Learner weblog
If you’ve followed Kevin Cameron’s Bastish.net for any length of time, you know that here’s a man who asks big questions. One of the big questions he’s been asking is what we as a species — or more specifically: as citizens and as consumers — do to the environment, or what we allow to happen to the environment.
Unlike most people, he’s always felt urged to act on these questions and do something about them. After examining his options for a long time, he decided to enrol in an M.A. programme on environemental sustainability in Sweden. He moved from Tokyo to Karlskrona, Sweden, a couple of weeks ago.
Now that he’s settled in, he has started sustainability.bastish.net, a Bastish.net section which he plans to use as a learner weblog:
I will be following my studies, as well as trying to cover some of the fundamental scientific points of sustainability, both reviewing and further researching what led me here in the first place.
And… it gets even better than that. In a little conversation we’re having in the Tawawa Tutorials, he says he “will use it for the other people in the class”.
Dig this: students setting up their own weblogs to discuss their studies. That looks like a whole lot of collaborative, autonomous learning.
Rock on, Kevin!
Comments
pketh :: September 16, 2004
Wow, this just made my day!
Rudolf thanks for sharing and Kevin thanks a million times more for starting this. As a biology student I also have an interest in the environment, but like you mentioned feel too intellectually insecure to talk about it (my field is more towards cellular/genetic stuff).
But it’s still a passion for me, and you’re absolutely right when you say that the air we breath and the water we drink Should be more important than the latest Apple gadget. Count me on as a dedicated future reader :)
Whoa — customer to see you, Kevin! =)
Yes, a group weblog may be the way to go; contributors may find it easier to cross the threshold if they don’t have to take on the responsibility for a whole site of their own, and a single collaborative site might generate a dynamic that individual weblogs may not be able to spark off. Crooked Timber is one of the more impressive group weblogs I’ve seen.
I’d say get together with your classmates and discuss the options. Don’t allow yourself to be carried away by the intitial enthusiasm, however: mountains have a nasty way of giving birth to mice, and I’ve seen collaborations start with a loud bang and end with a squeaky whimper.
I’m not sure Google’s Pagerank is a very accurate gauge of anything, really. A Technorati search for sustainability turns up quite a number of promising results. You may want to do some networking there.
kevin :: September 19, 2004
By the way, for your Japanese readers, one of my classmates is keeping a blog in Japanese and speaks about the program often.
Min Dagbok (Swedish for “my diary”)
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The going has been rough getting other people hooked up with the blog. Everyone seems to have great interest, many people saying they want their own, and I am doing my best to get them started with their own, but I think they may get a little tired of me asking them every day “So, did you write on your blog yet?”
In a week or so we will have a class blog set up, to which everyone can post articles like Tawawa. Maybe this will be easier for people to contribute to, rather than their own personal blog, if they don’t have to do it every day.
It’s amazing how little info there is in the blogosphere about these topics. I can tell because after only being “open for business” for a few days, I have snagged a few top page placements on google for some very key sustianability terms.