Category: community

community · environment · health

Healing Honey And The Beekeeping Craze : NPR

Beth Kelley

I’m far from home right now, and feeling it. I could use a touch of home…and for some reason honey seems very homey to me. Especially when it’s made at home! Don’t laugh, urban bee-keeping is becoming a big thing, as part of the local-vore, grow-your-own-food movement.

Beekeeping classes from Medina, Ohio, to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and New York are seeing an unexpected shift in enrollment. Numbers are way up as thousands of novices take up the hobby. And who are these new beekeepers? Increasingly, they’re women.

“The surge has really been with younger, urban women,” explains longtime instructor Kim Flottum, who teaches beekeeping in Medina.

Flottum estimates that there are about 100,000 backyard beekeepers across the United States. Exact numbers are hard to pin down. But subscriptions to the publication Bee Culture are on the rise. And when Flottum published a how-to book — An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden — 60,000 people snapped up copies. The book is aimed at making the hobby easier and using more lightweight equipment.

more via Healing Honey And The Beekeeping Craze : NPR.

anthropology · architecture · community · creativity · culture · design · environment · happiness

The Most Colorful Cities In The World

Beth Kelley

Living in the Pacific Northwest I can definitely appreciate the idea of adding more color to one’s life! Interestingly, it tends to be warmer climates that have the more colorful buildings, although Denmark and Finland has some of the most colorful interiors (and now exteriors) I’ve seen. Color has an amazing effect on human mental health and mood. People often talk about getting back into nature to see all the colors. Now, the colors can come to you (unless you live in a community with a rule against bright colors).

Urban life doesn’t have to be bleak and gray — in fact, many of the world’s cities pride themselves upon the bright palettes used to liven up their architecture. From the garish blue-walled buildings of Jodhpur, India, to the gentler pastels of Charleston, S.C., these cities are far from monotonous.

Charleston, SC
Charleston, SC
Nyhavn, Denmark
Buenos Aires, Argentina

More of The Most Colorful Cities In The World: Pics, Videos, Links, News.

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brain · community · creativity · happiness · mental health · play · psychology

Grandma the superhero

Beth Kelley

Mental health is important throughout the entire human lifespan, from infancy (see previous post) to old age.

Courtesy of Boing Boing, I ran across this great story about actively pursuing good mental health, helping out a fellow human being, and using creativity and silliness to accomplish it.

“Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika, a WWII survivor, feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he photographed her dressed up as a fictional superhero. To his surprise, she loved it. The photos are a bit comical, but there’s an underlying sense of hope, strength and courage in them.”

View Grandma’s Superhero Therapy (18 photos). From the blog: 

Frederika was born in Budapest 20 years before World War II. During the war, at the peril of her own life, she courageously saved the lives of ten people. When asked how, he tells us “she hid the Jewish people she knew, moving them around to different places everyday.” As a survivor of Nazism and Communism, she then immigrated away from Hungary to France, forced by the Communist regime to leave her homeland illegally or face death.

Aside from great strength, Frederika has an incredible sense of humor, one that defies time and misfortune. She is funny and cynical, always mocking people that she loves.

With the unexpected success of this series, titled “Mamika,” Goldberger created a MySpace page for his grandmother. She now has over 2,200 friends and receives messages like: “You’re the grandmother that I have dreamed of, would you adopt me?” and ” You made my day, I hope to be like you at your age.”

People often forget just how much fun, funny, and spunky people can be after living on this Earth for a few decades. My grandmas were and are unstoppable forces of nature.

There have been a few photographic projects with older folks, in retirement homes or elsewhere, but the artist in me definitely feels like this demographic is an important part of humanity to explore that has been relatively neglected.

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anthropology · behavior · community · disease · education · environment · health · mental health · Social

How the places we live could heal us | Grist

Beth Kelley

This is an interesting follow-up/add-on to the RadioLab “Cities” episode I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. The Healing Cities Working Group of planners and health professionals in Vancouver, BC is working to create healthy environments in urban areas, particularly focusing on food and food sources.

It’s possible to interest public officials in the health impact of the built environment because Canada has nationalized health care.

