Another million pageview year for the blog, even though TK has been quite negligent with the blog toward the later half of the year. Thank you everyone for reading; I don't deserve it, but thank you anyway. Have a wonderful holiday season.
Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.
A few years ago, when we started the Learning Garden at SMU, Dick Langill donated a pile of worms from his home garden, so that we could start our own worm bin. The fat red worms ate a lot of compost, multiplied and eventually needed more space to stretch out.
We now had more than enough to share so that others could start their own worm bins. The great thing about worm bins is that the worms eat up the compost and make rich soil that provides a low cost and a natural way to feed the plants. Worm tea made from worm castings (yup, worm poop) is the best fertilizer there is.
Glad to have SMU alum, Sarah Gabel, back to help with the garden!
In the beginning of Fall semester, Sky organized a worm bin building workshop. It takes two plastic tubs and some holes. There are many variations of this design, here is one from Seattle Tilth. We started with our huge pile of red worms that needed to be split up. The worms had to be picked out by hand and added to a fresh pile of newspaper strips and compost.
Hand picking worms out of the rich soil.
Everyone got some worms and bins to take home for their gardens and in Annabel's case, for her dorm room. Since worm bins don't smell, they are a great and easy way to compost indoors.
Pam Holsinger-Fuchs adopts some garden worms for her garden.
Alan Tyler has a pile of worms to take home too.
The best part is that by using a worm bin, you turn your food waste into a reusable resource that goes back into the garden instead of the landfill to produce methane gas. According to the EPA, food waste that goes to the landfill breaks down anaerobically and produces methane, which is 21 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. By feeding the worms, you are actually helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions and feeding your garden to grow more food.
OIKOS FYS101 class takes veggies to the Food Bank
Here is what we do with the food we grow. Our First Year Seminar class took this harvest to the Thurston County Food Bank where we learned about how this local non-profit helps eliminate hunger, diverts good food from going to the landfill and provides healthy and dignified food options to people in need.
Young academics? How young? Well, it doesn't really matter. One can be young by age, or by year of service in the academic or educational institutions.
I have a mission to accomplish. I have been teaching at the university (Universiti Sains Malaysia) close to 22 years now. It was a journey with lots of ups and downs, a fair share of disappointment and failures but with lots of joy and satisfaction as well. Reflecting on my journey, I realised that I'm here now because I have been blessed with kind colleagues and mentors who guided and supported me in many different ways. No man is an island...
I have a mission to accomplish. I want to play a more active role to help young academics who are still struggling to find their footing in the academic world. They need guidance to facilitate their journey. They need mentors to share their experience and wisdom to keep them on the right track. These mentors should be sincere and honest to lend their ear and hand, to listen and to talk, to advise and to critique—without any vested interest or hidden agenda.
In my effort to help inspire and guide new academics, I decided to create a Facebook group, "Aspiring Young Academics", as an avenue to discuss issues, exchange ideas, share resources, and provide support. Please feel free to invite your colleagues to join this group.
Have you checked out the Learning Garden on campus lately? Our veggie crops and flowers are growing like crazy in this hot weather. There is a lot of work to do and volunteers are needed to help with harvesting for the local Food Bank, planting crops for fall and-as always-weeding. Garden Manager, Sky Myers is on campus every Friday from 10 am to 2 pm and is seeking volunteers to help out through the remainder of August, September and October. Faculty are encouraged to contact Sky to schedule a time to bring your class to the garden. Special projects and dates can be arranged to suit your needs. Drop ins are always welcomed!
Worm Bin Workshop September 18th Our Eisenia Fetida (aka Red Wigglers) have been very busy this summer turning vegetable scraps into worm castings. These little critters are totally amazing at transforming organic material into gardener’s gold. These bins are tidy, they do not smell, and are perfect for apartment dwellers or those who don’t need a large, outdoor composting system. Our bin is so full of worms that we have enough to share! If you are interested in starting a worm bin to compost your kitchen scraps, join Sky September 18th from 12:00 -2:00 pm. Donations will be accepted to cover the cost of materials. RSVP to Sky at lmyers@stmartin.edu by September 4th to participate.
The mass university is good for equity, but must it also be bad for learning?
Hannah Forsyth, Australian Catholic University When universities began expanding, they became more inclusive. While this is a good thing, scholars often look at their large class sizes and lament that many of the students won’t set foot in the lecture theatres or libraries thanks to technology, and grow increasingly frustrated at the shallow assignment responses.
They ask: whatever happened to learning? Is there still a place for old-style, face-to-face education, good clear thinking and real, tangible books?
Students: responsible for their own learning?
Professor of philosophy David Armstrong fondly observed what he thought was the best part of learning from his academic career that spanned the 1950s to the 1990s:
I like for the Faculty of Arts the idea that you sit around for a long time discussing things in coffee shops and pubs and quadrangles and anywhere else that you can get some seating and, finally, towards the end of the year you’ve got to get some work done […] That’s a good way, I think, to conduct an Arts education; students educate each other in the course of this.
This description was familiar to me, for it resembled Sydney University’s key approach when I studied there in the 1990s. Perhaps it still does. The idea was that “good” students in the vicinity of a good library would largely educate themselves.
It wasn’t bad, in a way. Students were immersed in a strange, alien and exciting intellectual environment. They were in classrooms with others like themselves. They were exposed (in an often-distant way) to heroes of their disciplines. With plenty of time for sitting around in quadrangles and coffee shops, they had well-developed ideas that ended up, sometimes, in their essays and exams.
