Green Design » Education

Wanderlusting No. 3: Lego Power

Chris Turner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Wanderlusting on the Sustainability Trail
Postcard No. 3: Lego Power

I don’t think you can overstate the power of myth. You can have statistics out the wazoo and an airtight logical argument in favor of bringing the age of oil to an end pronto, but if it doesn’t map well onto the existing storytelling frames of our culture (about which see George Lakoff for more info) and isn’t regularly reinforced by the standard thematic tropes of society at large, it’s a nasty upstream swim to actually see the thing spawn the kind of critical mass of progeny that produces big change.

Which is why the following tableau is so inspiring. Here’s the exhibit by which the forward-thinking Danes have chosen to mythologically reinforce the concept of energy for the prepubescent hordes who descend upon the nation’s top tourist attraction:

Click image to enlarge

This is the centerpiece of Legoland’s installation on energy. Alongside royal palaces and Japanese cityscapes and a modern airport, the iconography of everyday power includes both an oil-drilling platform and a couple of wind turbines. Both of which, kids, are practical, commonplace ways of producing more power. If more of the storybooks and symbol-strewn amusement parks of your childhood look like this, in other words, you’ll come to see these things – fossil fuels and renewable energy – as interchangeable.

Well played, Legoland.

Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope, a Canadian bestseller and multiple award nominee detailing his 2005-06 travels in search of the state of the art in sustainable living. He has recently embarked upon a new global research tour for a forthcoming book on the structure of the sustainable twenty-first century economy. He is posting “postcard” blogs from his travels here on Worldchanging.com. This is the first posting in the series.

Read previous "Wanderlusting" postcards:
Wanderlusting No. 1: The Welcome Mat in Copenhagen
Wanderlusting No. 2: Livability

Photo by author.

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(Posted by Chris Turner in Education at 8:00 AM)

Stop The Pollution, Pick A Solution

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:45:51 +0000

by Robin Urban Smith

Ever heard an anti-idling rap? Or Seen the "Funky Pollution Dance?" Tune in to this video to see what Livable Streets Education students are up to at MS 51 in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

This piece originally appeared on Streetfilms.org

Related posts:
Introducing Livable Streets Education
Get Schooled in Livable Streets

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 12:45 PM)

How To Be A Green School

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:38:47 +0000

By Zac Goldsmith

Teachers and students want to do good things for the environment, but sometimes they can't see the wood for the trees. Zac Goldsmith sets out five things all schools can do.

