Climate crisis - why are universities so silent?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

We are in the midst of the greatest environmental collapse since long before human beings emerged onto this planet but the vast majority of governments and obedient citizens have decided that the best strategy is to pretend that there is no threat and continue with business as usual, focusing on short-term profit above future survival. Science denial is now becoming mainstream and the United Nations' reports coming from the world's experts on climate and environmental science are flippantly dismissed as alarmist and governments pay at best lip service with greenwashed statments of fantasy and wishful thinking. Climate activists are ridiculed and often branded as extremists and a "threat to democracy" whilst the governments and corporations that are profiting from actively destroying the world we live in are portrayed as rational and responsible. 

Since the science behind these reports come from the world's universities and research institutes these organisations are worryingly silent in national debates. Instead of fully and vocally standing up for their own researchers and offering a united front against the deluge of disinformation and greenwashing, they seldom if ever make their voices heard. There are some positive signs, such as the EUA's (European Universities Association) A Green deal roadmap for European universities published in October last year..

EUA’s Green Deal roadmap outlines processes and interventions which can boost universities’ impact and visibility in pursuing a climate-neutral, environmentally sustainable, and socially equitable Europe. The roadmap should serve as an inspiration and template for how universities can face the climate and environmental challenge over an extensive timeframe, enabling them to make both an effective contribution and serve as exemplars of sustainable communities.

Certainly almost every university has some kind of environmental/sustainability policy but on the ground there are often only cosmetic changes. Despite the lessons learned during the pandemic about the affordances of digital meetings and conferences we have largely flocked back to on-site conferences and academics, like other professions, are flying far and wide again. This despite all relevant research pointing to the fact that business as usual will have catastrophic societal consequences in the next 20-30 years. If that wasn't bad enough we have the terrifying trend that just when we need global cooperation to solve global crises the world is filled with toxic xenophobic nationalism leading to more conflict and destruction.

These thoughts were given greater perspective last week in an article in Frontiers in Education, “No research on a dead planet”: preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia, by Aaron Thierry, Laura Horn, Pauline von Hellermann and Charlie J. Gardner. Universities' passivity in this issue will threaten their future existence.

Despite thousands of higher education institutions (HEIs) having issued Climate Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to ‘business-as-usual’. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so severe as to threaten the persistence of organized society, and thus HEIs themselves.

Universities are of course simply following the societal indifference to our impending crisis, often with a warped pride in being as climate unfriendly as possible, refusing to even contemplate flying and driving less often, eating less meat, consuming less and living more sustainably. Our governments confirm these prejudices as here in Sweden where we are being encouraged to fly and drive more with increasing subsidies to fossil industries. Climate change and environmental protection are guaranteed conversation killers - I have tried! But universities should at least support their own scientists and offer a research-based response to the disinformation.

This dissonance extends to the individual behavior of many academics. For example, the normalization of aviation-based hyper-mobility in academic work (Bjørkdahl and Franco Duharte, 2022). It is even the case that professors in climate science fly more than other researchers, despite the tremendous carbon emissions associated with such activities (Whitmarsh et al., 2020). On a day-to-day basis, most academic staff seem to be maintaining the semblance of normalcy and unconcern. So great is our apparent collective indifference that an onlooker could be forgiven for thinking that we do not believe our own institutions’ official warnings that an emergency is unfolding around us.

It's time to speak out, but not as individuals (vulnerable to the hate and threats that speaking out provokes) but rather as institutions or even alliances of institutions. Universities still carry a lot of weight in society even if it is being eroded by authoritarian politicians. If they do not speak loudly and clearly in support of their own science then they risk becoming irrelevant. It is that serious. I will give the last word here to the authors of the article.

For too long we have allowed a culture of climate silence to dominate in our universities, leading to a misalignment of our priorities from our core purpose and values, thereby perpetuating a maladaptive response to the unfolding planetary emergency and undermining the very future of the higher education sector. Universities have in effect become ‘fraud bubbles’ (Weintrobe, 2021) in which staff and students must construct a ‘double reality’, in order to pursue a narrow social role, trapped in maladaptive incentive structures of increasingly neoliberal institutions. This ultimately serves to reproduce the hegemonic practices, norms and conventions driving socio-ecological collapse. As an academic community we must urgently learn to grapple with the role that universities can play as leaders in the necessary social transformation to come. Our dearest notions of progress, rooted in our desire for the beneficial accumulation and application of knowledge (Collini, 2012), are now both directly and indirectly threatened by the climate crisis.

