A new blog has been created and now I need to make a start on the Education for Sustainability course. For this first blog post I simply wish to share my current thinking around sustainability and my plans for a sustainable approach to being a student undertaking this course.
It was great to see Peter's prompt to us on Moodle discussion as I had already been pondering my thoughts around what sustainability meant to me and I could draw rapidly on the notes I had already made around those thoughts.
For me sustainability is all about choice! The choices we make around the careful and thoughtful use of resources to nurture and maintain ourselves, our environment and support a viable future. It will be interesting to see how my thoughts develop, shift or change through this course.
One of the choices I have made in relation to this course is the way in which I will collate and use my study resources. Usually when I undertake study I end up with sheets of A4 paper containing hand written notes all over the place and piles of printed readings heavily decorated with highlighter pens and sticky notes. Trying to find or remember something previously read involves much thumbing through paper or shuffling piles.
For this course I have decided to try a different approach; and explore how effective that approach is for me also whether it is or isn't a sustainable practice in our age of ever increasing use of and dependence on technology.
Here's my plan -
I will use:
• Evernote notebook as my learning journal (Evernote is cloud based and means I can access my notes from any computer or mobile device)
• Diigo to keep track of articles and webpages - this is a social bookmarking website that I moved to in preference to Delicious a couple of years ago as I preferred its functionality.
◦ - tag EfS
• Blog - Balance and Sustainability - to share learning with the enrolled group
• Moodle - for other course communication
• Mendeley (perhaps) -a referencing and storage tool to keep, annotate and cite documents
I hope to provide some reflections along the way as to how this is working out for me. I'm looking forward to reading others blogs and hearing what others are doing.
Great start and very leafy theme. You're using all the cool tools too.
ReplyDeletewhat a splendid suite of apps.
ReplyDeleteWillie
Yes a splendid suite of apps, but what do they have to do with sustainability? I have grappled with this over the weekend and after initially thinking they have frack all to do with saving humanity, I now think that perhaps they do. It is not because they reduce the use of paper, as paper is a renewable resource and computers are not (that's obvious)but it is because they are part of a "suit of things" we call technology. If you think of sustainability as the prevention of the extinction of the human species, then technology is going to be our only way out. The planet will be here long after we are not (well until the sun becomes a red giant anyway). And when you reaslise that 95% of all species having lived on Earth are already extinct then well perhaps that's nature's way too. No, there really is no notion of "sustainability" on Earth and for humans to continue indefinitely we have to find a new planet and that will be done by the use of technology. So let's embrace technology and live sustainably for as long as it takes to colonise another planet in the universe so that when the lights go out in our solar system we will be happily (peacefully and sustainably)inhabiting a different rock in the sky.
ReplyDeleteIf we don't wake up to the perils of continued economic growth, peak oil and climate change VERY soon however, I don't think our current rate of technological discovery will save us. Perhaps someone could ask the Arab states to start putting some of their oil money into space travel instead of luxury ocean going "yachts".
I am all for keeping things simple and can easily get lost in technology. For myself I would favour going for a one stop shop that meets all of your needs in terms of housing all of your materials. Is that a possible / desirable outcome for you? Not trying to be picky here cause this set-up obviously works for you.Just curious to explore the benefits you have found for doing things this way.
ReplyDelete