News

4 Ps for Quality

MESPOM volunteed for the Quality Assurance exercise by the European Commission and has been selected as one of six Erasmus Mundus courses (out of about 100 existing). The purpose of the exercise is to examine how the joint character of Erasmus Mundus courses contributes to their high quality. Here are some thoughts which I prepared for the first visit of the EC QA team to Lund.

4 Ps for Quality

Purpose, people, pattern and profession – these are the aspects of MESPOM’s quality which are due to its ‘jointness’, the fact that is run by four universities together.

MESPOM graduate awarded Development Cooperation Prize for her thesis

Tahia Devisscher, a MESPOM graduate of 2007 has been awarded a Development Cooperation Prize from Belgian Development Cooperation for her MESPOM thesis on the impact of biofuel production in Malaysia.

MESPOM student receives Pan-African Prize for Entrepreneurial Teachers

Leonard Akwany, a MESPOM student (06-08), has won the 1st Pan-African Prize for Entrepreneurial Teachers. Leonard, a leader of Eco-finders Youth Movement in Kenya, has been working to promote environmental entrepreneurship in the poorest region of the country since 1995. Through cost sharing and improvisation Eco-finders has been able to use its limited resources to reach out to over 100 schools and hundreds of community groups, to establish ‘Environmental Enterprises’.

MESPOM students win Lund Green Prix

The Lund Green Prix is the final event in the ISS (Industrial Sustasinability Strategies) course. Students design a "car" constructed from simple materials such as card-board, wood sticks and plastic straws.

The students compete in groups in five categories with their "cars".

- Greatest marketing potential, where staff and students vote on their favorite

- Performance, where the "cars" travel down a slope created by the tables in the Aula

- Disassembly, where the students are to scrap the "cars" under time pressure

Nobel Peace Prize and MESPOM

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The Nobel Peace Prize of 2007 has been awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

MESPOM-CEU e-learning platform

The CEU Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy and MESPOM have established a joint e-learning platform using the Moodle course management system.

We are not Mountains

As Leyla and I bid farewell to Leo and Karen early this morning, the mood was nowhere near as heavy as I would have expected. Her final words before she got onto that harbinger of dorm goodbyes, the airport minibus, were the following pearls:

“We are not mountains; humans meet.”

Even as I basked inwardly in the dawn-lit glow of the wisdom of the ancients, coming from a mouth that often spouted it - punctuating many other things – I knew I would write this entry.

Environment and Security in Eastern Europe

A report on environment and security in Eastern Europe was launched on May 21st, 2007 at the OSCE Economic and Environmental Forum in Prague. What does it have to do with MESPOM? Well, as the lead author I had to apportion my time between this exciting work and equally exciting MESPOM coordination for the last year. Others from the MESPOM community - Ruben and Alexious from CEU as well as Mykhaylo (a MESPOM Scholar 2006) - were involved as well as five CEU alumni and two IIIEE alumni.

MESPOM Graduation 2007

The first MESPOM students graduated. The journey which started in September 2005 in Budapest has come to an end 20 months later.

 

Google Apps Education Edition for MESPOM

Google approved licensing Google Apps Education Edition to MESPOM. In particular, this means e-mail addresses @mespom.eu will be available for the members of the MESPOM community. Read more about a set of case-studies about Google Apps at different universities.