Biomimicry Course Assignment 1: Naturalist Lens

Assignment 1: Naturalist Lens

Where is your place? Did you name it?For this first observation I sat beneath a tree in the gardens of my block of flats (see picture below, it's unfortunately sideways, so you will need to turn your head). I found a bunch of busy ants that looked like they were scouting out new places to live and perhaps excavating a home within the trunk of the tree. (See my writing below)

What is 1 thing that you noticed during your observation that you’ve never thought of or seen before?When listening to the wind, it blew in a periodicity that emulated the sound of waves at the beach and I wondered about the "frequency" of wind gusts - are they regular, are they similar to the periodicity that we find in ocean waves? 

What was the hardest part about doing the observation for you?Finding the time to get outside to actually do the observation as it's been an incredibly busy week.

Online Learning and Biomimicry

Online learning is starting to become a bigger and bigger platform as time goes by. From free learning platforms such as Khan Academy, that lets you choose to practice a variety of skills, to websites dedicated to various, more specialised courses (such as the CS-101 course I took through Udacity, back when it was free), if you keep your eyes open, you can find the most incredible courses.

At the beginning of this week, I started a one month (free) course offered by an online learning platform called Canvas,  on an introduction to a topic that goes by the name of Biomimicry. This is something that I've been passively checking in on every now and then but is a concept that I really like. In a nutshell, and to use the words of the women who is the primary force behind Biomimicry, Janine Benyus, 

The idea, in the broadest sense, is that that one observes how nature solves a particular problem and then uses the insight gained by this and applies it to the problem that you're trying to solve. The key here, is that you emulate a solution on three different levels - on natures form, on natures process and finally, on natures ecosystem. 

I'm still in the early stages of the course, but I'm really looking forward to learning more about this topic and I thought that, since it's only the first week, if anyone who reads this blog was interested in joining me, you can click on the link here and also enroll for free!

There are so many different online learning platforms, here are a list of ones that I'm familiar with (some of them I've tried out, some of them I've heard good things about), just in case you'd like to check out the world of online learning for yourself!

Udacity
Codecademy
Excel With Business
Khan Academy
Canvas
Coursera
edX
Crash Course