It's a worrying fact that around 400,000 British children are on behavioural drugs such as Ritalin. Some, no doubt, need the treatment, but the sheer number of children taking these drugs suggests that in our society, childhood itself has come to be seen as a disease.
Children spend an average of 13.9 hours a week in front of their televisions, and six hours in front of their computers. It can't be healthy. According to Unicef, British children are the unhappiest in Europe, despite unprecedented material wealth.
There are many reasons for this, but one, surely, is the fact that children have become increasingly insulated from the natural world. We've all heard of the surveys revealing that teenagers think cows lay eggs, and others where children can identify more brand logos than trees, by a staggering margin.
My view is that children will form a significant part of the green fightback. They instinctively understand the value of the environment. Ask any 10-year-old if Google – at its height – was really worth more than the Amazon rainforest, and they'd laugh.
But if the current crop of children is to emerge as a generation that cherishes the environment, they need to understand it, connect with it and love it. That goal must form part of the school experience. Schools collectively are huge energy consumers, producers of waste, and consumers of resources. What can they do?
1 Good food
One thing we all do is eat and so of all the levers for change, food is the most far reaching. Even a small change in the way we eat has huge implications – in schools, that is particularly so. The government spends approximately £2bn each year on food for schools, hospitals and prisons. Imagine the impact if instead of buying the cheapest junk on the world's markets, that money was invested in local, sustainable produce?
The benefits would be huge. We'd see money flowing into our collapsing rural economy. We'd see a significant reduction in the amount of oil used to ship and fly food around the world. We'd actively reduce our dependence on a global food system that is ravaging the world's breadbaskets. And of course, we'd see the market flooded with good quality sustainable food. With levels of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease increasing, and with growing evidence linking diet with mental health, crime and antisocial behaviour, that's no bad thing.
We're failing nationally. But there are some exciting local examples, for instance, in Merton, south London, where parents set themselves key goals: to win funding for a working kitchen in every school and to improve the quality of ingredients and cooking standards. It was ambitious, and no one knew if it would work. But it did. Led by the formidable Jackie Schneider, they pressurised the council to put aside £450,000 to refurbish primary school kitchens and allow them to produce fresh food on site. They also set up a twinning scheme with a nearby farm. Inspired by their success, I helped set up a similar campaign for Richmond and Kingston, called School Food Matters. The group is already making huge progress.
2 Cooking and growing
It's not just the quality of the food. Children should also know about preparing it, and growing it. Growing food – as a process – has a clear value. Catherine Sneed, a counsellor in San Francisco's county jail, noticed early on in her career that the same people kept returning to prison. Inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, a novel in which connectedness to the land binds families together, she set up a small prison garden. Inmates loved it, and the project flourished. The food they grow feeds hundreds of low-income families in the area, and inmates who take part in the project are a staggering 25% less likely to return to jail than those who don't.
If growing food is therapeutic for California's prisoners, there is every reason to believe it will be good for all of us. All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms.
3 The school run
Anyone driving through London after the school term ends will notice immediately how much easier it is to get around. The school run contributes massively to congestion. There are various schemes set up to combat this, not least the walk to school movement, whose annual walk-to-school month has inspired children and parents to promote healthier living and conserve the environment. But we need more, and parents should add their own pressure to calls for a dedicated school bus scheme.
In the US, yellow school buses represent the largest mass transit system in the country. About 450,000 of them take more than 25 million children to and from school. Each school bus takes between 30 to 60 cars off of the road during rush hour times. The leading US school bus manufacturer, IC Bus, is now producing the nation's only line of hybrid school buses, which improve fuel efficiency by up to 70%. Each hybrid school bus is estimated to save $3,000 (£1,820) and 800 gallons of fuel annually. Our roads and our environment – not to mention commuters – are crying out for such a scheme to be introduced across the UK.
4 Energy savings
If schools successfully implement energy reduction measures, most can save as much as 10% on utility bills – water and heating – which, even for a small primary school, can run to £30,000 a year. With decreasing budgets and increasing costs, this is money they need: UK schools spend approximately £450m on energy each year, three times as much as they do on books, about 3.5% of their budgets.
It's a challenge that needs to be met, and it can be incorporated into the classroom. In many schools, children are already taught about the smaller measures, like turning off the lights at the end of lessons. Beyond that, children can help calculate the school's energy usage, and identify ways to cut it. They can use a school neutral carbon calculator (www.earthteam.net/GWCampaign/calculate.html) to help calculate their "carbon footprint" and understand how their school can reduce its emissions.
Parents, teachers and children can also lobby their local authority to champion the purchase of renewable power through their joint buying consortia. If it refuses, they can opt out of the contract and buy their power independently.
5 Waste
In the UK we generate enough waste every hour to fill the Albert Hall. At a time when pressure on the world's resources has never been greater, we have to find a way to be more efficient. There's a lot that schools can do.
As a start, they can better understand the issue, and following that, they can incorporate waste reduction in the school, and hopefully in their own homes.
Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy. The figures are shocking. Each year 13bn bags are used and thrown away in the UK. Each bag will be used for an average of 20 minutes, and, once discarded, will take up to 1,000 years to decompose. About 200m will litter the countryside. Others find their way into the seas, where they are mistaken for food and kill up to 100,000 marine mammals each year, as well as countless birds.
Many countries have taken the initiative to ban or phase out bags, including China, South Africa, India and Kenya. In the UK, we're miles behind, but there are some good local examples. The campaign in Richmond borough is being spearheaded by the schools themselves.
I had the huge pleasure of walking with a class of bright, 11-year-old children – unannounced – to a Tesco store in Kew. The children demanded to see the manager, and despite initial reluctance, were able to pose a series of hard-hitting and brilliant questions about packaging and plastic bags. They now fully intend to take the same questions to the chairman, Sir Terry Leahy, in Tesco headquarters.
None of these ideas is revolutionary, but all will make a difference – and together they will make a real difference. They are just a few ideas on what children and parents can do to green our schools, and help ensure that the next generation has the appetite, understanding and knowledge to deal with the environmental crisis we face.
Zac Goldsmith, former editor of the Ecologist magazine, is the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond and North Kingston. His book, The Constant Economy, will be published in September by Atlantic Books
www.eco-schools.org.uk
www.schoolfoodmatters.com
www.mertonparents.co.uk
www.greeneruponthames.org

This piece originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
Creative Commons Photo Credit

Related posts:
Finalists Announced in Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom
UK School Lunches to go Local and Organic
Sustainability Education for All Ages
Community, Edible Gardens, School Lunches and Student Action at Zuni Public High School

Want more about sustainable schools? Browse our education archives

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 11:38 AM)

Environmental Volunteers: Filling the Gaps in Science Education

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:20:46 +0000

Nominated by the TerraPass team

There is a lack of science education in public schools. Due to inadequate training, 80 percent of San Francisco Bay Area teachers devote less than 60 minutes per week to science. Teachers turn to nonprofit organizations to help meet their needs.

