A recent report from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria (A school that is nearly as good as SFU) claims that there’s enough under-used capacity in British Columbia’s energy grid to charge 2.5 million electric vehicles, nearly the current amount of vehicles on the road. The grid, which receives the vast majority of its power from hydro dams (90%) and other renewable sources, is being continuously upgraded and modernized by the BC provincial government who aim to have complete energy security with adequate backup and mitigation measures for the province as it continues to develop and grow. This is great news for Nissan, whose new electric model, Leaf, will be touring through the US for the next 2 months, with one stop in Canada. That stop is Vancouver. Another development that will surely help the launch of Nissan Leaf in the Pacific Northwest will be the creation of an electric car corridor between Eugene Oregon and Metro Vancouver. This is also good exposure for Vancouver as it moves forward with an asserting of itself as the greenest city in the world.

The corridor is largely funded by a $100 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (as a part of the recent stimulus funding) while Canadian taxpayer money similarly supports the creation of it here in BC. This has been criticized by some who think that increased transit, bike sharing programs, and urban density are more cost effective ways to reduce carbon emissions in the region and that the corridor may be greenwash. Some others believe that Nissan hedging its bets on friendly legislation, subsidies and infrastructure upgrades like the electric car corridors is risky, placing a lot of faith in taxpayers and governments to assist EVs breaking into the market. It’s true that electric cars, until they are produced and consumed in the millions, are going to remain relatively expensive. Mark McDade, Nissan Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) project manager made a blunt statement recently that subsidies and other forms of government help will be necessary if cars like the Leaf are to roll onto the market in substantial numbers. Without assistance they will remain too expensive and the fancy corridors we’re building will be full of very quiet recharging stations. Because Canada is such an energy rich country, it has largely been up to cities and provinces to help facilitate the changes that EV Cars need in order to attain real market presence. The Federal Government, for numerous pragmatic reasons, has been quiet on this front. (The massive geographic extent and therefore the cost of any automobile infrastructure upgrades on a national level for starters) Compared to past initiatives like Hydrogen fuel cells, electric vehicles have a simple plug and play refueling process, bypassing the largest stumbling block that other alternative automobile designs have suffered from.

The Nissan Leaf goes on sale in Vancouver starting in 2011. We’ll be the first market in the world in which it launches. After that it will be released in the rest of Canada and the world. According to McDade, the BC Government, BC Hydro and City of Vancouver have been “All hands on deck” even putting through legislation to ensure that electric vehicle power plugs are installed in all new homes and purchasing dozens of Nissan Leaf’s (Leaves?) for the provincial car fleet. Yes BC taxpayer dollars are going to make executives at Nissan very happy as we’re playing a major role in opening the door to the North American market for them, saving them a lot of money and effort. In the end though, I think the people of BC are more open to helping our province shift to an EV market as we’d probably rather fuel our vehicles with our own hydro-electricity than from melted tar pumped down from Alberta to Texas, refined and then sold back to us for 10 times as much. That’s just my opinion though, maybe there are some who like that.

As hundreds of millions of students around the world return to school this month they bring with them their iPhones, laptops, notebooks and fancy new cell phones. Some teachers may have a hard time considering whether those are toys or in fact the new tool on the frontier of reaching young maluable minds. The new challenge is the same as the old challenge- engagement. And everytime there’s a new technology, from Fischer Price Walky Talkies to the new iPhone 3G, sure enough students will be distracted by their awesomeness- until it blows up in their face in the case of the iPhone. Univerisites around north america have begun to see that the best way to engage young students is to adopt the mediums that they themselves have become accustomed to sharing information. When I was studying at Langara College in Vancouver I remember one of my final classes where we saw several videos- all on Youtube. And students were encouraged to use facebook to organize materials and communicate regarding group projects. Our project was called Operation Monarch, on the effects of deforestation in Mexico on Monarch butterfly populations. Not to be confused with Project Monarch- a supposed secret Nazi/CIA government Mind Control hypnosis conditioning program to create obedient slaves for teh secret Alien-Illuminati global shadow government. Or so these crazy paranoid folks claim. But let’s get back to reality.

At Queen’s University Film and Media program, students can download podcasts of film studies professor Sidney Eve Matrix’s lectures, if they miss class. However, she also has an 83% attendance rate in part because of the exciting ways in which the class environment engages students. Not every teacher is excited for social media in the classroom though. Wayne Cox, a political studies professor at Queen’s, said he thinks technology in the classroom can turn students into a passive audience. Matrix emphasizes however that social media engages students outside of the classroom, and takes the themes and topics out of the school environment exclusively and into their personal or social lives. For a full breakdown read this article in the Queen’s Journal. And bringing school out of the confines of the classroom and into student’s lives is really where a large part of the challenge lies. It used to be called HOMEWORK, but now it takes a matrix of social media to keep kids connected it seems.

Schools in the Dallas Ft-Worth Area are utilizing social media in this way to reach students and keep them engaged. According to the Dallas News three different school districts have begun to engage students through Twitter and Facebook. Teachers can post wikis and blogs to aid students and schools can post and tweet all information about upcomming games, events, or even test scores and immunization updates.  Even President Obama is reaching out to students through the internet. In his recent online speech directed to students he stresses the importance of responsible use of social media, and warns if they ever want to be president that they should watch what they post on Facebook.

Universities in Vancouver, UBC, SFU, Capilano, and the several colleges throughout the city and lower mainland have in some form or another felt the positive and negative effects of social media in the classroom. My experiences at Langara and SFU have been nothing but positive, so I’m a big fan of education continuing to adapt to new mediums and methods if it means better engagement. University Canada West, a small univesrity offering many online programs, recently announced the comprehensive launch of its social media strategy which includes its own Youtube station, and all other relative forms of social media. Seems schools and students everywhere are both re-learning how to teach and learn.

I guess the UN didn’t hear about Senses: A blog about the Thirdi Software Perception. The award winning website was developed for the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology by whiz kids and specialists from the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC) at SFU, Xa:ytem Longhouse Centre of Mission BC also contributed to ensure authenticity. That authenticity was regarding a virtual tour of the lower mainland as it was 3000 years ago; interacting with the Sto:lo people and the natural environment the way it was or at least as close to as what scholars, researchers and First Nations people of today believe it was. The collaboration was enough to ensure that out of 20,000 entries from around the world, the United Nations World Summit Award went to the Vancouver university. SFU is already respected for GIS software development and has a strong reputation in spatial information systems. This award will hopefully shed more light on the talented pool of innovative designers the school has produced.

The site is great and one of the reasons it received the award was because of its focus on serving the needs of a local population. It has a real utility to it beyond its attractive design, it’s interesting and informative and will compliment the collection at the  Virtual Museum of Canada very well- which you should take the time to check out if you haven’t seen it already. The virtual museum takes exhibits and presents them online through interactive and pictorial collections of historical documentation. The site from SFU is the ringer on this team.

Spongelab Interactive, a Canadian company out of Toronto also won an award at the WSA.  Their site is an interactive learning environment that teaches kids all about plants. It’s also a fantastic design and really fun to use. These kinds of web designs present to me, a turning point in education. Kids need to be engaged at the level of technology that entertainment and culture operates on. Schools need to realize that old mediums of teaching will have an increasingly hard time competing with new mediums of entertaining, and kids need to be engaged on a more interactive and captivating level. These kinds of software and site designs can take us in that direction. I bet  Marshall McLuhan would be proud of his countrymen for producing such quality and useful rich media content.