Today I listened to an Elluminate audio recording of a discussion between George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Alan Devine as part of the CCK09 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge online course. This discussion was concerned with the topic of Openness & Transparency in online learning. I also watched the video titled ‘The Amazing Unknown Flower’ by Alan Devine which is part of a much larger project about ‘opennes’ that he undertook. While in Australia from the USA, Alan met a person who had commented on his blog about a flower that he had photographed.

Recently I’ve been thinking about Connectivism and the Environment. Is there a specifically Connectivist approach to environmental issues? Every day when I go to work I meet with young adults from a range of countries. There could be students from ten or more countries in the classroom. These include students from China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Saudia Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mongolia. I’ve learnt over time that people may not always share the same values. In Australia, many people are taught to value animals perhaps in a different way to some other parts of the world. On the other hand, possibly the majority of people do share common feelings about animals.

One thing that I feel we do share strongly is an interest in knowledge-building. In this context, as a teacher in a classroom I advocate that the forests of the world can be used to provide us with knowledge. Personally, I am concerned about the destruction of the forests in South East Asia and Papua New Guinea – rapid deforestation on a large scale has occurred within the last 10 years. The tiger is reported to be on the verge of extinction across the world. The elephants, orangutans and tigers of South Asia are all threatened. It’s not my place to make judgements about other people’s values although I do have a desire to raise students awareness of plants, animals and forests in the hope that by doing so, more students will come to value these life-forms to a greater degree.

It is disturbing to find that forests are cut down 50,000 hectares at a time for the purpose of making photcopy paper, for example. One proposal is that we all could pay attention to a project called ‘The Encyclopedia of Life’. Just through the process of photographing and recording information about life forms, we all may see the knowledge building value of forests. They are more valuable to us than photocopy paper. Also we can link this interest in knowledge building with our lifestyle choices, for example, the need for action to reduce poverty and the continuing development of clean technologies.

References

URL – ‘The Amazing Unknown Flower – [cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/]

URL – The Encyclopedia of Life – [http://www.eol.org]