The Environmental Volunteers shares the wonders of environmental science with schoolchildren, sparking interest in discovery of the natural world. This wonderful organization reaches over 11,000 students annually and is transforming environmental science education in the Bay Area.

This year, the Environmental Volunteers spearheaded Science by Nature, a world changing collaboration of 13 independent organizations (a majority of the environmental and science nonprofits in their region) which will collectively provide students with multiple classroom and field study programs, delivering more frequent and diverse environmental science experiences than any one organization could provide.

Later this summer, a new website (see beta) with a searchable database will offer the programs of all collaboration partners and provide teachers recommended sequences to maximize science education effectiveness. The site will even allow teachers to register for programs from all organizations using one common application.

This world changing project is scaling environmental science education; increasing science hours in the classrooms; inspiring environmental stewardship; and saving resources through its collaborative approach.

Bonus haiku:

Teachers are searching,
Website collaboration.
Knowledge! Please give grant.

Images: Hands-on experiences bring environmental education to life. At top right, a student uses a hands-free approach to experience the texture of a banana slug. At bottom left, a fourth grader feels the grip of a starfish in a marine science program.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 7:20 AM)

Environmental Volunteers: Filling the Gaps in Science Education

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:20:46 +0000

Nominated by the TerraPass team

There is a lack of science education in public schools. Due to inadequate training, 80 percent of San Francisco Bay Area teachers devote less than 60 minutes per week to science. Teachers turn to nonprofit organizations to help meet their needs.

The Environmental Volunteers shares the wonders of environmental science with schoolchildren, sparking interest in discovery of the natural world. This wonderful organization reaches over 11,000 students annually and is transforming environmental science education in the Bay Area.

This year, the Environmental Volunteers spearheaded Science by Nature, a world changing collaboration of 13 independent organizations (a majority of the environmental and science nonprofits in their region) which will collectively provide students with multiple classroom and field study programs, delivering more frequent and diverse environmental science experiences than any one organization could provide.

Later this summer, a new website (see beta) with a searchable database will offer the programs of all collaboration partners and provide teachers recommended sequences to maximize science education effectiveness. The site will even allow teachers to register for programs from all organizations using one common application.

This world changing project is scaling environmental science education; increasing science hours in the classrooms; inspiring environmental stewardship; and saving resources through its collaborative approach.

Bonus haiku:

Teachers are searching,
Website collaboration.
Knowledge! Please give grant.

Images: Hands-on experiences bring environmental education to life. At top right, a student uses a hands-free approach to experience the texture of a banana slug. At bottom left, a fourth grader feels the grip of a starfish in a marine science program.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 7:20 AM)

Introducing Livable Streets Education

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:55:58 +0000

The newest member of the Livable Streets Initiative, Livable Streets Education (LSE), partners with schools, cultural institutions and community-based organizations working for improved urban livability, greener transportation, and safer streets. This spring, LSE is in residency at fifteen schools around New York City, working with students in grades K-8, as well as partnering with community and cultural organizations on special events.

This short Streetfilm provides an overview of the recent work they've been doing - in particular, it highlights LSE Director Kim Wiley-Schwartz's work with grades K-2 at PS 87. Please check out the website to see more on this groundbreaking curriculum. And to see some of the amazing art produced by the students, refer to this page and videos.

This piece was originally posted on Streefilms by Clarence Eckerson, Jr.

related posts: Sustainability Education for All Ages

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 1:55 PM)

Introducing Livable Streets Education

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:55:58 +0000

The newest member of the Livable Streets Initiative, Livable Streets Education (LSE), partners with schools, cultural institutions and community-based organizations working for improved urban livability, greener transportation, and safer streets. This spring, LSE is in residency at fifteen schools around New York City, working with students in grades K-8, as well as partnering with community and cultural organizations on special events.

This short Streetfilm provides an overview of the recent work they've been doing - in particular, it highlights LSE Director Kim Wiley-Schwartz's work with grades K-2 at PS 87. Please check out the website to see more on this groundbreaking curriculum. And to see some of the amazing art produced by the students, refer to this page and videos.

This piece was originally posted on Streefilms by Clarence Eckerson, Jr.

related posts: Sustainability Education for All Ages

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 1:55 PM)

Project H Design Builds Playground for Learning

Geoff Manaugh — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:00:30 +0000

[Image: The finished "math playground" in Uganda, by Project H Design].

Project H Design recently completed the installation of a "math playground," or Learning Landscape, at the Kutamba School for orphans of AIDS in rural Uganda.
Part outdoor classroom, part spatially immersive lesson in arithmetic, the project gives students a place to study in at least two senses of the phrase. On the one hand, it's simply a forum for learning; on the other, it is literally a place to study: the space itself, if I've understood this correctly, serves as a model for play-based education.

[Images: The "math playground," by Project H Design].

