Samuel Mann

Benchmarking the environmental values and attitudes of students in New Zealand's post‐compulsory education

How much do teachers in tertiary education know about the sustainability characteristics of their incoming students and, if this knowledge were to be available, how could their educational approaches be influenced by this knowledge? In New Zealand, Otago Polytechnic has committed itself to the goal that every graduate may think and act as a sustainable practitioner, and staff are changing their approach to teaching to achieve this. This research sought to benchmark the environmental worldview attributes of an incoming cohort of Otago Polytechnic students to support academic staff who need to know more about the sustainability interests and characteristics of their students, so that they may provide appropriate educational programmes. The research was also designed as the first stage of longer‐term research to evaluate the impact of these institutional changes on how students transform during the period of their tertiary education experience. The data and analysis presented here suggest that even before students start to study in the institution different groups have substantially different sustainability values‐sets. The authors anticipate that the research instruments and approaches used in the present study will contribute to a substantial national exploration of the sustainability value‐sets of tertiary students.

How Do We Measure Affective Learning in Higher Education

Educational outcomes related to sustainability often include affective attributes such as values, attitudes and behaviours. Educators in higher education who attempt to research, monitor, assess or evaluate learning of affective attributes can face a bewildering array of methodologies and approaches and a research literature that spans several fields of enquiry. This article provides an overview of affective learning in the broad area of education for sustainable development, guidance for university teachers and researchers contemplating measuring affective attributes and a frame-work of affective attribute measurement based on the Krathwohl et al. (1964) taxonomy.

Computing education for sustainability

This paper presents policy on Computing Education for Sustainability for adoption by SIGCSE. The paper describes results from a survey of Computing Educators who attended ITiCSE 2008 where such a policy statement was mooted. This survey also provides a comparison of understandings of sustainability held by those computing educators against recognized benchmarks. From these findings and understandings an action plan to integrate Education for Sustainability into computing education is proposed.

CHI at the barricades: an activist agenda?

Technology plays an increasingly important role in enabling activist agendas, supporting activist activities and self-organization, bringing people together on causes they support and developing tools and platforms to scaffold activist activities. This panel explores both the role of HCI in activism and activism in HCI.

A synthesis of computing concepts

This is the report of Working Group 4 of the ITiCSE Conference of 2005. The working group met to introduce some new participants into an ongoing project designed to explore the representation of all the computing and information related disciplines in a single, comprehensive, graphical and interactive structure. The goal of the work is to support the classification of research work, the development of curriculum recommendations and accreditation criteria, and the analysis of proposed programs of study.

What have we learned?: a SIGCHI HCI & sustainability community workshop

The role and influence of HCI research in addressing the challenges of sustainability remains unclear despite ongoing interest. Sustainability-oriented paper authors, workshop participants, SIG attendees, and panelists have made ambitious predictions about the contributions of the CHI community and identified critical directions for the field. But have lessons from the past decade of HCI & Sustainability research been taken substantively into practice, within and beyond the CHI community? Have they had a significant positive influence on the vitality of the worlds ecosystems? If not, how can we re-orient? This workshop is a venue for taking concrete action to integrate what we have learned about sustainability - from within and beyond HCI - into a common framework to guide the community toward more influential contributions and more rigorous evaluations of HCI & Sustainability research.

Simple, sustainable living

The goal of this workshop is to better understand how to design for simpler lifestyles as part of a more holistic understanding of what it means to be sustainable. This goal takes us beyond what has been previously emphasized in sustainable HCI or at the confines of environmental sustainability. Instead, we discuss the possibilities of an alternative framing of technologies, economies, cultural norms, social mechanisms, and everyday practices that may be needed for simple, sustainable living. We posit that achieving simple, sustainable living may be a matter of thoughtfully embracing positive complexity and avoiding negative complexity. These require careful decisions about design, choice, and use of technology, as well as taking a broader perspective on sustainability.

Expanding the Boundaries: A SIGCHI HCI & Sustainability Workshop

Following a challenge issued to the Sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to broaden its boundaries to increase breadth and depth of impact [16] this workshop will explore 5 key questions to encourage SHCI research to play a broader role in tackling global sustainability issues and to support the societal change that this will require. Out of this, it will produce a map of existing and future research agendas, and a collaborative position statement. It will also provide an environment of support and challenge to allow individuals working in this research area to consider their personal practice and the difficulties (both practical and emotional) they may encounter.

An ethical basis for sustainability in the worldviews of first year students

A key focus in transforming the profession of ICT to one of contributing to a sustainable future is the education of students who may think and act as sustainable practitioners in computing. An important understanding in this is the relationship between ethics and sustainability in the student intake. This forms a baseline upon which higher education can build. It is argued that sustainability can be considered ethics expanded in time and space but it is not previously known if an ethical understanding relates to an ecological worldview or to desires for contributing to sustainability. This paper reports on a survey of the first year intake of a New Zealand polytechnic (n=52) and explores the link between ethics and sustainability in freshman students in their first week of higher education. A measure of ethical naivety was constructed based on standard measures of naive ethics (legalism, egoism, agency and relativism), the responses to this were compared to the standard measure of ecological worldview, the New Environmental Paradigm. The implications for education for ICT4S are discussed.

Collaboration in sustainability vision

This paper examines the collaborative underpinning of sustainability and suggests the adoption of collaboration as a basis for developing a Sustainable Lens. A framing reference of sustainable practice is used to provide direction to a consideration of the relationship between sustainability and collaboration. This is then used to prompt a discussion of research implications.