really also like to have such a team and be such a, being such a collaborative spirit and it was impressing me very, very much. So I think that, of course, you have, you are now, I think, working on e-learning still with educational alchemists that is your company now, which is, in a way, somehow all around the work you did on what you call the Carpe diem learning design methodology, pedagogical transformation, online teaching and all these things. You have been also, I was making now a list also when I prepared for this today, you have been at the University of Liverpool, you were in Australia for some time, I think six or eight years, Provost Chancellor of University of Western Australia, Provost Chancellor of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Executive Director, Professor of Learning Futures at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland and more and more and more. So we are very, very happy to have you here together with us, really, really happy, you're a good friend, I would consider you a good friend and it's really nice to be with you in this time. And folks, I also have to tell you something else. Today is a very, very special day also because it is actually Jilly's birthday today. So, and that's why we would like to invite you all, you all here in our Appelro Workshop conversation to share with us, or with Jilly, your birthday wishes actually in the chat. So today it's Jilly's birthday and you can share your birthday wishes in the chat. We have also prepared a little candle for you and we're going to play you a little music also. So that's for you, Jilly. Thank you very much and thank you everyone for all the birthday wishes. I'm a great believer in celebrating and it's great to celebrate it with all of you. So it's made it very special for me. Thank you very much and amazing. Fantastic. So happy, happy birthday. Thank you. I appreciate everyone. So we also want to ask you, our participants who you are from, what is your professional field and for that, I don't know, Laura, do we manage to stage our Mentimeter exercise here? Yes, I think so. So welcome everybody from my side as well and I'm also very happy about this celebratory beginning of it. So I think that's a spirit we should take for the ongoing conversation. Keep it relaxed, keep it nice and keep it happy and celebratory. Happy birthday, Jilly. Thank you very much, Laura. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen with a little Mentimeter link for you. One, we have a link that you can access, of course, that I'm sharing in the chat for now. And I'm also sharing a QR code where maybe it's easier for you to access it. Just one second. Here we go. So you can take the QR code to access our little Mentimeter or you can also go to menti.com and take the voting code or you go to this menti.com and then this number or you take the link that I typed in the chat. What we are asking you to fill in this, we want to get to know you a little bit better. It's very nice that you already shared what your name is and where you are from and we are very happy to have you all here for this separable conversation. And now we want to find out what field you are in actually. So what your profession is. So we are in the field of online education here also fire education, et cetera. So I put in some professions and try to find the one that suits most for what you actually do. Maybe it's not perfectly possible then you can click other. And if it's something completely different, we're happy to have it shared in the chat as well because that might be interesting for all of us as well. Okay, we can see already that we have some professors and lecturers some working in higher education administration awaiting a little bit for some others to share. Okay, we have a lot of others. So I must have forgotten some categories. So we're happy to have this shared in the chat supporting communities of practice. That's Jill, welcome Jill. Okay, everybody else is invited to fill in the mentee. Maybe those who are saying other would like to say what their profession is. I guess we've got some learning designers and learning technologists here maybe. So we have Maline and Ed Tech. Thank you for sharing. I thought that would be a category probably, Laura. For people who follow me anyway. Dirk's having trouble. Okay, typing again. mentee.com and the code. You need to put the coding guys. Or I can share a form in the QR code again. Maybe that works. It worked when I used it on my mobile phone. Otherwise you can just use the chat. We're happy to there as well. But we're quite mixed, aren't we? Yeah, right. Okay, so there's also a second question that we will ask you to fill in in our mentee meter. Because today we are talking about the subject of future skills. That's a subject that Ulf and I are working with a lot. And that's also a subject that we are very excited to talk to you, Julie, about. And future skills. We have many ideas about them. And there are many skills that we can talk about for designing a better future for coping with the challenges of tomorrow. And as it will start. And now I see that more people are joining the mentee. So we have PhD student researcher working in higher education administration. So very mixed, as you said, Julie. Yeah, I'm proposing the next slide to you, which will be that we ask you to fill in a future skill that from your point of view will be very, very important for graduates of tomorrow to master the challenges of the future. We won't propose a list or anything. So just whatever pops into your mind, what do you think will be very important as a future skill for the challenges of tomorrow? You can type in and we will see in a word cloud, your ideas and proposals. Here we go. Here we have it coming. And the bigger the letters are, the more people have typed in this exact wording. Creativity right in the middle now. Yeah. But we also see, yeah, collaboration, social skills, courage. I like that one as well. Yeah. It takes some courage, doesn't it? An empathy. Nice. If the empathy thing, those of you are interested in that, on my YouTube channel, there's a whole section about the five-stage model and empathy. I'm in conversation with someone from Interpol who's been doing empathy training with some of the L and D participants. So if you're interested in that area, I've sort of mapped on views of empathy onto the five-stage model. So you might want to have a look at that. Did you say that's a conversation with somebody from Interpol? Yeah. I've been working with them doing some training. Oh, really? Okay. So in the police work? Well, yes, they're sort of policemen, but mainly digital, I think. But she is the, you know, she's the digital L and D person. So she's training the trainers and was interested in the five-stage model. So I just thought, oh, I could put it. I could put the YouTube. It's just education. Our commission, if you put that into the chat. That's really, that sounds really fascinating. Yeah. But if you put that into YouTube, it will come up. There's about, there's quite a lot on the activities and five-stage model and people have used it there. But if you look for the one on digital empathy as well. Thank you. So we have creativity in the middle here, collaboration, communication, empathy, courage, entrepreneurial, digital collaboration, flexibility, imagination, digital skills, adaptability, critical thinking, cognitive ability, aha, okay. Yeah, not much really, is it? Technology, self-reflection, adaptability. We'll do it tomorrow. Yeah, fantastic. We have worked on this issue of tools trying to make a set of profiles in the last few years. And the last thing which we did actually is we were trying to identify all studies which have been published on future skills in the last, I think six years. In Germany, first of all, we are now doing that for the wider world, but now we've done it for German-speaking countries, let's say, and we identified 13 studies on future skills, McKinsey and Kinlo, Ernest and Young, and some higher education research institutions and so on. And we were then creating an inventory of all the future skills which they had actually proposed. These are 252 different future skills. And then we were trying to cluster them and we were trying to find a good framework how to deal with this really huge diversity. 