George Veletsianos, PhD

Tag: climate and edtech

Digital education in times of climate crisis: beyond content

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On July 15, 2022

In learner experience

In an earlier post, I suggested that one way our field could respond to the climate crisis is by helping people understand that climate change will impact them. Stephen Downes takes that to mean “looking at the content of what we are teaching.” That’s true, but that’s not quite what I had in mind. Yes, we should be consistent in updating our curricula to address topics of significance. That includes climate change in relation to digital learning. It also may include data ownership, indigeneity, inclusion, and so on. But, what I was hinting at when I mentioned our field’s involvement in the interdisciplinary kind of work that is needed to address climate change were design, development, and evaluation work that we (and our students) could be undertaking. Such work can be expansive. Two examples are the following

  • partnering with various initiatives to support education-related outcomes. For example, Not Too Late is a project led by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua which involves outreach and community-building, and which may benefit from learning design expertise that relates to building, fostering, and sustaining online communities.
  • partnering with others in the design, development, and evaluation of climate-related education efforts. For example, learning designers and researchers are well suited to lead the kind of action listed in Royal Road University’s 202-2027 Climate Action plan (pdf): “Develop a suite of accessible (low cost/no cost; multiple offering) courses (credit and non-credit) and educational outreach initiatives that raise awareness, increase understanding, encourage involvement, and build support for innovative climate actions within and outside the [university] community. Included in this roster are courses related to a range of climate action competencies including climate science, climate justice, social science and landbased approaches to climate adaptation and climate resilience, biodiversity and Indigenous rights.”

Indeed, amongst the many things that education technology and instructional/learning design programs train our students to do is design, develop, and evaluate of learning experiences that address complex issues in partnership with interdisciplinary teams.

Before it’s too late: On Neil Selwyn’s introduction to “studying digital education in times of climate crisis”

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On July 5, 2022

In futures, scholarship

With the same criticality and thoughtfulness that characterizes the rest of his work, Neil Selwyn recently gave a talk for our friends at the U of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Digital Education titled “Studying digital education in times of climate crisis: what can we do?” It’s a great talk, and worth watching and reflecting upon.

At the beginning of the talk, Neil makes this comment:

This is a really unfamiliar topic for me to be thinking about and talking about…But I’ve been working since 1995 on various critical lines of digital technology in education and never thought about sustainability, really. I’ve basically spent 27 years pointing out why things don’t work. But, coming over to Australia 10 years ago has given me just a real personal visceral wake-up call to climate crisis and I’ve quickly become super mindful of the need to get my own work, and also my own area of work, edtech, up to speed with issues relating to sustainability, climate breakdown, possible eco-compromised futures to come and all the rest of it. So, the fundamental challenge that I’m currently wrestling with and the challenge which I’m now gonna burden you with, I think is terrifyingly simple. Do we actually need digital education? Is digital education a realistic part of a livable future or even just a survivable planet? And if we think it is, in what form and what do we do about it?

These are important questions, and I expect that more and more researchers in our field will explore facets of them. I would like to add another one that doesn’t quite have to do with edtech, but I think deserves the attention of researchers and designers in our field: How do we help people understand and respond to issues of sustainability and climate catastrophe before they become personal?

Like Neil, i didn’t grapple with climate change in any concerted and scholarly way until recently. I don’t think we’re unique in this regard. The broader literature that I’ve been engaging with over the past two years relating to COVID-19 misinformation includes models that suggest that people negotiate and respond to perceived risks to their health based on their perception of susceptibility to an illness or disease; belief in severity of risk; belief that taking action would reduce severity or susceptibility and therefore have benefits, etc, etc. In other words: How could we help people understand that climate change will impact them (or their children, nieces, nephews, etc?) in significant ways (i.e. susceptibility, severity) and that the benefits of responding to climate change outweigh the costs of not doing so? Importantly, how do we do that before the issue becomes personal*?

To be certain, this is an interdisciplinary question: colleagues in climate science, public policy, and educational psychology are likely dealing with aspects of this already, and partnerships can be mutually beneficial. It would be good to engage with this soon, while climate change still feels like somewhere else, somewhere a little bit distant, because by the time it becomes personal for most of us, it may be too late.

* There’s a debate focusing on the worth/value of individual vs. systemic responses here that I’m going to ignore for this post. Suffice to say it’s an issue worth thinking about.

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