This semester the Office of Campus Sustainability partnered up with the ENV1101A course on a Community Service Learning Project. This isn't anything new because we do a project with this course every year... but this time, under the supervision of professor Tom Boggart, we mixed things up and had students work on mini sustainability projects. The change in format was to see what kind of innovation we could spark from the students if we tightened up some of the parameters. For instance, this year we gave the students a maximum budget of $1,000, limiting the scope and hopefully getting the students to think outside the box. We also had students produce a poster presentation rather than a formal report so that they could engage a more visual audience. So here are some of the results; they are spectacular. What impressed me the most were the really innovative things that people did to incorporate environmentally friendly design concepts into their posters. com...

Photo credit: jonathan rausseo How would you like to help the environment, earn credentials, and learn some professional skills all in one week? The Centre for Global and Community Engagement (CGCS) recently approached our office with an interesting proposal, alternative study breaks. In short, take a student's boring reading week and turn it into an amazing learning experience with the end goal of making the campus more sustainable. In case you don't know who CGCE is, they are the group that operates the Community Service Learning program (you know... volunteer as part of your course work). They also run the co-curricular record and are basically a one-stop shop for volunteering on campus. So in the last little while, the CGCE got a lot of questions from students asking if there were more intense volunteering opportunities (you know.... a lot of intense volunteering in a short period of time). Then the idea was floated to do this during the reading week becau...

Photo cresdit: Jonathan Rausseo I am going to fold big concepts together here so please bare with me. Concept #1 - Living Laboratory I've talked about this before but a little refresher is in order. The Living Laboratory is a concept that places the University campus at the center of unique learning experiences. These learning experiences typically happen outside of the classroom and can be structured or unstructured. Concept#2 - Biodiversity zone A Biodiversity zone is at it's heart an area with a higher variation the the number of organisms. Simply put, more living things in a given space. So if I take these two concepts and bring them together then what we get is the Biodiversity Garden for the University of Ottawa. The concept of this project would be to create a small garden on campus with a disproportionately high amount of biodiversity. This would create a space that would not only increase the number of species on campus, it would also create a space where students in t...

Photo credit: uOttawa gazette So you say that you can’t hand your assignment in on-line because your prof won’t let you. Unfortunately that statement is bull$@!t and I think I have some proof to back this statement up. Have you seen the uOttawa lately? In a recent issue there was a nice little article about some Geography and Environmental Studies profs that decided to go paperless with their assignments. To make sure that their TAs (teacher’s assistants) were properly equipped for the task, the professors purchased some ipads and voila… a paperless semester was born. ( Article ) And of course there were the infamous Experiential Learning Sustainability surveys. I blogged about this earlier this year ( Love and Surveys ) but the results are slowly trickling in and it turns out that 45% of professors do allow students to submit their work electronically. Sure this is a little less than half but I bet it is way more than you expected. Another interesting tidbit came out of these surveys...

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rausseo A couple of months ago I blogged about the surveys that were being conducted in Eric Crighton's Environmental Studies course ( Love and Surveys ). For those of you that didn't read it here is the Cole Note's summary... students conducted over 2,000 surveys about environmental issues on campus. This was part of the Experiential Learning Program. As the results begin to role in I thought that I might take the time to tell you about the recommendations that were made. Each student was asked to only do the surveys, but also include a series of recommendations about how to improve the campus based on their surveys. The results are in... Most people recommended that we needed more bins (228). Another 107 recommendations were made to produce more information. 63 people wanted more online content, etcetera. All the big recommendations have been highlighted in the nifty chart up above. They cover everything from recycling to green space to paper consu...

Photo credit: Surveyonline Il y a deux semaines, j’ai eu le plaisir de travailler sur les sondages de la classe du cours de première année d’environnement…oui! Vous l’avez peut être deviné c’est dans le cadre du cours ENV1101, enseigner par Éric Crighton. Moi, je m’occupais des sondages concernant le recyclage au campus. La grande aventure commençait lorsque mon patron, Jon m’envoie les résultats des sondages qu’il a reçu des étudiants. J’en recevais une dizaine à la fois…au point que ma boite courriel ne fonctionnait pas très bien car elle était saturée de messages. Ma tâche principale était de s’assurer que les données sont bien rentrées dans les diverses pages Excel, pour en suite les jumeler dans un même document. Ça semble simple dit comme cela, mais la réalité était toute autre. Je vous explique. Les problèmes que j’ai rencontrés étaient soit que le fichier ne s’ouvrait pas, car il a été fait dans un ordinateur Mac, soit les données n’étaient pas complètes faute de tricherie d...

Okay so you didn’t hear this from me but I may have gotten in over my head. You see I am working on this project with Eric Crighton, a prof over in the Geography and Environmental Studies. Actually we have been working together for the past four years on this project. The objective of our project is very simple. Use first year students to change the way that our school work is conducted to basically save the world. Please allow me to put together a couple of concepts that have crossed my path recently. 1- There is this concept called the Living Laboratory. It is pretty simple; use the campus as a huge on-going experiment so that every day events can become teachable moments. So a building gets built – engineering students study how this happens. A new marketing campaign is launched – communications students evaluate its success. A jogging club is formed – health science students help create an optimum training schedule. And so on and so on. 2- Course Work Ecology – why is it that we ar...

This isn't really anything new but it is certainly exciting. The Office of Campus Sustainability participates every year in the Experiential Learning program. In the past we have worked with Eric Crighton' s first year environmental issues class. Each year these students help conduct recycling surveys on campus that ultimately end up being used to improve the campus recycling system. This year we have been working with Renate Sander-Regier, the prof for the third year natural resource management class. The concept is simple - the students of the course have to assess the natural resources of the campus and make recommendations about how to use them all sustainably. Please allow this brief interjection. I like the ELS program because it does 3 things. First, students get to do some real work and learn some practical skills, not that theoretical stuff that sometimes leaves you feeling empty sometimes. Two, a community group gets the benefit of some much needed work / info / hel...