Over two hundred people turned up for the Peace and Creativity Salon at the United Nations University on Friday, 26 September. We set up a screen and video projector in the UNU courtyard, and Global Lives built their installation at the front of the campus (photo credit - Jason Hall).

The event began at 5pm with the first public screening of the Wisdom Years, a new documentary from the UNU and the World Health Organization. The documentary looks at ageing in Japan.

This was followed by the world premiere of the new documentary from Director Tim Wise, entitled Soldier of Peace. We had a video conference link up with Tim and he explained that his intention when making the filmq was to “put peace back on the agenda in the 21st Century.”

We then went into salon mode with plenty of time for people to interact over food and drink. At this point in the evening, we held a screening in the UNU Media Studioof the award winnng documentary from the UNU entitled Voices of the Chichinuatzin. We rounded the evening off with a dance performance from PeaceBoat.

The event was organized by the UNU, in collaboration with Temple University, Global Lives, and many more.

Expand your social network, enjoy a night of global engagement through film, and feel the power of film as a vehicle for positive change.

To celebrate the 2008 International Day of Peace, UNU invites you to the Asian premiere of the movie Soldiers of Peace. Also screening will be the latest documentaries from UNU — The Wisdom Years and Voices of the Chichinautzin.

The event begins at 5:00 p.m. on Friday September 26 at UNU in Tokyo. Admission is free.

Details and registration

Year by year the number of disasters in the Asia Pacific region continues to increase. Extreme weather events related to climate change are one reason for this increase. However, the region has also been struck by several major earthquakes affecting highly populated areas.

The United Nations University is planning to offer an advanced seminar series on Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. The series will be implemented in collaboration with the University of Hawaii and a network of partners in the region.

The first lecture will begin on 25 September and will continue each week until 11 December 2008. This course is designed for graduate students and professionals interested in disaster management and relief.

The lectures are delivered by experts from across the region and each class lasts one and a half hours. The classes take place through video conference with online support via a learning management system. All lectures are conducted in English.

The courses are integrated into existing teaching programmes at the partner universities. In Tokyo, students taking the course must attend classes in the Media Studio on the ground floor of the UNU building.

If you live in or around Tokyo and you are interested in applying for the course, please send an email and one page curriculum vitae to the following email address by Monday 22 September (onlinelearning@unu.edu). Pleases are limited.

Photo Source: Lakerae

With global warming and climate change currently generating one of the most vigourous of global debates, there are a lot of mixed messages and information out there to digest.

Somehow cutting through the clutter, we came across this simple non-verbal animation from 350.org. We hope you’ll agree 350 is a number really worth spreading.

Are you interested in sharpening your e-tutoring skills? Do you want to learn how to build and implement an online course?

Well here is your chance. At the end of September, the UNU Global Virtual University will co-organize two online courses together with Stord/Haugesund University College and the University of Agder in Norway.

e-teaching I is designed for budding online course tutors. e-teaching II involves learning how to design, build and run online courses. These are both part-time, for credit courses.

More information can be found at the University of Agder and there is a flyer that you can download which includes comments from previous course participants. The deadline for applications is 15 September 2008 and the courses begin on 17 September 2008.

The Media Studio team is just back from Sapporo where we joined people from over 60 countries in the iSummit’08. The yearly event is organized by iCommons, an organization at the forefront of an international movement that seeks to develop a united global commons by collaborating in open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

The event was extremely inspiring for us. For a long time UNU Media Studio has been committed to the ideals of collaborative production and open sharing of content over the Internet. The iSummit’08 gave us the opportunity to get in touch with talented people from all over the world who share these ideals and who are finding creative ways to implement them in practical terms in a wide range of disciplines such as video production, education, publishing, business, law, photography, government, and fashion amongst others. [ read more ]

On 17 July, we organized a screening of the Wisdom Years documentary for staff from the UNU Centre and the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies. As you can see from the photo, we had a good turn out in the UNU Media Studio.

The Wisdom Years documentary offers glimpses into the urban lives of 70, 90 and 100 year old Japanese people and their secrets to maintaining physical, mental and social health.

After showing the documentary, there was a question and answers session. Overall, the feedback was very positive.

In order to promote the documentary, we have prepared six short interstituals and a sample is included below. We would like to hear from you about this topic and the documentary, so please feel free to submit your comments.

THE WISDOM YEARS - Silver College from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

Today is a big day for the UNU Media Studio. We launched a new web magazine called Our World 2.0 focusing on climate change, peak oil and food security. We are witnessing a convergence of these issues and now is the time to look for solutions that ameliorate, rather exacerbate the problems.

This is a big departure for our team since we normally spend a long time building content and saying “ta-da…please come and use our wonderful educational materials.”

Sean Wood suggested that this time around we co-create new content with our colleagues in the UNU and our partners, and with as wide a community as possible.

We have never made a web magazing before and so we are learning by doing. We will share what we learn with you as well.

So please join us on this journey.

Last Friday, 4 July 2008, the UNU hosted an excellent symposium entitled Innovation and Climate Change. The speaker line up was very impressive including James E. Hansen, Gwyn Prins, David Steven, Alex Evans, Shuzo Nishioka, and Ted Nordhaus.

The UNU Media Studio team was invited along to interview all of the speakers and to create a series of podcasts. The first in the series was uploaded to the main UNU homepage on Saturday 5 July. You can see it below.

More will follow soon on the UNU website and also on the Our World 2.0 webzine.

CLIMATE CHANGE - Messages to the G8 from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Citt, Luis, Naoto, Koari, and David for making this happen.

There have been some big developments over the past couple of weeks. First of all, we have set up a YouTube Channel that can be used by anyone in the UNU to share their video content. Second, we have set up an account with Tube Mogul that enable the UNU to distribute videos to a number of video portals. The idea is to place UNU videos where the audience actually is, rather than hoping people will discover them on our websites.

Third, Citt and Koari have just completed a series of seven podcasts for the UNU Priority Africa project. You can see them on the UNU Youtube Channel and they will be accessible via the UNU main website. An sample video, hosted on Vimoe, is included below to give you a better idea of the themes covered.

PRIORITY AFRICA - Climate Change from UNUChannel on Vimeo.