The month of April was spent working on preparing a final report for our EPA "People, Planet, and Prosperity" project and preparing to take seven UMUC to EPA's National Sustainability Design Expo at the National Mall from April 18-20. The picture on the right shows six of my students in front of our poster at the EPA Expo.
It was an incredible experience and showed that people could get together online, work on a project together, and then come together face-to-face to celebrate and make more connections, all the while decreasing their ecological footprint on a daily basis.
I had students from northern York in England, San Antonio, Texas, and from various counties in Maryland meet in my home to prepare for the Expo, and then present together in front of the judges and the public on the National Mall. Most of us had not met face-to-face before April 2009 although we had worked on this project for almost a year. The fact that we could all come together using the Internet to work on a project on sustainability gives me hope that people can come together to work toward sustainability.
If you want to see the project my students worked on online, please visit http://www.umuc.edu/gogreen/
They did this project while serving in the military, working, raising children, taking care of aging parents, and going to school. The fact that we can come together online and work toward a common problem -- how to make a lighter footprint on our earth -- while doing all the other things that regular people do in life, gives me hope.