93 of them are in the field of digital skills. And what we found is that it was really actually possible and that's what I wanted to share with everybody for introduction. That's here, I don't know if it's showing now. It's showing up now. Oh, no, we've got your drive now. There it is. We were actually able to allocate, to sort them into these different categories. These are 17 different categories. That's our, what we call future skills, profiles, map. And you can click on these different things here. You find that at nextskills.org, digital literacy is one of the issues. And we were seeing that we could allocate all the 93 digital future skills which we found in the other studies. Here, for example, to this category, to this profile. Decision competence, ambiguity competence, ethical competence. These are all the different skill profiles. We call them skill profiles which we have done research on. And we believe very much that for higher education, this is now the next big thing, the big challenge to see how actually can we better and become better in supporting students in developing this competence. We also think that from, let's say, a purely educational point of view, that's not rocket science. And we believe that we have all the models in place, actually, which we need. We don't need to develop completely new didactics or new learning scenarios. Of course, it's always good to be creative in learning scenario design. But we somehow feel that higher education, also other fields of education, other sectors, are not really making the step towards future skills. And we wonder why that is actually happening. We were, of course, thinking about, yeah, we need a culture change. We need new models and symbols and future visions. But somehow, yeah, we are currently struggling with this issue. And that's a little bit the stage on which now we would like to have a conversation together with you, Jenny. And I'm stopping now my screen sharing here because we don't want to get into a slight PowerPoint war. We want to actually... I don't have any say you can put yours up as appropriate. Yeah, and I think war is also not a good... I think there's so much on my website, everyone now. So I've still got the gilliesammon.com one, which has got mostly research and publications on. But there's also the Education Alchemist one as well, which has got a lot of other stuff on. And then, as I say, there's also the YouTube channel. So almost anything is, if I refer to, unless I invent something new today, in which case this will be the reference. That's also already a future way, at least, to share everything in the open and to find your way in the open. We are just recently actually having an initiative where we try to educate teachers to deal with open education. And one thing was to have a conversation on how can teachers actually guide learners to be good and knowledgeable and competent to find their ways in the open space to become autonomous learners. I think that's quite an art. I'd like to know the answer to that, actually. Yeah, we do. Actually, before we go on to you asking me things, can I ask you something? Please. Your 17 profiles, which are great. Do you think any of them, as opposed to thinking about them as curriculum or skills to be acquired, do you think any of them are more likely to be acquired depending on the mode of learning that's used to acquire them? So rather than sort of aiming for the skills, have you looked at all about the relationship to whether it's done with high quality online or whether people need to be face-to-face or all the other combinations of hybrid and blend and mobile that we could avoid talking about right now? But whether there is a kind of another matrix or grouping, does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I think, I mean, we are experimenting with different things there now. Of course, you can play all the active learning modes good to develop many of these skills, research-based learning, problem-based learning, to become autonomous, self-reflected and so on. So this is all important, I think. What we are doing actually now, more and more is that in the courses in our universities, we are presenting students these skills up front and we're discussing it with them. And we are asking them, which of these skills do you feel already super familiar with and which skills do you think there is still room for improvement and development? And can you create a plan for you so that throughout the things we are doing now in our seminar or course or lecture, you can always have a focus on this. And sometimes we will ask you questions. So think about your skill plan. How does it relate currently to what we are doing here? So that's in a way to put learners on a pathway in which they understand, wow, I have a responsibility here to become the person which is driving my learning. And it's the ultimate in metacognition too, isn't it? And the classic thing that, unless they actually are able to be aware of how they're learning as well as what they're learning, then they're always going to sort of be in the wind of where they go. I was just thinking as well when you asked Julie that in the last two years, we did a lot of interviews with students about how they perceive what skills they have maybe learned in the past few years doing the remote emergency teaching and they all very much talked about self-competences or like self-content, like self-organization, etc. So they at least reflected a lot on them. They also said that they perceived that they were very, very important that also if they didn't feel like they were very developed individually yet that they had to struggle a lot in this time. So that's something that was very much perceived at least. That's interesting. Because ultimately the thing is, and this is some of the research I've been doing in the last year, is how much the actual place that you're in structures the educational experience. And it's almost subliminal. And it's kind of the first time someone explained it to me, it was like a blinding flash of the obvious, you know, that so much of what we do in a university setting or even in a training room if we're talking about, you know, training or other forms of employment, but certainly in a university, you know, we've got a thousand years in Europe of the building structure in our behavior and therefore our expectations of learning. So I have sort of super sympathy with those academics that, you know, say, well, the only way is to go back to how we were. I'm not complying with that in any way, but I have sympathy.  And when I tell them that you can do all this online, you can get equivalents online, you can actually do a lot of it better online, shock horror. Then, you know, I say, but it will take you a little longer, and you'll have to do it a little differently. And that's where the block comes. Oh, I don't have time. I don't have time to do it differently. I have to do it the way I've learned and I've been taught. And so I think it, I have, and I think it is a lot to do with, you know, you're walking, the lecture starts within minutes. If we're doing group work, they, you know, you can put them into groups in seconds, can't you? Because that doesn't work online. You can go around yourself and see what's going on and get a feel for it. Of course you can do that online, but it takes up more time. And so I don't think we should underestimate, it's not just a preference for face to face. It's to do with something about our whole psyche is expecting certain kinds of behavior. And when I've explained this to people, they stop saying, well, everything would be all right if only they'd turn their camera on. And all the things I've heard numerous times over the pandemic, it's not about that at all. It's about understanding the really quite deep psychological changes that people are going through and their expectations. But that's why, well, that wasn't really about what I was asking. It was really whether, you know, certain modes of learning going to promote, but I get what you're saying on that. So the only thing I would say that when I first started doing a lot of the futures, but which was back in Leicester off with the beyond distance research line and the media zoo and all that sort of thing, we had some really quite nice funded projects there on creating academic futures and so on. Can't seem to get any funding for that kind of thing these days, but we did then. And what we found then is we thought that if only we could get to the students, they would tell us what they wanted in the future. And it really, really didn't work. They wanted more or better of what they'd got. They didn't have this vision. And I think that we've got a bit of a different responsibility in this to get beyond this kind of expectation, you know. And at one point, you know, I can remember a group of medical students, really smart students who were certainly seeing the future for medicine changing in front of their eyes. But when I said, well, how do you want to learn? How do you want to be assessed differently? And so on rather than see one do one, which has been the tradition forever. They said, well, you're the professor. Julie, I was supposed to know this kind of stuff.  Why are you asking us? I don't know. So it has to be collaborative. It has to be, you know, multiple perspectives to start to identify some sort of viable pathway. And Julie, wouldn't you say that that actually it starts? I think this is really an interesting conversation and totally different than we thought to lead you in there. But wouldn't you say it starts actually at the very day when we are enrolling, our students are enrolling to our universities and they are presented with a curriculum which has defined 28 modules for the next three and a half or a bachelor program. And basically they can from now for the next two years tell you exactly on which day they learn what. Wouldn't what you are saying, wouldn't that the consequence be actually that we have invites students to develop their own curriculum in order to, you know, to change this behavior, to break this cycle, this vicious cycle somehow. Yeah, because that's what we do ourselves throughout. I mean, we do it ourselves as lifelong learners, as academics, don't we? We're constantly curious. And that's really, I mean, overarching all your fantastic portfolios and schools and understanding that we have at that is really the need to be curious, isn't it? I mean, when we were in complete lockdown in the UK, my two granddaughters who live nearby, I wasn't allowed to see them nor them me for several months. And both their parents, both full-time working professionals were working from home. So like thousands of millions of others, it was chaos.  