Alan 00:00:04 So it's time for another episode of OEG voices. And we're actually in the middle of recognizing, Open Education Awards for excellence from 2020, there's been so many, I'm still catching up to them. And I'm your host from Open Education Global Alan Levine, Nominations are open now for the 2021 open education awards. And we hope you're thinking about a person or a project like Manifold Scholar, for this recognition. And so we're really excited to have a big crew here from last years winner, Manifold Scholar won in the open tool category. We have new categories for open infrastructure. So this would also nicely slide into that. The Open Tool award recognizes software applications that proved to be essential for professionals, trainers, and teachers for building delivery of an education and especially with Manifold, some beautiful stuff. Alan 00:00:55 So we're going to learn about that today. And we're really excited to be talking to the team for the project, including Matt Gold, an old friend of mine, Associate professor of English. He's got so many titles-- director of, but he's coming to us from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He's director of digital initiatives, director CUNY commons. He's a co PI on the Manifold project and he's probably doing 20 other things I don't know about. Matt, welcome to the show. We're going to just do some quick intros and then we hopefully can dive into a discussion about Manifold. Matt 00:01:28 Thank you so much, Alan. It's a pleasure to be here and we remain so honored by this award, and we're really excited to talk with you today. So thank you for introducing me. I'll turn it over to the rest of the team, introduce themselves. Zach 00:01:42 Hi, I'm Zach Davis. I am a partner at Cast Iron Coding, a web development agency in Portland, Oregon, and I am the technical lead on Manifold. Terence 00:01:59 Hi, my name is Terence Smyer. I'm the Manifold digital projects editor at the University of Minnesota Press, where I work in the production department, helping our acquisitions editorial team and our production department facilitate new Manifold projects into the platform. And then I also use my publishing background to help inform the direction of the Manifold platform. More generally, I work with training and documentation and all that sort of good stuff. Krystyna 00:02:16 Hi, my name is Krystyna Michael, and I'm an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College at CUNY. And I've been working on Manifold, in terms of curriculum development and faculty Support Robin 00:02:29 And I'm Robin Miller. I am an open educational technologist at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center. And I support everyone in the CUNY community across our 25 campuses who make amazing projects on Manifold. And I also work with Terrance and the larger Manifold team to do training documentation. and anything else I can to support Manifold going forward. Thanks for having us well, Alan 00:02:55 Thank you very much. And so we should just start out-- Can you give like the quick snapshot definition of what Manifold is? Matt 00:03:02 Manifold is an open publishing platform. It was created originally for university presses to publish monographs, but in the year since we've created it, it has been used increasingly by the open educational community to publish, OERs - open educational resources. So it's a place where you can take content that you have and publish it in a professional looking space with beautiful aesthetics, responsive, mobile design, um, and just a really modern- Alan 00:03:37 And I have to say, it's been a while since I looked at it, when I went to check out the examples, it's like, these are fairly stunning, like a lot has evolved since it started. So maybe what was that original, like you said, sort of the need for publishing to do probably, you know, what academic scholars wish to do publishing digitally, but now it seems to be like a really rich media platform, which has a lot of collaboration potential. So when did it start? Um, and, and I have to ask why, why is it called Manifold? Matt 00:04:08 The history of it-- I published a book with the University of Minnesota Press in 2011 called Debates in the Digital Humanities. And I still remember meeting with Doug Armato the, director of the press and also obviously a member of our Manifold team along with Susan Doerr, Eric Lundgren and Wendy Barrales, and other members of our team, who I wanted to mention. I remember meeting with Doug in I think 2010 about the idea for this book. And, and we talked about it, he brought me on board. And one thing that I mentioned to him then was that many digital humanities publications were being published open access. And I, I said, you know, this is a really important aspect of the field. And I feel like for this book to have its greatest impact, like we should do that. And kind of to my surprise, Doug was totally on board with that. Matt 00:04:58 He thought it made sense. And so we published the book in print first and then spent the year working with, with Zach's team at Cast Iron Coding, with another designer, and with the press. And we published a website for the book, an interactive website that had different features where people could highlight passages, they can comment on them. And it really provided a kind of interactive way to kind of encounter the book. And over the years, like that was like Manifold itself now sort of really well designed. It didn't seem like the kinds of more structured eBooks that people kind of were used to the sort of, it felt very web like. It felt like a, like a sort of part of the