Abstract:

The aim of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is to sensitize, motivate and empower learners to raise awareness on, and adapt their behavior towards contributing to sustainable development through the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and values. ESD is intended to provide learners with a holistic perspective by integrating ecological, economic and socio-cultural aspects that are necessary for shaping a more sustainable future. For that, ESD is mainly carried out in informal education by organizations such as protected areas, museums, zoological gardens and non-governmental organizations.

Just as in formal, i.e. traditional, learning settings (e.g. schools), contemporary methods, tools and resources are required to cope with changes in society, including digital transformation. One aspect is the use of Information and Communication Technologies along with digital geomedia which refers to all means of analyzing, displaying and visualizing geodata. Examples are location-based games (e.g. Geocaching), data visualization tools (e.g. interactive web maps and dashboards, virtual globes, story maps), web mapping tools and data capturing apps as well as Earth observation data and applications (https://esdplus-zgis.hub.arcgis.com/pages/anwendungsbeispiele).

In a pedagogic context, the use of digital geomedia is related to concepts such as Learning with Geoinformation, Spatially-Enabled Learning and Spatial Citizenship. These approaches underline and support numerous advantages of using digital geomedia in education: being a measure to assist, enrich and amplify educational purposes and to foster the efficiency of teaching, providing possibilities to empower learners to explore spatially contextualized contents in a self-controlled, user-driven manner, and to enable non-conventional visual communication and co-creation processes. Despite the existing potential, it seems that digital geomedia is currently still underexploited used in ESD. But, what does the use of digital geomedia in ESD actually look like, and how is digital geomedia used in ESD? What are barriers and which hurdles must be overcome in order to fully exploit the potential of digital geomedia in ESD? How can these barriers be faced?

These aspects are addressed by the ESDplus project (https://esdplus-zgis.hub.arcgis.com/). In order to further support the use of digital geomedia in ESD, ESDplus aims at developing suitable teaching and training materials - on the one hand, to show how digital geomedia can be appropriately integrated in a suitable way into ESD activities and, on the other hand, to prepare ESD pedagogues for a competent use of digital geomedia. The basis for the development of the ESDplus teaching and training materials is a deep understanding of the actual use of digital geomedia in ESD, including barriers that ESD pedagogues see.

The according information was obtained through literature and Internet review, a survey of ESD pedagogues, and workshops held together with ESD pedagogues on the use and discussion of digital geomedia in ESD. The methods used revealed the following: in fact, digital geomedia is rarely used in ESD; in particular location-based games are used in ESD; first of all, ESD educators ask for an overview of existing possible uses of digital geomedia in ESD; there is a strong need for sensitization, acceptance building, etc. to reduce skepticism. One way to address these issues is through community building and dissemination activities.

Keywords:

Education for sustainable development, digital geomedia, informal education, learning with geoinformation.