The school was sending out this syllabus curriculum that they were supposed to work through, you know. So one of the things that I did with my partner was said, look, we'll take them on Zoom for an hour a day which would just give you a little bit of a chance to do something else or sort of survive the day. My younger granddaughter, her name is Sophia, she looks exactly like me. She's very blue-eyed and blonde. The other one doesn't, but she's very blue-eyed and blonde. And she's spent her whole life going around being princesses, sparkly things. I mean, that's what she did. And she's very horsey as well. So she's quite athletic, rides horses and so on. And I'd got this syllabus, which was so boring, I couldn't tell you. And I'm sure it was fine when the teacher was teaching it, you know what I mean? So I sat down and I thought, what can I do? I mean, in 10 years' time, she's going to be in your university, you know. And you know, what can I do to help prepare her to be? So I thought I would turn her into a researcher. So I did things like she was seven, but it was enough. And I taught her to ask good questions. I taught that anything you know starts with good questions. And I taught her the basis of scientific method, really. And it's so hilarious now to you as she still thinks like that. And I'm very happy to report that she no longer wishes to be a princess. She's now going to be a paleontologist. So that's okay. And I tell you what we did, we did the periodic table. The first thing, you know, rather than flashcards at each reading or whatever, we did flashcards with the periodic table. So she can now, she sits there sort of answering all the quiz answers, you know. But what I'm saying is that you can think differently about this, but the child herself would not have been able to do it. But I just took that opportunity, sort of the chance to opportunity. The other thing I should report that you can teach for your olds to read entirely through five minutes a day on Zoom. And that was her sister, but that's another story. I'm going to go off the track. No, no, no, no. It's exactly, you know, now this is exactly the time where we all would reach to our glass and would reflect for a minute on what has been said and then continue in a different road. That's exactly the idea. But I would like to make a point there. And the point is you talked about this behavior, which is such a big heavy tradition in universities. We talked about how we not have students participating in what they do and how actually it is not very, you know, we don't need to wonder actually why they are not more active. I once was doing a workshop that was 10 years ago for one full day with 30 or 40 participants in a conference. We were making a thought experiment and this thought experiment was about imagine a university without grades. What would happen actually?  They would only come if they're interested. And why would they stay there? They would only stay there if they're interested in learning. And suddenly you have to rethink what we do in universities or in other education institutions probably as well from this perspective of learning as an activity which is originating in the interest and the motivation of the individual person. Aha, interesting. And when you are now talking about your granddaughter for example or I'm talking about this workshop now, it seems all very logical to us as a community but when we go tomorrow into our universities we find a totally different reality. Totally different reality. I wonder from your experience now, you know, really looking tens and tens of years into this whole issue always being the person actually on the forefront, you know, as chancellor, vice chancellor, pro-vice chancellor, the famous researcher, professor in Europe with your model stuff. What is your impression? What is a good way to break this, to move somehow? I just wanted to comment on the, you know, getting people started on things. I mean, what you had was just a very good question which was different from any question that had been asked before in your workshop. And the activities framework when I was researching that, which some people will be familiar with, that starts off once you've identified the purpose which of course is a basic design tool as you need to know why you're doing something and what you want the outcome to be. But after that, we always start with a spark. So it's a spark to start the activity, a spark to start the dialogue. And it's been interesting, we've done loads of the activities workshops during the pandemic period and a lot of people have been introduced to it for the first time. And I'd say that idea of spark, as opposed to delivering everything the student needs to know which is what our temptation is to do that. A spark just to start the thinking going has probably been the key pedagogical difference that's changed people's minds. I mean, it is a whole framework as you know but it's fairly easy to adopt. So many people in feedback said to me once you'd explained the spark to me I thought completely differently about it. So it could be a good question because we've always known but it could be something completely different and most of the time I encourage people to use open educational resources not something that they themselves have created but something that's already out there possibly imperfect, possibly not invented by you but just something to start the dialogue going. So what you actually asked me though wasn't that it was it was about the good it was about well I had to think about some of what you might ask me and it's very true that I've been around quite a long time and I have been worked in different countries and I've worked with different disciplines and then probably in the last 20 years or so I've had leadership positions of various kinds and so technically I'm supposed to be influential. Exactly. Yeah, right. Right, so I thought I would just do a very quick run through of kind of one thing that I mean I sat down this morning and I thought of the one thing I wanted to tell you about some of these jobs that I've done in that time because actually they're complex adaptive systems and there's no one thing I mean if there was we'd all know it by now wouldn't we? We would know it by now and I promise you we wouldn't be keeping it secret but they would have got it out of the spine now but you know it's a complex adaptive system and it's also layered so it's everything that we do I mean I think of it as concentric circles it's everything that we do as individuals in our own teaching the workshops we run you know this kind of thing when we engage with the community then there's in the institution there's the next layer out and this by the way implies to employers as well I mean I've got a London Development Specialist in Education Alchemist that helps me constantly to think a bit differently from that perspective so there's the next layer out which might which might be our discipline because as academics that sort of drives us or it might be our department and then we've got the faculty, we've got the university and then we've got the country context and then we've got the world and all the things that are happening sort of globally and most of those come inwards and influence us and we've got limited ways of influencing the other way so I just wanted to say that before I told you what they were but think of it as these kind of how can I influence, how can I start and of course you've always got to say well if I do this as a project exactly as you've done with your future skills work which has been going on for a long time and is constantly developing now and constantly influencing I think that you need to work out how can you then sustain and build and that's also a clear message we need to give to our students so we're giving you a start in this but look for ways in which your cognition will build towards your aim so anyway, shall I have a go? I've got seven of these and you can tell me whether they make any sense everyone so I started off at the UK Open University which probably a lot of you will know was the most fantastic innovation in the UK. It was quite a political thing at the start of it it was founded in 1970 so it's over 50 years old now it was the first to use the term openness and of course there's the Fern University and others in Germany and there's been about 40 universities around the world modelled on it now but it was openness in the sense that it wasn't that there weren't grades because there were but you didn't have to have anything other than a credit card to get in which meant that the teaching was completely open and it was considered the University of the Second Chance and there's all sorts of stories about it I myself, I'm a product of that I definitely wasn't born with any advantage and did my first Open University degree and then stayed onto PhD but what's the one thing I've learnt from that it's another whole webinar about talking about what else we could learn from it not the least that if you allow things to become too embedded however innovative they are at the beginning then they're very very difficult to change as the external environment changes which is a tragedy really but that's not the thing I was going to offer from that it was the idea of equivalence the understanding so long as the outcome is at least equivalent and often actually there are emergent properties as well regardless of the mode of whether you had the admission qualifications, how you learnt how long it took, how it was organised all those sorts of things actually in the end don't matter as long as the outcome was equivalent to the more traditional mode or any other mode or any other place and I think as I've gone through all the design work that I now do I'm going to put an equivalent sort of emblazoned on my forehead to have a cat with equivalence on which I put on a very sound so that's the one thing I'd say to you if you're being challenged yourself or you're trying to influence others say that we promise that at least the outcome will