Eco-Vis

A bit off subject for the Cloud Institute project, but definitely within the theoretical scope of the class. Eyebeam ran this ecological data visualization contest a while back. The links at the bottom of the page may be of interest (I haven’t checked them out yet).

http://www.eyebeam.org/learning/ecovis.php

Thoughts on the Cloud Institute + Social Media

I’m with Doug and Patrick that some attractive marketing demonstrating the utility of using ‘technology’ and social media for sustainability education, plus the Plaza’s usability & functionality (which we will hopefully see soon) would be tremendously helpful before the upcoming conferences.

One thing that struck me at the meeting was that a “Web 2.0″ presence could simultaneously help support three functions for the Institute: marketing/fundraising, pedagogical/curricular, and professional development. I suppose it operates like a system. The products of the curricular realm (class blogs, for example) could be used for marketing/fundraising/grant proposals. They could also serve as starting points for ‘behind-the-scenes’ pedagogical discussions among educators.

There would, of course, be some overlap, but I wonder if this conceptualization could help the class organize into teams around these three functions? At the very least, I think we can help the Institute connect sustainability education to media literacy and integrate social media into a curricular (and a professional development) framework. I suppose the ‘deliverable’ would be some practical copy that they could use in future proposals.

Thoughts?

- Jedd

Ambient information + sustainable social networking links

Just archiving a previous email:

Here are a few related articles and sites I’ve stumbled across over the past few months:

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/08/a_couple_of_mon.html
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/08/24/08

These above two links are to an article and an interview with technology journalist Clive Thompson, in which he discusses the cognitive advantages of using ambient information in service to real-time energy usage monitoring, an energy utility’s pilot program that tried this, and linking energy usage up to social networking to create “a social virus type of effect where people would be almost actively reducing even more of their energy usage so they won’t look like a complete energy glutton in front of their friends.”

http://www.diykyoto.com/wattson.html
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html

The two sites above are “product pages” for the ambient devices mentioned in the first set of links.

http://makemesustainable.com/mission

This last link is to a sustainable social networking site designed to track users’ carbon footprints. I’m somewhat skeptical, but it looks like an interesting “text” to analyze for strengths/weaknesses.

Inaugural post

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