Chelsea Schelly

Open-source 3-D printing technologies for education

Objective3-D printing technologies have the potential to improve both Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and Career and Technical Education (CTE), as well as integrating these two educational emphases and providing opportunities for cross-curriculum engagement. The objective of this study is to investigate the potential of open-source (OS) technologies in an educational setting, given the combination of economic constraints affecting all educational environments and the ability of OS design to profoundly decrease the cost of technological tools and technological innovation. MethodsThis paper reports on a 3-day workshop augmented with online instructional and visual tools designed for middle school and high school level educators from a wide array of disciplines (including traditional science, math, and engineering as well as computer, shop, and art). Teachers (n=22) submitted applications to participate in the workshop, the workshop was observed for both evaluation and research, teachers participated in focus groups (n=2) during the workshop in order to discuss their interest in OS 3-D printing technology and its potential role in their classrooms, and teachers completed a voluntary post-workshop survey and responded to follow-up after printers were in the classroom for one year. ResultsDuring the workshop teachers built 3-D printers using OS technologies that they were then able to take back to their schools and into their classrooms. ConclusionThrough workshops augmented with online instructional and visual tools designed to provide facilitated yet self-directed engagement with a new, relatively unknown, and relatively complex technology, paired teacher teams were able to successfully build and use RepRap 3-D printers based on OS design in just three days. PracticeHere, we discuss both what the teachers learned and what we learned from the teachers regarding the potential for educators to construct OS 3-D printing technologies as a tool of empowering and transformative education. ImplicationsOpen-source 3-D printing technologies have the potential to improve education through a sense of empowerment resulting from active participation, as well as through cross-curriculum engagement. Display Omitted Open-source 3D printing provides a cost efficient means of STEM education.These technologies can also empower student-driven engaged learning.Report on workshop for science educators to build 3D printers for their classes.Teacher workshop augmented with online instructional and visual tools.Results indicate transformative potential of these technologies in the classroom.

Reducing Energy Consumption and Creating a Conservation Culture in Organizations: A Case Study of One Public School District.

How can existing schools significantly reduce their energy use? With energy costs rising and school budgets shrinking, energy use is a substantial cost that can be reduced through conservation efforts. Using a case study methodology, the authors compare two public high schools from the same school district, one that has achieved moderate energy savings and another that has reduced its electricity use by 50% over several years. Examining the individual and organizational components of both schools’ efforts, the authors find that the greater success at one school is the result of integrated efforts at all levels within the organization, from district administrators to individual students. Success is based on structural changes, individual behavioral change, and, most important, the weaving of both into a cohesive organizational culture emphasizing conservation. This study demonstrates the potential of behavioral change and organizational culture to foster environmental education, conservation, and fiscal savings for other public schools.

How to Go Green: Creating a Conservation Culture in a Public High School through Education, Modeling, and Communication

This case study examines how energy conservation efforts in one public high school contributed to both sustainability education and the adoption of sustainable behavior within educational and organizational practice. Individual role models, school facilities, school governance and school culture together support both conservation and environmental education, specifically through the application of principles from behavior theory, including modeling commitments, values, expectations, and behaviors. In addition, role models with the traits of charismatic leaders can be especially instrumental. In this school, communication is the thread connecting the multiple aspects of modeling, helping to create the synergistic relationship between conservation efforts and environmental education. This study demonstrates that conservation efforts, when modeled successfully in a public school setting, can simultaneously and synergistically meet the goals of conservation and sustainability education.

Testing Residential Solar Thermal Adoption

Solar thermal is a viable technology that uses clean, renewable energy (the sun) to provide a primary heat source in homes. A combination of structural constraints and value-oriented motivators potentially influences solar thermal technology adoption. This study examines the extent to which solar thermal adoption correlates with structural or value-related factors through logistic regression modeling. Variables measuring socioeconomic circumstances, environmental concern, and ecological conditions are used to predict residential solar thermal technology adoption at the county level throughout the United States. This project provides insight regarding the role of structural and value-related factors, thus highlighting the significance of both structure and agency in explaining social change.

Understanding public perceptions of wood-based electricity production in Wisconsin, United States: the place-based dynamics of social representations

ABSTRACT Public support is critical to renewable energy sector growth, an important element of reducing fossil fuel dependence and mitigating climate change. Prevalent understandings of public support for renewable energy projects often work within a binary framework of acceptance and non-acceptance, arguably unable to capture the nuances of localized public responses to specific projects. Taking a place-based approach and insights from social representation theory, we report on public responses to wood-based electricity production in Wisconsin, USA. Findings indicate that public responses are tied to social and cultural contexts, varying in relation to community histories and identities shaped by other community resources. These results suggest that public perceptions of renewable energy technologies are shaped by representations formed in socio-spatial context, offering insight to inform future decisions in the renewable energy policy process.

Understanding energy practices: a case for qualitative research

ABSTRACT While researching the adoption of residential solar electric technology through a comparative two-state case study, participating solar electric technology adopters indicated some ways that policy—namely, the structure of incentives provided via their state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS), local rebate program incentives, and the requirements for eligibility to receive economic incentives—influenced their energy behaviors both prior to and after installing solar electricity at home. Arguably, insight into the nuances of their energy practices emerged as a function of research design involving a qualitative interview process that allowed for unstudied and unpredicted responses during the interview process. This note makes a case for using qualitative research methods to understand energy behaviors as a method for exploring energy practices, consistent with an emergent emphasis on practice theory in studies of natural resource consumption.