be the same so that's the one thing that's influenced me from there and an example of that that comes right up to date then if you look on my website on the PEAP, the Peer Enhanced E-Placements it's a massive piece of work I've been doing with a colleague in the allied health area where due to the pandemic that people couldn't complete their degrees or couldn't complete go on from one year to the next because there simply weren't places in the health service for them and how we managed to put that online and it's absolutely gone viral this model now so if you're interested in that I would also be interested in anyone who'd like to try outside the health area so you can either look at E-Placements.net or you'll find it on my website so that's the idea of equivalence because there with health we were stuck with professional bodies who, well, it's life and death if you can't train health professionals unless they've got the person in front of them actually, yes you can so that was what I got from the OU I think this is like you described it it was a revolution in times it is still a revolution and I think also I myself have tried to design for my own university some kind of ways how we can offer pathways into the university which are based on this idea of equivalence and it is really, really difficult if you do not have this kind of a system like the Open University was presenting it as a model and it's still really difficult so higher education is really still very, very exclusive and when we are talking about the seamless pathways between the institution the educational sectors we are not yet there at all and when we did the research on future skills it was always associated with asking for example we did expert interviews and daily studies we were always asking them and the experts the issue which constantly came up was not just that the skills the skill profiles were defined and discussed and so on but it was constantly also the idea in the room students in the future will probably have a very different student life they will for example not start in university one and graduate in university one but they will start in university one their studies and then they probably will have a multi institutional pathway and then the question is how do you take with you the things you have learned and present it to the next institution and to the next institution and to the next institution and still have a situation in which you can progress and which you can stick so to speak all these things together to not just they should look at the AU because they still are not any entry requirements so I mean that's one answer by their actions they will be known won't they would you like another one you mentioned the university of Leicester for those who are not familiar with it it's sort of a middle sized science and technology university in the middle of England Leicester I think about the furthest away from the coast it's a very multicultural place absolutely fantastic place and I loved living there for the six years that I was there it was a really fantastic city really great place and I mean again I thought of at least a dozen things I could tell you and Alph's already mentioned about the research alliance it gave me the opportunity to truly develop a real team based approach to transformation but I think there it was really the leadership the vice chancellor who recruited me was called Sir Bob Burgess unfortunately very recently a couple of weeks ago he passed away rather too early he was a great leader in the UK and he freely admitted when he recruited me he had not the slightest idea of how to introduce digital and that he was recruited me to find out how we might be able to do this and I think throughout when you've got a very senior leader like that there's two ways they can do it they can either say this is the outcome that I want and I'll support you and these are the ways I want to do it and I have been in lots of interviews like that and I've said good luck thank you very much but some people will need that won't they you know we'll need that clarity or there's others that say I really don't know how to do this but I'm prepared to support you to try and given very few parameters and we I think all we really agreed there is that we wanted to increase capability from academics to you know do their best thing and deliver it and one was a guy called Professor John Fothergill those of you who are going to have a look at my YouTube channel look for John's talk on how he really didn't believe a thing about this silly business but over 10 years he discovered that using activities he could get better results than the lectures he had been doing before so he's told that whole story going back over a long time and he's interviewed on my channel so capability from individuals but also capacity to actually change what the institution does and any of the strategists out there I use entirely resource based strategy so this is what the university is really good at and what it can do that other people can't easily copy now there's a danger in that because we all think that our little course actually is the best thing but it's the idea of working out what you're really good at that you can scale up and offer to the world and when you're using resource based strategies what do you mean was that well it's built on the university's strengths rather than a strategic like a porterish view of oh this is what the market wants and therefore we must change ourselves to meet it you and I and probably everybody else here know what happens when you try and get universities to do that you know quite a few decades go by and eventually it's lost in the midst of times and they still haven't met what the market need was which is changing so it's the idea of really being strong about what you're good at and being realistic about what you're good at and it often means partnering with employers you know to identify sort of future skills exactly as you have done and that's what Leicester was really really good at and it took up in the medical area for example in the science area things that it was good at that it applied to digital whereas up until then we're talking about beginning of this century about twenty two thousand and four people thought oh yeah online is okay but it's for the discursive subjects or you know it's for social science and arts and it's you know maybe a bit of law you know but nobody thought about the hard end science which is what Leicester had a medicine and so on but I think there it's the leadership saying I trust you have a go at it just come and tell me if you need me to open doors and that's exactly what happened there and it was a transformational experience and it enabled us to get research to do R&D along with actually scaling up so the Carpe Diem learning design we did lots of them and developed that but we also had research and evidence programs running along one question directly to this story which you just told and relating that also to this issue of future skills when you are going to back then 2004 you said when you were going to the faculty and you were saying okay this is something we would like to try to work out the digital teaching learning environment this probably is very similar when we today go to faculty and tell them now we have a tradition of knowledge transfer to our students and now we would like to change into thinking about future skills which is different and I think that can be compared very well what was your experience what worked to convince them I think at the time we would do an awful lot of work on the Carpe Diem framework which starts off with a vision now for everyone if you don't have a strong vision your transformation is never going to work you have to have everybody on board with it but you have to have a strong vision even if it is wrong you really do need to have a strong vision going forward and it was at the time as well when we were really researching Carpe Diem to get all the frameworks in place that we still use just as much now and our first part of it was in his or her future environment and we still do this and we work on the time scale that the faculty or the university wants to work on and I work with a visual artist who develops an image of what they are talking about so for example if he was here now he would be constantly sketching and sketching and ultimately develop something with all the interactions, the climate but right in the middle of it would be the graduate in his or her future environment so I can think of many there are some on my website if you want to have a look at them always the graduate in the middle there is just one that I remember we were working on an MBA for horse racing at Liverpool yes they have a specialist MBA of course they have got the entry race track and actually horse racing anyone who doesn't know is a major industry worldwide and there are all sorts of jobs in it they are facing digital futures and all sorts of things anyway the only time where I didn't get the student in the middle of the rich picture was that one I got the horse in the middle the middle of the rich picture with a big heart around it anyway but normally the student or sometimes in health you get the patient in the middle that means the vision is real in the publishing, what do you think these models like these quarters of change and so on models to use well, yeah, okay as I say I think having a framework to work for is a good thing I don't think they're sufficiently contextualised you'd have to be pretty confident to make sure that they work for you and for me they take too long I prefer that the idea of a concentric circle lots and lots of sparks which will then ripple out