A Lake on the Edge: The Future of Lake Naivasha

Here's an index to each of the short films about Lake Naivasha on YouTube. They are all around 5-6 minutes duration.

Part 1: The Heart of the Lake.

Part 2: The Aliens Are Coming!

Part 3: People and Pollution.

Part 4: What Can We Do?

Part 5: Our Planet Earth.

A Lake on the Edge: The Future of Lake Naivasha, Part 1

This is the first of a series of short videos we are planning to use for our project. The original film was written by Dr. David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester with around 25 years experience in Kenya.

The whole of the series is now available on YouTube, see the 'playlist'.

Further learning materials are currently being evaluated, such as a simple computer model of Lake Naivasha and a game based upon this.

Our intention is that all these materials will form part of a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) scenario, something which we have some expertise in at the University of Leicester.

I hope you enjoy the videos - please do leave comments on YouTube!

Cheers,

Tim

"Very likely"

So we are probably contributing to Global Warming through our combined effects upon the planet since Industrialisation according to the IPCC.

There's a nice piece on the BBC website by a lady from the MET Office about computer models.

Complexity of Sustainable Development

I was fortunate enough to attend the NESCI Winter School over the past couple of weeks in Cambridge, MA in the U.S. It was a very informative and productive 2 weeks as well as being a lot of fun! The way I've seen it for some time now the number of systems which interrelate when one considers Sustainable Development leads to a great deal of complexity. Complexity Science therefore, we may assume, would give us some handle on how to deal with this complexity.

So, it turns out, the science of Complexity does indeed provide a number of tools and methods of analysis. Examples of the former would include modelling and examples of the latter would include networks. To illustrate, aside from the classes at NECSI from 9 to 5 each day every evening was spent on group work.

Our group in week 1 investigated issues concerning social capital and intervention strategies to alleviate 'social exclusion' (another interest of mine and also of some interest to this project). We developed a model and wrote a paper on the theoretical background.

However, of more relevance here, our group in week 2 investigated Global Warming. So, getting back to Complexity Science methods:


Firstly we realised that it is important to manage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development. Hence, we developed a semantic network (as a form of ontology) of the knowledge we were researching and integrating into the NECSI Wiki. It is called Global Warming Ecosystem Brain or G-WEB.

Secondly, we developed a model, named atmosmodel, which helped us to develop our theories resulting from our newly researched knowledge of Global Warming. I likened this to the process of acquisition, argumentation and application I talk about in my PhD thesis.

We did not have long at all to carry out this work so it is all in its early stages. However, the whole course proved to be useful for 'Science for Sustainability'. In fact, as a means of developing the game tool kit which we are proposing will be the centrepiece of this project, I would like to explore the development of a simple model.

All in all this was two weeks well spent with a whole host of ideas gained in a very short space of time. Furthermore, some intelligent and quite dedicated people got to cross-fertilise their varying ideas about Complexity Science which in itself made the whole trip incredibly worthwhile.

English Is Not The World's Language!

Somewhere near the start of this project I imagined having the website in multiple languages. I knew from my Postdoc that the widely-held perception of English being a de facto standard for the world's population is, of course, completely unfounded. Moreover, this misconception actually inhibits progress and particularly in Education.

So I asked a few friends if they could translate the website. As my own language abilities are truly lacking then I'm afraid I expect my own contributions will be mainly in English (we're all hypocrites :) However, it looks like a dear friend will try to translate the main pages to French. C'est une excellent début!

Should anyone want to try to translate the main web pages to another language, particularly one that is spoken by a wide cross-section of the world population, please do get in touch. We may be able to reimburse you for your time and effort.

I do believe there's a need for 'the message' to be spread far and wide and especially not just to English speakers but to some of the people on our planet who may actually be the ones currently suffering the most from our collective ills.

Innovation

From early in the project I was always interested in the Sustainable Earth or planet idea... I didn't have a clue how we would be going about it, just that soomething would happen in the coming weeks and months. Now that the idea is a game - a really innovative way to get our message accross to all ages if worked properly.
The idea of the Blog came about after discussions with Tim and what he wanted as an outreach tool. It's come together slowly and hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks, the Blog will be fully functional as a Current and Latest News page. I was supposed to keep a blog of the things that i am currently doing, so I may be starting up my own Blog, for the project and then in the future as a record of what I'm doing. It's a really great way to see for yourselves where you are and what you are doing. It means that we can update the science4sustainability members and general public quickly of any news.
If some of you want to know who I am and what I do, check out the Google Groups archive. For the time being, I'm going to say bye (partly because i'm not that sure what to say but mostly because i've got a meeting with Tim tomorrow and he won't be happy unless i do the work he asked me to do over the week!!).
Divaker
(or just D)

Our Planet Earth

Some momentum has been building with the project recently. Firstly, several teams (loosely defined) have 'emerged'. These are what I am, for the moment, calling

• An Adminstrative Team
• An Online Research Team
• A Stakeholder Team
• A Face-to-Face Team
• A Core Research Team
• A Game Development Team

So, secondly and as the team constructions hint, we are proposing to develop a game for this project! The obvious intention is to make learning fun, motivating and relevant to the context. So, to achieve particularly the relevance, we will actually be developing a Toolkit, or the 'design of the design' for a game. This Toolkit will be named Our Planet Earth. Therefore, to help develop the Toolkit, we are hoping to explore the game design in the context of the Rift Valley in Kenya. A colleague, Dr. David Harper, has a long-standing interest in the ecology and more recently Sustainable Development of this region. I recently interviewed David and probably will do so again. David and a colleague have also produced many films of the region which he currently uses for education purposes. More of this later...

Finally, the idea of the game is to model the local systems relevant in multiple contexts (hence developing a Toolkit which can be used to 'localise' a game), particularly in Africa. Obviously there will have to be enormous limits to achieve this though and, ultimately, make the game playable. So, if you have any ideas as to what you think might make a good game for Education for Sustainable Development or have already played some of the games that exist and have thought of ways to improve them please do share your thoughts here.

As I keep emphasising, and the Toolkit name implies, there's only one way to address these problems we are all facing and that's together.