Are Residential Dwellers Marking and Claiming? Applying the Concepts to Humans Who Dwell Differently

Mitch Roses paper in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (volume 30, issue 5, pages 757–771) arguing that dwelling involves acts of marking and claiming offers bountiful conceptual tools for understanding the dwelling experience. Here, I apply Roses ideas to the modern residential dweller and use this application to assess Roses claims. Specifically, the typical and mainstream modern home dweller is contrasted with several different empirical case studies of people who dwell differently, using alternative technologies, practices, and forms of organization in residential dwelling. These case studies are explored using the language of ‘marking’ and ‘claiming’ as put forth by Rose (pace Martin Heidegger) to illustrate what these concepts offer for understanding the experience of dwelling in a home. The observations of residential dwellers who dwell differently suggest that Roses concepts do help to elucidate the dwelling experience, but that intellectual assistance from other sources, including classical and contemporary pragmatist thought and the work of Marcel Mauss on the relationship between action and thought as well as Paul Harrisons claims regarding relationality and variation in dwelling, helps to further develop Roses abstract formulaic and connect the dots between conceptualization and the empirical experiences of residential dwelling.

Utilizing GIS to examine the relationship between state renewable portfolio standards and the adoption of renewable energy technologies

In the United States, there is no comprehensive energy policy at the federal level. To address issues as diverse as climate change, energy security, and economic development, individual states have increasingly implemented Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs), which mandate that utility providers include a specified amount of electricity from renewable energy sources in their total energy portfolios. Some states have included incentives for individual energy technologies in their RPS, such as solar electric (also called photovoltaic or PV technology). Here, we use GIS to visualize adoption of RPSs and electricity generation from renewable energy sources in the US and examine changes in renewable electricity and solar electric generation over time with the goal of informing future policies aimed at promoting the adoption of renewable energy technologies.

Constructing a Sustainable Bioeconomy: Multi-scalar Perceptions of Sustainability

Bioenergy holds significant promise to mitigate the climate-related problems associated with fossil fuel use in heat, electricity, and transportation fuel production. Many governments are encouraging bioeconomy growth with new policies. International trade between bioenergy producing and consuming nations has increased over the years. Developed countries with significant greenhouse gas emission (GHG) emission reduction goals are replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy, creating new export commodities for developing nations. However, increased bioeconomy development can put local social, economic, and environmental conditions in bioenergy producing areas at risk. To minimize the potentially adverse impacts of bioenergy development on existing socioeconomic and environmental conditions, several sustainability certification programs have recently been developed. However, there may be significant differences in how actors across multiple scales, including international non-governmental organizations, state and national governments, and local community members perceive a sustainable bioeconomy. In this chapter, we look specifically at two bioenergy development cases, one in the context of economic development in Latin America (jatropha-based bioenergy development in Yucatan, Mexico) and another in the context of a post-industrialized nation (wood-based bioenergy development in Wisconsin, USA) to understand how different actors view sustainability. Our conclusions suggest that, first, developing a sustainable bioeconomy requires addressing sustainability in all stages in the supply chain, and that, second, community perceptions matter in developing a sustainable bioeconomy, thus there is value in a bottom-up approach to policymaking.

Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975, (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology), Kelly Moore. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (2008), 328 pp.

Kelly Moore’s work chronicles the evolution of three organizations that challenged the relationship between scientists and the military after World War II. By examining post-WWII science–military ties and exploring three particular social movement organizations, Moore discusses the evolving perception, of the public and scientists alike, about scientists’ role in military technology development. Moore contends that the groups, each advocating conscientious employment and research decisions as well as public information provision through unique frameworks and tactics, pushed the boundaries of the scientist-as-expert paradigm and disrupted science-as-usual during this period. Chapter 1 introduces the argument of the book as well as the three organizations that are detailed in the subsequent chapters. Each group, Moore argues, is situated within a particular political tradition. Relying on bodies of research within science, state, and social movement studies, this chapter highlights Moore’s main questions and themes as the reader moves forward. Chapter 2 outlines the science–military relationship between 1945 and 1970. From the development of the atomic bomb, increasing R&D funds at a small handful of prestigious universities, and intensive military and political advising by scientists, Moore traces the increased focus on the social and economic benefits of science and the opening up of federal funding to a larger swath of research universities that occurred in the 1960s. After WWII, the executive branch relied heavily on the advising of scientists, and scientists similarly relied on the funding and status provided by their political and military ties. In this climate, the first of the three organizations Moore discusses emerged. Chapter 3 examines the formation and tradition of an organization called the Society for Social Responsibility in Science (SSRS). Formed in 1949, SSRS relied on a model of personal responsibility and ‘exemplary action’ based on the Quaker tradition, which served as the foundation for the group’s formation. SSRS was not a social movement in the convention sense, for they did not pursue tactics of direct action or intervention. Instead, they argued that scientists had a responsibility as individuals to choose employment and research consistent with their personal ideas regarding justice and peace. This responsibility was not based on their role as scientists, but on their inclusion in the human race – all individuals shared this responsibility to avoid immoral acts. Moore argues that this model is based on the moral