and influence others with a very strong vision for the overall university we also do quite a lot of imaging on the rising star for the university where they really want to go because we found certainly well, most western countries and to a certain extent others as well because they've done quite a bit of work middle and far east that everyone was saying we're going to be a global university now they were all saying exactly the same thing there was nothing that distinguished them so we do tend to push people a little bit more for a resource based vision of what they're good at can you tell us an experience where you would say this was a case where it really did not at all work there was so much resistance it didn't work at all did you have this kind of experience as well no I can't think of anything where it really didn't that doesn't mean to say they weren't individual failures of adoption but I think probably the most challenging one I had was at the University of Western Australia which is in Perth in Western Australia if anyone has ever been there it's just the most beautiful campus on earth so if you get offered a job there take it it is gorgeous and but it's quite remote I think it's believed it's the most remote city from other cities and I think there's six universities in Western Australia which is the biggest western chunk of Australia and the actual city is quite small surrounded by bush land and all that sort of thing and acquired a few problems with traditional the idea of Aboriginal knowledge is very very different from what we think of Western scientific knowledge some real challenges to traditional universities this gorgeous campus which had been built a long time ago which looked like Stanford you know gold colour brick and archways and it was a long was swan river with dolphins anyway you get the idea it was lovely had a lovely time there was there for three years and also there had no trouble recruiting students absolutely no trouble recruiting students it was something like you know one five students for every place I mean it was mad really and UWA was the top university in the state and everybody wanted to go there and also all the governance both of the state and the university they were all alumni okay so just imagine how embedded kilometre long beautiful campus and somebody like me said oh we're going to go online and we're going to address the world and we're going to do all this and so on so if that's not resistant so I don't know what is however I did have a deputy vice chancellor who sort of said I won't name him but who said have a go you know have a go he's a bit of money and he was super supportive he enabled me to take one of these heritage buildings and turn it into a flat space for teaching the only flat space on the campus for teaching with flexible chairs and all that sort of thing and to create we actually won awards for this building because we created a heritage building that we then used for what was the Centre for Learning Futures and it was dedicated to that but it was doing the regular things we had a Carpe Diem studio we had research and innovation we had 30 ways of supporting academics to research into their own teaching we just threw everything lots and lots and lots and lots of small things at it we had the futures observatory for local employers which were mainly mining quite a lot of very big high tech stuff and we had constant events in there which were with the local community and with the employers and in that time we did 330 Carpe Diem workshops some of them were programmes with all the vision in some of them were very practical storyboarding for modules and we had a team of people to help them build them so it was 330 events literally thousands of modules and in that time we moved the university about all these multiple nobody went in and said you're going to change you're going to form you but in all those little things that we did when I went there it's called the group of eight in Australia I don't know what the equivalence is in Germany and other countries but it's like the Russell group in the UK that tend to be traditional research universities with campuses and so on as the group of eight the evaluation of teaching they were at the bottom of the UWA of the group of eight not in other things and when I left there only three years later they were second for evaluation of teaching so was that a failure it wasn't a failure he's a massive strategy and that you all need to come on board with it I just didn't do that it's true that I used to get professors hiding behind the wonderful trees in the campus if they saw me coming and interestingly actually changing the landscape in which we operated by developing people started to say can I come we did a massive redevelopment a lot of the other things started to happen across the campus and we did start to create this ripple effect and we had projects on sort of learning analytics and all the things that they'd never even touched before so that was really a drip drip drip and then a cascade approach which is a question which is coming to my mind when I listen to you you are talking about this I was wondering what is actually the underlying idea of successful learning or learning at all within your framework how do you how would you describe that I do teach just two frameworks within it which you would consider to be pedagogical one is the five stage model which is still going strong and the other one is activities I don't tend to teach very much about the research behind them I just refer people to that because it's there if they want to but it has six stages so it's the vision in part so you've got purposeful design brief storyboarding which is quite transformational for most people the idea that you design once and then you can deliver it many many times and I'm now doing a lot of work on the delivery part so I've got a new workshop on E-modrating which has brought the matrix of E-modrating right up to date for the post-pandemic world because I've now got lots of people who've done their design work and want to optimise their teaching number two is storyboarding number three is what we call prototyping people to pick parts of their storyboard and then use the utility's framework to try it out and that's super popular and again you can see the dawn breaking as they start to do this that there is a different way over the horizon and then we allow a lot of time for collaborative work and designers with the subject librarians and so on and then they end up with an action plan who's actually going to do what which is new for a lot of people so that's the basis of it so it's not really saying this is the way you should do it but we do give the five social model of nativities so it's good at showing people how to do storyboarding now and that's got a lot and it's got equivalence it's got authentic assessment in it that means basically that you are actually not starting from a point where you are saying listen we need to think about a different world and in this different world there's lots of change and if we only focus on knowledge then the students will have in three years they probably will not be able to use this knowledge anymore because it's already outdated and how can we enable them to develop competencies rather than just knowledge attitudes, values and so on so that's actually not the way you're going about do this together have a go at this and it's also very quick because you know the main reason people always tell you I don't have any time to do this and that's a tragedy because all universities should be allowing time for innovation and change but we know in workloads that's a serious problem it's every country in the world that I've worked with so Carpe Diem sees the day so we used to do it in a long one day workshop right starting about 8 o'clock in the morning going on until people sort of were falling asleep over their storyboards but you know whereas we digitalized it because of the pandemic and we now do half a day on vision in and design brief and then we do half days on the rest of it so it's a similar amount of time in total but we take up to about 20 modules in one go and we use something called Miro do you know the Miro platform we use that with all our own designs on and we also I suppose online they don't get quite the same way of going to be able to walk around all the storyboards and comment on other people and that sort of thing but we encourage them to do that locally in between the times but that means basically you you are not really working on education objectives also they are working on it they are objectives it's their objectives and in a way you are providing the framework but what's the real innovation in there that's what the power to the learner or I don't know we would tend to have purposeful framework around it I mean if you do storyboarding and all the facilities in that it does completely to a learner journey and a learner pathway so we give advice on that activities is the spark to start the activity between them so there are a range of subtle things that go in there and you will get some people for example who start here I can't imagine not doing it the way I have done it for the last 30 years and you will get them to move to there where they will have a few activities and then you will get some people obviously further along that will move all the way but you do also get some people doing massive rainbow leaps as well and becoming major fans I have just put this Irish guy called Pep I have just done an interview with him and I have put it on my YouTube channel and he discovered activities by chance and he teaches AI and robotics so it's not an obvious one and he is talking on