That is, within the numbered arrangement of tires and benches is a spatial pedagogy: using the landscape itself, any number of spatialized games, such as "Around The World" and "Match Me," can be used to teach elementary mathematics.

[Images: One the finished benches, via Project H Design].

The didactic landscape was, at one point, simply a kind of mathematical test-landscape in a U.S. gymnasium before being tried out by the students on site in Uganda, before reaching its final installation.

[Images: Testing out the landscape, via Project H Design].

Check out the whole research, design, and installation process through their Flickr sets.

[Images: Via Project H Design].

I absolutely love the idea, though, that it might be possible to derive mathematical lessons from the built environment surrounding us. That, somewhere in the walls, roads, and buildings we find ourselves alive within, are equations waiting to be deduced, geometries to be studied, forces that we can isolate, graph, and understand. Whether through games or lectures, it is the spatial world itself that we study.

[Images: A handbook to spatial learning, via Project H Design].

Of course, this is one of the most basic things you do when you first study engineering: you look at a bridge, tower, or other structure and you try to figure out how it stands or works. Or you stand behind Notre-Dame in Paris, staring at those stone cobwebs of intersecting buttressed supports, and you try to understand how it is that cathedrals gravitationally function.
But how incredible would it be to realize that, say, your entire city had actually been organized by urban planners two hundred years ago as a kind of inhabitable lesson in mathematics or logical reasoning, like something from the early theories of Friedrich Froebel?
Who?
In an unbelievably interesting exhibition held two years ago in Pasadena, the Institute For Figuring explored the educational system of a now relatively under-known man named Friedrich Froebel and his influence on what we now call kindergarten. To quote from their online exhibition at length:
Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.
I don't mean to imply here that Project H's "math playground" in Uganda is an example of Froebelian education – because, as far as I'm aware, it is not – but I do mean to say that it would be amazingly cool if the spatial environments of modern life were organized more along educational lines.

[Images: A Froebelian garden for kids – that is, a kindergarten – brings spatial education to Los Angeles in this archival image, courtesy of the The Institute For Figuring].

Your every commute to work becomes part of a spatial curriculum, carving out education through space.
One of the questions here would be: could you reverse-engineer mathematical lessons from the environment that already surrounds you? Or do you need to purpose-build pedagogic spatiality?
In any case, read more about Froebelian education through the fascinating Institute for Figuring, and stop by Project H Design to find out how you can support the philanthropic construction of future Learning Landscapes elsewhere.

This piece originally appeared on Geoff Manaugh's site, BLDGBLOG

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(Posted by Geoff Manaugh in Education at 12:00 PM)

India’s $20 Laptop

Julia Levitt — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:41:24 +0000

A New Delhi-backed project has released news of a breakthrough in accessible personal computing: the $20 laptop. According to an article from yesterday's Financial Times:

India’s “Sakshat” laptop is intended to boost distance learning to help India fulfil its overwhelming educational needs. It forms part of a broader plan to improve e-learning at more than 18,000 colleges and 400 universities. However, some analysts are sceptical that a $20 laptop would be commercially sustainable and the project has yet to attract a commercial partner.

A prototype will go on show at a National Mission on Education launch in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, tomorrow. Pioneered in India by scientists at the Vellore Institute of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and at the state-controlled Semiconductor Complex, the laptop has 2Gb Ram capacity and wireless connectivity.

R.P. Agrawal, secretary of secondary and higher education, said last week that the cost of the laptop was about $20 a unit, but he expected that to fall. He also said he expected the units to be commercially available in six months.

As reporters and bloggers of all stripes have been loudly announcing, this new project dramatically undercuts the much-hyped XO, a U.S.-produced low-cost laptop. The XO is the flagship product of the One Laptop Per Child project, an innovative attempt to bridge the digital divide which Worldchanging ally Ethan Zuckerman has discussed in detail here and here.

No matter who produces the hardware, bringing IT technology to the developing world is a crucial component of any plan to increase the quality of life for populations in the Global South. If international market competition helps to speed up the process, we're all for it.

Photo credit: flickr/amanky, CC license.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Education at 11:41 AM)

Unigo.com: Open Discussion on Higher Education

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:21:42 +0000

By Sharon Hoyer

The first important decision of many young adults' lives – where to apply to college -- was once made largely in the dark. Up until recently, widely accessible sources of information on colleges came largely from the schools themselves, along with a handful of annual magazine guides that provide cold numeric rankings and limited profiles.

Social networking may be about to change all that. Entrepreneur Jordan Goldman, who graduated from college himself only four years ago, has launched Unigo.com — a platform where college students can sign on, create a user name and candidly critique their schools. Currently, profiles of 250 colleges exist on Unigo, but the site will ultimately expand to cover every college in the country. I recently talked with Jordan about how students are using the world’s first open-source college guide.

What issues come up most frequently in Unigo discussions?