“When you have a public health care system like we have in Canada, we all collectively pay the end-of-pipe costs,” said Holland. “So anything we have in our society that makes us unhealthy, we end up paying for it.” Of course, that’s true in the United States as well, but there is much less transparency and awareness of those costs because of the way our system is set up.

In Canada, Holland hopes to be able to involve doctors and public health authorities in the fight against sprawl and for more walkable and transit-oriented neighborhoods. Among the Healing Cities Working Group’s many planned initiatives is a partnership with health officials to advocate for more health-enhancing infrastructure and development at the local level.

via How the places we live make us sick, and how they could heal us instead | Grist.

Other studies have found that greener neighborhoods also decrease stress and make people more likely to walk or bike places. Where you live, what have you found works best for you personally to motivate you to get you outside, moving, and buying less insta-food?

behavior · brain · children · community · creativity · education · environment · health · learning · mental health · technology

Let’s hear it for being a kid

Beth Kelley

I’ve been reading some very depressing stuff today – about one school that doesn’t allow anyone over the age of 6 to have recess, kids not feeling protected from their tormentors, and so on – so I needed a pep talk.

Adora Svitak’s TED talk did just the trick.

 

anthropology · behavior · community · creativity · environment · play · Social

Games in Real Life

Beth Kelley
Drawing of ancient Indian board game with piec...
Game board from India; looks kind of like a city grid. Image via Wikipedia

An article featured on the O’Reilly Radar last month that interviews Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code, who is currently working with Frank Lantz to integrate gameplay into the fabric of reality, or what he calls “Big Games.”

Big games are “games that take place using some elements from the game system and some elements of the real world. Something Frank Lantz had worked on with Katie Salen and Nick Fortugno was called the Big Urban Game. It involved transforming the city of Minneapolis into a game board. They did that by using huge inflatable game pieces, about 25-feet high. The players, among other things, were moving these huge pieces around the city.”

“There’s a few of us who have been thinking about how “play” and the “city” were going to combine. We’ve been drinking the same Kool-Aid from the same cooler for quite a while.”

The way Slavin’s describing his vision reminds me a lot of parkour. Interesting ideas.

Read the full interview (highly recommended).

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anthropology · architecture · behavior · community · Social

Radiolab explores the city!

Beth Kelley

What makes cities work? How do humans live in such HUGE tribes. More than half of us live in cities.

I’m a new city transplant. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it, but it’s a fascinating topic to explore.

There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can’t explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who’s walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that’s slipping away.

Thanks Jad and Robert.

Cities – Radiolab.

community · environment · Nature

Reclaiming urban space for community use

Beth Kelley
The recently restored Seward Park Inn, Seward ...
The recently restored Seward Park Inn, Seattle, WA. Image via Wikipedia

I love hearing about citizens taking the initiative to clean up parks, fix up land, and give places names as a sign of ownership for the land, not as in a “I OWN YOU” kind of ownership, but a “I am responsible for you” kind of way.

A group of park-lovers in Seattle took it upon themselves to clean up Seward Park and give the different trails and landmark names.

Knute Berger of blog Crosscut writes that he and a bunch of his friends “floated the idea of naming many of citys unnamed features, including alleys, street ends, trails, and other urban features that are yet unnamed on maps.

“There are many reasons to do this. One is reclaiming urban spaces, like alley ways; another is recognizing more than a centurys worth of life and accomplishment of Seattleites in the years since the streets were named. Yet another is to take the opportunity to include more indigenous names for natural and city features.

“A naming project is currently underway at Seward …”

more via The Crosscut Blog.

community · culture · education · family · learning · play · school · Social · technology

HASTAC, Superman, and the school fair

Beth Kelley

The Education system in the U.S. has reached a pretty low low right now. This is currently being displayed on the big screen in the documentary “Waiting For Superman.” Film-maker Davis Guggenheim “follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, and undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying ‘drop-out factories’ and ‘academic sinkholes’.” (IMDB)

So, what do we do about it?

Lots of things.

One idea is HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Advanced Technology Collaboratory. Pronounced “haystack”, it is “a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.” They’re the group behind Reimagining Learning (DMLcompetition.net), and other scholarly workshops.

Cathy Davidson, Duke University Co-founder, HASTAC; Co-PI, HASTAC, writes:

Traditional education too often forgets its precious social condition of face-to-face interaction and takes its collective opportunity for granted. If your classroom can be replaced by a computer screen, maybe it should be.

