The Impact of embedding Sustainable Development within the Teaching of Computing. Dr Neil Andrew Gordon Department of Computer Science University of Hull Hull n.a.gordon@hull.ac.uk www.hull.ac.uk/php/cssnag ABSTRACT This paper considers the impact on students’ learning of Legal, Social, Ethical and Professional issues and IT topics when set in the context of sustainable and green computing issues. This is considered within the teaching of a single module, where the effectiveness of embedding in this way is assessed through a comparison over 3 cohorts of 150+ students in terms of their overall assessments in contrast with material on sustainable development and green IT. The paper starts by considering the notion of Professionalism and Sustainable Development, before discussing some of the issues in teaching these topics and the possible benefits for engagement. This is followed by a review of the impact with some objective data to demonstrate the impact. Keywords Sustainable Development; Green IT; legal, social, ethical and professional issues 1. INTRODUCTION Within Computer Science, the notion of professionalism is a key feature of many courses, being recognised as crucial given the strong vocational aspect of computing. This is reinforced because it is a requirement for accreditation [1] and is specified within the subject benchmark [6]. However, the teaching of these topics is considered by some – both faculty and students - to be peripheral to, and even in conflict with, the technical content that makes up the essential core of computing education. One way to challenge and address this is through making explicit the relevance of these topics to the future practice of computing professionals [1]. Sustainable Development has been on the teaching agenda for a number of years, and across the entire spectrum of education, from primary through to higher education [8]. The arguments for its inclusion include a number of social and philosophical arguments, but perhaps the more pragmatic argument is the strongest; that as future active citizens the impact of national and international policies inspired by sustainable development will affect the work and lives of computing professionals, and as such graduates in computing should understand the issues and appreciate the complexity and interrelated nature of these. 2. THE ISSUES 2.1 Professionalism in computing The stereotypes of a typical computing student – male, with strong technical skills but somewhat lacking in social skills, technology obsessed, introverted yet focussed – does have some resonance with experience, especially in the UK where the gender imbalance [7] in computing courses is recognised as a weakness and risk to the discipline (see Figure 1 for details for the author’s department). These characteristics – whilst not uniform nor a true characterisation of all computing students – are present to some extent across cohorts, and can be in conflict with the aspects of professionalism that are considered important to practitioners within society. For example, legal aspects – whilst technical – are not directly computing related for those students whose main focus is programming and hardware. Social aspects may be considered by many students as peripheral, when their main interest is to work on their latest assignment or programming project by Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. © 2011 Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences