Everything is Interrelated

Dr Birgit Penzenstadler,
California State University

One of the rewards for having written published papers is that you get cited. Google Scholar sent me an alert to say I get a mention in a paper by Birgit Penzenstadler, and others (2018), with the intriguing title "Everything is interrelated". This describes an intensive week long  course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), Finland.

This report is useful as along with the theory as to why and what was planned, the authors showed what was changed in the light of experience during the week. No plan survives contact with the students (apologies to General von Moltke).

The authors are a little dismissive when referring to my green computing course (Worthington, 2012), saying such modules can be  "... plugged into the existing computing course". But what I suggest they could have done is use such on-line modules before their intensive face-to-face sessions. This way the students can be introduced to the basic concepts without using up valuable classroom time.

In the past there has been a problem in getting students to actually complete preparatory material. But this can be solved by making the material assessable with small automated quizzes and peer assessed discussions.

References

Penzenstadler, B., Betz, S., Venters, C. C., Chitchyan, R., Porras, J., Seyff, N., ... & Becker, C. (2018). Everything is interrelated: Teaching Software Engineering for Sustainability. Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering. URL https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/87821/1/Everything%20is%20interrelated_TSpace.pdf

Worthington, T. (2012, July). A Green computing professional education course online: Designing and delivering a course in ICT sustainability using Internet and eBooks. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2012 7th International Conference on (pp. 263-266). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2012.6295070