c. The e-Book

Teaching Materials

Being a collective of teachers (interchanging teaching on the various parts of the course) and as we started off with practically zero permaculture materials in spanish, we had to first create this basic resource to teach the courses with, accurately, consistently and efficiently.

I had a clear aim of staying very close to the source’ (The Designers Manual) because of the worrying trend we see in the ‘first world’ of adapting / diluting permaculture to various eco-fashions.

Also I think very important to respect the very good guidelines suggested as protocols that we have developed in the international permaculture network because in those rests our collective power: what would make us a strong and dynamic chaordic structure and not just a weak de-centralized one.

And we are currently, I believe, wobbling between the two possibilities.

Taking virtually all of the substance from the Designers Manual made our job relatively easy (mainly a question of translation) but I also wanted to create multi-functional, high quality but flexible teaching materials that could be used over and over, and especially changed easily as we gained experience in seeing what worked well and what didn´t, in transmitting quickly the important models.

News

< Guillermo on the Action Learning Programme

Spanish PC Book

Clearly digital information comes with these easy to edit qualities, and as visual information is particularly important in learning and especially in permaculture design (many diagrams and especially photographs), we decided to use ‘powerpoint presentations’ to plan and transmit the classes + simultaneous mind-map making (by the teaching colleague or students) on a flip-chart, which serve as notes we use for reviewing the course as we go.

The handouts we also created to supplement the personal notes we encourage the students to make, and this in turn suggested the idea of writing a spanish PC book ...

Wiki Revolution

In the end we translated a small “Introduction to PC” book and it seems that our more ambitious PC book project has infact started materializing in a form we did not suspect: via our many wikis.

The pre-IPC8 national convergence we organized, as a Complementary Currencies conference produced our first wiki, in 2006.

The wiki-mania that followed spawned many others (I started and am the main writer in all of them) which I recently interconnected as I realized that IS the beginnings of our collectively written, easily editable, mini-max and very up to date PC Book?!

< David, Antoine & Alberto from the Action Learning Programme,

after assembling a parabolic solar cooker

Audio & Video

I have been invited several times by local radios to speak about permaculture subjects over the years and during nov-dic 08 I was offered two series of programmes and given 100% editorial control over the contents.

So I decided that one series would be about the Transition Movement and the other on our Permaculture curriculum.

To make the recordings as multi-functional as possible, they will all relate to existing and expandable back-up information on the web and be available as audio downloads.

Am learning how to edit audio in order to create this resource.

Although the likes of UTube are making video very popular also with permaculture (mainly in the "First World"), radio and audio are - and probably always will be - much easier and cheaper (and therefore more appropiate) technologies for most of the rest of world, and in particular the spanish-speaking parts.

As this is a niche that isn´t being filled at the moment by any spanish-speaking permaculture colleagues, it seems to make sense to focus on this medium instead of the much more used video (which already does enjoy the support of several very able spanish colleagues).

< stall where we displayed posters about a permaculture water manifesto water manifesto for on our Island

News

The Book Story, so far

Been thinking about making our excellent certificate course into a textbook.

Its certainly in demand already as everyone says there is too much for a 15 day course... would be perfect if could do it bilingual, so it can multifunction as a planetarization tool, help everyone all learn more languages.

The english version is now moving as a private site with Tesa, an amazingly inspiring colleague that am having tons of fun working with .. might eventually be a public site but for now up as a private one, our working space.

Very exciting!

Also brought the domain names PermacultureScience com, info and net

... permaculturing anything I can get my paws onto ...