there about how it has been transformational for his teaching the innovation is in there but it is done subtly and collaboratively and I think more acceptably Laura do we have questions from the audience actually because that was our plan to also the audience if they have questions no we don't have questions yet I just typed it in there was one earlier I can't remember where it was now but Jilly I have one question because listening to you it's very fascinating because you've done so much work which was about change and transformation which was always about new ideas and change and I remember talking to students in our podcast conversations in the beginning of the pandemic a bit overwhelmed but also excited and curious about everything and after this time of two years going on I felt like there was some fatigue of them as well of the whole experience and also of the constant need to change and also a feeling of the pressure because they realize this might not be the last challenge for us in the future we will need to change the whole time and that's why we're talking about future skills the whole time and I wonder is there a way to not get into the mode of fatigue and maybe fear but to get more into the mode of curiosity and courage that I hear from what you are sharing with us I have a lot of sympathy for them don't you it's us as well isn't it absolutely I think I have also other granddaughters who were invested during this I've seen it very firsthand as well how difficult it's been for undergraduates I don't think it's been quite the same for post-graduates and for working students who were grappling with the non-contact world in a different sort of way but I think if we move to sort of quality learning especially using the five stage model which gradually builds communities of practice really totally and absolutely addresses that learning is not an isolated activity that needs to be done with and for others and I think also and I didn't say to just now with story building it's really good to have both synchronous and asynchronous activities so it needs to be very carefully planned but so it's spread out during the week and students do have a clear plan of what they're expected to do by when and some of it is synchronous and some of it is asynchronous that also has the huge advantage that if God forbid we go back to entirely online or people want to go entirely online then anything you're currently doing face to face can move back fairly easily into the plan but I do think that this recognizing that things take longer online that they need carefully planned that recognize this organizational lifestyle that the students are going to have to acquire for their future skills reasons if not for any other and as life skills really as well and dealing with families and health care and all the hundred and one other things that we're doing this way as well I think they will gradually start to acquire those skills I get the fatigue but that's not a reason to revert we've got to use it as an opportunity to do new things to build our best opportunity in the last 1000 years the last question I have is a very modern one released the recent days what do you think about hybrid settings I think it's a bit of a cop out really yeah don't you I prefer I think when we're story building we prefer to blend because it's better to have different experiences throughout the week in that sense but I think what they're talking about hybrid is sort of old block here and a block there aren't they and again if it's sensitively and intelligently and coherently designed so everyone knows what's expected of them fine but if it's just well we really want to do it this way but you've got to do some online then it's not going to work so I think we have a question here from somebody from Ronald yeah quite a long one yeah it's about the five stage model I can read it to you and it's about the challenge he is having when using the five stage model to keep the students in the kind of synchronous learning models specifically in open education students fall behind and then they are not all in the same space it often feels that we are going backwards and forwards and it takes a long time to get all on the same space it can be done but it is not easy so it's a common so is this about the amount of time it takes to go through the model I didn't quite understand is the question I want to speak I don't know if you can we don't know really I think it's it's a question if the students are in the open if they are learning autonomously it's a risk that they are not developing all the same right I mean from the point of view of the five stage model it's assuming groups of students are working together it's not a model to use to develop activity it's a future I mean there are things that you should know about doing that but that isn't what it is it is intended to go for socialising students so they understand something about how to work with others particularly how to work with others remotely and they'll tend to go from actually what you might call contributing but really still being in pursuit of their own goals but if you get it right to collaborating which is where they will be able to develop joint goals and make multiple contributions to an outcome yeah sorry no I just as Anu Radha was also now asking about the five stage model she's asking where she can learn more about it and I think it's on your website yeah I'll put the website in here and I think it's just Laura do you have still a takeaway activity for everybody because I just looked at the time we are time is flying somehow it's just three minutes left in our session and I think we still wanted to do some kind of takeaway exercise how do we do that actually first of all I would like to re-share this one that we had before because I was fascinated with you said Julie that it really is about social learning as well and when we first collected the important future skills for tomorrow's graduates we had not only creativity but we really had the social communication collaboration skills so we can really find that here but for summing up a little bit also what your personal takeaways are from this session conversation that really got a lot of directions and ideas and inspiration of course we think that you all reflected at the same time what does it actually mean for me this whole story of how to induce change how to induce transformation how to accompany it and what does it mean for myself for my teaching for my learning experience etc so we want to ask you what is your takeaway in transforming future higher education and what do you take from that conversation it can be as before it can be one word it can be a couple of words that you can type into the mentee it is the same link that I shared before and you can also take mentee.com and use this code 1001-5137 and I'm also sharing the QR code and we look forward to your personal takeaways for the future of higher education so I think things are starting to pop up with knowledge eagerness I like that one Ah, use the five-stage model Very practical takeaways as well Train the teachers with knowledge eagerness Yes, digital skills, yes, yes So while we are waiting here I think I would like to thank you very much Jilly for this, you know, this is such a rare occasion that just time for conversation about experiences often we meet and then we have our slide set but you just talk about it and I really felt this to be very, very, very wonderful really wonderful and thank you, thank you for that thank you for agreeing to just open your treasure chest of Well maybe we should do it more often Keep on your birthday Yeah, it's not my birthday every day Yeah, it's not my birthday every day So some more things that were provided by your supporting teachers is a big one Well, again, I was going to talk about that but there's quite a lot about the development I do is called E-modrating and there's got a lot on my website and supporting teachers I don't know very much about supplier ethics but another one I had was when I was working at Swinburne I worked on a massive private public partnership so there's a story to tell about that that would be probably a good one to talk about another time about relationships between universities and partners You know, whether that is the future Thank you Thank you very, very much It can also take away is that you're a very good spirit to share your experience with your work and I think that's also something you can take away from that I'm living across the street there is a big church standing always, every hour the bells are sounding and now they're sounding to say it's 6 o'clock Our time is over now Good evening and Julie you we wish you a good I'm going off to family birthday party Thank you very much Thanks for the song Enjoy also the rest of the Eden or the open education There are more sessions tomorrow and the next day Have a good time Good luck and stay healthy and see you in some other context Thank you very much


The re-education camps, what we used to know as daily re-education camps, were in existence before the construction of this massive interment camps that the Chinese government built since late 2016. Based on various reports, the camps are still in the process of being upgraded and expanded as we speak. Late last year, two credible reports were published, one by Australian think tank and the Reuters. It states that the expansion rate of these camps in less than 20-month period was 465%. The area of expansion is equivalent of 140 soccer fields. And just outside of the regional capital, Rimchi, based on BBC, is in the process of building world's largest prison camp. So there's no end in sight as we speak on these camps.


Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is podcast episode number 185 tonight We're talking about happiness and joy and when you might reasonably be able to expect those things to come back And what that process looks like during recovery because I know many of you are asking the question Why can't I feel happy? Why can't I experience joy? Is it ever going to come back? That's what we're gonna talk about in this episode So I am drew lince a lot of creator and host of the anxious truth And if you are new here, if this is your first episode this podcast is all about everything anxiety and anxiety recovery So if you're dealing with panic attacks panic disorder agoraphobia OCD health anxiety social anxiety This is the place we got you covered here.  I appreciate your continued support. I'm glad you're here, too. Before we get going with today's episode I just want to remind you that this episode of the anxious truth is brought to you by me Because this is more than just a podcast There's a bunch of other stuff that goes with it including these three books that are up over my left shoulder if you're watching the on video I have written three books that anxiety and anxiety recovery and by all accounts the many many thousands of people who read them all seem To love them and feel that they are very useful So if you'd like to know more about the books I have written and you don't know about them already You can head on over to my website at the anxious truth calm and check them out If you have one or more of those books and you are digging them and you haven't done this Maybe take a minute and write me a review on Amazon because it really helps me out And I appreciate that. Thank you all. So let's get into this episode. We're gonna talk about happiness Enjoy and when can I feel happy again? I can't feel happy. When is that gonna come back for me? And I understand that because I was in the grips of that too So when I was in the midst of the worst of my anxiety way back in maybe 2007 like that time 2006 2007 2008. I was working with a therapist for a little while. I loved her She was so tremendously helpful for me. I owe her a debt I will never be able to repay and I want to tell you a little bit of a story to illustrate how I Experienced this problem and this question of why can I feel happy? So I was in a session with my therapist one day and this was a thing that that had been really stalking me this problem of Not being able to feel happy and I brought it up to her and and you know, I said listen I have a problem here because aside from everything else that's going on I seem to have lost the ability to be happy. I can't feel happy I cannot experience joy.  I cannot feel joy So this is freaking me out and it really was a I don't mean to make light of it It was really really weighing on me in a big way. I thought that I was broken I thought that there was really something wrong and that somehow this anxiety had turned off a switch And I wasn't sure if the happy switch was ever gonna turn back on So she like I said, she was wonderful and she said, okay, I get it. You're clearly in distress over this which I was Now I could feel all the other emotions because I was starting to get a little choked up in her in her office talking about that Because I truly felt that I was broken. She said, okay, so let's work this through. She said Tell me how you got here today and I'm like she really liked threw me on that one When she asked that excuse me how to cough she asked her tell me how you got here today and I said, okay What is this got to do with any she goes just tell me how you got to my office today? I said, I drove here like I always do. Where is this going? And she said okay, tell me three things that you like about the car that you drove here today to see me and She must have seen the look on my face because like I did not in any way understand Why we were having this particular conversation It made no sense to me like I was in trouble and she was asking me about my car Which was the last thing on my mind and she said just go with it Just give me three things give me the first three things that pop in off your head that you like about the car that you drove here And it was in the middle of the winter. It was pretty cold winter that year and I said, I don't know the seats I have heat I have heated seats. That was nice And she said, okay, it's really cold out, right? I'm like, yeah, it's really cold She goes in the seats are heat so keep the seats have heat so keeps you wrong.  Where is this going and she said you got in your car and a cold day And you turned on the heat in the seats and it made you feel warm and you like that. I said, yes I like that she goes that's happiness and I I remember just sitting back. I was sitting on her sofa I know stereotypical you're on the therapist sofa, but I was sitting on the sofa I wasn't laying on the sofa and I just sat back and I looked there and I'm like what and she said That's happiness like you were happy because your butt was warm and she made a little joke and we chuckled a little bit I said, that's happy and she said, what do you think happy is? And and honestly she kind of backed me into a corner there and she made me confront my Expectations which were a little bit distorted. I said, well, you know, like I'm looking at my kids I'm looking at my girls my daughters and like I should be Experiencing these way the joy like joy just happiness and she goes. Yeah, I know I know what you think you should be experiencing But you know, that's not the only form of happy, you know, and I'm like, holy cow. You're right She blew my mind She literally blew my mind in that moment and it was such a turning point for me in terms of that that particular Problem of being worried about my emotions and not being able to feel joy and things like that because that is really pressing on me So she said let's finish this exercise. I want you to make a list of anything that makes you happy I don't care if you write it on an any index card or a piece of paper You keep it on my phone or whatever it was. It doesn't matter and I did I was I was keeping it on my phone I had the original iPhone back then by the way. So and yes, I had the notes You know, I was keeping a note on the iPhone And we wrote down five or six things that were silly like that I don't know. I like pizza like, you know, I like the seeds in my car I like classic rock music and she said, okay So when you feel that you are unable to experience happiness One thing that you can do sometimes will be to just go to that list Just use the list look at the list for a second and think oh, yeah Those things do bring me enjoyment enjoyment enjoyment as a form of happiness And she explained to me that happiness exists on a spectrum and that the default state for human beings is not Nirvana like if you're watching on video, I got my hands way up here like our happiness our default state for happy is not at the Super level 10 happy. It's just not and I have lost sight of that So I often talk about anxiety being a great magnifier and distorter, right? And distorts things that twist things it magnifies things and yes, that's exactly what my anxiety was doing for me It had twisted and distorted and like Irrationalized my view of what happiness was I expected happiness to be this Spiritual experience when in reality We can have those experiences as human beings certainly and we do in our lives from time to time But that's not the default state of happiness and that's not the only form of happiness So my therapist and that they really really helped me put that into perspective now I so struggled with it because you can't just reason with an anxious mind, but it did help me a lot to Understand that nirvana like extreme unbridled joy Even when like looking at our children or our partners or whatever the glory of nature is not Guaranteed nor is it to be expected nor is it the default for people So if you are in a situation and that lesson has stuck with me to this day And by the way that list was on every phone. I have ever owned since then including the one I have right now I'm never gonna delete that list I never look at it anymore, but it's very meaningful to me So I hang on to it and that might be an exercise that you want to try it was really helpful for me Give it a shot. It might help you. It's just a reminder. So if you are in that situation where you are feeling That you cannot conjure up joy and I hear the word joy a lot with this question I cannot experience joy. There's no joy in my life. I can't be joyful or sometimes it's expressed as I can't I can't find gratitude I can't be grateful. I can't feel happiness. I cannot conjure happiness gratitude Gratefulness joy. I can't none of those things and I have to remind people all the time. Well, you know, that's not the default state for a human being a default state for The for a human being is just neutral like most of the time if you think about a time that you were not in an anxious state You're not dealing with these anxiety problems. You most of the time were neutral You actually didn't have an opinion about how you felt because how you felt was not the most important thing in the room All the time like it might be for you now So right now how you feel is the most important thing in the room all the time Right, you're constantly judging it and you're constantly Striving to not feel bad and you think that the opposite of feeling bad is feeling joyful But it's not the opposite of feeling bad is not knowing how you feel to be totally honest with you as Somebody who has gone down the recovery path and is now on the other side of this and it's had the privilege of talking to so many people Who have gone through this the consensus is the opposite of feeling bad is not feeling great The opposite of feeling bad is feeling contented or just feeling neutral or not actually even noticing So what I want you to consider here is that you are judging this based on that black and white sort of thinking I am either feeling terribly because of my anxiety and fear or I will be happy But in reality that should really be I am either going to pay very close attention to how I feel all the time Or I'm not going to pay attention to how I feel those are really the two opposite ends here It's not sadness despair pain anxiety fear or joy and nirvana and happiness on the other side You know unbridled gratitude the to the two ends of the spectrum that we are really working with is I care about how I feel all the time and I don't really care how I feel most of the time So the process of regaining that ability to feel happiness and joy Number one would come incrementally.  