We spent about two months just doing research on every one of the colleges on the site before going into the field. Then we spent about five months making sure the content we received was from students of every major, extracurricular activity, hometown, ethnicity, religious affiliation, political affiliation and sexual orientation; in a lot of cases we got 10 percent of the student body to submit content. When we went live we had a varied and diverse perspective. So between campuses there’s a variance of which issues are important and, within each campus, variance based on who each student is and what their interests are. There’s no one uniform concern across all students or campuses.

I think one of the values of Unigo is that if we have 200 reviews of a particular school, users can choose to see only reviews by, say, left-wing students at a conservative institution or African American students at a school that may have a great overall experience, but fewer African American students enrolled.

Is there a way for students to search Unigo according to the programs offered at different colleges?

We’ll soon be implementing Unigo Match—a tool that will allow students to talk about themselves—what they’re interested in, what their background is, what kind of school they’re looking for, what majors they’re looking for—and will recommend schools to look at, as well as individual reviews of those schools written by students just like them. It isn’t in place just yet, but it will be integrated in the live site in about two weeks.

How else can this tool change the face of higher education?

Because Unigo is an evolving platform, anyone with an email address can sign on and create content about their school. That content can be reviews, photos, videos and documents. Those documents can be creative writing, political writing, humor writing, journalism and you can search and view the content created by your fellow students on your campus. But you can also see content created across schools; so you can search documents related to, for example, green issues on both your campus and other campuses. Right now we have students creating work in isolation. Unigo will allow students to upload what they’re working on and collaborate with students at other colleges, which I think could be very useful.

I bet it will be a while before we understand all of the ways that connecting students across the country -- and thus lending power and credibility to their otherwise isolated ideas -- could spur change at the university level. But some ideas seem ripe for the picking: for example, with some of the new and evolving fields of study we've been discussing on Worldchanging in this week's series Majors Making a Difference, we can't help but see the potential for a tool like Unigo to shape the majors of the future through students swapping ideas about what they're learning and what they want to know. And it also seems natural that Unigo could become a platform for the advancement of innovations that level the playing field, such as open source textbooks or even open higher education.

Sharon Hoyer is a freelance writer covering sustainability, culture and arts in Chicago. You can find more of her writings on the environment at the Examiner and Centerstage Chicago. You can find her in the garden or on her bike.

Photo credit: flickr/svobodalT, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 5:21 AM)

Unigo.com: Open Discussion on Higher Education

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:21:42 +0000

By Sharon Hoyer

The first important decision of many young adults' lives – where to apply to college -- was once made largely in the dark. Up until recently, widely accessible sources of information on colleges came largely from the schools themselves, along with a handful of annual magazine guides that provide cold numeric rankings and limited profiles.

Social networking may be about to change all that. Entrepreneur Jordan Goldman, who graduated from college himself only four years ago, has launched Unigo.com — a platform where college students can sign on, create a user name and candidly critique their schools. Currently, profiles of 250 colleges exist on Unigo, but the site will ultimately expand to cover every college in the country. I recently talked with Jordan about how students are using the world’s first open-source college guide.

What issues come up most frequently in Unigo discussions?

We spent about two months just doing research on every one of the colleges on the site before going into the field. Then we spent about five months making sure the content we received was from students of every major, extracurricular activity, hometown, ethnicity, religious affiliation, political affiliation and sexual orientation; in a lot of cases we got 10 percent of the student body to submit content. When we went live we had a varied and diverse perspective. So between campuses there’s a variance of which issues are important and, within each campus, variance based on who each student is and what their interests are. There’s no one uniform concern across all students or campuses.

I think one of the values of Unigo is that if we have 200 reviews of a particular school, users can choose to see only reviews by, say, left-wing students at a conservative institution or African American students at a school that may have a great overall experience, but fewer African American students enrolled.

Is there a way for students to search Unigo according to the programs offered at different colleges?

We’ll soon be implementing Unigo Match—a tool that will allow students to talk about themselves—what they’re interested in, what their background is, what kind of school they’re looking for, what majors they’re looking for—and will recommend schools to look at, as well as individual reviews of those schools written by students just like them. It isn’t in place just yet, but it will be integrated in the live site in about two weeks.

How else can this tool change the face of higher education?

Because Unigo is an evolving platform, anyone with an email address can sign on and create content about their school. That content can be reviews, photos, videos and documents. Those documents can be creative writing, political writing, humor writing, journalism and you can search and view the content created by your fellow students on your campus. But you can also see content created across schools; so you can search documents related to, for example, green issues on both your campus and other campuses. Right now we have students creating work in isolation. Unigo will allow students to upload what they’re working on and collaborate with students at other colleges, which I think could be very useful.