Maybe I have missed good examples of university action. Please send examples in that case. Happy for all signs of resistance!

Why tech - the dangers of digital over-dependency

"Map Reading" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Erik Schepers

In our rush to adopt all things digital we seldom pause to consider what we are discarding from our lives. Handwriting, navigating by map, calculating in your head, remembering facts, deep reading, dealing with silence and so on. Obsolete skills you may think but extremely useful if the digital alternative breaks down. For example, here in Sweden we have virtually achieved a cashless society and although cash still exists it is becoming extremely difficult to spend it. Public transport is almost completely cashless, many shops and restaurants refuse cash and even the banks don't want to touch the stuff. Many old and vulnerable people (asylum seekers and homeless people without bank accounts) are therefore completely marginalised, but that seems to be regarded as collateral damage in the rush towards a digital future. As a result, every step your take and every move you make are being stored and exploited. At the same time we are building an extremely dangerous vulnerability into our society. If there's a power or network connectivity failure, nothing works. You can't buy anything and there's no back-up.

I have been thinking about this for a long time and have consciously reverted to some old-school habits in an attempt to keep myself in touch with both worlds, trying to become functionally ambidextrous; able to handle both the digital and the analogue. This week I stumbled across a short interview with Kris De Decker, founder of Low-tech Magazine, ”Reconsider the thinking that everything should become digital”. He's a former tech journalist who has discovered the joys of low-tech. The magazine's slogan is "doubts on progress and technology" and questions the belief that technology can solve all our problems. It contains low-tech solutions to everyday problems and the website itself runs on a solar-powered server showing that you can be low-tech and still benefit from some aspects of the digital world. It also questions many technologies that we consider green such as electric cars, wind turbines and solar cells; they all rely on batteries and manufacturing processes that have a considerable footprint. But it's not about retreating into a cave and living off-grid, but reassessing our over-reliance on a technology that is becoming frighteningly vulnerable.

In the interview, De Decker explains why we shouldn't discard our old skills.

We also lose a lot of skills. As someone who doesn’t have a smartphone, I have noticed that I have become one of the few people who still knows how to navigate a city without staring at a screen. This makes us also very vulnerable. If our complex infrastructures falter, we are helpless. Just think about the infrastructure we need to do digital payments. Cash, on the other hand, is very resilient.

Maybe we should all challenge ourselves now and again to go retro for a while. Try visiting a city and see how well you can survive without TripAdvisor, Google Maps, Uber etc. See the sights with a map and find restaurants by asking people. It works, but just in a different way. If we lose that ability we lose our resilience.

Then there's the issue of the environmental impact of technology. I have been working enthusiastically with webinars and digital conferences as an answer to the need to reduce the carbon footprint of frequent flying but we also need to realise that technology has en enormous impact too. All our devices and gigantic server halls that store our data are extremely damaging to the environment, not to mention the ever-growing mountain of electronic waste that is all too seldom recycled.

But of course digital technology is just as physical as any other technology. There is an enormous infrastructure behind the internet. The production of computer chips requires complex factories and lots of energy and other resources.

I'm not going low-tech (yet) but I am attracted to the idea that we embrace digitalisation with more caution than before and dare to maintain contact with the skills that digitalisation is trying to make obsolete. We need to be able to work on both sides of the digital divide and develop a functional resilience. You never know when you may need to work out something for yourself again.

Deconferencing or unconferencing?

"Audience" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by NordForsk

Educational conferences are big business and whatever field you work in you'll find a conference somewhere every week of the year. Take a look, for example, at Contact North's excellent overview of conferences in educational technology for the year ahead - a breathtaking 1700 of them! All of them involving a hefty carbon footprint in terms of air travel. As I've written before, we can't go on meeting like this.

Now there's a growing interest in deconferencing; reducing the number of conferences you attend, ultimately to zero. This is not just about reducing our climate anxiety, there is also the question of what you actually gain from attending conferences. Are the benefits to you and your organisation worth the time and effort or do you go simply because you are expected to or simply due to habit? After a while you realise that you have heard most things before and the number of eureka moments per conference is alarmingly low. Over the last year I have been trying to only attend conferences that can be reached by train. One advantage of this is that you have to think carefully before signing up for a conference. Is it really worth those lengthy train journeys and a lot of leisure time sitting on trains and waiting at stations? I'm also aware that train journeys are not always environmentally friendly, especially if the trains are hauled by diesel locomotives. But it's not just about cutting the air miles, it's about rethinking the meaning of conferences and trying to finding new arenas to meet.