web. And I think people really responded to it and wondered like, oh, how can I use this to create my own book online? Matt 00:05:47 And we didn't really have an answer for them because a lot of the code for it was hard-coded into the site. But the Mellon foundation, to I think in 2014 came the Association of University Presses and sort of put out a call for proposals to help think through the future of the digital scholarly monograph. And it was at that point that the Press and the CUNY grad center and Cast Iron Coding came together with a proposal for Manifold, which was to take that prototype of the debates book and sort of turn it into a platform that anyone could use. You know, as I said earlier, we, it was imagined really for a university press audience, but it really has expanded in significant ways. As for the name we, you know, we went through a sort of like a set of, of, you know, like candidates for the names and none of them seemed right. I'm trying to remember, Zach, do you remember? Like we had like, feel like we had like a lot of like Greenleaf, I don't know, some sorts of leafy type of names, Book Pages. I don't know what there were. And Susan Doerr came up with "Manifold" and it just seemed right, because it was like just, you know, multi, multi dimensional, multi compartment sort of term that could fit many different use cases. Alan 00:06:59 Well, for Terence, you've got the publishing background, like how, how has sort of that, you know, how do you bring that to sort of this digital platform and what do you see that you can do differently? You know, that you couldn't do before. Terence 00:07:09 Yeah, sure. I know it's, it's actually, it's interesting because one of the founding things that Matt was talking about was wanting to be able to extend what publishers were already doing, allow them to publish to the web in ways they hadn't been able to before. And so, like, in addition to the debate site, some of the other things that were kind of circling in Doug's mind were, you know, escaping away from like this companion website ethos, where you got a print book with a URL that's pointing readers to a specific site . We were holding like these media files just in reserve that help inform that core scholarship. And now with Manifold we're able to bring that content directly to bear on the material, as an enhancement. So that's, that's something that is, I think really exciting for scholars to be able to do, to be able to bring that kind of material in as well as be able to leverage, you know, web technology, to be able to put out interesting visualizations, data visualizations, maps, all those sorts of things that we can do as Manifold to really make it a much more interesting and engaging experience than you can do in just a print environment. Terence 00:08:09 And then on top of that, we're able to facilitate like really interesting conversations that could be potentially be by authors or by teachers and faculty in the classroom. So you can create like engagement that helps inform later scholarship. I know that one of the things that Doug was saying at the beginning was that he was hearing at conferences that scholars really wanted to be able to explore like this kind of like gray scholarship space, where they had a work in progress that was like coming alive as they were working on it. And being able to have these rich annotation tools allows the scholar and their perspective audience to really, you know, help shape that conversation and overall scholarship at the end of the d Matt 00:08:48 A lot of the early kind of digital reading tools that even the ones that were sort of web based were very kind of skeuomorphic in their design. They were trying to mimic like the printed book with like animated page turns and those kinds of things. And I think one of the things that Zach and Cast Iron has been so successful at doing was, has been creating a tool that just feels *of* the web. It just, it's a web reading interface that feels really kind of natural in the browser. Alan 00:09:15 Yeah, that was my reaction. Cause, you know, I was just, I also didn't like, I won't name the other platform that a lot of people use it. They look kind of boring, compared to Manifold. Not only in the visual mode and the functionality, but all this integration of different kinds of web content. And I like what you said, Matt, about being out of the web. Maybe, Robin, since you've worked with a lot of faculty, like how do they take to this? Like how easy is it for them to sort of be able to get productive in the, in the platform? Robin 00:09:45 Well, they love it. And they're excited about it for all the reasons everyone has mentioned and because it makes their publications look beautiful. That's something Matt mentioned very early on is, you know, Manifold looks really good. It's also great for students because we encourage a lot of student publications. So it's a great way to, to empower student voices and to give their scholarship a really beautiful platform to share with the world. And I think that everyone's a little different. They come to Manifold with different technical skills, but they're excited about it. They love to use it. They love to build courses on it. They love to bring in open-access texts into it and use them in the classroom and use the social annotation features. I think especially over the past year and a half with remote learning and everything that's been happening, we had just a flood of instructors coming to us and saying, okay, I've heard that Manifold is amazing and has social annotation tools, I gotta engage, my students, you know, we're all having a tough time. It's