We are using lessons from collaborative open web development and peer-to-peer learning and assessment to storm the academy at the first international Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, Nov 3-5. Surrounded by pioneering open source web developers and experimenters in online peer-to-peer learning, we are using methods of the open web to look back and at shake up traditional learning institutions. Were looking at four key areas that need storming: collaboration, syllabus building, assessment, and publishing (including peer review). Our chief idea is that face-to-face learning should not be taken as a given in education but as an affordance, as an opportunity not a default. How does thinking about the unique opportunity to learn together change the components of traditional learning?

more via We’re Storming the Academy! A Provocation and a Promise | HASTAC.

Teachers are already spending their own money to provide supplies for a fuller education experience.

“Vicky Halm spends a $1,000 a year out of her own pocket to equip her Brooklyn classroom. She buys star stickers to help motivate her students, but she also spends a great deal on basic supplies — such as pencils and paper.
A whopping 97% of teachers frequently dip into their own pockets to purchase necessary classroom supplies, according to a national survey conducted by Kelton Research. Last year, teachers spent more than $350 on average from their own income on school supplies and instructional materials, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Association” (CNNMoney)

There are lots of opportunities for students to gain hands-on learning outside of the classroom too. Zoos and Universities often have family or kid-only programs to try out.

“Children and parents hummed through wax paper-covered combs while jazz singer Jeni Fleming sang the “Science Saturday” version of “Hound Dog,” everyone rocking out to their newly learned blues chord progression. And so — with tingling lips and a room full of smiles — the second season of Science Saturdays came to a close. Over 900 children from Bozeman, communities as far away as Helena, Stevensville and Glasgow; and the Crow Indian Reservation have participated in Science Saturdays since MSU started offering the program in the fall of 2008, said Suzi Taylor, outreach director for MSU’s Extended University. (MSU News)

Parents can also organize these events. A blogger on GeekDad describes his son’s school fair:

For our school fete we blacked out a classroom with curtains and asked for donations from people to enter the “Corner of Curiosity.” It was amazing what people came up with. There was a delightful Plasma Ball near the entrance which was a favorite of the younger children, and a beautifully faded yellow newspaper from 1938 headlining concerns about Hitler’s leadership in Germany. One parent produced a display of the “history of mobile” phones and others had insect collections.

One student produced what has to be the most curious of collections – a collection of animal scats. A local community member supplied a whale vertebrae (and a kangaroo vertebrae for comparison). But, the real value was being able to present a fund raising activity for the school that was also educational. (GeekDad)

Any small measure, from buying markers to throwing a curiosity fair, helps enrich kids’ learning and keeps them wanting more. Even just a little bit of time each week adds up quickly.

community · Social

Building communities through online tools

Beth Kelley

It used to be considered sketchy to combine our online and offline worlds. With programs like Meetup and Foursquare, however, those days are long gone.

Lisa Gansky an author, instigator & entrepreneur, wrote a book about it, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing. She also wrote an article for Boing Boing about 100k Garages “a Mesh-web-enabled sharing-platform that pairs people who want to make things (Makers) with digital fabrication tools (Fabbers).

“Many projects are small businesses that sell unique items. But 100k Garages, a team-up of ShopBot Tools and Ponoko, uses grass roots enterprise and ingenuity to help get us back in action — to modernize our public infrastructure, develop energy-saving alternatives, or simply produce great new products for our homes and businesses. There are already thousands of ShopBot CNC tools in garages and small shops across the country, ready to locally fabricate the components needed to address our energy and environmental challenges and to locally produce items needed to enhance daily living, work, and business.”

There are other non-business examples too; the sport Parkour spread internationally thanks to YouTube and online forums. People donated to the Haiti Earthquake relief fund in record numbers because they could do it via text message. People have Meetups and Tweet ups all the time. Foursquare is based entirely on allowing people know virtually where you are physically. However, security and safety are still a major concern, and some people still feel odd sharing these kinds of details online where anyone can access them, not just the community members they intended.

How do online communities translate into interactions in the real world and vice versa? What has your experience been with the navigation of having specific communities that exist both online and in-person? Does one seem more real than the other? Comment below.