Cluttering scholarly thinking
As it was for Armstrong, this is the approach to learning that attracts the most nostalgia, perhaps especially among academics. For scholars, I suspect such nostalgia reflects a yearning to make ideas the centre of our work, a wish to de-clutter our thinking from the largely meaningless bureaucratic tasks that often dominate the day. These cluttered lives make for frustratingly shallow thinking – which we observe in our students all the time. We are forced at times also to see it in ourselves.
This cluttering of academic life has clearly spread to students. Corridor discussions among scholars express frustration with the thinking of students more concerned with the time spent in paid work than in quadrangles discussing ideas.
Across the mass university there seems to be a steep decline in opportunities for face-to-face learning, for peer-to-peer discussion or to wander through libraries stumbling across interesting and stimulating ideas.
De-personalised learning
What does the future hold? Will students in the ever-growing university ever even see one another? Will they just sit at home on their laptops reading the snippets of eBooks allocated by lecturers they mostly know only by their email address?
Who will they talk about ideas to? Their parents? They certainly show fewer signs of being able to leave home.
And yet their ever-growing focus on paid work is necessary, even if it is primarily just to keep up with the minimum technologies young people need to be able to take their place in society, for who can have friends these days, let alone study or work, without a mobile phone and good WiFi?
Ebooks and online technologies are essential to a mass university system.Daniel Sancho/Flickr, CC BY These pressures on the experience of student learning in the mass university clearly have multiple sources. But our dystopian fears may be overstated. Many aspects of online education are excellent. Imagine if we still had students parading through current serials sections of libraries to photocopy this week’s readings? Or worse, as was the case before photocopiers, all reading the same copy?
Does eLearning empower students and save scholarly labour?
Online teaching and learning are not necessarily isolating activities. Facebook alone shows us that. Of course good teaching matters online as it does everywhere else: any course is alienating and confusing with the wrong teacher, even on campus. Sadly, we have far too few teachers dedicated to their students’ learning in classrooms both online and on campus, in part because the cluttered life of the scholar makes good teaching difficult.
Will we end up just trying to keep students at wifi-length, just to try to make a little more time for scholarship?
What about students’ relationships to one another, the idea that bringing them together on a campus offers them a place in which to make their worlds bigger? Will they still have opportunity to educate one another? Will the days of quadrangles and coffee shops and sharing ideas really pass away?
Designers of flexible learning spaces and campus cafes have been thinking about this for some time, as have the architects of new libraries. As is often the case in the mass university, managers seem to believe that institutional planning alone can make student learning happen, even informally. They seem to forget that it was actually the students, not the cafes and quadrangles, that were doing the work.
It’s not campus design that does the work, students interacting with each other brings about new ideas and thoughts.Saint Louis University/Flickr, CC BY And they almost entirely overlook the reality that the learning that Armstrong idealised relied on students possessing a whole lot of skills that were likely derived from their class and, certainly in Sydney, also often their ethnic background.
This is not news. Educationalists worldwide since the 1970s have observed that the characteristics of educational success are closely linked to class status. To use my own discipline, it is evident that students who grew up with books on the shelf in English, which they were likely to discuss over dinner, have skills that push them further ahead as historians than students who did not.
Their parents’ own educational background also assists them in navigating educational institutions. Those of us who teach non-traditional students often end up frustrated that they have just not understood the task; this is far less likely to be a problem where educational norms permeated a childhood.
The mass university needs now to support students more actively. It means doing more than just putting smart students within reach of a good library and letting them educate one another.
The mass university offers new opportunities for more inclusive learning
Despite our dystopian suspicions, the mass university, as it continues to grow, offers great hope. Our students, coming as they do from wider backgrounds, bring new knowledge and skills into our classrooms. These are skills we’ve never before been able to integrate into curricula and subjects. If we can teach them well – in an inclusive manner that draws out and values these skills as innovations in our fields – we will make knowledge in our universities bigger and better. Nostalgia for a form of education designed for white middle-class students will not achieve this. But attention to the privileged task of teaching in the mass university just might. The Conversation is running a series on “What are universities for?” looking at the place of universities in Australia, why they exist, who they serve, and how this is changing over time. Read other articles in the series here. Hannah Forsyth is Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Annual Plant Sale at Saint Martin's Learning Garden
April 29, 30 & May 1st from 11-2pm in the garden adjacent to the cafeteria patio.
This year, in addition to the usual variety of vegetables, flowers, herbs and berries, we will have an assortment of garden planters madefrom repurposed materials by student intern Steven Caron.
Throughout the summer quarter the Learning Garden will be offering workshops on how to make some these fun garden projects including:
Vertical Pallet Gardens, Terra cotta Hanging Pot Planters, Repurposed Glass Planters, Beach, Wood Planters, Hanging Gutter Gardens, Garden Totems, Birdhouses, Birdfeeders.
TAKE A SUMMER CLASS(3CR.)! Get outside and learn.
COM395: Ora et Labora: Contemplation and Work in the Garden(3cr.)
This course has three components: 1. Hands on work in the Learning Garden, planting, tending and harvesting fruits and vegetables for Thurston County Food Bank. 2. Researching local and global issues related to food production and distribution. 3. Creating media stories based on research,m contemplation, and the hands-on experience of working in the soil. Students may take either or both sessions.
Main Summer Session
Fridays, 9am-12:20pm
Instructor: Sky Myers
SERVE
Volunteers needed! Contact Sky Myers (svdervish@gmail.com) if you would like to help with the plant sale, planting or if you have plants to donate!
All sale proceeds go towards the Learning Garden. The vegetables grown in the garden go to the Thurston County Food Bank.
