education

Environmental Education Improving in Ontario

- Adam Clare

Teaching people about the environment makes a lot of sense since we live in it. Surprisingly, in many school systems knowledge and awareness about the environment is not shared. In Toronto, Evergreen has been working for years to make the environment important in education. Their efforts are paying off as schools throughout the province are benefiting from their programs.

At that institute, Inwood says, “Teachers learn concepts of ‘ecosystems thinking’—the idea that every action we take as humans affects some other form of life on the planet. Then we demonstrate how this can play out in their classrooms.”

Rather than talking to Grade 1 students about climate change, teachers are encouraged to get them excited about picking up litter, or vermicomposting.

Teachers’ growing appetite for eco-education can be partially attributed to policy. In 2009, the Ontario Ministry of Education mandated that environmental education be delivered at every grade, in every subject—not just science.

Read more at Torontoist.

Online Sex Ed Course Decreases STI Risk in Teens

- Adam Clare

A lack of education around sex can lead to a lot of unwanted things like sexually transmitted infections and diseases to pregnancies. For many people sex is a taboo subject so delivering worthwhile information to teens can be difficult due to parent’s attitudes. One way to get directly to teens is through the internet and, unlike abstinence-only programs (which raise STIs and lower condom use), a new online course helps teens be safer when it comes to sex.

The results of the study showed a 10-per-cent increase in condom use among students who had taken the course and a reduction in self-reported infections for those students who were sexually active when the course started.

Gonzalez-Navarro said there was a significant, positive impact on sexual behaviour among friend groups who had taken the course.

“That was pretty encouraging,” he said. “You get much more effects if you have groups of kids knowing the same things.”

Read more at The Star.

Reading for Faster Freedom in Brazil

- Adam Clare

Prisoners in Brazil may be able to shorten their stay in jail by reading and writing. It’s only 48 days but it can make a difference, the prisoners need to read from a collection of philosophy, science, literature, or the classics then reflect on them in a submitted paper.

Educational programs like this are a good way to help people returning to society restart with more focus and support.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and
write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be
free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,”
said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

…

“A person can leave prison more enlightened and with a
enlarged vision of the world,” said Sao Paulo lawyer Andre
Kehdi, who heads a book donation project for prisons.

“Without doubt they will leave a better person,” he said.

Read more.

MIT and Harvard to Launch Full Free Courses Online

- Adam Clare

This is a really cool way to bring post-secondary education to more people via the internet. Harvard and MIT are launching a new initiative built upon MIT’s expertise in online course delivery to launch a new project called edX that’ll give unbridled access to the knowledge in the two acclaimed institutions.

“Through this partnership we will not only make knowledge more available but we will learn more about learning,” Harvard President Drew Faust said this morning at a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access.”

Faust predicted the venture would “change our relationship to knowledge and to teaching for the benefit of our students and students and would-be students everywhere.”

Standing beside Faust, MIT President Susan Hockfield said: “You can choose to view this era as one of threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes. Online education is not an enemy of residential education but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally.”

Read more here.

Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

The Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education is happening this June in Toronto and they want people who are interested in discussing the relationship between academia and media to attend. I was invited to a pre-conference brainstorming session recently and I have to say that I’m looking forward to this event.

There are a lot of really good people speaking at the conference so if you’re interested in how the media represents academic findings and how academic institutions relate to media organizations you should conference out.

Higher education affects every aspect of our lives – from the economy and the environment, to culture and communications. While the media play a critical role in shaping public understanding of this institution, little discussion has taken place about how that influence is manifested – or about how, in turn, higher education uses the media to mould how the public perceives it.

But that’s about to change.

Introducing Worldviews: Media Coverage of Higher Education in the 21st Century. This innovative conference, scheduled for June 2011 in Toronto, Canada, will not only examine these issues, but explore why it’s important to do so.

The 2011 inaugural conference will consider a range of important issues, including:

How media coverage of higher education has changed over the past two decades and where it is headed
The impact of social media and how it is changing what is covered and how higher education is understood
The role the media play in influencing public policy debates on public education
How higher education engages with the media to inform public opinion
The different realities of the developing and developed worlds

Visit the conference’s website.

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