I can recommend an excellent post on the topic by Alan Levine (aka CogDog), On deconferencing. He has withdrawn from the conference circuit and explains the reasons and it's not just about carbon footprints. It's also about the exclusivity of big conferences. Many of us who get paid to attend conferences tend to take it all for granted and seldom stop to think how privileged we are. We are part of an exclusive club and we tend to forget that there are millions of academics who cannot afford to attend or face visa restrictions and other barriers even if they can afford the fees. He admits that he was one of the club:

It was for work. It was just part of the job. Even later, when going independent, others still paid my fares in exchange for presenting/workshopping. I earned it, right? And it felt, yes, a bit glamorous. And I was there to to tweet out all the foibles of travel woes, missed planes, rude TSA agents, bland food.
Never thinking about how that looked to someone who did not get such opportunities.
As a road warrior, I was so… justified.

However his main reason for unconferencing is the search for deeper discussion and the limitations of the traditional conference format:

Even now, I picture these large conference halls where most folks are there tweeting slides. 

We need to rethink our conferences or better still devise new arenas for meaningful, accessible and inclusive discussion with less dependence on airlines and expensive hotels.

Conference on… but I am deconferencing. I am looking for better ways to share knowledge, ideas that can include more people and less travel, but just plain… better.

Experiments with digital conferences are promising but we shouldn't focus only on the digital arena. The concept of the unconference has been around for many years and is a physical gathering, generally small-scale, where groups get together and discuss issues of common interest without any keynotes or slideshows. These could also be arranged online. Many conferences fail to harvest the vast amount of knowledge and experience among the participants and the unconference is all about that. Maybe the future is more about more focused small-scale discussion groups, mixing synchronous and asynchronous as well as on-site and online collaboration.

I don't mean we scrap major conferences completely but we will certainly need to reduce their number and find other ways to meet. A major driver of academic conferences is their importance to researchers and demands for accepted conference papers as professional recognition. Maybe we can find new ways of recognising researchers in a more inclusive and interactive arena.

Innovating pedagogy 2020 - time for sustainable education?

CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by The Open University

The UK's Open University, in collaboration with the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL), Dublin City University, Ireland, has published its annual review of innovations in teaching and learning in higher education, Innovating pedagogy 2020. This the eighth report in a row and has common features with the much hyped NMC Horizon reports, such as predictions about the potential impact and timescales of each innovative practice described. These criteria are notoriously inaccurate (especially in the Horizon reports) and should not be taken too seriously but the descriptions, conclusions and references are interesting as indications on the present wind directions in the use of technology in higher education.

The ten areas examined by the report are:

• Artificial intelligence in education. This means learning for, about and with AI. It is also vital that educators are involved in the implementation of AI and make sure it is used to benefit teaching and learning.
  ... what is clear is that the topic of AI in education is too important to be left to engineers and entrepreneurs. Instead, it is critical that educators, learning scientists and other stakeholders engage, to ensure that the AI applied in educational contexts best supports the learners, the teachers and the learning.
• Posthumanist perspectives. This concerns the blurring of boundaries between humans and machines and the potential of this interaction for the benefit of education.
• Learning through open data. Public organisations all over the world produce enormous amounts of open data that should be used in universities to enable students to use authentic data for research purposes.
• Engaging with ethics. The (un)ethical use of personal data has been in the headlines for the last couple of years with the rise of what is often termed as surveillance capitalism. It is vital that students learn to learn how their data is used and misused and to gain a mature and informed attitude to the platforms and tools they use.
  Teachers and other education practitioners can actively engage their students with ethics by presenting authentic case-studies and giving opportunities for active discussion, ideally with people from different cultural settings and backgrounds. Only by engaging with ethics can we learn that our own mindset might not necessarily be shared by others.
• Social justice pedagogy. Developing the ability to see issues from different perspectives, especially in terms of power structures, prejudice, roles, accessibility issues etc.
  For individuals, the process of thinking about how they came to know what they know, and what they think about what they know, can be very challenging. Specific teacher education may be required, to encourage and prepare teachers to adopt a social justice pedagogy and to deal with how the approach may play out in class.
• Esports. The world of online gaming shows the power of learning and problem-solving in a community. These lessons are now being applied to create immersive learning communities.
• Learning from animations. Animations are being increasingly used to show processes, procedures and movement.
• Multisensory learning. Smell,taste and touch can be used more in learning activities.
• Offline networked learning. Millions of people have limited or no internet access but can still benefit from digital resources in local networks run on battery or solar powered servers.
• Online laboratories. Access to realistic virtual online labs give authentic laboratory experience to students who would otherwise never have access to such physical facilities.

