Possible Popularising Science projects
Linking Landscapes
Dr Kath Dixon is running a project in rural and semi-rural schools in Otago and Southland, to highlight the impacts that different land management practices, particularly agricultural management practices, can have on water quality and native biodiversity. The project will bring a cluster of schools located in the same biogeograhical region (such as a water catchment or peninsula) together to create a future vision for their entire landscape.
A pilot project will work with five primary schools located in or near to the Kakanui River catchment. All of these schools will be focusing on their landscape as the teaching unit for term one 2010.
A key learning objective for the project is “building a sense of interconnectedness”. We hope to facilitate the children to realize that they are both connected to the landscape and other users of it – and with that in mind, there are obvious opportunities to set up internal based networking tools so that students from different schools can share their ideas whilst increasing their IT skills.
Any interested MSciComm student would work alongside Dr Dixon to help develop such web-based networking tools.