Bite-size Blogger Collective

  A Gallery Of Wonderful Things https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/corixus Art Talk http://corixus.blogspot.com/ Send Puffin Panda Postcards https://community.postcrossing.com/t/send-puffin-panda-postcards-that-put-nature-first/366692 Pandas: Living Proof That Conservation Works https://www.wwf.org.uk/learn/wildlife/giant-pandas   Benefits Of Blogging https://www.nova.edu/lec/This-Week-in-the-LEC/2019/August/Benefits%20of%20Blogging%20in%20Education.html   Learning To Think Like A Puffin https://www.nova.edu/lec/This-Week-in-the-LEC/2019/August/Benefits%20of%20Blogging%20in%20Education.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/30/world/puffins-maine-kress-c2e-scn-spc-intl/index.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj1QB9Lh7rk   Ecoscopes For Transformative Learning http://blog.culturalecology.info/2021/05/04/biosphere-ecoscopes-for-transformative-learning/   San Juan Preservation Trust https://sjpt.org/about-us/ Connecting  Schools With Nature https://www.britishe...

When we develop empathy with people and nature, we are able to develop a deeper understanding and experience of how we perceive the world. This deeper ability to perceive wholeness rather than fragmentation is central to the way in which we can develop systemic solutions to the systemic problems facing us in the world today. https://srerobinson.medium.com/belonging-together-in-nature-deepening-our-sense-of-systems-in-the-world-4395f9e573c2 https://placeandchange.blogspot.com/  

The Bite-size Blogger Collective is  an international group of volunteers working within the gift economy to tell environmental stories that value wildlife for its own sake.  Our aim is to move beyond simple recall of scientific information by focusing on bioscopes.  A bioscope is a bite-size version of UNESCO’s concept of a biosphere reserve.  It is a smaller realm of cultural ecology that functions in the “third place” between home and workplace.  Here there is a narrower, more creative interaction in a free, non-privatized environment that encourages and welcomes people of all genders, race, ethnicity, age and socio-economic levels.   Biospheres are regarded as being exceptally for their biodiversity and in need of special protection.  However, every place is special to people who are in day to day contact with its life forms, rare or common and bioscopes reflect this fact. Bioscopes are learning places for testing interdisciplinary approaches to u...

  In 2020 a wildlife competition, The Puffin Prize, was sponsored by The Wildlife Trust of South andWest Wales (WTSWW) & International Classrooms On Line (ICOL). The organizers of the competition were trying to understand why young people enjoy nature. What do they find interesting and exciting and what would encourage them to explore further, to spend more time with nature? All that the entrants had to do was to share one of their favourite experiences of nature. It could be a visit to a nature reserve, or a walk through an urban woodland, a hedgerow or a field full of flowers.  The nature experience could be submitted as an art poster , an essay , a poem , a picture or a combination of any of these .  The hope was that the submissions would signify why the applicants enjoyed nature , what they find interesting or exciting and what makes them want to get close to wildlife.  Perhaps they would come up with ideas that would make it easier for them  to explor...

  The Bite Size Blogger Collective is revisiting the young people’s syllabus of hope produced by an international youth group immediatley  after the Rio 1992 environment summit.  The Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network (SCAN) was a spin off from this in Wales, where it was funded by Texaco, the Countryside Council for Wales and Dyfed County Council. SCAN now exists as three Google Sites, ( nowSCAN ,  Rescue Mission Planet Wales and Skomer Island ).  SCAN also led to the schools phenology network managed by the National Museum in Cardiff, SCAN Spring Bulbs For Schools .

  Fig 1 Networking nature with postcards: the basics The following picture/text system is being assembled and tested in a school context to network classrooms in Wales to support the new humanities-centered  Welsh curriculum.  The system (Figs 1) consists of three components; a geographic mother hub, which is a place that exemplifies conservation management in action; a technical hub which provides the facility for sending, receiving, saving and displaying postcards or other kinds of BKNs; a topic forum which stores knowledge and records discussion about a topic in environmental education;    To begin, a teacher should have: a topic to discuss; e.g.global warming  a fact to present; e.g. national ecological footprints  an opinion to state; e.g. syllabus development  a request to make; e.g. please send information about….  a destination to reach; e.g. an individual or an organisation;  a technical hub as a collection of resources to...

(i) Postcards   A postcard holds tangible memories with pictures and words to amuse and delight.  ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ is a hybrid analogue/digital version of classical postcarding. It is part of a social platform that utilizes the mailing, networking technology of the 21st century to preserve the old-fashion handwritten bought postcard, but illustrating it with a unique handcrafted personalised image. These postcard pictures aren’t squashed versions of bigger, bolder artworks and photographs, like Twitter and Instagram. They are public works of art and you can display the pictures you make in your own gallery.  Also, postcards are valued because we can hold them and look at them over and over without the need to open a computer screen to search and scroll. It is Instagram and Twitter in one and every bit as lovely and keepable as the art we frame and hang on walls.  On the other hand, any kind of picture/text on screen package is a powerful tool f...

  Fig 1 Making a meal of data and knowledge Wales has many firsts in environmental education and a postcard educational database was invented by Welsh teachers in the late 1990s as “Postcards for Our Planet” (POP).  This was a pre INTERNET communication system linking schools in Wales and Portugal.  The objective was to model a global democracy of youth to access leaders with young people’s ideas and concerns about how to ‘rescue’ planet Earth.  It was a postcard version of the citizen’s environmental network proposed in the first UK strategy for sustainable development. The idea was to help young people identify the good and bad things about where they live, then work to improve the bad things and share their ideas, achievements and experiences globally with handmade postcards.  ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ (NNP) began in the 2010s as a microlearning scheme scheme linking primary and secondary schools in Wales with their European counterparts.  ...

Skomer Island National Nature Reserve: illustrating a gift economy in operation   The Bite-size Blogger Collective consists of a group of individuals who have undertaken to produce blogs for self-learning about conservation management of wildlife and share ideas and experiences with others in a gift economy. Their blogs focus on the importance of having historic, social and material connections in belonging to place. This means properly valuing the spiritual, cultural and emotional values that nature brings to human behaviour.  In this context a gift has value in being declared a gift by the giver. The concept of a “gift” is deployed to understand how places are valued and cared for by people, families and community groups over time. The idea is to encourage people of all ages to explore the development of tangible and intangible connections between past, present and future places. Hopefully, an understanding of place as an inalienable gift may create a moral duty to nurtu...