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Absolutely honoured to be asked to deliver the keynote for the Wisconsin OT Association virtual conference. This is that presentation as well as the Q&A at the end of it for your consumption. Look after yourself, look after others, and always keep Occupied Brock@OccupiedPodbrock.cook@me.com Transcript Brock Cook 0:00 Hi, and welcome to another episode I got asked, and still can’t believe that I got asked to give the keynote presentation at the Wisconsin State ot conference a couple of weeks ago. And they asked me to give some lessons that I’ve learned in Korea that has involved a lot of empowering OTS to use online technology and an online space. So this is the presentation that I gave you guys also get the discussion towards the end of it, as well as the actual PowerPoint from the presentation and everything. So you’ll have everything as if you were there. So I hope you get something out of it. I hope you enjoy it. Please do let me know either way. And let’s roll it. Welcome to occupy plus the Patreon exclusive podcast for those supporters looking to inject some extra value into their practice. Thank you for your support, and enjoy. Host 1:11 Good morning and welcome to our 2021 Virtual World Conference. My name is Laura souls today and I am the VP of professional development in honor to kick off a two day agenda of expert speakers to set the tone and celebration of our professions. 100 years of resilience. today’s keynote speaker comes to us all the way from Australia. Brock Cook is a seasoned occupational therapist with experience in working in acute mental health rehabilitation, delivering his expertise through innovating, approaches of podcasts and webinars. Currently, Brock is an associate lecturer for James Cook University, and will be presenting on the topics of lessons I’ve learned pushing ot into a digital world. Welcome, Brock. Brock Cook 1:59 Thank you very much very kind. Just give me one second while I work this shared screen thingamajigger me out. There we go. Hopefully people can see that. Cool. So yeah, hi, thank you for asking me to come and speak to you today. I’m flattered, honored. And hopefully, I can bring something that is of interest to a range of people I was asked to I’ve been involved in this world of OT and how its uses online technologies and social medias and that kind of thing for a very long time now. So I’m gonna go through a bit of my history with, I guess, technology in general, and how that led me into that space of being able to try and adapt it and use it for how I’ve used it within OT. And I’m hoping at the end, if we can, if there’s questions, and I’m very much more of an interactive kind of person than just me speak to people through a screen kind of person. So I’d like to field some questions and try and explore I guess the future where to from here in that sort of question time towards the end of it, if we can so. So if I press the right button, that’ll help. So having a look at my technological journey, so that not there we go. All right, I’ll just do it this way. Sorry. where it started. So I was born in 1985. I my family we got our very first home computer. So one thing I will preface because I know this people have a whole wide range of ages in this room is I am of the generation that saw the start of pretty much all of the internet, that type of thing. So I remember a time before the internet, I remember a time before social media. And I was here when all of them started so I was kind of on the ground level learning all these things as they developed, which I think put me in a good position to start supporting other people and therapists to to actually use them and how to use them safely and effectively. So it started in 1990 When my my family bought the very first computer I remember dad bringing it home and it was absolutely enormous came in boxes that I don’t even think I could fit in my car nowadays. It was heavy. I was five at the time. I remember it not having a clue what it was other than it looked like a big TV with another box under it. It cost a fortune. So back then I actually looked this up. The, it cost us about two and a half $1,000 Australian. Back then which equivalent today was over five grand, which is a very expensive computer had a whopping 12 megahertz processor, VGA screen and 40 megabyte hard drive. Which, if you know much about computers, it did make me laugh because my iPhone, which I have sitting right here in front of me, is 9,000% faster than that computer has more than 10 times the screen resolution and six and a half 1000 times more storage and cost a fraction of the amount. So we’ve come a long way since 1990. But this is where it began. So I learned the very basics of how a computer works and the different parts of it. And for me as a kid, I was the kid that liked to pull things apart and put them back together, which I don’t know how my parents felt about that all the time. But I was very sort of enamored with this computer and how it worked. And I’d never seen anything like it. Fast forward a few years. So around 1996, we got our first internet connection, it was dial up many people probably remember the the weird dial up noise that used to make and you couldn’t make phone calls while you were using it. That kind of thing. A whopping 