The report is in general positive about the future as long as we can learn to harness the dangers of big data and artificial intelligence. Our attitudes to technology have changed and we need to be much more critical and cautious of the global tech giants.

The theme that interests me most is that of offline networked learning. Using battery powered mini servers and a wireless network, students in remote areas can work together with digital resources in a closed offline network (see also my post, Online learning - unplugged). This solution is also being used for education in prisons where internet access is not appropriate. However it is not only a solution for remote regions, there are arguments for closed networks even in developed regions. The report mentions the concept of  slow learning:

Networked offline learning brings people together in meaningful collaboration and sharing activities that can create opportunities for a slower, more deliberate learning experience than is typical on the Internet. 

Maybe we need to experiment with working in such distraction-free digital spaces to relearn how to focus. I don't mean that we go completely offline but a future skill will be learning to go offline in order to focus without losing the advantages of digital collaboration.

However, the biggest issue of all today is how education intends to face the greatest challenge of all today - the climate crisis. This is mentioned only briefly in the report but none of the innovations discussed will be of any relevance if the climate issue is not addressed immediately. Unless radical and uncomfortable changes take place on a global scale in the next ten years the future looks extremely dark. The educational sector must push harder for these changes, through further research but more importantly by integrating the message of United Nations sustainable development goals 2030 in every course and classroom. As I have previously written, we must develop sustainable ways to meet and collaborate, primarily through digital meetings and conferences. The carbon footprint of the higher education sector is extremely high through countless international projects and conferences (read more in this article in University World News, Time to cut international education’s carbon footprint). We cannot stop this completely but we could surely half the level if we develop better digital arenas for collaboration and learn how to use them effectively. As with all other aspects of the climate crisis, we know the dangers and we have solutions but entrenched attitudes and habits are the hardest things to change. My top trend for 2020 would be rethinking academic culture and focusing on sustainable education.

Reference
Kukulska-Hulme, A., Beirne, E., Conole, G., Costello, E., Coughlan, T., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Gaved, M., Herodotou, C., Holmes, W., Mac Lochlainn, C., Nic Giolla Mhichíl, M., Rienties, B., Sargent, J., Scanlon, E., Sharples, M. and Whitelock, D. (2020). Innovating Pedagogy 2020: Open University Innovation Report 8. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

How dare you! What future do we offer our children?

This short speech by Greta Thunberg at the United Nations climate summit this week has shaken me. I've been increasingly depressed by how the world's leaders and decision makers continue to pay no more than lip service (at best) to the urgent demands from scientists and experts for concrete action to prevent the disastrous effects of massive climate change. But this short speech spells out the message better than any scientific report. We're in danger of triggering a disastrous and irreversible process and those who can actually do something about the situation continue with a message of business as usual, in some cases denying that the problem even exists. At the same time, the scientific facts were made even clearer as the IPCC published its Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, outlining the potentially disastrous effects of global warming to the marine environment with severe flooding, collapse of fishing and increase in severe weather phenomena. The message couldn't be clearer.

Greta points the finger not only at world leaders but also at all of us. We have all contributed to the mess and it's our responsibility to do everything we can to avert disaster. We talk so often about our children's future but now when the children are begging us to offer them a future the world seems suddenly paralysed. The solutions are there, the science and technology are available but the will to change is absent. Yes, there are millions protesting and many are trying to adjust our lifestyles, but the majority are simply continuing as normal, assuming that it will somehow work out well in the end. In all disaster movies, no-one listens to the lone scientist who warns of the impending danger. The mayor insists that the show must go on and scoffs at the idea of a giant shark/mutant piranhas/monsters/aliens coming to spoil the festivities. Sounds familiar today doesn't it? In the movies the lone scientist manages to save the day at the last minute, but I'm not sure this is a realistic scenario.

