Using a Wiki to Support Sustainability Literacy

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.