56 kilobytes a second of internet, which is an I did this test yesterday is 5,000% slower than my internet that I’m currently talking to you on. So again, another leap forward in the last 25 years. But where it started to make a bit more sense about what we could actually do with this technology, for me anyway, was the birth of social media. Now MySpace wasn’t the first social media it was, I think it was the second but it was definitely the largest and most, I guess, key to shaping what the internet was going to look like. So 2013 or 2003, sorry, which was the year before I started my ot degree, my undergrad, I joined this weird website called MySpace on the recommendation of a friend of mine. And sort of start didn’t really know what to do with it. But then slowly realized that there were developing communities and you could connect with other people. And I actually that I still to this day have a friend that I met through MySpace, all those many moons ago. But it was the beginning of what we look at as web 2.0. So Web 2.0, if you haven’t heard of that term, was the shift in internet websites and tools online to be more interactive. So all of your social medias, like versions of web 2.0. Back in the day, we used to have forums and messengers, like I CQ, and AOL that kind of stuff. Before that, when the internet was really a place that you just went to get information. So look up a website, you go to that website, you find the information you need. And that was pretty much it. It was very one way traffic, web 2.0 allowed for configuration and interaction with the content on the web. So this is where things like wikis were born, where you could actually create content and put yourself out there without having to know like coding languages. MySpace, what MySpace did that was unique to everything else on the web was it allowed you to configure your own little space, so you’d actually have your own room or last one sort of felt like you had your own space, you can make your page look like what you want. You could put your top five, like songs that you were currently into on there, you could highlight who your best friends were and prioritize them into groups and all sorts of stuff. You could configure the colors on the page, what pictures you wanted to share on the page. It was the first really easily accessible and free space on the internet that people could configure to make their own. And that’s a really powerful that’s one of the reasons why it was so big, why it was so massive. The origins of it were very much trying to replicate our social interactions that we were having in person. So back in that day I was probably your typical teenager, before MySpace came out posters on the wall of cars and all that sort of stuff, and bookshelves full of magazines of, you know, rock music and rap music, and probably not a lot of highly what would be deemed highly educational content. But that’s the kind of personalization that kids in my era or in my area where I lived, just what you did with your space, it was a way to personalize your space. And my space offered you that in a virtual forum. The chats were all private, it was like messaging. Same as if you were having a one on one conversation with people. The music would be a few like recommending it. Like these are my favorite songs. Everyone at school knew who whose favorite songs were what it was very much replicating. In life interactions there was at this stage, and I’ll get to this a bit later, there was no algorithm that was changing anything, if you posted something, everyone in your list could see it, all of your friends, etc. It was very basic, in a way. So when did ot come into this, obviously, all that up until that point, it happened before I even started my degree, started my IT degree in 2004. During that time, we had the lovely Facebook, enter the realm and swallow was I had the time period during my undergrad. So we did a four year undergrad here in Australia. So I have a Bachelor of occupational therapy. I was using all of these social medias and tools. I hadn’t heard of anyone using it for any professional purpose. It was literally as it says on the box, it was just a social media. So you connect with your friends. So I kind of had three or four years with these tools to just play with them, I guess and learn what they could do and learn who you connect with and how they worked and their positives and negatives and all that sort of stuff. So I graduated at the end of 2008. So started working to those nine. And in 2010 is the earliest time I’ve been able to find of, I guess, a professional purpose, particularly for Facebook. So around 2010, there was I think it was the world the Prophet conference in 2010, there was a group of ladies that had all had similar ideas around trying to find a way to use these tools in a professional purpose mainly for CPD for clinicians. They got together and they started ot 480, which at the time was online technology for OT and just a group of women who started a Facebook group. It was open to anyone, anyone could join, ask questions, interact, network, etc. But on top of that, they also started what they what at the time was called the OT 24. Exchange, I think it wasn’t originally and then it got changed to the VX. So every year on world ot day, which is 25th of October, a