I have made some changes to my lifestyle in the last couple of years but admit that they are mostly cosmetic. Like most people, I'm still leading a comfortable lifestyle and following ingrained habits. I have often questioned whether not flying or eating less meat will make the slightest difference to the situation. The airports and planes are still packed, new massive shopping malls are opened every day, the annual consumer feeding frenzy of Christmas is already under way and the world's forests are disappearing rapidly. We seem to be consuming ourselves to extinction.

The role of education is absolutely vital to make people aware of climate issues and many educators are already making valuable contributions. But this is a global issue and needs international coordination. A major obstacle is the countries who actively discourage discussion of environmental issues even in schools or suppress any movement that may question or threaten the government's control. Even in the richest nations science and education are under threat since the solutions to the climate crisis threaten the profits and even existence of massive multinational corporations. The backlash we are seeing just now is savage and therefore it is essential that everyone in the education field is conspicuous and active in the public debate (where such action is allowed). Educators and scientists must react publicly to provide facts to debunk the conspiracy theorists and deniers. But we can't do this alone, we need political support. The saddest part of all this is that I see very few political leaders who are willing to step forward seriously and this is the core of Greta's message. She has power to influence but we need bold politicians who can do the real work. I can't see anyone willing to take the lead at the moment.

Trans Europe express - flightless conference travel

Hamburg Hbf, one of many stops on my travels

Having been responsible for a considerably large carbon footprint due to frequent flights to conferences and project meetings I decided this year to try and cut unnecessary flights from my work schedule. I have travelled by train to two activities in Norway and last week I tried a more ambitious project. I attended both the EDEN 2019 (European Distance and E-learning Network) conference in Bruges, Belgium and a project event and meeting in The Hague, Netherlands and did it all by train. I felt doubly motivated for this since I and a colleague planned to run a workshop at the conference on the challenge of organising engaging, interactive online conferences to minimise the need for air travel. I simply couldn't fly to the conference to run a workshop on that theme! Sadly the workshop did not attract much interest this time but we will try again elsewhere later in the year. You can read the abstract for our workshop in the EDEN 2019 Book of abstracts (p 72).

Changing train in Amersfoort, Netherlands

Some reflections then on my feelings after my first Interrail journey for almost 40 years. The whole journey consisted of 15 trains, two ferries and two rail replacement buses and took a total of three days and two extra overnight stays. Only one train was seriously late and although I missed my planned connection there was a later train I could take. I had planned to get some work done on the journey but to my surprise almost none of the trains had any wifi to offer and several did not even have electricity sockets so once the rather weak battery of my iPhone ran out of juice that was the end of the little connectivity I had. Many hours of just sitting on trains takes its toll and I was very tired after a long day on rails. Changing trains was always quite exciting working out which platform to get to and carrying my bags from one platform to another. I did however make short excursions outside many stations dragging my case on a bit of fast sightseeing, something you certainly can't do at airports. I read a lot, gazed at some beautiful German, Belgian and Dutch countryside and made brief contact with many cities I knew about but had never visited. It was a generally pleasant experience and gave me a sense of distance that you lose completely when flying. It just takes so much time.

My Interrail pass - valid all over Europe

There is no doubt that the explosive increase in international air travel over the last 20 years has had a major effect on global CO2 levels and that we need to reduce this as quickly as possible. Of course this is only one of many factors that are contributing to our environmental crisis but it's one that we can directly change if we only put our minds to it. However, if even a fraction of today's air travellers changed to rail transport then today's railways simply could not cope with the increased demand. Long-distance trains are already full and in most countries there are major capacity issues that need to be fixed immediately. It will take billions of euros to upgrade Europe's railways to meet the massive demand of the future and this investment must happen now, not in ten years or later.

At the same time we need to continue meeting each other to find global solutions to global problems. The need for effective digital meeting spaces is therefore the key to international development and we can certainly replace many physical events with online meetings, as long as we are prepared to test new methods and change our traditional approach. It may not be the same as meeting physically but in today's climate crisis, we simply don't have that alternative, at least not as the default form of meeting.

