Wake Up!: Blogs as a Tool to Encourage Students Progress from Learning to Acting

Discussions about environmental problems require multimedia—no lecture can present the same impact as a photo of turtles entangled in a net or a video of a mountaintop exploding. Typically, the professor chooses the photos, videos, even the issues, to present. Learning about and discussing all these environmental problems, however, can become discouraging, and students can all too easily disconnect. Continuing the discussions onto blog pages allows many more sources, points of view, and subsequent thoughts and actions to be shared, which could empower the students. It also provides the opportunity for students not just to reflect on the course concepts and discussions, but also to add creativity and multimedia to their essays. This presentation will show how blogging in the new course, EESC230 Global Environmental Problems, helped students to wake up and look at their world, express a more personal connection with environmental problems ,and then explore and navigate their burgeoning environmental activism. In the end, students emerged with a deeper, more entrenched connection to and knowledge of many environmental issues than expected by using course blogs.