ICT4S Reaching Out: Making sustainability relevant in higher education

Many media technology and computer science engineering students suffer from the preconceived opinion that sustainability is at best peripheral, and at worst irrelevant to their education. In this paper we discuss our experiences of integrating sustainability and ICT4S into a media technology engineering programme. An overarching tension has been in finding a balance between teaching about sustainability in general, and teaching about ICT4S in particular. Furthermore, what aspects of the wide and interdisciplinary area of ICT4S are most relevant to teach to media technology students, and how can the connection between ICT and sustainability be “refined”, clarified and expressed We explicate how we have gone about to shape the course in such a way that it becomes both relevant and possible for these students to relate to it, and we exemplify with choices made, of which one had been the implementation and adaption of the GaSuCo board game. While the results presented here are primarily relevant to media technology and computer science educations, we also conclude with recommendations to the larger ICT4S community. We argue that the ICT4S community does not only need to take part in developing education in this area, but also needs to conduct research on how to educate students in ICT4S.

[1]  Kjell Aleklett,et al.  Peeking at Peak Oil , 2012 .

[2]  Bill McKibben,et al.  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet , 2010 .

[3]  F. Chapin,et al.  A safe operating space for humanity , 2009, Nature.

[4]  Daniel Pargman,et al.  “It’s not fair!”: making students engage in sustainability , 2013 .

[5]  Corinne Le Quéré,et al.  Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis , 2013 .

[6]  Peter Blaze Corcoran,et al.  Higher education and the challenge of sustainability : problematics, promise, and practice , 2004 .

[7]  J. Rockström,et al.  Policy: Sustainable development goals for people and planet , 2013, Nature.

[8]  Anthony Townsend,et al.  Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia , 2013 .

[9]  P ? ? ? ? ? ? ? % ? ? ? ? , 1991 .

[10]  J. Tainter.  Energy, complexity, and sustainability: A historical perspective , 2011 .

[11]  P. Crutzen,et al.  The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives , 2011, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[12]  Lorenz M. Hilty,et al.  Sustainability and ICT - An overview of the field , 2011 .

[13]  John Karat,et al.  Evolving the scope of user-centered design , 1997, CACM.

[14]  Christopher Eccleston,et al.  “It’s Not Fair” , 2013 .

[15]  Marko Turpeinen,et al.  Kilograms or cups of tea: Comparing footprints for better CO2 understanding , 2011, PsychNology J..

[16]  Tom Goodwin.  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet [review] / McKibben, Bill , 2011 .

[17]  J. Houghton,et al.  Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , 2014 .

[18]  Jan Gulliksen,et al.  Key principles for user-centred systems design , 2003, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[19]  Clayton Lewis,et al.  Designing for usability—key principles and what designers think , 1983, CHI '83.

[20]  Anna Björklund,et al.  Social Life Cycle Inventory and Impact Assessment of Informal recycling of Electronic ICT Waste in Pakistan , 2013 .

[21]  Karel Mulder,et al.  HOW TO EDUCATE ENGINEERS FOR/IN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? 10 YEARS OF DISCUSSION, WHAT CHALLENGES REMAIN? , 2012 .

[22]  Thomas Lindhqvist,et al.  Integration of Sustainability in Higher Education: A Study with International Perspectives , 2008 .

[23]  Janet Davis,et al.  Computing and sustainability: evaluating resources for educators , 2010, SGCS.

[24]  Michael T. Klare,et al.  The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources , 2012 .

[25]  E. A. Avellone,et al.  Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers , 1916 .

[26]  Samuel Mann,et al.  Computing education for sustainability , 2008, ACM SIGCSE Bull..

[27]  John Robinson.  Squaring the circle? Some thoughts on the idea of sustainable development , 2004 .

[28]  Richard Heinberg,et al.  The post carbon reader : managing the 21st century's sustainability crises , 2010 .

[29]  Theodore Baumeister,et al.  Marks' Standard Handbook For Mechanical Engineers (Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers) , 2006 .

[30]  Richard Heinberg.  Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines , 2007 .

[31]  Stephen Sterling,et al.  Higher Education, Sustainability, and the Role of Systemic Learning , 2004 .

[32]  G. R. Brundtland.  Our Common Future World Commission on Environment and Development , 1987 .

[33]  Yu Cai.  Integrating sustainability into undergraduate computing education , 2010, SIGCSE.