Creating informal online meetings

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the missing link in online conferences; the opportunity to network and discuss during mingle parties, coffee breaks and sightseeing tours. This week my Austrian colleague, David Röthler, and I arranged an experimental webinar to show a variety of tools and methods for creating such informal meeting spaces. The recorded webinar can be seen above. The idea was to showcase a few of the many platforms and tools for more effective virtual meetings and collaboration and discuss the opportunities they offer for more informal interaction.

We ran most of the session in the web-meeting platform Zoom, including a virtual coffee break where we randomly created groups of 4-5 participants who had all grabbed a cup of tea or coffee before the start of the meeting. This strategy could be used at many online events as an option before, during of after the session to let participants socialise and reflect together. Many new opportunities could arise from such chance meetings.

One of the platforms we highlighted was a virtual office solution called Remo. We were lucky to have the founder of the platform, Ho Yin Cheung, in our group and he invited our participants into Remo to continue discussing in a new environment. As a result our session ended in a slightly messy overlap where some of the group was already discussing in Remo, some were still in Zoom and some were in both spaces. The advantage of Remo (and similar solutions such as Sococo and Walkabout) is that participants can choose to sit in an office, a meeting room, a lobby or even an auditorium depending on what they want to do. When two or more sit in the same room they are able to have a video meeting with screensharing and chat. In this way people can easily change rooms, join different discussions and invite others to join. Or you can simply work alone in a room but indicate that your are available for consultation if needed. Maybe a good way to have a virtual mingle party for an online conference.

Our guided city tour had to be rather brief to fit in with our short time slot but David was able to go out on the roof and show us a fine view of Salzburg castle and the monastery where some scenes of the famous movie, Sound of Music, was filmed. A tour guide can be filmed with a mobile device mounted on a gimbal for stability and show participants around a city, allowing remote participants the chance to ask questions either by audio or in a chat. One of our participants made the exciting suggestion of offering a variety of city tours with conference participants offering to lead a tour around their own city for a small group. The evening programme could then include a number of optional tours around several famous cities. An alternative could be a series of short virtual study visits to different universities (interesting new buildings and facilities), places of natural beauty (virtual bird watching perhaps?) and so on.

The technology is already in place and is developing rapidly and the only thing missing is the willingness of educators to start experimenting with new forms of online meetings. Of course it's not the same as meeting people in a physical space but considering the present climate crisis it may soon be the only option for international collaboration.

Destination Indonesia

I have just returned from an extremely interesting exchange visit to one of my university's partner institutions, State University of Malang (Universitas Negeri Malang), in eastern Java, Indonesia. My job there was to lecture and run workshops for staff and students on digital skills development and online collaboration as well as discussing aspects of technology in education with management, teachers and administrators. I must complement my hosts for excellent hospitality and a very warm welcome. It's always fascinating to discuss with colleagues in different countries and finding that although we have different cultures, history, languages and educational context we have so much in common. Higher education all over the world is in the midst of a digitalisation process that is forcing us all to revise our concepts of teaching and learning. This process is never simple nor straightforward, with frequent barriers and backlashes to overcome. Once we start talking, we recognise each other's difficulties and hopefully can learn from each other.

Malang State University (MU) was founded in 1954 and has today over 33,000 students based on three campuses around the city of Malang. The city itself, with a population of over 3.5 million in the urban area, is known as a city of education and is home to four public universities and 13 private institutions. The main campus is modern, tidy and very green with tree-lined avenues and parks. The most striking feature of campus life is that virtually all students have a motorbike (indeed the whole country is swarming with motorbikes) and all the parking areas are packed with bikes. There is no real distance education so all students live on campus and are all in the age group 18-23 since it is extremely difficult to apply for the state universities once you get older due to government regulations. The private universities accept older students but many of them are rather expensive. So here university is still seen in its traditional role as as something you do when you are young in order to get a good job. Professional development for alumni seems to be rather rare and when offered students are expected to attend campus classes.

The lifelong learning sector is covered by the Indonesian open university, Universitas Terbuka, with about 460,000 students. Like many other open universities around the world it offers a variety of study options with digital and printed course literature, broadcast TV and radio and a network of support centres in major cities around the country, often in association with other universities. I had no contact with any representatives of this university but in the world's fourth most populous nation (population over 260 million) there is surely room for more institutions in the lifelong learning sector.

MU is in the midst of the familiar transition from a fragmented digital learning environment run mostly by enthusiasts to an integrated part of the university's infrastructure.

