I hesitate to admit that I’ve only just partaken of an English afternoon tea. It’s been in my sights for years now, but I suppose some of the best things in life take time.
This afternoon, Blackrock’s House of Tea served up a lovely tray with sandwiches, scone, pastry, a smattering of desserts, and two luxurious blends of tea.
‘Twas a remarkable little meal. Tea time is moving back onto my list of definite “to dos,” and alsa, now, it’s much higher up!
A plumbing extracaganza!
I’ve recently moved office. Whereas I previously had an individual office with an expansive view, I now share a room overlooking an alley. But, remarkably, it suits me just as well.
As I enter and exit my workspace each day, I pass through architecture crits and exhibits of student work. My new home is Linenhall, the apex of Dublin School of Architecture at DIT.
The Linenhall complex has housed the Building Trades for many years–following a proud history as a linen production factory. My friend Fergus Whelan studied bricklaying here, before growing into the labor-rights activist/history research scholar he is today.
Having recently been renovated to serve architects as well, Linenhall provides me a sense of comforting familiarity. I’m surrounded by architectural explorations–models and drawings of all colors and tones.
This is the stuff of which my days have been made, from my earliest musings in college.
I’m comforted by the vocabulary of architectural models, drawings, and debates… by the buzz of activity and the creative clutter… by the occasional unnamable object of exquisite beauty.
And I’m pleased to share my work space with researchers in education and architectural technology.
Not sure what it is, but I wasn’t the only one taking selfies with it!
An ehhibition of precedent models.
Rome’s Pantheon and its plaza.
A chapel in Switzerland by James Turrell.
Piazza Navona and surrounds, in Rome.
San Ivo, by Borromini.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.
Hopping off the bus from Blanchardstown yesaterday I scurried from Manor Street to Bolton Street, reminded of the glories of Dublin’s architecture.
On North Brunswick Street I snapped a photo of the red brick Victorian-era building formerly housing the Richmond Surgical Hospital. I iMessaged the photo over to a Fulbright Scholar who recently arrived in Ireland, who teaches and conducts research at a medical school. The former hospital is being renovated into an educational center. It retains the ward layout common in the 1800s
as well as elegant outdoor porches for patients to recuperate in fresh air.
I darted across Church Street and up Constitution Hill, bumping into a class of DIT students learning to conduct geologic surveys as I criss-crossed the park at the Kings Inn Law School. The male carotids (the sculptures supporting the beam above with their heads) at the Deeds Office seemed frozen in action on this very cold day.
I ducked through its arcaded courtyard and continued down Henrietta Street, which is bound by regal Georgian town homes.
Passing by the historical front of DIT’s Bolton Street building, I slipped in the side entry, through the courtyard, up the stairs to the lofty top floor, and past the “crit pit” to an informal meeting with the new Assistant Head of DIT’s School of Multi-Dsiciplinary Technologies. He’s using the office space I enjoyed during the autumn — with a sweeping view across the city and toward the Wicklow mountains.
Braving Dublin’s blustery weather today (a mix of winds, snow flurries, and showers that would make my blizard-ravaged friends back in the USA weep–for joy), I made a field trip to northwest side of Dublin to visit Dr. Larry McNutt and the Institute of Technology in Blanchardstown (ITB). Larry has expertise in engineering and education–and he does sociological research to boot.
ITB, DIT, and the Institute of Technology in Tallah (ITT) are in the process of merging, with the goal of becoming Ireland’s first Technological University (TU). Larry is part of the “TU4Dublin” team that’s managing the merger.
Today, Larry and I spent a couple of hours discussing ways to improve the experience for third-level learners (i.e., college students). We both aim to make higher education more interesting and effective by helping post-secondary teachers hone their skills in teaching.
Before our meeting, Larry gave me a tour of ITB, an energy-efficient campus constructed since 1999. Because the focus of my PhD dissertation was green buildings constructed by post-secondary institutions in the USA, I was quite interested in seeing the design of the ITB campus and its individual buildings.
I also enjoyed discussing:
*educational improvement initiatives Larry is involved with.
*the design of various degree programs for teachers and for students.
