Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis

Abstract

Despite climate heating and rising ecological instability, environmental issues feature rarely in discussions of educational technology. Most commentators presume the continued unfettered use of digital education resources bolstered by occasional claims that emerging technologies might support the ‘greening’ of school and university provision. In contrast to such business-as-usual complacency, this article anticipates ongoing environmental degradation of the planet as radically upending the continued expansion of digital technologies in education. On the one hand, depletion of natural resources and energy curtailments might put paid to established ‘abundant’ forms of digital technology use. On the other hand, more frequent climate-related disasters might necessitate emergency forms of education for displaced and unsettled populations. As such, the article argues for a new paradigm of educational technology that is both wholly sustainable and targeted towards displaced and disadvantaged populations. The article considers a number of ways that such an ‘Ed-Tech Within Limits’ might be pursued – outlining fundamental shifts in thinking necessary to reorient educational technology along environmentally concerned lines.

Rewilding Technology

“…Videoconferencing and virtual learning are seen as sustainable alternatives to travel in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Personal AI companions are envisaged as supporting students through the distress caused by future extreme global weather events (Selwyn, 2021, in critique of e.g., Educause, 2020).…”

“…Increasing hardware durability, stopping planned obsolescence, instituting the right to repair and establishing shared DIY community spaces such as repair cafes, are amid the practical suggestions for how to reconfigure the practices of using edtech to make them more sustainable. Further suggestions include establishing commons approaches to the shared ownership of devices in schools, buying refurbished devices, using modular systems and renewables for schools, embedding sustainability as an issue across the curriculum and mainstreaming a mindset of digital abstention, adding the planetary dimension of datafication to critical data literacy, or reducing the use of technology to those moments in which it has a clear benefit (e.g., film-making), rather than assuming that if tablets have been purchased, they should be used for every learning task (Macgilchrist, 2019;Piattoeva, 2021;Selwyn, 2021;Warren et al, 2022) These are urgent issues and essential practices. They alert us to immediate possibilities and first steps to more ecological institutions.…”

Digital Based Learning Management With A Multimodal Approarch

“…Literacy is no longer limited to reading and writing because technology allows for multiple modes of content representation, such as instant messaging, digital storytelling, etc. Previous research includes work in the areas of critical new literacies (Burnett & Merchant, 2020), data literacies (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2020), media literacy, critical future-gazing around teaching and learning (Selwyn, 2021;Macgilchrist et al, 2020;Potter & Cowan, 2020).…”

Conceptualising Resources-aware Higher Education DigitalInfrastructure through Self-hosting: a Multi-disciplinary View

“…While most institutions adopted these solutions in what Teräs et al called a "seller's market" [12], alternatives -in the form of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) -have also been flourishing in parallel. Remarkably, many proprietary solutions are powered, at an infrastructural or dependency level, by FLOSS 5 . The 2010s have also seen a fast development of virtualisation technologies that are nowadays at the basis of many data centres, most prominently containerisation 6 .…”

“…Existing work that addresses the issues discussed so far can range from highly conceptual [5] to quantitative [6] with, however, limited explorations on the intersections between the many disciplines working on this field. Furthermore, relevant initiatives, virtuous examples or experiments such as the LowTechMagazine website 2 [7], CoopCloud 3 , commercial initiatives such as Ungleich's Data Center Light 4 , or the many reflections and examples on the field of "permacomputing" [8] are anecdotally regarded, in institutional discourse, as fringe experiences that cannot be replicated, or applied at scale within institutional boundaries.…”