Oh enjoying the seats is actually a form of happiness So there are moments. I know you have moments in your day Something just happened. I don't know what we'll power glitch. Okay. Sorry about that. Anyway So there are moments in your day when either you forget how you feel or you have little things here and there You enjoy your cup of coffee or your a cupcake or or you giggle with your kid Something happens during the day that puts you into that sort of neutral state not super joyful state Just a neutral state where you're no longer worried about how you feel for that one minute ten minutes fifteen minutes That's happy. That is really happy. That's what we're looking for here And as we go down the recovery process and we begin to focus less and less on how we feel all the time We become more and more ambivalent or unaware or just not caring Unconcerned contented with how we feel and then you will start to make space for Those feelings of joy and happiness will come back. So yes, I can feel those things now I can't instantly conjure them because nobody really can and sometimes that's a little bit of a dangerous message that we hear You know sort of in that toxic positivity and the online mental health community the healing community as if somehow we could just Decide to be grateful and feel feel joy and can just and happiness We cannot choose to feel those things we can feel those things we cannot demand them So right now you are demanding a thing that even recovered people don't get to demand all the time and you're kind of shooting at the wrong target So first you will begin to just not care how you feel and you'll start to move toward that neutral contented state and that is really our natural state and once you get there You're standing along the way you're starting with these tiny glimpses of happiness We might just call them enjoyment a quick smile an acknowledgement of something that is you like hey That's cool. I enjoy that that is a form of happiness So we look for those things while we are losing our fixation with how we feel all the time and As we are less and less fixated on how we feel. Oh my god. I feel so anxious my anxiety I feel anxious. This is terrible to nightmare. This is the worst I can't get out of this as that begins to go away We focus less and less on how we feel and we make a little bit more room for the emergence of those feelings of joy and Gratitude and happiness like you want so desperately They will be able to poke back through again right now All of the CPU cycles in your head all of the processing power is focused directly on how do I feel? This is terrible. This is awful. This is terrible. I must recover How do I recover am I doing it right and when am I gonna get better? There's no cycles left. There's no room for Nirvana, there's no room for joy There's no room for those that type of happiness that you're hoping that you're chasing right now You're chasing it, but even recovered people that aren't anxious anymore Don't get to chase that we can chase it, but we don't we never catch it You know it can come naturally when we allow it, but we don't get to get it either I don't get to instantly feel joy in Nirvana. I just don't At nor do most other people that's not a default normal default state for human beings So to answer your question and sort of wrap this up a little bit When you think that you will be unable to feel joy and happiness What I would tell you to remember is that right now all you care about is how you feel and That that anxiety state the anxious state that fear state is twisting and distorting your perception of what would joy and happiness is supposed to Be you've forgotten that that's not the default state and really you just need to stop for a second adjust that and say you know what I there are still things that for a moment here and there I can experience tiny glimpses of contentment or something that I just like and that's a form of happiness and As I become less obsessed with how I feel I will be able to experience that thing that I want so badly It will come back, but for now I just need to shoot for neutral So we're not it's you know You're needing Nirvana, but you really need to learn to navigate neutral Let me do a little iteration here in the letter n, but that's really what this is all about You don't need Nirvana. You need to navigate to neutral. That's really what we need right now And that's the answer to your question and when you get to neutral you start to get to that contented state Then the happiness and the joy that you want so badly will begin to come back in its normal state When it's warranted in your life some days will be very joyful Some days will just be neutral some days. You'll be sad. You'll be in a bad mood some days. You'll be angry That's the way human beings are So don't feel afraid. I can't tell you does not feel afraid. You will feel afraid I felt afraid but don't get stuck on the idea that you've lost the ability to be happy No, right now you're just preoccupied with this other thing Which is how you feel and how afraid you are all the time, but that doesn't mean you can't feel happy You will trust me you'll get there, but that's what the process looks like It's a march toward neutral which then opens up space for what you're really hoping to get but along the way Recognize these little bits of happiness in different forms that really do exist At least a few times in every day if you really look at them Maybe make a list like my therapist made me do it was actually very helpful I will I am eternally grateful for that exercise and like I said I carried that list around to this day So will you be able to feel joy and happiness again? Yeah, you will are you feeling happiness now? You are just not in the form that you are demanding, but we never get to demand that anyway no matter what our state So there you go. There's about 15 minutes or so on joy and happiness I hope that makes you at least feel a little better I hope that it gives you a little bit of a direction a little bit of hope on this You're not broken if you're not feeling joyful and happy right now. I promise so that is today's podcast episode Episode 185 in the books, so I'm gonna play you out as always. This is afterglow by my friend Ben Drake You can find Ben online and his music at Ben Drake music comm tell him I said hello if you go over there and you see him. He's hanging out on his website Nobody hangs out on their website. Anyway, check out Ben's music. He's a good guy Also, I'm going to ask the same favor that I always do if you are listening to this podcast on iTunes or on some platform That lets you rate or review the podcast Five-star rating is great. Leave a little review if you're watching on YouTube It sure would be good for you to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel just saying it really helps Anyway guys, thanks for coming by and spending your time as always We'll be back next week with another episode like we always are don't know what it's gonna be But we'll be here and remember this is the way


26. And remember, if it's just fire, that's when you throw down. The cannon's perfectly hard. Fire! That was so hard to do. Alright, watch this. Next round. Angle, you ready? I've been a profit specialist from Bravo 179. I'm a 6-day whiskey, a combat medic. So the biggest thing we're trained to is for any sort of gunshot wounds, IED blasts, any sort of explosions, anything like that.  Stuff like that. All the guys have been trained on CLS. You have your medics and then underneath them are combat lifesavers. They're not trained to the same standard as medics, but they're trained for similar injuries like gunshot wounds, amputations, anything like that that the soldier might get in the battlefield. I think I'm going to learn a lot about this deployment and hopefully learn from everyone else too when I grow as a person. Specialist Wesley Hardin, my unit is Bravo Company 179 Infantry. The objective today is just a standard squad attack. You come out of an ORP, which is an objective rally point. One of the team leaders will set up a support by fire, just like a local support by fire that's supporting the assaulting element as they bound up. And the assaulting element will conduct just a team assault, and they'll assault through the objective. We can kind of see where guys are having shortcomings or what people are really good at. We can use that to improve the final product which you're about to see. We come out here for a lot of fires. We have to be able to know that we can do it in real life. Everybody has an assigned role. We have to pin down that role until you can't do it wrong, until I can't do it wrong. None of these guys at the end of this stuff should be able to do any of this wrong. We've done it so many times. I love the Infantry, I love the Oklahoma National Guard, and I love Bravo Company once.