 Thanks. So just to note, I'm going to be, as usual, talking very fast and throw lots of stuff at you, huge numbers of links, this thing, that thing. Just want you to know that everything I link to up this week is at bit.lyvit.ly towards sustain. You're welcome to follow along if you wish. So how did I end up to be talking about sustainability education? I've been working in open education for a long time. I think this is my sixth time at the Open Education Conference, at least my fourth one here in Utah. So I've got this long background in open education, emerging technologies, things like that. But how did I end up with sustainability education on my doggie? So I think it's because, while there was a departmental reorganization, and even though I had absolutely no background in the field whatsoever, I kind of annoyed, I made kind of a pest of myself through other things, through my partner, Kira McPhee, and I used to have this group called the Sustainable Living Arts School. We had this idea of the learning party where a group of people want to learn something, so they identify an expert, they check in $10 or $20 each. The expert comes in, gives a bit of expert guidance, but then we actually go out and do the work. So this is how to do, for example, turn a lawn into a garden bed without digging it up. So it's got a no-till method of that. So yeah, we're kind of nice little model. This is from a learning party on home brewing. And I think once you talk home brewing later, I've gotten quite enthused about that, and we've gotten pretty good at it. I guess I got sucked into it too. I helped to do things like start community gardens in the neighborhood. So this was something that I did in my spare time. I have no formal background in sustainability. I'm not an ecologist. I don't go to those kind of events. But I guess I will say, and this is a bit of a warning for anybody here who hasn't read my blog before, who hasn't know me, you may have heard of badges, the alternative, the crediting system badges. I have actually been certified, you can see on the right hand side of my blog here, as an actual doom monitor. So do keep that in mind as I proceed. I will be monitoring some doom as we proceed, and you'll see why I earned this badge. Now, when I had sustainability education added to my portfolio, I had a question, which is usually the question that everyone who I talked to ends up asking me. So I don't think it's such a bad question to actually pose to this group for just a minute. Those of you who have someone sitting next to you, if you would even take one minute to just describe this particular question, what is sustainability exactly? And can you maybe come up with an example of a sustainable practice? So I'm just going to give you one minute, which some people hate the audio participation part of the show. There won't be much of that. I promise to talk at you for the rest of the session after this. And I won't even let you ask questions, I promise. But if you would just chat with the person next to you for a minute, see if you can figure out what sustainability is and come up with an example of something. All right, I'll give you about 10 more seconds before I demand your attention again. Did anybody come up with a short description of sustainability that will help me understand what it is? I hope somebody does. Yes? The ability to continue in perpetuity. The ability to continue in perpetuity, thank you. That's not bad. Do you have an example of what you would consider to be a sustainable practice or sustainable project? Well, we were thinking of, you know, in the desert you don't farm with cows because the land cows sustain. And so you have to look at many variables. It could be financial, it could be biological. In many areas, variables that you need to consider will this practice or this situation be able to continue based on the variables that you play. Good. Thank you. Does anyone else want to pipe up? Bye. Just a thought really. It seems to me that it's often we get a negative definition of sustainability, by which I mean it's easier to identify those things which are unsustainable rather than say that is sustainable. Yeah. So in practice it's often the other way around. I should warn you that I got about 20 minutes of complaining about unsustainable practices in store for you. I don't know if you already might do Mungeridge, but I do hope to end with about five minutes of what I would like to positive one small sustainable alternative to those. Are you out more to say? Maybe not. Maybe it's a bit too abstract. Oh, please. What thought about sustainability? Often to have a continued existence, things have to evolve as they continue to exist. I'm just wondering whether you can still say that the same thing has been sustained. It doesn't evolve, right? It's not the same thing. It depends on what it is, but if it does change, is it still the same thing that's being sustained or it just comes on the other side? Is it just evolution? Yeah. So again, let's just think about the label of sustainability. Yeah, I'm just going to sit here and trip out on that for a while. Thank you. Yeah. It's related. I mean time frame. I mean something can be sustainable for an hour, you know, but so what's your time frame? Well, I'm going to learn that this session isn't sustainable for the next 25 minutes. But yeah, that's a good point too. Duration is always an interesting question to add in there. Of course, within the open education world, sustainability has a very specific meaning. It usually means something along the lines and forgive me if I sound crass, but how