I bet it will be a while before we understand all of the ways that connecting students across the country -- and thus lending power and credibility to their otherwise isolated ideas -- could spur change at the university level. But some ideas seem ripe for the picking: for example, with some of the new and evolving fields of study we've been discussing on Worldchanging in this week's series Majors Making a Difference, we can't help but see the potential for a tool like Unigo to shape the majors of the future through students swapping ideas about what they're learning and what they want to know. And it also seems natural that Unigo could become a platform for the advancement of innovations that level the playing field, such as open source textbooks or even open higher education.

Sharon Hoyer is a freelance writer covering sustainability, culture and arts in Chicago. You can find more of her writings on the environment at the Examiner and Centerstage Chicago. You can find her in the garden or on her bike.

Photo credit: flickr/svobodalT, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 5:21 AM)

Providing a Completely Sustainable Campus, Inside and Out

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:12:28 +0000

While some campuses are focusing on physical changes that will bring sustainability to their grounds, buildings and cafeterias other schools are looking into more holistic approaches that bring the theories of sustainability into each course. We found a great example of this in a recent article in The New York Times about Stony Brook Southampton.

“Stony Brook Southampton will certainly be among a limited number of campuses with this level of commitment to sustainability,” says Judy Walton, acting executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. “Sustainability is really a change in the mind-set of how we operate. It’s like seeing the world through a new lens.”

There were only 200 students on campus this past school year, the college’s first; 350 are expected for the fall, and officials hope to reach 2,000 students within five years. If all goes according to plan, they will live in harmony with nature on a campus with geothermal technology and some wind-generated electricity; they will eat local produce in a cafeteria that does not have to figure out how to dispose of used cooking oil because it does not serve fried foods. In fact, it does not have a deep fryer.

But most significant is how Southampton, a part of Stony Brook University, is writing into its courses the concept of sustainability. Students study it when they study literature, economics, architecture or statistics.

Sustainability is one of those fuzzy academic areas that varies in what it encompasses, even what it’s called. But on its philosophy there is consensus: it takes a multidimensional approach to understanding man’s interactions with the natural and man-made world, with a strong social-justice component (something environmental studies has traditionally lacked).

Offering sustainability as a bachelor's and graduate degree is something that is currently unique to only a few colleges, such as Arizona State University and now Southampton. The area of study is spreading to other colleges; however, it's mostly arriving as a minor or a part of an interdisciplinary program.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Photo credit: Flickr/Icalder2001 Creative Commons license

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 4:12 AM)

Providing a Completely Sustainable Campus, Inside and Out

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:12:28 +0000

While some campuses are focusing on physical changes that will bring sustainability to their grounds, buildings and cafeterias other schools are looking into more holistic approaches that bring the theories of sustainability into each course. We found a great example of this in a recent article in The New York Times about Stony Brook Southampton.

“Stony Brook Southampton will certainly be among a limited number of campuses with this level of commitment to sustainability,” says Judy Walton, acting executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. “Sustainability is really a change in the mind-set of how we operate. It’s like seeing the world through a new lens.”

There were only 200 students on campus this past school year, the college’s first; 350 are expected for the fall, and officials hope to reach 2,000 students within five years. If all goes according to plan, they will live in harmony with nature on a campus with geothermal technology and some wind-generated electricity; they will eat local produce in a cafeteria that does not have to figure out how to dispose of used cooking oil because it does not serve fried foods. In fact, it does not have a deep fryer.

But most significant is how Southampton, a part of Stony Brook University, is writing into its courses the concept of sustainability. Students study it when they study literature, economics, architecture or statistics.

Sustainability is one of those fuzzy academic areas that varies in what it encompasses, even what it’s called. But on its philosophy there is consensus: it takes a multidimensional approach to understanding man’s interactions with the natural and man-made world, with a strong social-justice component (something environmental studies has traditionally lacked).

Offering sustainability as a bachelor's and graduate degree is something that is currently unique to only a few colleges, such as Arizona State University and now Southampton. The area of study is spreading to other colleges; however, it's mostly arriving as a minor or a part of an interdisciplinary program.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Photo credit: Flickr/Icalder2001 Creative Commons license

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 4:12 AM)

The College Sustainability Report Card

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:12:03 +0000

Earlier this month, the Sustainable Endowments Institute released a new interactive report card that indicated the sustainability trends at 300 leading schools including Columbia, Harvard and Stanford.

The report card is the only independent evaluation of sustainability in campus operations and endowment investments. It looks at policies and programs, from green dorms and car sharing to shareholder advisory committees and renewable energy investments.

Each school’s full-page profile can be found on the GreenReportCard.org website and includes “A” to “F” letter grades in nine categories: climate and energy use; green building; food and recycling; transportation; administration; student involvement; endowment transparency; shareholder engagement; and investment priorities.