a really challenging time and I'm sure Krystyna can speak to this more with engaging students and getting them to have these conversations in the margins of these texts. It's a really exciting space to have to not only, for many instructors to start out like, okay, I'm gonna take an open access publication, a public domain where maybe some of my own scholarship, put it out there for my students. And then they see how their students respond. And we've had quite a few projects that have evolved to include the student work as part of that project- their responses, to working with Manifold and working with texts on that. So that's pretty exciting because with this, you can watch this sort of digital publication grow, right. And that's, that's exciting. It's a really exciting to have that as a tool for everyone at CUNY. Krystyna 00:11:31 I think what's, what's really nice for teachers I'm using Manifold. I sort of think of it as sort of twofold. Like on the one hand, it lets you create really customized digital materials. So you can make your own version of whatever course texts you're teaching that include-- because of the way that you can embed auxiliary into the text itself. You can create a digital text that's like a one-stop shop that has all of your secondary videos, articles, links that are embedded into the specific place in the text where you want your students to turn to that thing. And so it can be really customized for your course, but also to meet your students exactly where they are, which is something that we think a lot about, at CUNY and especially at the community college level, that our students need particular-- we know what our students need and where they're going to get confused. And you can anticipate that when you're creating the texts. And then as Robin was saying, in terms of the social annotation, that's a really great opportunity for students to get low stakes practice talking to each other, but also talking with and to the texts. My students often say that when they start writing their essays, they start with their annotations and what everyone has. It's like a record of the course discussion, which is really nice. And it's a way to bring student voices actually into your text and, and have them represented there, going forward, which is really nice. Alan 00:13:01 Can you share something that you saw a professor or a group do that said, wow, like, like what, what, what does knocked your socks off? Matt 00:13:08 I'll mention one thing, which is, um, that Cathy Davidson with her students has been, created. She created something or the class created something called "We Eat" where students kind of did a collective writing project where they put together recipes from their lives and their families, and then wrote narratives around it and then sort of publish a kind of collective cookbook with narratives. And I, one of the things I love about that is because Manifold makes the publication look very professional, it's a great end point for student writing. So, as Robin mentioned, we have-- we encourage student population and, and a lot of faculty instead of, you know, having the model where the students just write individual term papers for the faculty member. Instead, what they're doing is they're collaborative-- collaborating on these kinds of collective projects that wind up producing a resource that others can use, which is just great. Robin 00:14:03 I'll jump In and talk about the Urban Education program has started out something which I'm hoping is going to move forward is their first year PhD student cohort came in, they created a project on Manifold. And each one of those students wrote an essay about what it was like to be a first-year PhD student in the Urban Ed program, and then was annotating and adding resources to that and building this out. And they're going to revisit this every year and build, so it's like this iterative project, that's just going to keep going sort of documenting what it's like to be a student in this urban education program at the City University of New York using these digital tools, which is pretty exciting. And, it's not going to be done, you know, it's got years and years and years that it's going to keep going. So it's, it's a pretty exciting one. Terence 00:14:50 I think I'd more generally, we're in the middle of right now doing a Manifold grant program. We're onboarding a number of different publishers and organizations to using the platform. And I say that without fail and Robin and I do like our introduction kind of like overview of what the platform is capable of everyone is just like, they had a very specific use case in mind what they want to use Manifold for. And then once we finish the overview, they're just like, oh wow, we need to invite more people to these, these training sessions. Cause we've got a lot more ideas down. We get realized you could do all of this. And so I think it's just, when I see it in action, it's provides all these like wild, new generative ideas that they can use use it for. So it's pretty exciting. Matt 00:15:30 Two quick other things. One is, you know, Robin put together this collection on the CUNY instance called "Libros en Español", which is a collection of open access texts by Spanish language authors, including Nine to Five texts by Galdós and just it's, it's been this incredible collection that for us at CUNY has helped us think about the OER landscape in general and how to kind of push back a little bit against the kind of like overwhelming whiteness and Anglophone nature of that OER canon. And so, we're really trying to lean into that and to think about, especially as we think