Without doubt 2008 was a year that will be remembered for a very long time. It is the year that the financial crisis erupted on the global stage, triggered perhaps by high energy prices and decades of misguided financial practices. At the same time, leaders across the globe were proposing emergency measures to cope with a major food crisis.

At the end of 2008, we did not seem as rich as we once were. This is at a time when we need huge resources to cope with a growing list of global concerns related to freshwater scarcity, over fishing, shrinking biodiversity, compounded by climate change. Meanwhile wars and conflicts continue.

Everyone is affected by these changes and every institution needs to respond. It is in this context that a major re-thinking is on-going at the UNU and the initial results are presented in the UNU 2008 Annual Report.

With new vice Rectors Takeuchi and Parayil taking their posts in 2008, we have begun to see the research programmes shift in response to the new challenges facing the globe. Under Takeuchi’s leadership the new Institute for Sustainability and Peace has been established in Tokyo, while Vice Rector Parayil is now heading the Institute of Advanced Studies in Yokohama.

Download the UNU 2008 Annual Report to find out more.

Voices of the Chichinautzin was awarded Best Science and Ecology Documentary at the 2nd IberoAmerican Film Festival held in Tepotzlan, Mexico, 11-18 May 2008.

Luis Patron, from the UNU Media Studio, was on hand to pick up the special Zapata statue. He was also present at the screening and participated in the follow-on question and answer session.

The documentary tells the story of the daily struggles of the local communities as they try to protect a biodiverse region outside Mexico City from illegal logging and development pressures. It was written, directed and co-produced by Patricia Sims, produced and co-directed by Luis Patron and edited by Michael Clark. The graphics and animations were produced by Sean Wood and David Jimenez.

The documentary will be screened on television in Mexico later this year.

Note: The photo of the statue is taken from the festival website.

We are happy to launch the Japanese version of the UNU Online Learning website. We also translated a few pages on the UNU Media Studio blog. Our Japanese readers can learn more about the projects that we are working on. The actual learning resources, however, are still in English and we will continue to blog in English.

We have used a Wordpress plug-in called Polyglot, that supports blog publishing in several languages. We are also using the same plug-in for the Voices of the Chichinautzin website (in English and Spanish). We made some improvements to the Polyglot plug-in and we plan to share them with the developer community in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to Oleg for the programming and Ayako for the translation.

The opportunities for the UNU to compare its work to that of other universities are few and far between. As such, I was very excited to see that the UNU has been included in the webometrics ranking of world universities. The purpose of these rankings is to assess the global performance and visibility of the universities.
According to the Cybermetrics Lab based in Spain, who compile the rankings, the focus is not only “on research results but also on other indicators which may reflect better the global quality of the scholar and research institutions worldwide.”
So how well does the UNU perform? According the results released in January 2008, the UNU is now ranked at number ten in Japan (up from 12 in 2007) and 483 in the world (up from 498 in 2007). This is extraordinary for a universities with just over 350 staff.
The original aim of the rankings was to support Open Access initiatives that facilitate improved electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material. These are goals that align closely to those of the UNU and ones that we hope to promote further in the future (for instance through the new UNU Opencourseware portal).

Happy New Year from the UNU Media Studio team!
We have some new activities planned for this year and next. We are currently brainstorming on a project that looks at the interaction between climate change, peak oil and food security (to name some key issues). It draws lessons over the next few years on how societies like Japan are coping with these powerful trends and, for instance, how it may be possible to meet the targets set out under the Kyoto Protocol. We will tell you more about this as we further elaborate our ideas. By the way, the photo is from Grant Neufeld and covered by a Creative Commons license.
In the early part of this year, we will be working with the World Health Organization to produce an advocacy documentary on aging happily and healthily. We did some scouting at the end of last year and the production team will be doing some filming this month in Kobe (the case study site).
A lot of projects will remain as before. We will continue to support the UNU-Global Virtual University based in Norway and also UNU Opencourseware (a cross the UNU collaboration). The video conference based classes under the Asia Pacific Initiative will continue and grow. Our collaboration with REDMESO and the development of e-case studies (using Fieldtrip) and documentaries will also develop further over the next two years.

Promoting learning on social and environmental issues is a key component of what we do. We are exploring further the role of documentaries in raising awareness on issues and prompting action. Openness is a central facet of how we approach our work and of how we share what we do through open content, open educational resources and Creatives Commons, etc.
But we are also really excited about the prospect of using various web services (Web 2.0) and social media in order to promote more effective communication with our audience and partners. These are just some of the activities, with other new collaborations gradually emerging, for instance with the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the University of Sydney. We will talk more on this later.

The UNU Media Studio is pleased to announce that the documentary and e-case study entitled “Saving the Ayuquila River” has received the 2007 Award of Excellence in the education division of the Society for New Communications Research Awards programme.
The Society honors innovative individuals, corporations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions and media outlets for the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of media, marketing, public relations, advertising, entertainment, education, politics and social initiatives.
The Saving the Ayuquila River video documentary and e-case study was developed by the UNU Media Studio in collaboration with the University of Guadalajara, Mexico and illustrates how scientists can work in local communities to bring about positive environmental changes.

The UNU Media Studio team (Luis, David and Andreina) traveled to Kobe recently to scout for characters and attend the HAT (Happy Active Town) Kobe Community Festival. While there, the team interviewed Mr. Kazuo Sakamoto (82), a community leader who has lived in the HAT for the past 10 years.

Sakamoto-san shared his views on community and personal health, reminding us that the secret to remaining active and healthy is very simple: eat well, sleep well and don’t worry about negative things.

This research interview is the start of a long term documentary project that will focus on aging looking at its links to technology and social ties.

Related links:
WHO, social determinants of health
English Longitudinal Study of Aging

As the world becomes more and more urbanized, the Media Studio turns its gaze towards a new theme: healthy urbanization in low resource settings. For this project, Bangalore (also known as the Silicon Valley of India due to the large number of IT companies thriving there) will be our new location.
Bangalore’s wide, tree-lined avenues filled with loud, yellow auto rickshaws welcomed us. But digging deeper, we found a city struggling with rapid urbanization and massive population growth.
To get a clearer picture of the situation, we visited some of the poorest areas of Bangalore and spoke to the people living there. We also attended a seminar on healthy urbanization, organized by WHO – Kobe Center (our partner in this project), which helped understand the challenges of building healthier communities in urban areas.
We thank WKC, WHO – India, HUP, SHINE and Mad Monitor Productions for their guidance during this mission and we look forward to their inputs in the next phase of this project.

It is three years since our last major update of our website and we felt that it was time for a change in direction. In two installments, I would like to explain some of the thinking that went into redesign our web presence. Let me start by talking about the “why” and the “how” in this post.
Why?
The content on our old site did not accurately represent the name of the site – “Online Learning.” This meant that many visitors were dissatisfied and did not stay around long to explore. In addition, our content had grown stale. So one challenge was to redesign the site so as to make the content more relevant, targeted and easy to understand and as a result to increase our site traffic and exposure on the web.
How?
Our new site development coincided with an internal evaluation of our approach to work. Before we could design the new site we spent considerable time on the philosophy underpinning our work. We recognized that three components – “Build, Share, Collaborate”- represent the core of what we do here in the UNU Media Studio. Using this philosophy as a guide we were able to define our web site goals. Of course, there was debate as to what we should include in the site, how it should work but we all decided that if it didn’t fit with our new philosophy then it would not be included.
In the next post, I will talk about the technologies we used to build the site.