Beyond sustainability
CONFERENCE CANCELLED.
We are sorry to inform that the host University, BSRU, has decided to cancel the conference due to political reasons and situation in Thailand.
Please contact the conference chairperson (Logan Muller, lmuller@unitec.ac.nz) if you wish to pursue the topics of this conference.
We are exploring many options to cater for the interest from the authors from 15 different nations that were to come and present and discuss and share their ideas.
Thank you for your interest and time and lets keep the interest and work alive on this issue of sustainability, integral to our continued inhabitation of this earth.
I apologise for the cancellation, but all things for a reason.
Keep faith and keep in touch!
Kind regards,
Go gently,
Logan Muller
This conference examines the heart of technology and education about technology. It calls on us as the educated community of this planet to bring examples of heart and purpose to:
- Computing, Information Technology and Information Systems.
- Technology.
- The way we educate and promote technology.
- Technology's underlying reason for being.
- How we are using technologies to improve the society and environment on our tiny home called Earth.
The way technology is used and its impacts are a result of the way it is taught. Its power to create, maintain or destroy is clear, yet how much educating of this heart and soul philosophy do we take responsibility for in our universities, businesses and organisations? This conference calls on those that are taking steps to share, collaborate and learn.
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In an awakening first world we are realising that there has been little at all "developed" about the way we have conducted ourselves on this planet over the last half century. "Progress", "advancement" and our developed world’s economic paradigms have seen a degradation in our environment and social structures never before experienced.
Global GDP has increased 6-fold since the 1950s and in that same time the number of people starving to death has doubled—derailing completely the concept that global economic growth is the answer to a better world.
We see superpowers cutting research and development budgets on alternative carbon-zero fuels and yet approving the largest military budgets ever, principally to protect their access to the worlds largest pollutant, oil, whilst global warming and its fatal impacts on life on this planet continue.
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To technology and education: behind the acceleration of environmental and social degradation has been some of the most advanced technologies ever created, including:
- Computing.
- Microchip technologies.
- Energy.
- Communication
- GE.
- Technologies in the construction and manufacturing sectors.
Our education sector has created a strongly competitive environment within itself to offer the “best” to accelerate these technological advancements with out asking "why?" or "where has this 'technological advancement' got us as a global community?"
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Selected papers will be published in the ACM SIGCAS special edition on Sustainability in early 2009.
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