using a wiki to support sustainability literacy

USING A WIKI TO SUPPORT SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY Lisa Payne Department of Computing and the Digital Environment Coventry University CV1 5FP [email protected]

ABSTRACT It is becoming increasingly important that students develop an awareness and understanding of sustainability issues: that they develop their ‘sustainability literacy’. For the past few years we have included some explicit coverage of this for computing students. Computing students tend to be very strategically-orientated and reject material which seems to them to be of no direct relevance to their career development. Helping students to see the relevance of sustainability to them is not easy. To encourage their engagement, in 2007/8, they were given a group assignment which required them to derive sustainability 'tips' for an IT development company. Most students, and particularly computing students, are very active users of Web 2.0 tools and spend much of their time communicating using social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo) and image, video and music sharing sites (YouTube, flickr). They routinely use chat and message board services and some use blogs. They view such communication tools as natural and ‘part of life’. Therefore, to support the development of submissions for their sustainability assignment, students’ collaborative work was supported by requiring them to use a wiki site. Whilst all students have accessed a wiki, at least in the form of the online encyclopaedia wikipedia, most students had never created one but readily saw its relevance to collaborative working and welcomed the opportunity to create one. Keywords Wiki, Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA), Activity-Led Learning, Sustainability Literacy, Collaborative Working

1. INTRODUCTION Recently it has been seen as important for all students, no matter what their area of study, to develop an appreciation of sustainability issues, a level of understanding sometimes referred to as sustainability literacy. Hence, the concept of sustainability will initially be described followed by some of the background to this imperative. Some students already have significant levels of interest in sustainability issues and some of the evidence for this will be described. However, despite this, the teaching of sustainability to computing students is challenging: the nature of these difficulties will be described. Over recent years most, if not all, students have become accustomed to using computing technologies within their learning and assessment. This is largely in the form of online discussions, animations or computermarked assessments. However, within their personal life modern students routinely use Web 2.0 tools, such as social networking and media sharing sites, discussion forums and blogs. This paper describes the use of a wiki, as a vehicle for assessment, to support collaborative group work. A wiki was adopted to address the challenge of motivating students in the development of their sustainability literacy. The rationale for this is considered followed by a discussion of the effectiveness of this approach.

2. SUSTAINABILITY The classic definition of sustainable development is: “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This was promoted by the United Nations Brundtland Report in 1987. However the importance of sustainability did not become widely accepted until after the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, often known as the Earth Summit, in Rio in 1992 [1]. The UK Government defines sustainable development as meeting four aims: • social progress which recognises the needs of everyone;

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• effective protection of the environment; • prudent use of natural resources; • maintenance of high and stable levels of economic growth and employment [2]. These aims clearly identify the scope of sustainability as encompassing the areas of the economy, society and the environment. Less evidently though, these aims also raise spatial questions. The issue may not be so much as to whether some development should happen but rather where it should happen; whether or not it is appropriate in a particular location. Spatial issues are thus now often added as a fourth area of concern of sustainability. Sustainability and sustainable development are often used as synonyms. For the purposes of this paper the terms will be used interchangeably: the subtle difference in meaning are unimportant here and will not be considered. A level of knowledge which is really just an appreciation of sustainability issues is sometimes referred to as sustainability literacy.

