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Permaculture Guidelines

We at Serlo have the goal to establish a high-quality learning website. We have formulated guidelines in order to help our active users to create the layout and structure of our articles in a unified and consistent manner.

There are general guidelines at bottom of the Help for Editors page. These guidelines are meant to make it easier to get started and offer guidance regarding the creation of articles, courses, exercises and solutions.

Guidelines specific to Permaculture

Articles, Figures and Courses

Articles serve to better understand technical terms and explain functions, concepts, principles and methods of permaculture.

Pictures and graphs can be integrated into an article in order to make it more appealing. They also support the understanding of functions, principles and methods of permaculture.

Courses are meant to teach practical skills or processes in permaculture step by step.

Please refer to the general Guidelines Pages for Didactics, Structure and Formatting of articles and courses.

Every Article and Course must have References.

Exercises and Solutions

Exercise tasks and solutions serve different purposes: to create awareness, to deepen understanding or to revise learned content. They also help practicing methods and ways of thinking of permaculture.

As for permaculture there are different types of tasks:

Action tasks

  • For rehearsing key competences (social skills, communication- and IT-skills)

  • Work order for field research, creative suggestions, project works, public campaigns etc.

  • No explicit solution; maybe hints for the implementation

Everyday-Check-Tasks

  • To relate lessons learned to the own experience world

  • Mental or sensual reflection on one’s own lifestyle and its implications for the system earth

  • Examples of solutions which can be complemented by users

Experience tasks

  • To foster sensual experiences in one’s own environment in order to develop problem or solution oriented thinking concerning issues of permaculture

  • Observing things and/ or connections in the world

  • Guidance for experimenting

Deepening tasks

  • To explain contents or structure of a deeper understanding

  • Explaining concepts or structures and its connections

  • Ideally related to practice, for example “Explain a friend the principle of zoning…”

  • Calculating a respective results

  • Linking further content or concrete results in the solution

  • Operators: “Explain”, “Research”, “Calculate”, …

Understanding tasks

  • To foster independent deductive reasoning

  • Construction or discussion tasks, brainstorming

  • Making plans or a sketch

  • Collecting own ideas for permaculture application in one’s own environment

  • Exemplary construction plans or ideas in the solution

  • Operators “Construct”, “Sketch”, “Collect ideas”, “Discuss”, “Dream”,…

Read on in the general guidelines section to learn about layout and formatting of tasks and solutions.

Videos

Videos are valuable tools in Permaculture education when it comes to showing practical skills or processes. Video-tours illustrate the explanation of constructions or tools of permaculture.

It is important that videos are well structured and short: at the beginning of a video, its content should appear in text-format and the displayed information should always relate to context.

Videos should not be longer than 7 minutes. A good balance between technical information and appealing, motivating design is perfect.

In order to make later translation easier, video comments can be added from offstage. Thereby, the text can easily be exchanged. As for quotes and interviews, one can work with subtitles.

Find out more on Embedding and Creating Videos.

Epistemological reflections

One of the main goals of permaculture is to foster majority, reflecting and judging autonomously. Articles of permaculture should be formulated as neutral as possible. Information should always be put in their respective context. Value judgments and not (yet) secured facts should always be exposed as such.