about issues of diversity, equity and inclusion at CUNY and for Manifold as a whole, how can we use our instance to really create many different types of, of open access texts? And that that collection is a great example of that. And then also Krystyna worked on this project called the "Negro in the Nation" where she and another faculty member, Justin Rogers-Cooper published a text that had been essentially out of print by Hubert Harrison and put together a kind of critical edition of it that they're using with students. That's been really wonderful. Zach 00:16:39 If I can throw one more in the mix too, you know, there's these examples of, of interesting single projects. I think there's also some interesting examples where the whole installation to solve a problem. So I think of,like Affordable Learning Georgia for this, where they're using Manifold, you know, to host like a little bit over 150 open access textbooks as alternatives to these, you know, expensive commercial textbooks. And, it's not so much that like any one of those projects is doing something, you know, really cutting edge that they may be. I haven't looked at them in detail, but that as a whole, they're using it as a platform for, for making this kind of content more, more available and accessible. Alan 00:17:21 Well, while we're talking Zach, let's talk about the code. Is it a Cast Iron and beautiful underneath? How has this been for you and your, your team to build? Zach 00:17:31 Oh, it's been great. I mean, this has been a real dream project for us. There's a couple of things that make it fun. I mean, one is that it was a green field project, so we could come at it and just kind of build this thing from scratch and it was well-funded. So we could, you know, take our time and, you know, do careful user experience design and visual design and, write code that we thought would scale and could last for a number of years instead of, you know, trying to hack things together and make things do what they're not meant to do. And then the collaboration itself between Cast Iron and, and University of Minnesota pressing CUNY is, is kind of like a dream team from my perspective, just because the, the people involved on this project, I don't know. We all, we all work together really well. I think we have, there are different directions that some of us see the project going like Minnesota comes at it from this kind of academic publisher angle. And CUNY comes at it from this kind of OER, you know, educational pedagogy lens, I think. And, and those things meet together to, to make a really, I don't know, I think, a really compelling product. And so it has been, it's been really fun to work with this group and to figure out how we work well together and establish our kind of processes for figuring out what we're building and engaging our community. Matt 00:18:53 Can I just say that, like, it's amazing to work with Zach and that I think Zach, I mean, is just a very special developer in the sense that he's not just a developer of code. He has a PhD in English. He wrote his dissertation on Milton while running Cast Iron Coding, you know, so he, he brings to all of this work, you know, a, uh, like a perspective and understanding of reading and readers and knows academic life that has just been so valuable. And it's, I feel so lucky to work with him and his team because of the, of the perspective they, they bring to the work. Alan 00:19:30 Sounds Fantastic. You guys would just have too much fun, which is just not a problem. Um, I, I was wondering like, okay, someone-- someone's gonna post this podcast, or they're gonna probably look at this stuff, what Manifold, like what, what are the ways people can get started? Like, no, there's some hostings or individual, is it sort of a thing that takes on, what does it take to be a man, a folder? I Zach 00:19:50 Guess I can answer this one and then jump in anyone else. So the timing is good because we just launched the new Manifold kind of marketing website yesterday. So, and as part of that, we rewrote and redesigned our whole set of documentation. Um, and so there's a lot of resources up now for getting started with Manifold. I think there are basically, you know, two, two paths that people take. One is to, um, get a Manifold instance hosted through Manifold Digital Services, which is a unit that's run out of, um, the University of Minnesota, um, out of the press and Cast Iron is delivering, you know, most of the hosting services around that. And the folks at the Press are doing, you know, the contracting and invoice and whatnot. So we do offer a pretty affordable, especially compared to some of the other services that are out there. Um, we offer a kind of managed instance of Manifold that's one. And we like it when people do that, because that money goes back into supporting the ongoing development and sustainability of the platform. Second option is to download it and install it somewhere yourself. I mean, Manifold is totally open source GPL, I think, is the license. So right now we provide two ways to get started. We, we provide operating system packages. So if you have sent to us Ubuntu, you can just download the package and just want a commander to get everything up and running. Um, and so that's a really easy way to get started. You know, you can spin up virtual machines somewhere, just go. Um, and then we also, these days are building Docker images and providing Docker compose. People want to start that way. And then we have a pretty active Slack channel or set of Slack channels where, you know, people can pop in and ask questions and get support and whatnot. And like I said, the