3. DEVELOPING SUSTAINABILITY LITERACY Sustainability literacy requires an awareness of generic sustainability issues. It is a level of understanding from which the importance of issues and decisions can be recognised, appropriate inquiries can be made and investigations commissioned. It would allow a professional to take decisions recognising the modern sustainability agenda without themselves being an expert in any aspect of the area. The issues this might encompass would include waste recycling; energy usage, efficiency concerns and carbon footprints; travel-towork policies; paper usage and electronic document usage and water management. However, there are some areas which are particularly pertinent to computing professionals. There are issues relating to energy usage and concerns about the efficiency of hardware and even software; hardware acquisition policies, reuse and replacement cycles and disposal policies; printer cartridge policies; teleworking and flexible work policies; videoconferencing usage and the outsourcing of work, particularly offshore. The government is clearly promoting the importance of sustainability. “Each of us needs to make the right choices to secure a future that is fairer, where we can all live within our environmental limits.” Tony Blair [2]. In the ‘Securing the Future’ report in 2005 the UK government asserted that sustainability literacy should become a core competency developed by all professional graduates [2]. The Sustainability Development Commission, the watchdog body with a remit to guide and monitor the government, believes that sustainable development skills are generic, like critical thinking, and required by everyone. They acknowledge that sustainability literacy is about attitudes and values [1]. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has committed to, and provided funding for, the development of students’ sustainability capabilities [3]. Recently, the sustainability imperative has been embraced by all the main UK political parties: it has become a largely apolitical concern. There is some limited evidence of IT employers wanting to recruit people with sustainability skills. In a survey of ‘top IT professionals’ all respondents agreed that it is important for the IT industry to be environmentally friendly [4]. In a report to the Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), Cade commented that “sustainable development is an important issue in the IT sector” [5]. The British Computer Society expects computing students to be aware of external factors which may affect them in their work as IT professionals [6]. This covers social, legal, ethical and professional issues and encompasses sustainability, identified as environmental aspects and globalisation. The delivery of the sustainability agenda has some of the characteristics and similar challenges to the delivery of these other external issues. Unless very well contextualised, they all risk being seen by students as being unimportant, or even irrelevant, to them and their likely careers. The teaching of sustainability must benefit from the fact that many young people are already highly aware of environmental issues [1]. The Future Leaders Survey (conducted in conjunction with UCAS) found that almost half the young people intending to study a social science or planning course felt it important that their selected university had a good track record on sustainability [7]. The same survey found that the number of students who said that environmental issues were important to them in making decisions varied according to their subject of study, from over 14% for veterinary science students down to 4% for technology students. Cade also reported a range of levels of engagement, with education students being the most interested [5]. (The position of IT students is not reported.) The following year’s Future Leaders Survey found that 42% of students believed that learning about sustainability would help them get the job they want after they graduate [8]. Additionally, many students wish to gain employment with organisations that are environmentally and socially aware and which have adopted a position of corporate social responsibility (CSR) [9, 5]. ITALICS Volume 8 Issue 1 February 2009 ISSN: 1473-7507 46

The experience of delivering sustainability content to computing students in the previous two years, using interactive lectures, demonstrated that many of these students just do not readily see the relevance of sustainability to them. Many of these students are really only interested in developing their technical expertise and not in any of the wider, external issues. Some students resent being taught about legal or ethical issues; they do not want to be taught about professionalism. Like these other essential topics, the significance and importance of sustainability needs to be clearly articulated and thoughtful creativity is needed to encourage all students to engage. A comment in the HEA report on the links between sustainability and employment observes that “generally IT students are not good at soft skills” [5]. Nationally, there have been a number of initiatives to deliver sustainability literacy education. Examples include a generic module in sustainability literacy at the University of Gloucestershire [10]. There are descriptions of the many sustainability initiatives at the University of Gloucestershire, collected by Roberts and Roberts [11]. Bristol University launched a module, available to any student, in sustainable development [12]. The University of Plymouth is developing generic guidance and examples to assist in the development of subject-related sustainability modules [13]. Other examples of including sustainability in the curriculum were identified as part of a Higher Education Academy review [14] and case studies in the area of computing [15].

4. THE WIKI APPROACH Modern young people, the so-called Generation Y, have grown up using the internet. Most students, and particularly computing students, spend a significant portion of their lives communicating using various internet-based facilities. Increasingly, they use Web 2.0 services, such as social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo) and image, video and music sharing sites (YouTube, flickr). They routinely use chat and message board services and some use blogs. They view such communication tools as natural and routine. Therefore, to support the development of material for this assignment, students’ collaborative work was assisted by requiring them to create a wiki site. A wiki is a website which can be created and edited collaboratively online, using a reasonably simple markup language. As described below, students were asked to complete an assignment, developing their work using a free, public wiki ‘farm’: a server on which students could create their own private group wiki. A wiki was used because, unlike a traditional web site, work can be done collaboratively but also remotely and asynchronously: students can contribute at their own convenience from their home PCs. Additionally it was believed that, whilst all students have used the online encyclopaedia wikipedia as a source of reference, few students had ever used wiki software to create their own web site and it was believed that they would welcome exposure to this new communication tool. There has been some adoption of wikis in Higher Education, since their invention in 1994 [16]. Many authors (for instance Augar et al, [16]; Parker and Chao, [17]; and Molyneaux, [18]) comment that wikis have only recently started to be adopted in teaching. Parker and Chao provides a literature review of the uses of wikis as a teaching tool [17]. Predominantly, wikis have been adopted for writing assignments, group projects, collective research and distance learning support [17, 18, 19]. Some authors also note that wikis have been used for project planning, documentation and collaboration [17, 18] or critiques of other students’ work [19]. Wikis also seem to be useful in supporting writing activities in that the mechanism of creation encourages authors to reflect and review their work [17, 19, 20]. It is clear that one of the advantages of using a wiki is that they can be used to develop and share knowledge collaboratively: for communal constructivism [19, 21, 22]. It is that facility for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), provided in a very flexible way [20] which encourages peer interaction and information sharing [16] and which fosters a learning community or community of practice [17, 23]. Wikis vary in how they operate and the facilities which they provide. Typically, contributions are anonymous [19] and permit open editing [16]. For this assignment however a wiki was selected which provided private space for each group’s work; posts were identified and there were change tracking facilities. It was considered to be important that each individual’s work could be identified if necessary. It was felt to be particularly important that groups could not see each other’s work so that they created their submissions independently.

