Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis

Educational technology is rarely discussed in relation to issues of environmental risks. When environmental connotations are considered, this is usually framed in terms of possible environmental benefits of expanded digital technology use in schools, universities and other education settings. For example, we see speculation over the environmental benefits accruing from reduced paper use, videoconferencing, and installing ‘green tech’ such as smart lighting and smart metering in a general push towards ‘carbon neutral’ campuses. Here, it is also reasoned that online teaching might well reduce the carbon footprint of schools and colleges, not least by lowering emissions of students otherwise travelling to classes (Versteijlen et al., 2017) as well as reducing on-campus power consumption (Caird et al., 2015).

Indeed, most forms of emerging technology in education attract occasional claims of environmental benefit. At the beginning of the 2010s, ‘massive open online courses’ were soon being praised for supporting the ‘reconceptualization’ of higher education along the lines of reduced carbon emissions and low environmental impact (Lane et al., 2014). Elsewhere, various other educational technologies have attracted similar praise – ranging from augmented reality (Alahmari et al., 2019) through to the role of blended learning in ‘protect[ing] global environmental resources’ (Caird and Roy, 2019: 107). If educational technology is considered at all in terms of its environmental impact, then this has tended to be in beneficial terms. As Becker and Otto (2019: 8) conclude:

“Digital learning … it saves resources and CO₂ emissions, thus contributing to the protection of the climate and to the goal of responsible consumption and production. … it helps to connect people from different cultures by allowing for intercultural exchange among students without additional travelling … it facilitates a self-regulated learner-centred style of learning that is well-suited to empower learners to become agents of a sustainable development”.

This confidence spills over into imagined future forms of environmentally sustainable forms of teaching and learning. For example, the 2020 edition of the influential ‘New Horizons’ report presented a ‘Collapse’ scenario shaped by ‘climate-related catastrophes’ and associated ‘political destabilization’. Here, higher education systems of the late 2020s were imagined to have been ‘dramatically transformed’ by ‘two primary forces: the dangers posed by climate change and the advances in digital technology’ (Educause, 2020: 36). In this scenario, digitally driven universities are imagined as a vital element in how societies can ‘address the climate-related challenges’. Global networks of universities are formed to ‘focus on online learning as a sustainable educational model’. Online courses allow for ‘time-delimited enrolments’, students paying monthly subscriptions to access learning and earn micro-credentials when needed. While the authors of this scenario acknowledge that ‘extreme global weather events and droughts will impact students’ well-being’, it was suggested that students will have personal AI companions capable of significantly decreasing ‘rates of depression and other markers of mental distress’.

While willing to anticipate political destabilization and climate catastrophes, these scenarios reinforce a dominant framing of extended and intensified use of technology to overcome educational (and societal) challenges. These framings presume a continued status quo of institutionalized and credentialed education, as well as the unfettered functioning of expanded digital infrastructures. Digital technologies continue to be imagined as offering a ready response to any problems that might arise from climate catastrophe – mitigating everything from restricted geographic mobility to impacts on mental health. All told, the bottom line is one of an assured techno-solutionism (Johnston, 2018).

The claims and scenarios just outlined all presume environmental instability as a largely knowable and containable challenge. Yet, what if this is not the case? What if environmental instability cannot be ‘solved’ simply through the expanded application of digital technologies but is actually exacerbated through increased technology use? In contrast to the business-as-usual complacency outlined above, it can be argued strongly that the relationships between educational technology and environmental instability demand more diverse thinking. As such, it makes little sense to anticipate environmental change solely in terms of steady continuation of existing conditions – rather, this is something that needs to be anticipated in more catastrophic and radical terms. As such – and this is the core message of this article – we need to anticipate the ongoing environmental degradation of the planet as radically upending existing assumptions about the continued use of digital technologies in education.

Imagined along these lines, then, it is worth thinking how our current reliance on ‘abundant’ technology use might soon be curtailed by (i) the ongoing depletion of natural resources and (ii) increasingly unsustainable energy demands arising from the production and consumption of digital resources might soon curtail. This suggests reassessing the ‘cornucopian’ logics (Preist et al., 2016) that have underpinned the past 20 years’ thinking about digital education as essentially limitless, infinite and replicable. Such assumptions are implicit, for example, in norms established during the 2010s that digital technologies need to be personally owned and frequently upgraded, expectations for classrooms to be full of screens, and the pressure to achieve ideal ‘one-to-one’ ratios of at least one device per student. An entitled sense of digital abundance also underpins expectations of instantaneous and continuous access, unlimited and eternal ‘cloud’ storage, high-bandwidth connections and high-definition content that is stored in multiple versions and shared repeatedly across different platforms.