documentation is really strong. I mean, of all the kind of open source projects I've been involved with, we've put a ton of time and effort into that documentation. Um, Terence and Robin, uh, lately have done a lot of work on this. So, uh, so there's a lot to kind of digest there too. Matt 00:21:59 How far into this project are we like four years, five years or so? Zach 00:22:04 Yeah, I think three years since we did the V1 release five years, five years since we started working on it five or six. Matt 00:22:13 And so, you know, people want to get started, can, you know, do that managed hosting, but also, you know, if they do their own hosting, we're now developing a set of kind of support services around them. So we can give advice on how to, how to manage technical advice on how to manage an instance, if you're self hosting or editorial advice, or for institutions that are using Manifold for OER and open teaching, we can, we can consult on those kinds of things. Alan 00:22:41 And, you know, from the new site, which I was looking at this week, um, you know, there's a number of institutions that seem to be joining the Manifold fold. Are you seeing any international interest? You know, I know, I know AU Press, but like, are you seeing the interest from other parts of the world? Terence 00:22:56 Oh Yeah. One four, um, partners is, um, Melusina Press at the university of Luxemouerg and they've they've, they were a really early adopter of mManifold. They started using it right when V-1 came out, if memory serves, and they've also funded some work around localizing, Manifold interfaces, that's underway currently. Matt 00:23:16 University of London, Press, uh, University of Victoria libraries. Terence 00:23:21 University of Calgary Press, Athabasca University Press. Yeah. We've got a number of university of West Indies in Jamaica. So we've got broad, a broad use case across the globe. Matt 00:23:32 And the thing is also because it's open source and because we don't engage in any kind of tracking software or anything, we don't always know who's running it. So sometimes we've learned about instances of Manifold only after the fact. So we don't, we don't truly know about everyone who's running it. Alan 00:23:49 It's going to be surprised, you know, oh, they're, they're using our stuff. I was, I was, I was looking at some of that stuff. the Affordable Learning Georgia and it's incorporating sSftChalk content. So has that been a new thing to sort of be able to expand the kind of things that you can include inside of Manifold? And so what are some of the things you can pull off, like a list of that maybe the other textbook ones don't too. Zach 00:24:15 Generally speaking, you know, like whatever, well, let me back up. So when, when Manifold ingests, um, a text, right, which is kind of what you see in the Manifold reader, that text can come from a few different kinds of sources. We'll ingest, epubs. We can ingest HTML. We can ingest, um, markdown, word documents, Google docs. And then also we have this mechanism called the Manifest where you can create a yaml file, that references different kinds of documents. So that's nice for a use case where like, let's say you have a class and, um, you know, you're doing some collection of student writing and each student is writing in a Google doc and you put all those URLs in a manifest, and then you can ingest into Manifold as a single book in that ingestion process. All of those different inputs basically get turned into HTML with some validation and some rules and what not applied. And so in theory, you know, most of the things that you can have in HTML like images or videos, or even an iframe can be included in what gets ingested in, in Manifold and made visible in the reader. And then we also have, you know, a mechanism for adding resources to the project and annotating the text with those resources. And you'll see that, I don't know if they're on ALG has been on some projects and that's a way to kind of include maybe interactive components, uh, kind of in the margin or something that can open it an overlay and Manifolds. So we try to support, I mean, we're like we started out with ePub, which in some ways are the most complex ingestion format. And that was really to support the University of Minnesota press who had this initial goal of putting, you know, a series of books up. And then from there, we kind of worked backwards, other lower fidelity formats and are trying to stay in a place where like this platform works for the publisher who has a robust workflow, but also for the individual scholar student, who's just writing a document essentially. Matt 00:26:17 Just to say, people have embedded H5P quizzes in their, in their books. Um, gephi, uh, interactive visualizations. A lot of times what we're finding is that people kind of come to us with, with questions and we're figuring out ways to make things work. Alan 00:26:33 So what kind of things are you dreaming or what's on the sketch board? Like what, what are some new things you want to throw into the Manifold mix? Zach 00:26:40 There's a couple of things, um, for, is about to get released. Beta should come out today, tomorrow this week. And, you know, that has a number of big features around word ingestion. Um, there's some new work on, um, around analytics so that people can see how, um, users are interacting with the content without using Google analytics or some provider like that. Those are the kind of the main features of this version. B seven will come out, you know, late Summer, early Fall. And the big feature there is around these classroom OER use cases. So we got Matts team brought in, in