Teaching and discovering environmental history online

From 27 June to 2 July 2011 the sixth conference of the European
Society took place in the city of Turku in Finland. The meeting
consisted of many parallel sessions on a wide range of topics
exploring the interactions between human societies and nature in
the past. This podcast will report on a paper discussing the
results of a novel experiment in environmental didactics
involving the web and e-learning technologies carried out by
Martin Schmid of the Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria
University Vienna and Rogerio Ribeiro de Oliveira of Pontificia
Universidade Catolica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They used web
technologies to teach an intercontinental course in urban
environmental history involving classes in Rio de Janeiro and
Vienna. The second part of the podcast reports on a roundtable
entitled Towards an online environmental history of Europe. This
panel discussed the technical, structural and thematic issues of
an online environmental history of Europe which is under
development by the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and
Society in Munich. The project, dubbed Arcadia, will be an
encyclopedia-like resource with articles in the form of localized
histories and each entry will include time, theme and location
metadata as well as information about relevant organizations,
people and species in order to visualize it on a map and make the
material searchable. The site will provide visitors with
exploratory tools to aid the discovery of material. The Arcadia
online environmental history will be launched in early 2012 as
part of the umbrella Environment and Society Portal.