All told, we need to reconsider the basic expectation that educational technology now involves significant amounts of technology. Indeed, belying previously outlined assumptions that digital technology is somehow environmentally beneficial (or at the very least environmentally neutral), the continued expansion of digital technology throughout education can in no way be rationalized as somehow off-setting the hugely detrimental nature of the full life cycle of the digital products and processes that go to make up ‘ed-tech’. Instead, the environment costs of technology use in education need to be properly acknowledged and then challenged in a number of specific ways. First is what Miller (2015: n.p) terms the ‘dirty material origins and processes’ of digital hardware. Educational technology relies on digital devices, batteries and attendant infrastructures that are constructed from dozens of different metals – including scare metals and ‘rare earth elements’. For these reasons alone, educational technology clearly needs to pay closer attention to the non-renewable material resources and ‘geophysical reality that make technical media happen’ (Parikka, 2015: 13).

Aside from these material origins, the production of digital artefacts and devices is a similarly environmentally destructive process. For example, it estimated that between 70 and 80% of energy expended during the lifetime of a laptop occurs during its initial manufacture rather than its eventual use (Greenpeace, 2017). As illustrated in Crawford and Joler’s (2018: n.p) forensic insight into the life cycle of the Amazon Echo device, the production of digital hardware ‘requires a vast planetary network’ to facilitate the smelting, processing and mixing of raw materials which are then shipped halfway around the world to be assembled. Each of these stages involves the production (and disposal) of further toxic waste products. As Bhowmik (2019) reasons, we need to better acknowledge the ‘messy primitive’ ways in which digital technologies come into being – replete with chemicals, minerals and metals. There is nothing ‘virtual’ or ‘artificial’ about digital technology.

Further energy expenditure results from the data infrastructures that facilitate the use of these devices. Behind the ephemeral notion of ‘the cloud’ and ‘trace data’ are the material realities of data processing and data storage in the form of energy-greedy climate-controlled data centres and server farms that require substantial amounts of power and water to function (Thylstrup, 2019). It is reckoned that internet usage accounts for around 8% of total energy consumption in the United Kingdom, with two internet searches generating equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle (Shalini and Prasanthi, 2013). Similarly, training a typical machine learning model is estimated to emit the equivalent of around 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide – comparable to the lifetime carbon emissions of five cars (Strubell et al., 2019). All told, digital education is founded on a technology industry that has an ‘explosive’ footprint in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions – a trend that is set to increase in an ‘alarming’ manner over the next few decades (Belkhir and Elmeligi, 2018).

Also to be taken into consideration are the considerable environmental costs of dismantling and disposing devices and other hardware once they have outlived their usefulness. The growing problem of ‘e-waste’ resulting from discarded hardware has been well-noted, with the recycling (and what is often more accurately described as dumping) of devices leading to heightened levels of pollution, contamination and toxic waste in some of the poorest regions of the world (Gabrys, 2011). In stark contrast to rhetoric of ‘greening’ the operation of education through increased technology use, advocates of educational technology need to face the fact that ‘consumer electronics and other digital technologies are made in ways that cause some of the worst environmental disasters of our time’ (Maxwell and Miller, 2020: n.p).

Any notion of ‘within limits’ implies a fundamental reduction of resource usage, coupled with a renewed focus on social equity and sufficiency (O’Neill et al., 2018). In a practical sense, this might prompt us to reimagine patterns of resource procurement and work out ways to break the continual ‘churn’ cycle of regularly ‘upgrading’ hardware and software. For example, the IT industry actors can be pushed into better durability for their products – boosting the quality of manufacturing processes, supply chains and working standards. Products can be designed on a modular and disassemblable basis. At the same time, schools, universities and educational institutions can develop cultures of procuring refurbished and reconditioned hardware, as well as developing in-house capacity to repair and refurbish technology.

This suggests breaking the cycle of ‘planned’ obsolescence of technologies every 2–4 years to an ethos of ‘planned improvement’ and design for efficient longevity (Satyro et al., 2018). Establishing local cultures of ‘right to repair’ and ‘technological care’ can extend the life cycle of technological systems and artefacts and assert local control over what are otherwise configured as globally produced and corporately controlled technologies (Houston and Jackson, 2017). Imbuing ed-tech with a spirit of improvisation, maintenance and reconstruction can also extend to issues of energy and connectivity. This might involve encouraging ‘DIY resilient’ computing infrastructures being established and maintained within educational settings – for example, community-based internet networks, long-range Wi-Fi and other forms of low-tech connectivity. It also makes sense to support cultures of developing and maintaining DIY energy sources – for example, following the establishment of ‘alt-energy’ grids such as community power banks (Bhowmik, 2019).