do we keep getting money to do what we're doing? How do we continue to justify the existence of this project so we can keep doing it? I think I dare say that's an undercurrent of a lot of our things. I went to an event in London about a year and a half ago and there's this very radical dude named Joss Winn. He gave a session on open education and sustainability and I might have to give my doomonger a badge to him because, you know, he just makes the point. The environment is not sustainable, the population is not sustainable, the civilization is not sustainable. Our leaders, our institutions are completely incapable of addressing these challenges. So why the hell should we do any better? And he actually gets more provocative from there, so I would encourage you to check that talk out. And he's done other things like that as well. I don't pretend to have a particular definition of sustainability. I do like this one. This is a professor at UBC who's now retired. But I just love this idea of enjoying the good life and working together. And this notion that, you know, there's contingent and absolute values, local, short-term, long-term. I mean, I like that phrase though. It's essentially the good life. Not in the sense of heat it is unnecessarily, but in the sense that it feels okay. It feels equitable that you're doing good, you're feeling good, you feel good about what you're doing and you're not doing it at somebody else's expanse or the planet's expanse. I don't pretend that that's the best, but it's the one I like the best. So just to lay that out there. Now, sustainability at UBC. Now, I have to acknowledge, as you notice, Jeff Miller's not here. I'm here on my own and he actually wrote up a good chunk of the write-up that may have brought you here today. This is my attempt to address some of those points. Sustainability is kind of a big deal of the University of British Columbia. They actually say they want to be, quote-unquote, the most sustainable university in the world. So there's all sorts of big initiatives there. Huge amounts of money been spent on so-called green buildings, grey water waste, things like that, solar, taking heat from the processing plants where the computer servers are and using it to heat adjacent buildings. The lot's kind of really creative, high-energy stuff. The teaching and money piece, which is where I'm going to end, is considerably more in-co-it. And to be frank with you, when I proposed this session eight months ago, I had hoped I would have more tangible things to show. It's really actually hard work to get people to think about, well, what is this thing, sustainability? How do I incorporate it into my practice? There's a lot of good will, a lot of people who want to do it, but it remains really in-co-it and it's been kind of tricky to be frank. I do have high hopes for something. Of course, I can't show you very much now. I'm going to be showing you some open frameworks and tools later on. We are actually developing an interdisciplinary course called Sustainability 101. This will be an interdisciplinary open course with professors from engineering, forestry, across the university, and I have very high hopes on this and they'll be on a platform I'll be showing you a little later. Probably the most interesting thing, though, about sustainability education is that perhaps it's because incompetent people like myself are working in it. The real leadership has been shown by students here. The most interesting initiatives at UBC are UBC Reads where they get some really top-ranked speakers like Bill McKibbin, Stewart Brand, people like that to come. And then this organization Go Beyond, which is actually a student organization. And I would like to ask, does anyone else know of a discipline where the students organize the conferences, choose the program, determine the speakers, facilitate the activities, and the audience are professors and staff from universities. So that's a really interesting opportunity. I've kind of come to accept that maybe the leadership should come from the students on this and I do link to some of their work here and would encourage you to take a look at it because it's the students really that are making it happen. So I'm just going to move ahead, though, and pause at a question. When this landed on my docket, I actually thought this job would be easier than it was because I thought, well, this is about public education, changing behavior, making a difference, right? I mean, this isn't ivory tower stuff. This is about changing the world. This is about saving the world. And having had some experience in the open education world, I assumed when I took over this docket that there would be this vast amount of fantastic open resources out there on building capacity and improving sustainability education. And to the point where, even without really doing an assessment of it, I actually initiated a project where I was going to develop a toolkit for sustainability education, capacity building, as my institution, based on OAR. Unfortunately, I really wasn't able to find anything. I mean, I found things on climate change and stuff like that, but the only thing I'm actually working on teaching and learning practices towards sustainability education, the only thing I was able to find was this UNESCO resource, which interestingly enough is fully copyrighted. I'm not sure why that is. And it's okay. Most of this content was written 10 years ago. And frankly, I'm just kind of surprised this is all there is. Now, part of the reason I'm here is not so much to complain or to shame anybody, much including myself. But I