Campus technology for the climate crisis: a summer 2022 workshop

Last month I offered a workshop on what climate change might mean for higher education. I’m just starting to do this kind of thing, so I’d like to share and document it here.

The setting was the ShapingEDU Virtual Summer Camp. That meant a bunch of folks interested in education and technology, mostly (all?) in higher ed. Sessions covered a wide range of topics: AI, libraries, storytelling, race, gender, cloud computing, science fiction as metaphor, etc.

A sample day.

What I sought to do was get people working in an around ed tech to think about how the climate crisis could change their work over the next generation. From the description: “[F]rom campus buildings to teaching and research… [p]articipants will each start developing an educational technology plan for the fraught years ahead.”

In practice, that meant a session framed around what I see as three the topic’s major domains:

1. The physical campus
2. Research
3. Teaching
4. Campus-community relations
5. Campuses engaging the nonacademic world as a whole.

Time was very limited, so I quickly presented key ideas and questions for each domain, then asked participants to write about how their work might…