GREEN Riders: Southeast Asia

Six weeks. Two bikes. A camera. A continent of environmental stories, struggles and successes. Plus, several thousand kilometers of twisted little roads stringing it all together. Welcome to GREEN RIDERS: Southeast Asia.

From July 1st, 2012, my friend Kenny Peavy and I will journey by bike and other sustainable means from Bali to Phuket, Thailand. Along the way we’ll be exploring Southeast Asia’s wealth of biodiversity, and meeting with groups and individuals involved in its protection and destruction. Plus, making connections with communities to learn more about their conservation efforts and promoting environmental education and action to protect the region’s threatened natural gems.

Follow us on our blog, through our Twitter, Flickr and Facebook feeds. Most of all, watch our ongoing video serials on the blog and our YouTube channel!

GREEN RIDERS is a project of the Environmental Education Alliance of South East Asia (EEASEA).

Google Earth: Exploring the Pale Blue Dot

What happens when you put in the hands of the world, for free, the most accurate, comprehensive, detailed, realistic replica of the planet that has ever existed? 

Rebecca Moore, engineering manager of Google Earth Outreach

In March 2014 IST hosted the first ever Google Summit for Education in East Africa. Responding to the invitation for workshops I offered to do a session on Google Earth entitled “Travel through time, find water on Mars and sandwiches in Dar.” I knew from experience with Google Earth that you could view historical satellite imagery to travel through time, I knew the Mars mapping allowed you to see signs of ice and water, and was pretty sure that you could find a sandwich shop just about anywhere. Beyond that, I was very keen for the opportunity and structure to spend a good amount of time becoming familiar with other features of the software. If you want to learn about something, teach it. The more time I spent, the more I was impressed with the way such a remarkably global structure for exploration has been used for such personal and intimately meaningful purposes. I built the linked site in lieu of a slideshow presentation to frame my workshop and facilitate participant exploration of this amazing, versatile tool.

Experiential Education

At YIS we have been discussing how to deepen the practice of experiential education in our curriculum, classrooms, and school community. In order to facilitate this discussion a co-worker and I began to co-chair a working group tasked with articulating a vision and bringing it into the school. To track our discussions we created this wiki. The group has been somewhat on hiatus for the past several months, but we’re hoping to pick up steam again soon!

Team Tanuki

Every team needs a catchy name. While adventuring and competing in tuk-tuk challenges around South East Asian nations (OK, once only, but still…), Elif and I take our name from the Tanuki.