5. THE ASSESSMENT All second year computing students undertake a module entitled ‘Professional Skills and Group Project’. The module seeks to develop students’ groupwork and communication skills through an extended group project. Appropriate project management techniques are formally taught. Additionally this module is responsible for ITALICS Volume 8 Issue 1 February 2009 ISSN: 1473-7507 47

the development of an awareness of legal, ethical, professional and, more recently, sustainability issues. In 2007/8 there were 84 students enrolled on the module. In order to encourage engagement it was decided to set a small assessment in the area of sustainability: in previous years this material had not been explicitly assessed. It was anticipated that by setting an appropriate coursework, students, largely through their own research, would discover and appreciate the relevance of sustainability to IT employment. The assignment was completed in small groups. Students were free to form their own groups: there were 18 submissions.

Figure 1: Sample submission [24]

The assessment used a scenario which gave an outline of a fictitious, small IT company which was seeking to adopt more sustainable practices. The assessment asked students to derive ‘Top Ten Tips’ which spanned the range of aspects of sustainability. Those ideas needed to be supported and justified by providing links to relevant information sources. Since it is not appropriate to expect computing students to be able to assess the validity of specific detailed technical information in this arena, the assessment criteria adopted embraced the derivation of relevant ‘tips’, the identification of supporting information sources and an assessment of the authoritativeness of those sources. Whilst this assessment firmly contextualised the investigation of sustainability in the world of IT employment, it was considered to be unlikely that this alone would be sufficient to motivate the more resistant students. The assessment was therefore structured around creating a wiki. There were significant technical difficulties with using the particular wiki farm selected. These understandably caused some consternation. Difficulties included intermittent access and login problems and problems with uploading some file formats. The particular software selected was simply not robust-enough for this application. All student groups nonetheless managed to create their wiki. An example of the index and a tip page from one submission is in Figure 1. All student groups successfully identified ten ‘tips’, across the range of aspects of sustainability. Almost all tips were relevant to the case study and would enhance the organisation’s sustainability. Almost all tips were supported by some form of resources, although these did vary widely as to their value and authoritativeness. ITALICS Volume 8 Issue 1 February 2009 ISSN: 1473-7507 48

The relevant learning outcome is that students develop an awareness of sustainability issues, that they understand its scope and can see its relevance to, and application in, the workplace. By identifying sustainability opportunities in a professional context, as provided through a case study, students gained this awareness.

6. THE STUDENT VIEW During the period of the assessment there were no student comments at all, positive or negative, about the relevance of the sustainability content. Students were asked, as an addition to the routine module evaluation, what effects there were on this assessment as a result of using a wiki. Many comments, understandably, related to the technical difficulties. However many students generally welcomed the wiki approach: “It was kind of fun” “It made the task more interesting” “The core idea behind using a wiki was a good one” Many students particularly welcomed learning how to create a wiki: “[It taught] us an alternative way of presenting data that is becoming more and more popular on the internet” “It allowed me to use a [wiki] which I have not used before, so it was an interesting assessment” “Was useful to learn about wikis, as I now know they are useful tools for group work and I have [subsequently] used one for other university group projects. ... So this was a useful experience.” “Good idea for us to learn about wikis and experience creating one. Good to understand how they work.” Many students valued the software as a collaborative asynchronous communication medium: “Made effective group work” “It was easier to work as a group” “We were able to use the time we had effectively” “Having a wiki was useful as it allowed the group to work together, even when not physically in the same place” Of course the prime purpose of the assessment was to develop students’ sustainability literacy skills: the development of wiki skills being incidental. Students reported positively on that too: “We actually learnt about the points we had to discuss and it was good” “It gave us more in-depth knowledge on what sustainability [is] about” “Learnt more about the concepts that link the environment and computing world.” “Allowed me to know more about the ways to keep a company sustainable” There was very little negative reaction to the sustainability content: indeed there was only a single negative response, from a student who was still not convinced: “A bit pointless as I will have a computing degree and not one to save the environment”.

