Postgraduate Course: Energy & Society II; Methods and Applications (GESC11009)
Course Outline
| School | School of Geosciences |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This is a core course for the MSc in Energy, Society and Sustainability.
The course provides the ontological and epistemological basis for the MSc and introduces different research methods that are useful in the study and development of 'energy literacy', which in itself consists of three domains; cognition, affect, behaviour. Through the analysis of real world case studies, students develop experience in the use of these different methods.
The case studies are focused on individual consumption and everyday life. This course is unique in its effort to combine three important aspects of sustainability education; (1) understanding what drives unsustainable levels of consumption, (2) developing research skills for the participative analysis of (energy related) consumption at individual and household level (3) developing research skills for the participative analysis of environmental exposure through digital technologies.
The course explores three interlinked issues. The methodological focus on digital technologies is transformative in our future abilities to track and understand consumption and how it relates to externalities in our everyday life. Secondly, the course links energy to other material consumption (rather than studying 'only' energy) and thirdly, the course explores how citizens engage with data, how knowledge can be co-produced when citizens and researchers collaborate, and how this may affect behavioural change by the citizens involved.
The fieldtrip serves to link up the class-based, consumption focused learning with supply-side and transport issues faced by grid energy. It explores the scale of behavioural change required to achieve transformative change in our energy system. The fieldwork thus addresses both scalar issues (from individual small consumers to large scale grid actors) and the (often hidden) geographical heterogeneity of the grid.
The course is designed to engage with the rapid evolution of smart meters, mobile sensors, tracking devices, mobile phones and wearable technologies. Given the current state of technologies and their prices, the course will be able to examine (with regards to consumption:) domestic energy use and food purchasing/intake, and (with regards to 3 environmental exposure) indoor and outdoor air quality, temperature and humidity. |
| Course description |
Week 1: Introduction, epistemologies and ontologies of different disciplines.
Week 2: Selection of research methods; fit & purpose.
Week 3: Interpreting qualitative data.
Week 4: Decision support tools and assessment methods in different disciplines & professions.
Week 5: introduction to big data (analytics, management)
Week 6: Serious games for sustainable consumption
Week 8: Dissertation research design
The fieldtrip to the Orkney islands serves to develop a 'whole systems analysis' of energy production and consumption for a defined geographical area, using the various methods students have been trained in during the class-based part of the course. The first part of the fieldtrip will focus on situational analysis, covering the following topics :
History of energy provision 'at the margin'
Resource mapping; wind and marine energy.
Active grid management
Community energy
Fuel poverty in a local context
This will subsequently feed into the development of a sustainable energy vision for the islands, both for the purpose of local sustainability and the potential for learning from this experiment that can be applied in other landscapes.
Field course locations may change for a variety of reasons, including security risks, increased costs or inability to access field locations. Any changes to the main destination of the field course will be announced as soon as possible
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | This course is only available to students studying the MSc in Energy, Society and Sustainability or MSC in Carbon Management. |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 20 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 12,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 8,
Dissertation/Project Supervision Hours 8,
Fieldwork Hours 16,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
152 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Gain a shared epistemological basis for the masters programme, appreciative of the important contributions that different disciplines and methods can provide.
- An understanding of the driving forces of unsustainable consumption and the resulting negative externalities.
- Experience in the use of digital technologies to monitor, assess and critically evaluate levels of personal and household consumption.
- Experience in the use of digital technologies to monitor, assess and critically evaluate environmental exposure during everyday activities.
- Experience with citizen science, self-directed fieldwork and public engagement in relation to 2 & 3.
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Reading List
Banks, M. and Zeitlyn, D., 2015. Visual methods in social research. Sage.
Boyd, D. and Crawford, K., 2012. Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, communication & society, 15(5), pp.662-679.
Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S., 1994. Handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications, Inc.
Kitchin, R., 2013. Big data and human geography Opportunities, challenges and risks. Dialogues in human geography, 3(3), pp.262-267.
Maisonneuve, N., Stevens, M. and Ochab, B., 2010. Participatory noise pollution monitoring using mobile phones. Information Polity, 15(1, 2), pp.51-71.
Manovich, L., 2011. Trending: The promises and the challenges of big social data. Debates in the digital humanities, 2, pp.460-475.
Patton, M.Q., 1990. Qualitative evaluation and research methods . SAGE Publications, inc.
Rode, J.A., Toye, E.F. and Blackwell, A.F., 2004. The fuzzy felt ethnographyżunderstanding the programming patterns of domestic appliances. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8(3-4), pp.161-176.
Sofaer, S., 2002. Qualitative research methods. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 14(4), pp.329-336.
Swan, M., 2013. The quantified self: Fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. Big Data, 1(2), pp.85-99.
Schwartz, T., Betz, M., Ramirez, L. and Stevens, G., 2010, October. Sustainable energy practices at work: understanding the role of workers in energy conservation. In Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries (pp. 452-462). ACM.
Schwartz, T., Denef, S., Stevens, G., Ramirez, L. and Wulf, V., 2013, April. Cultivating energy literacy: results from a longitudinal living lab study of a home energy management system. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1193-1202). ACM.
Van der Horst D., Harrison C., Staddon S. and Wood G. (2016). Improving Energy Literacy through Student-Led Fieldwork - at Home. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 40(1), 67-76.
Wood, G., van der Horst D. et al. (2014). Serious games for energy social science research. Technology Assessment and Strategic Management 26(10), 1212-1227. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Methods,Living labs,Sustainable consumption,co-production of knowledge,Collaborative monitoring |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Dan Van Der Horst
Tel: (0131 6)51 4467
Email: Dan.vanderHorst@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Karolina Galera
Tel: (0131 6)50 2572
Email: k.galera@ed.ac.uk |
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