Event Description
Bring your questions and observations about nature and be prepared for some good-natured fun while learning about our local wildlife in the LLI class. Convener Pam Otto may be familiar to you from her Good Natured newspaper column in Shaw Media publications and her The Good Natured Hour videos, both of which delve into current happenings in our natural world.
Convener: Pam Otto is a graduate of NIU’s outdoor education master’s degree program and has worked as a naturalist for the past 20 years at public agencies including the Forest Preserve District of Kane County and the Fox Valley Park District. She has been with the St. Charles Park District since 2007. Prior to engineering the career switch that led to her dream job, she worked in trade publishing but spent every spare moment catching bugs, watching birds and chasing snakes.
Credit https://pixabay.com/
Jason Klein, the director of P-20 initiatives at NIU, said that absorbing knowledge keeps us young.
“I have been lucky enough to work in some educational settings,” he shared, “where I ve been able to learn a lot of the applied brain research to learning and we know that humans can continue to build neural connections, at all ages and we also shed neural connections as we learn new things.”
The classes for the NIU Lifelong Learning Institute normally take place on campus, but COVID-19 shifted things to the internet last fall.
Klein suggested that the online setup is creating even more connections because participants are joining from different states.