Do you know of a freely accessible online intro course to sustainability that could be used to initiate some under informed people to the issues and ideas of sustainability?
we have been presented with a copyright protected, closed format, password protected, pay-here-please resource that would be quite effective for initiating people into the concerns, but does not in my opinion present a sustainable model for online learning development. I wish I could show you this resource, but.. it requires a password.
I criticised the resource as demonstrating unsustainable practices in terms of online resource development and learning, now I’m tasked with finding examples of more sustainable online resources… open source, freely accessible (no passwords), collaborative yet concise and informative… I expect I will find little in the way of finished resource.
It is a difficult task, as the expectation has been set by the resource that has been presented. A very linear, ‘mechanically interactive’, multi media broadcast of introductory information speaking to a particular frame of thinking about the issue (corporate/organisational sustainability). It is a genre of online learning resource that I have come to see as unsustainable… but on the other hand it has been suggested that such content could be an effective resource to ask participants to first go through and then critique and use as a basis to help build a more sustainable version .. hmm perhaps a Wikiversity or Wikieducator development would be such a venue for user genertaed content…
The Wikipedia entry for sustainability has an excellent range of resources, including a list of educational opportunities which I will slowly review.. The Wikiversity site has the beginnings of a potential course, but already beyond the concise and engaging resource we are looking for just now. The good thing about these 2 wiki examples is we could mold them to our needs without issues with access and copyright restrictions.. perhaps it will work out cheaper and more effective to do just that then to buy in an external resource like the one that has been presented to us. If we can’t find a ready to use resource that models sustainability, my thinking is to consider the cost of developing an easy to follow step through of available resources, including the drawing in of a variety of multi media (such as this video on Youtube that William found a few days ago). So if anyone has a good ‘lesson plan’, link or entire curriculum handy that would step people through an introduction to the concerns of sustainability, that would be most helpful. Anything that relates to social, economic and ecological sustainability is being sought.
So at this stage, any help in finding accessible, open for reuse and remix, concise and engaging resources would be appreciated. Links to individual resources like that Youtube video, texts, or whole curriculum/lesson plans would all be helpful. Please add anything to the comments below, or using the Del.icio.us tag intro-to-sustainability. I will collect and review all that is found and attempt to summarise ideas from there.
I hope this post generates discussion and links, both would be helpful. Thanks for your time.
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November 17, 2007 at 1:18 am
sunster
Hi Leigh!
My name is Sunnie and I work with Chris Geith at Michigan State University. It’s funny that you bring up a Sustainability 101 resource because that’s exactly what we’re working on with the director of our Office of Campus Sustainability! The project is still in its formative stages but its goal is to provide people with the resources to become informed about the issues of sustainability and hopefully make changes that are relevant to their specific environment. We would love to dialogue with you about your thoughts and ideas on this project.
Thanks!
Sunnie
November 21, 2007 at 8:17 am
brent
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Ecological_Sustainability
brent.
November 21, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Ron Monk
Check out http://www.sustain.ubc.ca/ It’s not an online learning tool but it’s a great resource and a good example.
November 23, 2007 at 8:45 am
simonfj
“the expectation has been set by ‘the resource’ that has been presented”.
This is the problem isn’t it? The ‘resource’ is considered in terms of ‘the institution’s’ sustainability. As .edu institutions, including their networks, are fully subsidized through the public purse (usually), they are entirely unsustainable.
Perhaps you might find this useful. It compares between two concepts of knowledge. The first being the old ‘objective’ kind. The second being the ‘constructionist’ approach. http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=10605
Biggest difference? With the second you don’t just aim to “provide people with resources”. You work to improve the ‘specific environment’ which might be (must be) shared by institutions. So far as physical networks are concerned we can simply compare between the duplication of a client/server (like your, and Sunni’s, institution’s) model and a less resource intensive P2P model (like Wikipedia). So far as content is concerned we can compare between broadcasted (pushed) media, and interactive (demanded) media. models. One works at delivering content, like logs to a factory, the other works at communicating what the logs might be used for, before they’re cut down.
That’s the trouble with the sustainability of knowledge. If you define it in terms of physical objects, we’ve lost any chance of making it so.
Or to put it differently, and this follows on from what you (and Jimmy) said on the Wiki Uni elist about the WikiFoundation “hosting learning communities”, we need to improve the meta.comms networking tools (including audio), which support the ‘production’ of (inter-institutional) media.
Maybe Sunnie, you and a few other institutionalists (yu know i don’t mean it) could start a sustainable communication’s project (between institutions).
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Communication_Projects_Group_-_Projects
November 23, 2007 at 11:38 am
leighblackall
Hi Simon, thanks for the comment. I have started a Wikieducator page for the project, and we have a web conference coming up on Dec 8 UTC.. TBA.. The Wikieducator page is just a scratch pad for us at the moment, but if it turns into a collaborative project of what ever kind – (logs or how to log 🙂 then that would be great to experience.. we’ll see what the web conference can bring up.. At this stage we have Michigan State Uni, and people from Uni of British Columbia trying to join in…