05/3/12

Enabling and Enhancing Environmental Education

Terrestrial Research on Ecosystems and World-wide Education and Broadcast (TerreWEB) is a new program designed to bring faculty and students together to conduct global change research and to develop improved scientific communication strategies. Through the program, graduate students from the Faculties of Arts, Education, Forestry, Land and Food Systems, and Science are trained to use multimedia to better communicate their research to the general public, working toward a more sustainable future.

UBC Mix supported three TerreWEB projects last school year. First, Mix sponsored a student to use Web 2.0 strategies to promote TerreWEB’s interdisciplinary weekly seminar series and measure attendance and feedback.

Second, Mix subsidized the purchase of a digital camera for multi-disciplinary science communication film production workshops, which cover a wide range of topics like camera techniques, storytelling, and editing.

TerreWeb Fieldtrip to ForestEthics

Third, Mix supported a TerreWEB workshop on online communication and a networking fieldtrip. Students from Integrated Sciences and the School of Community and Regional Planning instructed fellow students on how to use blogs and social media to share their research findings. Next up was a fieldtrip to two of TerreWEB’s collaborating organizations to learn about their missions, projects, and student-community collaboration opportunities. Using the skills they developed in the communication workshop, students wrote blog entries about the fieldtrip and its lessons.

Image credits: terreweb.ubc.ca