Looking ahead to what this unit might serve me for the rest of the course, and beyond it has initiated two points I wish to briefly cover here as potential thoughts for my Action Research Project. It has sparked interest in the situated spaces of academia, teaching, learning, and the higher education institute — the two points are below.
Firstly, the ecological impact of teaching, both in a human sense and in a nonhuman sense. I am particularly interested in the energy use of digital services, the interconnectedness of technologies, and what impact that is having on the nonhuman living world, and in turn will have an indirect effect on our human constructed built environment. Data centres and the storage of ‘cloud’ files is very physical and requires a lot of infrastructure. How does ecological impact resonate with the universities milieu? What happens if the amount of energy used in digital services to communicate, enable, and teach was actually limited? What is the environmental impact of submitting my PgCert Unit 01 through digital cloud storage services? The following statement struck me when I considered the volume of messages sent and received between staff, Moodle, and UAL comms alone, especially about the situation of teaching in a digital-led university: according to The Good Planet (most of the carbon usage facts are actually from Mike Berners-Lee (2010)), if everyone around the world deleted just 10 emails (spam or not spam), that would save 1,725,000 gigabytes of storage space, which is around 55.2 million kilowatts of power.
Secondly, me reflecting on the sometimes mundane elements of teaching and the institutional situation has reflected that I’d like to challenge that, through playful means. There are a few research papers I have read already and one statement has stuck with me as a rationale of the need for playfulness in higher education (both for students and teachers alike):
“The dissatisfaction with performance indicators, micro-management, accountability and efficiency that helped spark the emergence of playful academia, is now growing, and, in effect, helping playfulness as a form of antidote or spread of resistance” Nørgård & Moseley (2021). Looking forwards I hope the explore what the practical uses of play in academia and/or teaching could mean. But most importantly how to make it not appear lame or not ‘proper’ teaching or learning.
References
Berners-Lee, M. (2010) How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything. London, England: Profile Books.
Brown, N. and Leigh, J. (2018) “Creativity and playfulness in higher education research,” in Theory and Method in Higher Education Research. Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 49–66.
Nørgård, R. T. and Moseley, A. (2021) “The Playful Academic An editorial,” The Journal of Play in Adulthood, 3(1). doi: 10.5920/jpa.954.
Save our Planet by Deleting emails – The Good Planet (no date) Thegoodplanet.org. Available at: https://thegoodplanet.org/2020/06/02/how-you-can-save-our-planet-by-deleting-emails/ (Accessed: March 20, 2024).