The Digital Sustainability Group overview of the talk
We provide a brief overview of each talk. Obviously the talk itself is much richer and ours is only one take!
The Digital Sustainability Group had the first of our talks in June with Nick Baker (University of Windsor, Ontario). Nick is Director of the Open Learning Centre at the UoW, and has been thinking about and working towards ethical, equitable, accessible and sustainable Ed tech procurement for some time. His talk focuses mainly on considerations of procurement in Canadian HE institutions though his points will no doubt resonate across HE contexts.
Nick provides a comprehensive overview of those considerations. He outlines work that is being done, while setting out the risks in doing too little. He explores various approaches to ethical, equitable and sustainable procurement, suggesting questions that can inform the conversations institutions have with edtech companies. He talks about the need for guidance to facilitate the procurement process. To this end, Nick and colleagues across 8 institutions in Ontario are developing openly licenced resources and guidelines. They will be published later this year. You can still participate in the research process informing the publication by following the QR code on slide 2 in the presentation and via the video recording.
Nick covers themes that will no doubt resonate with different people. I was struck by his point about the need to, and ways of decolonising the Ed Tech curriculum, notably in ensuring diverse voices in design, development and procurement teams. I was also interested in his analysis of ed tech surveillance technologies which, he argues, set up cultures of antagonism and mistrust and pedagogies of control.
Nick’s discussion of the environmental harms caused by digital technologies will be of interest to anyone concerned with the environmental impact of ed tech. Nick argues that Edtech is often viewed as somehow floating beyond the material world, rather than embedded in it in environmentally destructive ways. As Nick says, it’s important that these harms are better understood and addressed in institutions, something that the Digital Sustainability Group is keen to do.
