UBC Reads Sustainability


“books” shared CC by bjornmeansbear

A few changes in my professional profile at UBC in recent weeks… My old Office of Learning Technology has merged with the former Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth to become the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology.

Among the changes for me personally is an assignment to coordinate our Centre’s efforts having to do with sustainability. Along those lines, I am very pleased to announce our participation in an exciting new initiative that originates from UBC’s Alma Mater Society. UBC Reads Sustainability is intended “bring well-known authors on the topic of sustainability to our campus to engage in a campus-wide discussion.”

The idea is to integrate these events with in-class activities, and already instructors from five departments have agreed to take part. Two fantastic speakers have already been lined up:

* David Korten, on “Creating a Real Wealth Economy for a Just and Sustainable Future”. Wednesday, September 29th, 6:00-7:30 PM at the Victoria Learning Theatre in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Free registration here.

* Stewart Brand on “Rethinking Green”. 7:00-8:30 PM, Tuesday, Oct 5th, Multi-purpose Room, Liu Institute of Global Issues at UBC. Free registration here.

This is a brand-new series, and we at CTLT could not be more excited about how this idea is set to grow.

3 thoughts on “UBC Reads Sustainability

  1. Hi Brian,

    I hope you’re intending to invite Bill Rees to your seminar series. You’ve got the man that literally coined the term ‘ecological footprint’ working at your university.

    I was in touch with him a while back:
    http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/11/16/bill-rees-the-vulnerability-and-resilience-of-cities/

    As you know, I followed this up with a number of blog posts on resilience and sustainability:

    http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/tag/resilienteducation/

    Bill Rees has also written about sustainability and universities – both the teaching of sustainability and the very sustainability of universities themselves:

    http://www.academicmatters.ca/AcademicMatters/docs/AM_APR_08.pdf
    http://ceae.colorado.edu/~amadei/CVEN4700/PDF/HigherEd(Rees).pdf

    and although not about sustainability and education, he has a good paper on the builder sector and sustainability which can be extrapolated to the building of campuses:

    http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a910981245&fulltext=713240928

    You might also be interested in these two new books on this subject area:

    http://www.ies-uk.org.uk/resources/newsletter/issue46/article1.html

    I’m looking forward to following your work in this area. Good luck.

  2. Joss, thanks so much for checking in and sharing this material… I would love to work with Bill Rees in some capacity, hopefully this role will allow for that.

    The links are killer – your ongoing work in this area has been of great interest to me, and I will enjoy digging in deeper. I still feel like I’m finding my way, but hopefully I will grope my way to a place where I can contribute some useful work.

  3. Keene State’s CELT (a mashup of learning design, experiential learning, teaching excellence, and edtech support) welcomes UBC’s CTLT (which seems to be the same thing?).

    Throwing these things together works great. You are going to love it.

    I will warn you — faculty will be confused by it — “I don’t get what you *do*” they may say. I settled eventually on really stressing that we were all the old stuff, but now were coordinating our efforts under a single director reporting to the provost. Institutional alignment, etc.

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