Within and Beyond the Walls: Sustainability Implications of Educational Technology Infrastructure
Owen McGrath, University of California, Berkeley
It’s worth pointing out again that the three projects described in this chapter all admirably exemplified familiar notions of eco-friendly sustainability at some level. The new science building that houses the lecture hall would achieve LEED Gold certification within a year of opening; the experimental classroom renovation involved some adaptive re-use of existing infrastructure, recovery of natural light, and the piloting of a campus-wide green waste initiative once it re-opened; and the general assignment classroom upgrade involved asbestos abatement and the installation of very eco-friendly furniture. Beyond these more prominent sustainability achievements in the construction of physical infrastructure, as we’ve seen, the A/V-IT installations in these three projects reveal ways in which the contravening undercurrents of technology investiture can move undesirably and unpredictably. The quickening pace of technology change hints at never-ending replacement cycles ahead in all these rooms. Combined with an industry tendency towards planned obsolescence, the accumulating flow of e-waste represents a major underlying environmental threat in terms of material hazard. The potential long term impact of products such as the increasingly popular flat screen, for example, could be unprecedented. Used widely nowadays for signage and information displays, the flat screen’s different underlying technologies (i.e., plasma, LCD, LED) all present significant environmental hazards in disposal, while their service life expectancies average only five years (Socolof, Overly, & Geibig, 2005; Lim et al. 2012). This sort of situation, of course, is not new. In the computer age, such adverse side effects often find cover under the ‘creative destruction’ trope that encourages us to focus on the benefits of progress and not the costs. This flawed logic extends through to a tragic corollary that gives rise to policies and trade agreements allowing for e-waste to be exported to developing nations for disposal (Isles 2004). The fuller implications of e-waste cycles have only recently begun to receive serious attention (Voloudakis, 2010; Selfe, DeVoss, & McKee, 2009 ; Post, 2010 ).
Meanwhile, in spite of the ominous implications, the A/V-IT technologies deployed in these teaching and learning spaces do point toward possibilities of real improvements in classroom-based teaching and learning. The technologies do not merely enhance traditional modes of teaching. Today, in observed use, the three spaces described in the chapter can certainly be seen as providing many interesting and new instructional accommodations: synchronous tele-presence for remote participants; ‘flipped classroom’ configurations for student-led group work; and lecture capture systems that provide for asynchronous review and study after the fact. Even the trendy MOOC, which joins the enrolled students with a larger global body of virtual students, suggests potentially important new dimensions if teaching and learning activities are less dependent upon physical space. Transcending traditional physical limits of co-presence in the classroom and campus could perhaps lead to new sustainability strategies in higher education. Granted, the free MOOC’s instructional delivery, organized as it is around the official Computer Science lecture course, deliberately mimics the face-to-face experience experienced by the locally enrolled students. Yet, the editing of the videos into smaller time segments for the MOOC do hint at further possibilities for changing the traditional didacticism of the lecture hall. Gathering in one place and time to listen to a lecture need not necessarily be the organizing principle of a computer science class, it seems, if instruction can be delivered digitally in this modular fashion.
Although useful as a studio for video production for the MOOC, the auditorium stage and fixed seating don’t lend themselves particularly well to instructor-student interaction coordinated around programming as an activity. Located away from where either the students or instructors actually carry out any significant amount of programming work, the auditorium lecture probably appeared somewhat awkward or archaic even before the MOOC phenomena arose. In short, the traditional auditorium could be said to lack the physical affordances normally found in places where either students or professional computer scientists would do their work. In the fields of Architecture and of Education, there have occasionally been those with visions of transcending such learning/doing dichotomies, which are consistently reproduced by the traditional approaches to designing instructional facilities. Long before there were MOOCs, for instance, there was MOBOC, an ingenious endeavor wherein the escape from classroom walls was vehicular not virtual (Alexander 1977; Rusch 1974). More recently, theorists have attempted to open up new cross-disciplinary conversations between architects and educators, with the aim of getting beyond taken-for-granted notions of teaching and learning that commonly underlie the architectural approaches to designing educational spaces (Boys, 2011). Likewise, research on teaching and learning and classrooms has often been criticized for leaving unexamined the physical constraints of institutional spaces, which are usually treated with only cursory descriptions of context (e.g., participant grouping arrangements and instructional media placement). When re-framed instead by theories of learning that emphasize participation in communities of practice, traditional classroom arrangements become de-familiarized and open to radically new analyses (Lave, 1996). As it turns out, such ‘situated’ approaches are well attuned to analyzing and accounting for the multi-layered contexts of teaching and learning in traditional institutional settings. As the sustainability issues of the three case studies in this chapter intimate, classrooms and the buildings that contain them should not simply be seen as neutral stages or befitting backdrops supporting timeless instructional performances. These spaces and the activities in which the participants are engaged shape and are shaped by individual initiatives, institutional imperatives, and technological forces, among other things. They are sites where money is spent or withheld. They are sites of publicity campaigns, large and small. They are sites where instructors and students coordinate their activities—sometimes in tradition-bound rituals that endure irksomely and other times in new ways that inspire dramatically.