*hot cross buns (I’d never seen one before today)
It’s a banner day for me when my interests in sustainable architecture, educational planning, and engineering education (plus food!?!) weave together so nicely. Imagine finding a person who can discuss all these topics with ease.
Larry McNutt is such a person. I look forward to bumping into him around TU-Dublin again soon.
A colleague from Virginia Beach, J. Timothy Cole, and I published a chapter in the recently-released textbook called:
Marketing the Green School: Form, Function, and the Future
Our chapter is called:
Enhancing Building Performance and Environmental Learning: A Case Study of Virginia Beach City Public Schools
This abstract summarizes the article so you can tell if you’d like to read it:
“School buildings directly affect their natural and socio-cultural environments. They do this through their construction, maintenance, operation, and demolition. Most of the school buildings we have in stock today drain natural resources and inadvertently perpetuate a culture of environmental, social, and long-term economic ignorance and misuse. When approached thoughtfully, however, the design of school buildings can help inform and enrich society. Well-designed buildings can impart environmental knowledge and values. They can foster more effective behaviors among the people who learn in and from them. Effectively designed buildings can also conserve natural resources and—at their best—even help replenish the natural environment. For many school leaders today, participation in green certification programs represents one important step toward improved building and learning performance. This chapter provides a case study of successful learning approaches developed by Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS).”
Here’s the introduction:
“Aimed toward educators and school administrators, this chapter provides a broad overview of design issues related to sustainability. It proffers concrete examples drawn from Virginia Beach City Public Schools (VBCPS) to enhance performance at the level of the building, classroom, district, and region. VBCPS’s environmental approach integrates educational planning with facilities planning. Its facilities department has been driving change in school design, classroom pedagogy, purchasing, transportation, and even regional design standards.
The examples in this chapter provide a snapshot of one moment in an ongoing process. They illustrate how one innovative school system is generating and applying new knowledge for the benefit of its buildings’ users, the local public, the wider education community, and the world. Overall, VBCPS strives to provide the best possible environments for learning teaching and living. Its efforts include:
• Integrating environmental issues throughout the curriculum
• Preparing students to bring new knowledge into the community and share it with their families and employers
• Introducing new construction techniques to the region
• Encouraging architects and builders to reach for higher standards
• Monitoring the division’s environmental performance and continually seeking to improve
• Disseminating their research and techniques for broad adaption
• Monitoring its own (and its community’s) energy and waste flows
• Striving to achieve net-zero carbon emission
In this chapter, we provide rationale and theoretical underpinnings for green school design, and we share successful practices developed by VBCPS. Knowledge in the realm of environmental design and education is continually evolving. As such, any list of “best practices” is in constant flux. In writing this chapter, we seek to provide a description of some of the best practices we have discovered and/or created up to this point in time.
Most environmentalists have adopted the World Commission on Environment and Development’s (1987) definition of sustainable development as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 43). The “green building” movement fosters new strategies to help overcome outdated construction practices that require vast material resources and cause tremendous waste and pollution. Today, North America’s over-reliance on cheap energy has reached crisis proportions (Steffen, 2008; Wackernagel & Rees, 1996). All told, buildings consume 65% of the electric power used in the United States (Landsmark, 2008). They use 36% of all energy used and 30% of all raw materials. Buildings are responsible for half of greenhouse emissions from the US (Gifford, n.d.; Udall & Schendler, 2005). Educational facilities have been among the worst, although higher education buildings seem to waste more energy than K-12 because control systems are looser (Leslie & Fretwell, 1996).
Recently, VBCPS analyzed all sources of emissions within its control, using data from 2006-2010. It found that even though its overall energy consumption had steadily declined across the five-year period, its building-related activity still accounted for 65% of VBCPS’s overall emissions. Its second largest source of emissions related to transporting people and goods. Its calculations considered electricity use, combustion from paper/stationary waste, and losses related to the transmission and distribution of electrical power. School leaders are working to address the division’s primary sources of emissions, through integrated strategies that involve enhanced building performance, revised vehicle fleet policies, and more informed commuting habits of students and employees. Leaders are also creating strategies to control the 1% of its green house gas emissions that resulted from solid waste, refrigerants, chemicals, and wastewater.”
Yesterday, an all-day NVivo training course. Today, a robot building workshop for teens. Every day here brings a new adventure.