a NEH grant, like about a year ago, give or take. And so for that, we've been focused on building more functionality around kind of collaboratively annotating texts and making it easier for instructors to kind of set up assignments and Manifold and, and roll that, roll them over into a new class. So a lot of attention to like just making instructors' lives easier when working with Manifold and having different like roles around annotations and, and being able to also pull content, um, bits and pieces from different projects on a Manifold instance and kind of create a reader or, you know, a set of course material based on what's on the instance. Further out, we have like all kinds of stuff coming that's funded. So there's localization, we're doing work around, um, supporting journals in Manifold and adding some new kind of data models and records for journals. Uh, we're trying to, we're going to do some work around making annotation more robust, so making it easier to include media and, you know, um, images, video, whatnot in, in annotations. We're going to try to make Manifold more extensible. We have some work around plugin kind of extension interfaces to do, Gosh, I'm sure I'm leaving some things out, but so if anything jumps to mind Alan 00:28:46 Can I make a pizza? Matt 00:28:52 I wouldn't put it past Zach. Alan 00:28:54 So I don't know... Anybody. Like, did you picture this when you started this project that you'd be in the spot? Matt 00:28:51 Not really. I mean, I think what's been really cool about it, especially is that, I mean, we, we built, we've been building out the Manifold community intentionally, like, first of all, I should have expected, but did not quite expect like how nice of a platform we would kind of collaboratively create. And a lot of that has to do with the design and user experience that Zach mentioned earlier. So that has been like a surprise, but what's also been cool is just seeing how many publishers have just been using it and in so many different kinds of ways. And I think that to me is the biggest surprise is that I feel like so far, at least we've, we've managed to thread the needle between building a platform that is as useful to university presses, which are using the platform in a very controlled way to publish digital versions of their books while also having the same platform work as a kind of large, messy OER community platform for like the CUNY system or Affordable Learning Georgia or, or University of Washington, Temple university. And we've been able to do that without kind of creating a platform that feels like it's sort of like too much of a Swiss army knife and doing everything. So, you know, I remember Zach early on would talk a lot about how, like, this is an opinionated piece of software. We've been guided by, I think, a lot of the work in a tech that is really thinking about the priority of the browser experience and how like we have to work with the open web. That has been sort of like the guiding force behind what we've been doing. And I think because we sort of bet on the open web and sort of went that way, that, that good things are fine. Alan 00:30:29 Thati s quite refreshing to hear all the stories that you read every day. Anybody else want to share, like, you know, are really, you know, something that our audience should really know about, you know, Manifold or what, you know, what else people are doing with it, or wanting to do with it. I was intrigued by that, that I get the concept of that. There's the ability for students to create content within. So can someone talk about how that works or what, what ways that people do that? Krystyna 00:30:54 Yeah, so some prompts of Kathy David's said, actually, I think it was the first one to do this where, um, at the end of one of her courses, her students created use their final essays to create a, um, essay collection, um, that they published. And so one of the students wrote, or I think two of the students collaborated to write an introduction and then, um, each student has a chapter, um, and it's just a really nice, uh, way to, uh, showcase the work that they had and for also for the students to have something to point back to afterwards, as, um, as a thing that, that they have written with their end, cause it looks polished and it looks professional. And then the other way is through annotation. So students, you know, some professors will have students, um, just annotate, wherever they're moved to annotate. So they will cover what makes a productive annotation, um, in different types of annotations. And then they'll ask their students to, um, to annotate. And that can be really nice for the professor and in general, to see where students tend to annotate, because you end up with what I always call like a heat map because, um, the annotations tend to cluster in particular spots and then there'll be pages where nobody writes anything. And it can be sort of just as generative to ask the class, like, why did nobody write on this area? And everybody wrote here. And a lot of times it's not because they thought it was boring, but because it was something that made them sort of uncomfortable or they didn't understand it or something like that. And then another way is that students can actually act as sort of discussion leaders. So professors will sometimes go through and ask questions and have students answer them sort of like a discussion board in the text. Um, but you can have students be the sort of discussion leader and go through and post the questions and have their classmates. Um, and that could be nice also as a kind of record for future classes to look back at and see what