7. EVALUATION The submission of work in some electronic format was quite important since it needed to include links to supporting websites. However, other web technologies could, maybe, have been utilised instead of a wiki. Students could have been required to present their findings as a standard website but, for many students, this is now routine and mundane: this is certainly so for computing students. A blog, discussion forum or webbased word processor (such as GoogleDocs) could have been used but these also are regularly used by many students and are very easy to learn to use. Most significantly though, none of these technologies provide the helpful combination of group, asynchronous edit access, as offered by a wiki, and blogs and forums do not generate a final complete artefact. It is likely that these students would have been equally motivated by the requirement to create a podcast or RSS feed. Very few students would have developed applications using either of these technologies and would probably have been interested in learning about ITALICS Volume 8 Issue 1 February 2009 ISSN: 1473-7507 49

them. However, neither of these technologies offers the combination of characteristics which made a wiki such a useful tool here. Of those students who chose to comment on the use of a wiki, other than the comments about technical problems, all commented positively about it as either a collaboration tool or as a useful new skill. Almost all students valued the adoption of this approach. It could be considered that the development of wiki skills are valuable, per se. Some authors consider wiki creation to be an aspect of students’ digital literacy [21] and useful for transfer into business [17]. For these computing students such skills are easily learnt. However, this exposure has enhanced the students’ skill set in a way which they valued: “useful to learn”. This mirrors the findings of Raitman et al, at Deakin University, that computing students welcome using novel communication technologies [25]. The students’ comments support the view that wikis usefully support cooperation and collaboration: “effective group work”. Some students recognised the depth of the learning achieved: “we actually learnt about the points”. Their comments identify the usefulness of the communication being asynchronous: “able to use our time effectively”, a benefit identified by Duffy and Bruns: “considering students’ busy schedules, a wiki can be very useful for ... streamlining group projects” [21]. Since the module is substantially about the development of communication and groupwork skills, wiki software will be utilised in future years. Self-evidently, the wiki software used in 2007/8 cannot be recommended. A similar assignment was used the following academic year and the software used that year, pbWiki, proved to be entirely reliable. Whilst sustainability content had been delivered in previous years there had never been any attempt to assess students’ learning. Despite content delivery being contextualised within the world of IT, the lack of assessment probably reinforced any immediate student reaction about it seeming unimportant or irrelevant. By setting an assessment on this topic students were encouraged to explore, for themselves, its relevance to IT employment. Students recognised this connection: “know more ... to keep a company sustainable”. The quality of the work submitted supports that judgement. All student groups successfully derived a diverse set of sustainability tips, most of which were supported by relevant information sources. Students had clearly engaged with a range of relevant issues and resources, thus raising their level of ‘literacy’ about sustainability.

8. CONCLUSIONS In previous years a number of students seemed to not engage with the sustainability material as presented. Based on the experience of this delivery it seems that by getting students to actively consider material for themselves they can see its relevance to their situation in a way that is very difficult to achieve with a more passive form of learning. Whilst this was anticipated the degree of the improvement in their level of acceptance was pleasantly surprising. The particular wiki software selected caused frustration but, despite that, many students could see the usefulness of the approach for collaborative work. Whilst there is little academic benefit from this aspect of the work, learning how to create a wiki did expand the range of communication tools available to these students, which some have since chosen to use again. Students valued the opportunity to learn to use a technology which they can see is starting to be used quite widely: it was new and interesting to them. This experience clearly highlights that the use of novel technologies is, of itself, motivating for computing students. Acknowledgement Many thanks to the group of computing students who agreed that their work could be used as an example here: Kevin New, Yang Zhao, Steve McDevitt, Kieran Cooper and June Chang. Note This paper is substantially the same as: Payne L. Supporting Sustainability With Wikis. ELATE08 Learning and Teaching Conference ‘Enhancing our learning and teaching environment’. Held 24 June 2008 at Coventry University, England.

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