WOHESC
This past week, I was privileged to attend the Washington Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference (WOHESC). The conference took place at Western Washington University. The goal of the conference is to promote collaboration and facilitation of sustainability in higher education institutes around Washington and Oregon.
One speaker at the event is Todd Mitchell from the Swinomish Tribe. Todd does environmental education for the tribe. A lot of his work revolves around education of place, through interactive activities. His activities were basically all about finding ways for people to engage with the topic through discussion. One acitivity we did was make a living timeline. Basically everyone had an event, related to the tribe or tribal affairs, that they were representing. People had to discuss where they should be on the timeline, and line themselves up from most to least recent. After we did that, Todd would have us go down the line and introduce our topic to the group, and would then point out any inaccuracies of the timeline. The other activity we did is this. We picked a noun that was somehow related to the tribe and then we found a partner. We would then discuss with a partner on how our word and their word was related. These activities reminded me that interaction and discussion are very important to stay engaged during lessons.
OPEnS Lab Tour
(Openly Published Environmental Sensing) OPEnS Lab, is a lab at OSU. This lab is overseen by Dr. Chet Udell. The lab works with environmental sensors, which is very relevant to the project that I am currently working on. One of their projects is called Weather Chimes. It uses similar types of sensors to the sensors available to us through the databot, although the Weather Chimes sensors are much more robust. The Weather Chimes project is used for practical sensing purposes. They have been deployed in many locations around Oregon and Alaska. Their goal is to track the status of different streams, including their temperature and surrounding environment. They have open source code that supports this project. OPEnS Lab keeps all of their code open sourced, which is in alignment with my project’s focus on accessibility. Unfortunately I do not think that using the Weather Chimes as an in-classroom teaching tool will be a possibility. The Weather Chimes project is great for its primary use, but it is out of the price range and more complicated to set up compared to what we need for this project. I had a great experience seeing the OPEnS Lab, and I think that their projects are worth checking out if you are in the field of environmental sensing.