just wanted to note, if you've already went on the wiki, if you are aware of anyone out there that is doing work that can improve, that we can reuse and incorporate and build on in our own faculty development and student engagement university, I did develop this very simple just Google doc where if you could just throw a URL in or suggestions of things I should be looking at, I'd be very grateful for it. And in fact, we want to jump in at best point too and raise one. I'd be happy to take some time on that. But my immediate assessment is just really not very much. And again, I just want to underline something here. So I have this reading here. This guy here, if you're ever in a room with a bunch of sustainability educators or sustainability minded people or hippies, if you're just kind of in a room with those kind of people and get on their good side, quote some David Orr at them. David Orr is kind of one of the real leading lights. He's a genuine radical, but he's also had real broad fingers. So this is a piece on what is education for? A very often cited piece in sustainability education. And here he is. He's just saying, dire jeopardy. We don't have a moment to lose here. The human survival is at stake. Not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind. Essentially saying that education has been the problem that has gotten us to this point. And we need to desperately reform it and make some really important changes. And that's kind of like the idea here too. The problems are just getting so complex. And our ability to address them is really not keeping pace with it. That's a Thomas Homer Gibson graph. As far as I know, completely invented data, I don't think you can actually measure ingenuity. But it kind of illustrates a sense, right? Anyway. But, so, you know, David Orr, what a guy, right? Well, I've been at public lectures where sustainability educators cite David Orr. And they'll say things like, you've got to read that article of his called, Architecture's Pedagogy. Well, I would be interested in buying it, but if I don't belong to a university, it's going to cost me 43 bucks to read that three-page article. And these are people in public lectures who are telling people to do this. That's actually an older article, a more recent one, published by Wiley. Not David Wiley. David's a nice guy. But the Wiley online, I actually tried to find out how much optimism and hope in a harder time from 2007 would cost. And I actually went through the process of creating a user account. I could give them all sorts of information. It was like I was getting a mortgage through them. I still couldn't find the actual price. And even at this point, as you can see, prompting me for my credit card information before they even told me how much it's going to cost. Very ethical behavior there. Question. How does design thinking interact with sustainability? How do you see that? Can I get to that? Because I actually do plan to finish with that. Okay, great. Thanks. This is another article. I'm sorry to just, but some of this stuff just freaks me right. This was a piece on the higher education's responsibility to challenge and critique value and knowledge. And to these conflicting norms and interests. We need to contextualize. We need to have an emancipatory view with regard to sustainability. That particular article, which was just published a couple of years ago. You can only $25 to read that article. Why am I hammering away at this? I mean, I guess, to me, this kind of cuts across disciplines. But, you know, ones where you say, we don't have a moment to lose or our survival as a species of the state strikes me as kind of just a little extra kind of something that gets in my car. I don't know if you saw this particular visual. I actually kind of entered this field in 1998. And I remember people talking about the crisis and cereals publishing even then. As you can see, there's been a little bit of concentration of ownership in the field then. Maybe you don't care about that. Maybe the concentrated ownership into a handful of corporations isn't a problem for you. It's worked so well in our financial sector. I can't see why it would be a problem in the academic publishing sector. But it's had an effect on prices. Guess which line the yellow one is? Those are the costs of periodicals. Those other graphs are showing things like cost of living increases. And the prices of books in general, which have more or less stayed at pace with inflation. Not so with cereals publication. And what do you know? Look on the right side there. Elsevier and Springer are among the most profitable of the publicly held companies in the corporate world. Now, I don't think I have to say too much about this. I think people here are broadly aware of what Open Access is all about. But that said, let's just remember, most of these articles are contributed for free by people like us. Most of these articles are peer reviewed for free by people like us. Indirectly subsidized by public funds all along the way. And then we have to buy them back at this exorbitant rate. Now, what is sustainable about that? And why is it that academic publishing is so much more exploitive than the so-called outside world? I mean, aren't we especially concerned about access to knowledge? Aren't we especially concerned? Oh, I took five minutes. Great. So I'm just going to move ahead. I wanted to talk more about Aaron Swartz. We got a guy looking at facing 30 years in prison because he downloaded a bunch of articles, many of which were in the public domain. So is that an open education issue? I just have a question for