The learning management system (LMS) is an adapted version of Moodle run by the IT department but still only optional for teachers and as a result the uptake is only partial. Those teachers who do use the LMS need more training to use the more interactive features and the next challenge is to build a structure for offering support and professional development. This in turn requires management commitment and a digitalisation strategy covering all of the university's activites. We discussed many options for development including the introduction of educational technologists to support faculty, digitally skilled teachers acting as mentors for colleagues and ways of rewarding those who use digital tools in their teaching. Recognition of those who promote digitalisation, support colleagues and are innovative in their course design is a crucial driver. These issues are under discussion and it will be interesting to follow developments there in the future.

Another topic of interest was how to use technology to build bridges between the university's three campuses which, although they are all in the same region, are far enough from each other to limit contacts. Video conferencing is of course an interesting option to build bridges and there was interest in developing this in the near future. Transport between locations (up to 80 km) is not so easy with heavy congestion meaning that journeys of even a few kilometres take up to an hour. As a result the three campuses are largely self-contained.

Finally I must add that these are simply my impressions from a one week visit and not an attempt to provide a any overview of Indonesian higher education.

Academic conferences - we can't go on meeting like this

"Video Conference" (Public Domain) by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine

The best part of my job over the last ten years has been the opportunity to visit so many different places and be able to collaborate with colleagues from all over the world. However, in the light of the dire warnings from climate scientists that we need to radically change how we use and abuse the world's limited resources (especially the recent IPCC report), the most obvious way we in education can contribute is to travel less, especially by the forms of transport that cause the highest levels of carbon emissions, namely flying.

The field of education clocks up an enormous amount of air miles per year. It's a multi-million dollar industry. International conferences are important meeting places and offer an arena for all researchers to get recognition and attention for their work. All international projects need physical meetings at the participating institutions to ensure the smooth progress of the work and to disseminate the results through local seminars or conferences. All of this involves a lot of travel for all concerned, nearly always by air. And one trip nearly always generates more contacts and then new invitations to speak at or attend more events or join yet another interesting project. There are thousands of conferences in every conceivable field every week of every year, all battling for attention and registrations.

How can we move to more climate-smart conferences and meetings? The most obvious solution is to arrange more virtual conferences but I'm not sure there is an e-meeting platform that can really create the immersive experience and socialising opportunities of on-site events. There are a few completely online conferences each year but I suspect it's extremely difficult to attract paying delegates since the mindset that online events should be free is so prevalent. The blessing and the curse of online conferences is that you can participate from the comfort of your desk. This is of course convenient and flexible but the curse is that you are also expected to work at the same time. As a result almost noone gets the experience of attending the whole conference, just dropping in now and again as work demands permit. I doubt if many bosses would give permission for you to sit at your desk for two days without doing your normal work. Another important attraction of conferences is that they allow you to switch out of work mode for a couple of days to learn new things and network with others in your field. The advantages of the on-site meeting are many but if the threat of radical climate change is to be met, then we simply can't go on meeting like this. At least not as default.

Virtual conferences, however, could be an opportunity to widen the scope and diversity of academic events. One of the main attractions of academic conferences is to give researchers the chance to present their papers. This is fine if you study at a wealthy university but what about researchers from developing countries? There are plenty of good research projects going on that never come to light because the researchers can't get funding to attend the high profile (and often expensive) conferences in Europe and North America. Tighter visa requirements make it simply impossible for academics from certain countries to travel anywhere. If we take the travel and accommodation out of the equation then we would open up participation to a much more diverse community.

Another opportunity for virtual conferences is offering greater linguistic diversity and giving a voice to everyone who has not mastered spoken English. In an online environment it becomes easier and cheaper to offer simultaneous interpretation of speeches in other languages, either by automatic voice to text translation or by human interpreters who can work from home wherever they may be. I've heard many good research presentations ruined by the speaker's low level of English as they read nervously through a complex manuscript. had we let them present in their native language with an interpreter we would have got a totally different impression of the research and the presenter. In an online environment we can easily add back channels for discussion and questions as well as offering participants the opportunity to discuss in smaller break-out groups.

All this requires a rethink of why we have conferences and new attitudes to how we can exploit online learning spaces. We could cut the number of on-site events if we want to but we need to do some experimentation and dare to innovate. Of course it won't be the same. But it doesn't have to be a poor alternative, it could offer many new opportunities. The main point is we may not have a choice in the near future.