The website also shows trends across policy categories. For example, a dramatic increase in renewable energy investments resulted in “A” grades more than doubling in that category since last year, from 21 to 50 percent of schools surveyed.

“Along with finding out what’s happening at a particular school, the larger question is how schools are using their resources,” said Orlowski. “Are they learning from each other and what example are they setting for students and for the community?”

To peruse these ranking or to create your own side-by-side comparisons of schools using criteria like athletic league, geographic region and Report Card grade, click here.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Image credit: The Sustainable Endowments Institute

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 4:12 AM)

The College Sustainability Report Card

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:12:03 +0000

Earlier this month, the Sustainable Endowments Institute released a new interactive report card that indicated the sustainability trends at 300 leading schools including Columbia, Harvard and Stanford.

The report card is the only independent evaluation of sustainability in campus operations and endowment investments. It looks at policies and programs, from green dorms and car sharing to shareholder advisory committees and renewable energy investments.

Each school’s full-page profile can be found on the GreenReportCard.org website and includes “A” to “F” letter grades in nine categories: climate and energy use; green building; food and recycling; transportation; administration; student involvement; endowment transparency; shareholder engagement; and investment priorities.

The website also shows trends across policy categories. For example, a dramatic increase in renewable energy investments resulted in “A” grades more than doubling in that category since last year, from 21 to 50 percent of schools surveyed.

“Along with finding out what’s happening at a particular school, the larger question is how schools are using their resources,” said Orlowski. “Are they learning from each other and what example are they setting for students and for the community?”

To peruse these ranking or to create your own side-by-side comparisons of schools using criteria like athletic league, geographic region and Report Card grade, click here.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Image credit: The Sustainable Endowments Institute

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 4:12 AM)

Sustainability Education for All Ages

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:40:28 +0000

One thing we've found is that universities aren't the only education systems interested in integrating sustainability into the classroom. Elementary schools are working to bring these messages to the K-12 crowd, too.

One example, recently brought to light in this New York Times article, is Common Ground High School in New Haven, Conn:

In its 11th year, Common Ground, a magnet high school of 150 students, chosen by lottery, was one of the country’s first so-called green charter schools. Today, at least 120 such programs put environmental topics at the center of their curriculum, according to the Green Charter Schools Network, formed just last year. The number has grown along with the expansion of the charter movement, says Senn Brown, executive director of the network. The environmental theme is particularly popular among charters: it lends itself to the kind of interdisciplinary, project-based approaches to learning that they employ, and the subject has also gained traction as a national issue.

Recently opened charters include the Springwater Environmental Sciences School, in a rural area bordering 500 acres of government-protected land in Oregon City, and the Michael Frome Academy, in Woodbury, Minn., which opens this fall with about 70 kindergarteners through third graders. The curriculum will focus on real-world projects related to the natural environment.

Unlike many green schools, Common Ground focuses on the urban environment, and its students reflect the economic and racial diversity of New Haven. Nestled in the woods of West Rock Ridge State Park, Common Ground is half a mile down a winding road from public housing projects and near the rapidly gentrifying Westville neighborhood.

What will also be interesting to watch unfold will be the transition of university students from environmental education programs into schools around the world. These new teachers will hopefully bring with them a more holistic set of knowledge and skills for teaching the next generation about the state of the Earth.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Photo Credit: Common Ground High School

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 11:40 AM)

Sustainability Education for All Ages

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:40:28 +0000

One thing we've found is that universities aren't the only education systems interested in integrating sustainability into the classroom. Elementary schools are working to bring these messages to the K-12 crowd, too.

One example, recently brought to light in this New York Times article, is Common Ground High School in New Haven, Conn:

In its 11th year, Common Ground, a magnet high school of 150 students, chosen by lottery, was one of the country’s first so-called green charter schools. Today, at least 120 such programs put environmental topics at the center of their curriculum, according to the Green Charter Schools Network, formed just last year. The number has grown along with the expansion of the charter movement, says Senn Brown, executive director of the network. The environmental theme is particularly popular among charters: it lends itself to the kind of interdisciplinary, project-based approaches to learning that they employ, and the subject has also gained traction as a national issue.

Recently opened charters include the Springwater Environmental Sciences School, in a rural area bordering 500 acres of government-protected land in Oregon City, and the Michael Frome Academy, in Woodbury, Minn., which opens this fall with about 70 kindergarteners through third graders. The curriculum will focus on real-world projects related to the natural environment.

Unlike many green schools, Common Ground focuses on the urban environment, and its students reflect the economic and racial diversity of New Haven. Nestled in the woods of West Rock Ridge State Park, Common Ground is half a mile down a winding road from public housing projects and near the rapidly gentrifying Westville neighborhood.