previous, not only what their own classmates were thinking, but what previous classes we're thinking, especially like more difficult texts where it feels like students might feel like they don't have anything to say about a text or to attacks that they can see that other people in their same position engaged it, and then they can engage Robin 00:33:03 If I could add one more little thing that I think is, has been really fun that I've seen this past year is not only are students starting to learn, to use the platform as students with annotations. For those who've been involved in class projects that then build out a Manifold project, say as a final addition to a class, but I've also seen a few students who've approached us and because we had the CINY platform open to anyone in our community to publish students, who've written additions of their own poetry, their own personal essays and reflections on just what it's like to be them, in New York city sharing stories they may come from, or they may be immigrants themselves, or they may come from immigrant families and just sharing these really personalized, incredible essays and writing these work and just wanting to share it. And I, I, I'm so touched to see these things because I don't know them if they're not reaching out to me to help, but they may have learned to use Manifold in a course. And then all of a sudden this beautiful edition of poetry shows up on The CUNY and it's like, wow, where did this go from? Nobody asks for this. They're not getting a grade, but it's something they just want to share. And I think that's, what's so exciting about working with the CUNY folks is because, you know, we've just introduced this platform that, you know, built this incredible platform for their voices and it's really able to elevate those voices, um, and share them with the world. So that's really exciting. Krystyna 00:34:25 Yeah. And I'll say something that I, that I was thinking about during the pandemic is the, there's something about the way that the annotations are both like allows you to annotate the text, but also have a conversation that inspires the students. Like on the one hand you get much more text-based conversations than you do in a discussion board. And like a learning management system, like students just sort of naturally will be like, oh, the sentence is longer than the other sentences or something. And you're like, they're thinking about the text because it's right there. But also that, that they then end up making really interesting connections to their lives and that kind of spin off and interesting and really kind of like personal discussions in the margins, which is really exciting to see and was the most surprising aspect of it. Alan 00:35:10 Yeah. Fantastic. Is there anything I didn't ask about, like what have I missed? Matt 00:35:14 I would just say two, well, two things I don't think we talked much about. One is just a basic thing that we, we sort of alluded to, but didn't mention is that it is a publishing system as, uh, as opposed to an authoring system. So the model is that you kind of write something somewhere else, whether that is in a word doc or a Google doc or somewhere else, and then you kind of ingest into Manifold. So that's just something to know about it, a kind of basic thing. And then the second feature, I don't think we've talked that much about is reading groups, which I think are really important, especially in the, the open education context, because, you know, using a reading group, that's how a lot of faculty are kind of bringing their students together. So the kinds of situation, like what, uh, proceeded, just described where you have a group of people coming together that could be a class in that conversation could be public and it could be a class that's consciously annotating a text, or it could be something that's private and hidden. And that is only visible to the class reading that text. So just wanted to mention those two features. Alan 00:36:14 Well, thank you so much. I was, I was talking to, um, another professor who was working on a project to do their entire foreign language program. They want to go to a zero textbook program. So they... they have good funding to do this, but she's just like, what do you suggest for platforms? Because so many of these publishing platforms are kind of boring because the Alegria, really loves her media. And so then I sent her Manifold, I haven't heard from her since, because I think she was so excited to find that. So congratulations everybody. And we really appreciate you taking the time to bring us Manifold. And we certainly hope you come back to, um, oh, we global. And thank you, listener out there for listener listeners for listening to this episode of OEG Boices. This is a podcast for producing at Open Education Global, there'll be some open licensed music in there. Alan 00:37:01 I call it's called joyful meeting, which certainly fits this kind of a gathering by an artist name, a crowd wander. And it's not in the free music archive, licensed under creative commons attribution. Non-commercial. So you'll find this episode, um, at our site voices.global.org, as soon as I get in there and do my editing. And we also hope you engage in fall conversations with the group in our OEG connect site. So, and if you would like to share any of your open education work or suggest future guests, please let us know. And so this definitely goes to show the more voices, the better it's, it's been really exciting to have you all here. And I appreciate just from me learning more about metaphor, but I hope we send lots of other people your way. So thank you everybody.