ICT and sustainability - an introductory module

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KTH Sustainability Council (KTH-S) announced that they will fund a number of smaller projects during the next academic year (2015-2016) under the banner of "Environment and sustainability without boundaries". I very much like that KTH at different times and on different levels supports smaller, more action-oriented projects in this way (smaller shorter applications focused on carrying out smaller more practical projects). I wrote a blog post half a year ago where I in greater detail explained exactly why I like these calls for smaller projects. In that blog post I also mentioned that my colleague Elina Eriksson had handed in an application to last year's call for sustainability-related projects (her application was successful).

This time around I handed in an application of my own, "ICT and sustainability – a summarising module". A requirement is that the application points at some kind of cooperation beyond my own department/school, so this application is joint application between my department (me, Elina Eriksson) and two teachers at the school of Architecture and the Build Environment (Anna Kramers, Anna Björklund). What we have in common is that we are responsible for teaching three different courses about "ICT and sustainability" on three different ICT-related educational programmes.

The basic idea of the application is to cooperate in the creation of a smaller 1.5 credit module about ICT and sustainability that could be adapted to slot in to different courses on different levels in different educational programs in different schools at KTH. The module would constitute an intensive one-week (40 hours) primer on ICT and sustainability to be taught to students who do not study an ICT-related programme.

Despite the ambition to develop a generic module that can later be adapted to specific contexts, we also want to have a "procurer" involved in the process. This would be someone who can place some demands on the module (to fit a specific context) and who would hopefully also have us actually teach the module when it is finished. We have already initiated discussions with two different schools about this and the proposed implementation that we sketch out in our application looks like this:

Spring 2015:
- Recruit at least one procurer (who would be a person responsible for a course or an educational programme).

Early autumn 2015:
- Interview the procurers and discuss proposed adaptations.
- Draw on and discuss experiences from having given three different courses on ICT and sustainability.
- Brainstorm ideas and choose ideas that are useful for initial planning of the module.

Autumn 2015:
- Develop the module

Calendar year 2016:
- Give the module at least once but preferably twice in two different schools at KTH.

I think we put together a strong, realistic application and I think we have good chances to get it funded. Since these are small, lithe projects, the procedure for reviewing the applications is also lithe and we will get to know if our project is funded already in the beginning of next month.
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