What will also be interesting to watch unfold will be the transition of university students from environmental education programs into schools around the world. These new teachers will hopefully bring with them a more holistic set of knowledge and skills for teaching the next generation about the state of the Earth.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Photo Credit: Common Ground High School

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 11:40 AM)

Colleges offer free bikes for everyone

Adam Stein — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:46:04 +0000

As long as you don’t bring your car to campus.

College campuses that want to rein in student driving have hit on a novel solution: give all incoming students free bikes if they agree to leave their cars at home.

College campuses are really the perfect environment for this sort of transportation experiment: small, geographically constrained populations of relatively fit individuals who need to make numerous short trips every day. College campuses, I imagine, also have more discretion over their built infrastructure — roads, bike racks, bike paths, parking spaces, etc. — than a typical small town.

It’s worth noting that bicycling benefits from certain network effects. That is, the more people that ride bikes, the more appealing biking becomes. For example, it’s well documented that bicycle safety increases when there are more bicycles on the road. Given such self-reinforcing effects, it makes sense for colleges to jumpstart the process by handing out bikes. The colleges themselves also reap benefits in the form of decreased need for parking, less trouble with alcohol-related driving accidents, and progress toward sustainability goals.

Free bikes aren’t the only approach schools have taken. Several have dabbled in different flavors of bike-sharing programs, with varying degrees of success. Bike-sharing is, generally speaking, a great idea, but it addresses a different set of problems. If a bike is your primary mode of transport, you don’t really want to fuss with micro-rentals. You’re better off just owning. Although possibly only appropriate on smaller campuses, the idea of just giving bikes away has an appealing simplicity.

Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass, where this post originally appeared. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.

Image by The University of New England.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Education at 9:46 AM)

Should They be Generation E?

Sarah Kuck — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:40:53 +0000

A few months ago, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin suggested that we label the next generation with the letter E, for energy and environment.

I can’t keep track of what young people are being called these days after a string of “Generation [ ]” labels. But my vote would be Generation E, for energy and the environment, if initiatives at a host of schools around the United States are any indication.

I’ve heard more than a few sociologists and historians opine that we’re essentially going to have to grow past our fossil fuel norms and into a new relationship with energy in which environmental considerations are integrated seamlessly into how people make choices related to energy. Maybe this is starting to happen among those who will inherit the consequences of energy decisions being made (or not made) today?

From everything I've read about the sustainability movement within the higher education system, I've learned that in almost every instance the ones behind the push for change are the students. Most of them see clearly the importance of obtaining the knowledge they'll need to rebuild a broken world.

With support and knowledge from a few good teachers about human rights, environmental ethics and ecological limitations, students have come to realize their role and the necessity of pertinent action. That's why they are asking that their education reflect these things more cohesively.

Does that mean they deserve the label Generation E? Only because we've given them no other choice.

This post is part of a week-long series focusing on how universities around the globe are remodeling not only their campuses but also their curricula. For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

Photo credit: Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Education at 9:40 AM)

Colleges Fight to Prove Their Commitment to Sustainability

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:40:33 +0000

This week we are talking about Majors Making a Difference, focusing much of our content on how universities around the globe are integrating sustainability into their campuses and their curricula.

In a special series on education from the New York Times, Kate Zernike recently wrote about how more and more students are now choosing universities based on a school's ability to provide a sustainability-focused environment and education. And as this trend continues, an increasing number of colleges are lining up to deliver:

Green is good for the planet, but also for a college’s public image. In a Princeton Review survey this year of 10,300 college applicants, 63 percent said that a college’s commitment to the environment could affect their decision to go there.

And where there are application decisions to be made, there are rankings. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, with more than 660 members, is developing a rating for environmental friendliness; at least six other organizations rated campus greenness last year, according to the group. There are lists from Forbes, Grist and Sierra magazines, and an annual report card from the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a research organization that assesses the greenness of an institution’s investment portfolio. And the Princeton Review will give its top marks to — ta-da! — Arizona State, Bates, Binghamton University, the College of the Atlantic, Harvard, Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Yale and the Universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.

Campuses across the country are racing to be the greenest of them all. They are setting dates in the not too distant future for achieving carbon neutrality (the College of the Atlantic, an eco-college in Maine, already claims that distinction, as does Middlebury College’s Snow Bowl ski area). They are hiring sustainability coordinators (the association’s job board used to get one posting a month; now it often has five a week). And they are competing with one another in buying green power (in an Environmental Protection Agency contest among athletic conferences, the Ivies triumphed, with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the quarter ending in April).

As colleges fight to climb the ranks to win the title of greenest, as the article points out, we should be wary of those in a rush to declare themselves 'green.' Seeing through they hype and looking for the facts on which colleges are truly committed to improvement may be a student's first test in determining what's sustainable.

For more ideas about what to study and where, or to join the debate, check out this week's feature, Majors Making a Difference.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 9:40 AM)