Such reconfigurations would certainly push us beyond the privileging of individual users and seek to re-establish technology use in education as a shared and communal activity. In contrast to expectations of ‘one-to-one’ or ‘bring-your-own-technologies’, schools and universities might deliberately establish conditions of ‘many people to one device’. This might involve a commons approach to device ownership and management – ensuring that issues such as technology procurement, usage and eventual disposal are governed by processes of collective choice and communal decision-making (Franquesa and Navarro, 2018). This spirit of democratic oversight might also extend to decisions of when technology is used and not used – ensuring that educational technologies are directed towards genuinely essential activities, or instances of clear educational ‘added value’. Conversely, collective decisions can be made where technological abstinence might be a preferred pedagogic strategy (Greenwood and Hougham, 2015). All told, educational technology use does not have to be an ‘always on’ default mode of engaging with education.

Establishing cultures of sustainable and scarcity-aware technology use raises the need to properly deliberate which uses any technologies might be most appropriately put. This implies establishing modes of democratic decision-making regarding which technology uses are considered expendable and which are ‘non-negotiable’ – that is, technology uses that merit continuing to be fundamental elements of contemporary education (Bates et al., 2015). In this sense, very few current forms of technology use in education might be considered unequivocally essential. Instead, plenty of current ed-tech practices might be judged extraneous, excessive or simply of marginal benefit. This raises an ongoing challenge of paring ed-tech back to its essentials – that is, the elements of technology use that genuinely support forms of learning and teaching that otherwise would not be possible or at the very least clearly ‘add value’. As such, these shifts in practice require a fundamental cultural change across education in most industrialized regions. Indeed, the excessive ways that digital technologies are currently being used are part-and-parcel of a current ‘amped-up’ culture of learning that prevails in many education systems (Greenwood and Hougham, 2015: 98). As such, a broader shift in mindset might well involve rediscovering modes of ‘simple learning’ (Håkansson and Sengers, 2014) or what Payne and Wattchow (2009) term ‘slow pedagogy’.

The nature of these decisions depends on the catastrophic nature of the climate futures that we are anticipating. In light of the broader interconnected crises that accompanying environmental instability, it might well be that the most necessary and ‘non-negotiable’ forms of educational technology are those that support the most vulnerable populations for whom ‘conventional’ education has been disrupted (perhaps temporarily) or even completely discontinued. For example, it makes sense to anticipate the increased frequency of climate-related disasters that necessitate emergency forms of educational provision for displaced and unsettled populations which no longer have access to their usual schools, universities and other educational institutions. These logics might increasingly shape education provision in light of climate-related crises throughout the 2020s – from extreme weather-related disasters, climate migration, food shortages, health, economic and political destabilization. As such, a new emergency paradigm of educational technology might need to be imagined that is both wholly sustainable and targeted towards the most deprived populations. Particular attention needs to be paid to concerns raised in the environmental justice literature (Bullard, 2005; Taylor, 2014) – for example, establishing forms of emergency ed-tech that cater for the needs of already marginalized and vulnerable social groups that are most likely to be impacted most by any disruption to basic public services such as education.

Above and beyond any specific actions and practices, the idea of ‘Ed-Tech Within Limits’ implies a fundamental shift in values. In particular, it raises the question of what ‘better’ means in terms of educational technology over the next few decades. Here, then, it seems reasonable to expect that ‘better’ no longer equates with a continuation of exponential developments of previous forms of ed-tech innovation. As suggested in the examples just outlined, this might require the rehabilitation of old ideas (such as a return to DIY resiliency, and memory-constrained ‘lean’ programming), while also remaining open to the ‘utopian imagining’ of other emergent realities. Of course, this all involves making normative decisions about what we value as ‘desirable’, ‘good’ and what is ‘worthy’ (Amsler and Facer, 2017). In this sense, the idea of an Ed-Tech Within Limits inevitably ‘raises questions about what kind of “good society” and good politics, with technology, we want, and urges us to reflect further about how we want to take responsibility for it’ (Coeckelbergh, 2018: 8).

So far, then, this article has advocated implicitly for a conscious move away from seeing educational technology in terms of individual benefits and instead towards collective engagement and responsibilities. As Hes and Du Plessis (2014: 131) put it, this involves rethinking educational technology ‘in terms of systems and relationships’ with ‘humans as coevolutionary partners with nature’. This is not an easy (or natural) shift to make when thinking about digital technology. As Coeckelbergh (2018) reasons, even discussions about technology and ‘social good’ tend to be based around individualist approaches and assumptions. Instead, the idea of ‘Ed-Tech Within Limits’ involves the integration of new values when thinking about educational technology that move beyond aspirations of efficiency as our primary logic and instead seek to integrate sustainable world views into ed-tech narratives and processes. These might include values of inclusivity, collectivity, mutuality, positive reciprocity, humility and non-attachment. These might also include recognition of the integrity of wider systems and balancing processes of recovery and regeneration with more familiar ambitions of transformation and empowerment. All told, this involves the mainstream embracing of values that hitherto have long been marginalized in ed-tech thinking.