Today, over 40 Transition Year students from secondary schools around Dublin came together to build robots at Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin Street campus. This was part of Ireland’s annual Engineers Week. Our event was supported by Engineers Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, and the volunteer efforts of more than a dozen staff members and students from DIT.
The kids were so much fun!
It’s amazing to observe these robots come together in a few short hours. We started at 10 this morning, and by 4 PM the robots were ready to rumble.
“The Irish Times” is running a series on women in STEM. I was quoted in today’s article.
The reporter chopped out all the caveats a researcher like me uses (tends to, most, lends support…) but all in all I’m very pleased to have been able to bring student development theory into the conversation here.
Thomas Snella and his national champion.
The RoboSlam volunteer team was in full force last Friday, guiding robot builders to victory in the 3rd National Robo Sumo Intervarsity competition. Friday’s RoboSlam and Saturday’s national competition took place during the 2015 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
At the competition, DIT first year student Thomas Snella (DT066) took the top prize. He will continue on the to European finals.
Second place team, also from DIT.
A cross-disciplinary team of DIT engineers of Seamus McLu (DT008), Aoife Redmond (DT009), Samantha Williams (DT021), and David White (DT006) won 2nd place.
DIT’s Michael O Meara and Alex Herizon (DT021) made the semi-finals of the competition.
DIT students came to the prep day well prepared. Thomas had designed and built his robot in the autumn as part of the common first year program that all 4-year engineering students at DIT now take. Members of second place team built their robot start-to-finish at our prep event, but they, too, had completed the RoboSumo module at DIT (a year prior).
One of the highlights of our prep day was that the secondary school students did such a marvelous job constructing their robots. We hope to see them at RoboSlam events again soon!
Read more on DIT’s website. Additional photos available on the RoboSlam blog.
Derek Ham and his family.
From across the Atlantic, I’m watching the USA finally reach a crucial tipping point.
Enough people are coming to their senses and finally recognizing that all white people in the USA do benefit from simply being white. We have life easier because of being white each and every day. Regardless of whether we want to or not, we do.
And therefore, we have an obligation to help fix a broken system.
A former colleague of mine, Derek Ham, posted a link to the article INTUITIVELY OBVIOUS_ Our white privilege earlier today. It was written by two white MIT professors.
Please read it, and then read Peggy McIntosh’s excellent article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.
Then, when you’re done, please take a minute to complete some fun and fascinating games developed by Harvard as part of Project Implicit. After you log in to the Project’s website, the server randomly assigns you one of Harvard’s Implicit Assumptions Tests.
I took every single one of the IAT tests available in 2006. And I found them to be stunningly accurate.
It was interesting to discover what sub-conscious preferences I had regarding various topics, including race, weight, guns, and the like. Taking these IAT tests is an effective and fun way to learn about yourself and to contribute to Harvard’s research project at the same time.
Incidentally, Derek Ham graduated from Hampton University the year I started working there. He went on to earn a Master’s from Harvard, then later teach alongside me at Hampton U. He is now earning a PhD in “Design and Computation” at MIT.
Derek is an African American male pushing the boundaries of knowledge and success on behalf of us all. My own work is inspired every day by Derek and his fellow Hamptonians.
Yes, I benefit from white privilege. But I’m glad to say that my parents passed along smart values. I remember being deeply aware of this privilege and letting it guide my behavior from the age of ten.
Since then, I’ve worked to help “level the playing field” whenever I can.
And I hope you will, too.
Click here to see the Prezi I made for the Energy Cube presentation day.
Last week we subjected our Energy Cubes to heat and light — and we measured how well they performed at keeping heat in while simultaneously admitting light. Today the students presented findings from last week’s Energy Cube performance testing.
The discussed their design process, results, analysis, and interpretations. They explained what they think they did well, and what they would improve upon for the next time.
I made a Prezi slide show of pictures for today’s presentations. You can click on the title slide (to the right) to view the Prezi, of view the images below to get a sense of the performance testing and the process of building the Energy Cube models.
I conducted the lighting test, although there aren’t any photos of that because I had my hands full. Michael O’Flaherty conducted the thermal test, as you can see near the end of the Prezi slide set, or in the small gallery below.
Ireland by Chance 