couple of days time, they would do a 24 hour conference, a virtual conference similar to what we’re doing here. So every hour on the hour for 24 hours. These women were from all over the world. There’s couple from Australia, one from Australia, one from New Zealand couple from the UK, a couple from America, your own Karen Jacobs was was part of that group. They would organize this conference get invited speakers every hour on the hour for 24 hours. And it would run those presentations would be recorded. It was completely free. People could come and go to whichever whichever sessions they wanted, they could watch the recordings afterwards, etc. That was one of the very end that all stemmed from this group that they set up. I got involved with them the following year. So 2011 seen the conference in 2010. Attended again in 2011. And then I at the time, there was this Facebook group, the OT for ot group, and I had this idea that maybe we could expand that because like online technology for it. That’s cool. But I only knew a handful of OTS that were even remotely interested in online technology. But what I did know was a lot of OTS that were interested in mental health, which is where I was working. So I pitched to the ladies to start or to let me start a satellite group. So I started a Mental Health Forum Tea group. And that was the start of, I guess, this period of time where different OTS started engaging with Facebook and are some of them were there to start their own satellite groups, I think there’s about 50 of them now. And some of them were there to engage with the groups that were based on their interest area, whether it was assistive technology or learning disorders, or there’s an oncology one, there’s obviously the original it for 80 MH for at the mental health one that I started. And as a moderator of that group, I treated it like, kind of like a breakout room at a conference, I guess, where I would pose questions and facilitate conversations and people would share resources, too, my goal was to one get people to network, you meet people from all over the world, this was a unique opportunity that we’d never really had before. Because we didn’t have the tools for it. It was also to get people to learn. My experience in mental health was that it seemed at that point in time seemed very disjointed in the knowledge that clinicians actually had. There wasn’t any sort of consistency even around what an OT his role was in mental health. Now, I know, I will preface that. Mental health is a fairly prevalent practice area in Australia. I know it’s not quite as prevalent for a variety of reasons in the States. But it’s quite common over here, I’d say probably 30, to maybe even higher percentage of our all of our OTS work in mental health. But there still wasn’t sort of any consistency. So my, one of my goals with that group was to try and wrangle some of that in around that same time. Twitter was was starting, I think, because of some of the stuff that I highlighted earlier around. Me being around when you know, home PCs became a thing being around when the internet started being around when social media started, I was always had this sort of like, how does it work mentality. And I, again, that probably stemmed from me being a kid that like to pull things apart and see how they worked. So when Twitter started, I was on it. I’m pretty sure my Twitter account is like 16 years old now or something. It tells me every now and then, but initially, it I couldn’t see any sort of way to use it. for professional purposes, a group of ladies in the UK did find a way however, so they started having a weekly, initially CPD chat for an hour using the hashtag Oh talk ot talk, depending on how you pronounce it, where they would have an invited guest on a certain topic who would come in and facilitate discussion around whoever wanted to join via that hashtag. And they would do that for an hour each week. That then stems or I guess a US version was born from that, which is the ote talk to us, us. Your own Tina champagne was involved in starting that one back in the day, that would have been 2013 ish, it was very quite a while ago. And that was auto successful. They used to do it monthly. And then every week during April, which I believe is your ot month. And the other big professional purpose for Twitter was live conference tweeting. They’re even now it’s probably still the biggest use of it within OT, which I’ve never been able to work out exactly why because the number of people that I know that have a Twitter account and will only ever use it whenever they’re at a conference fascinates me. But when it first started, it was really interesting to me to be able to obviously I’m on the other side of the world. If you can’t tell by the accent, to be able to engage in like your conference, your national conference with the people that are actually there and be able to interact with them live. While talks are happening while keynotes are happening. Them tweeting out content or their thoughts or their reflections about it. People outside the conference from all around the world being able to also engage with that content. It made for a really connected feeling profession in that online space. Some of the stuff from that I as I said earlier, li…
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