that. Is that something we should care about here? Are people talking about that? Are there any sessions on the legal situation of people like Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning? How about issues like digital privacy and the quality of the online environment as a whole? Does that have any impact on our practices here as open educators who want to exploit the web to its fullest potential? So let me just skip a little bit further ahead. Why am I talking about all this stuff in the context of sustainability? Well, I just want to note, and I'm not going to show too much about it, Walmart actually happens to be the number one seller of organic produce and milk in North America right now. But really, is that a sustainable practice? They're still shipping it all over in trucks. They're still paying non-subsistence wages to all people along the supply chain. And it's large-scale, massive, kind of unsustainable practices, but it's organic. Contrast doing that with the way, say, my friend Zach Dowell does work, paying very close attention to how the ecosystem where he farms works, and doing things like not chucking away the green waste at great expense and then having to add fertilizer back to the soil, but actually using the stuff that's being generated in the system. Now, is that a principle we can look at in open education? And here's where I'm going to talk a little bit. I don't know if it's exactly design thinking, but the alternative. I just want to show a little bit of the UBC Wiki. This is an open source Wiki, built on media Wiki. We just kind of thrown it over to the community and seen what they would do with that. So we have things like the main space where people can talk about all sorts of things having to do with campus life. So a list of all the administrative units on campus that happen to have Twitter accounts. Things like this that kind of enhance the basic functioning of the university. There's reviews of bars on campus. There's reviews of which residents on campus have the most parties attitude and which ones you can actually study and things like that. So you have that space. We maintain our documentation as well there. So we actually have generated quite a vast amount of open resource documentation on things like say Wimba classroom and how to use them and free screencast tutorials. So all of our documentation is just de facto produced in the Wiki. We don't have to go through a process to release it to the world. It's there. And then we work very hard to make this content as reusable as possible. I'll show a bit of that in a second, but I just also want to show the courses that we have in this. So here's an example where instructors and we are not telling them to do this. We're not paying them to do this. We're not providing them to do this beyond giving them a very nice space to work in. And we're seeing people coming in and actually creating very detailed online courses in open environments that are immediately shareable. And then you see things like this one here. I don't know who's doing this. Infinite series module work. It's just a massive amount of online content. I don't know. Like whenever I get depressed, I just go look at the recent changes on the Wiki and people I've never met or know anything about are using our system and generating massive amounts of shareable online content. Now, one of the reasons why they're willing to do this is we make this content radically reusable. So for example, the library to do all their documentation as well on our Wiki have this piece on how to find scholarly articles. Now this particular piece of content used to sit on eight different websites and if an update had to happen, they had to go and find where it was in charge of those eight different websites and make those updates. But now the content lives on the Wiki and then it can be dynamically republished in any number of environments because every single Wiki page has this little bit of JavaScript embed code. So you can take this content, copy two lines of code, put it in any HTML environment and that dynamic content will be rendered anywhere that you put it. So just to give an example that works, there's that how to find articles piece. So here is it living in a student information site and you'll notice it actually works with tab browsing and that same content on the library site. And again, it adopts the local look and feel of the library site. Put it in one place and that content is managed out of the one spot, changes made there, updated links, new stuff, whatever goes there. Yes, you can even put it inside a course management system if you wish. So you can have the open content authored in a Wiki and if you want to have a course management space and put your content there, you can do it. I'm being cut off so I'm not going to talk about this stuff here. But I just want to note that the type of environments we have, the type of decisions we make, whether we decide to make openness a practice as opposed to a product, and whether we think about it beyond just the content but our environments and our tools and our ethics will really decide between two very distinct, but I would dare say fairly distinct and I'd say one preferable potential outcome. We talk a lot about how the web is shaped in higher education. I would like to think as higher education knowledge professionals with a mandate to steward and steward our cultural heritage and promote free inquiry. We would take an active role in shaping the kind of web we would like to live. I'm sorry, we're going over time. I'd be happy to talk more with you guys later. Thanks.