Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss and present new teaching techniques to advance the concept and the practice of education for sustainable development (SD). Due to the recently introduced 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and owing their interlinkages and targets, an evolution of the traditional teaching techniques is needed. Design/methodology/approach With the use of a single revelatory case study, this paper presents an example of education for SD goals activity carried out at the University of Torino, focussed on merging SD with the active engagement of students. Findings The empowerment of students happens through a transformative learning experience grounded in the acquisition of managerial soft skills useful in co-creating and co-designing projects to contribute towards SDGs effectively. Practical implications The ultimate goal is to support students to become active citizens in their communities (e.g. starting within the University). Social implications Students learnt about SDGs and the complexities of sustainability, and, at the same time, they learnt valuable tools to contribute to their transformation to develop projects for the benefit of local territories and organizations. Originality/value The paper showcases how transformative learning could be applied to SDGs. Awarded as one of the best practices regarding SD by the Italian Network of Universities for Sustainable Development, the case involves students in a transdisciplinary, creative and open learning environment.
At the University of Turin (UniTo) the first attempt to reduce the ecological footprint dates back to 2006. In 2013 UniTo participated, for the first time, to the GreenMetric World University Rankings and it launched its most ambitious sustainable initiatives by publishing the first annual University Sustainability Report. Since 2013, several efforts have been made to reduce carbon emissions, to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, as well as for reducing water consumption, improving waste management, promoting sustainable mobility, and increasing ecological purchases. The most recent achievement was in 2016, when the University Green Office (UniToGO) was established. Concerning the energy management, UniTo may be considered as a “city within a city”: it counts about 70,000 students and 4,000 academic and administrative-technical staff studying and working in about 120 buildings, with an annual primary energy cost of over 10 M€. Thanks to UniToGO, UniTo adopted an Energy Plan with the aim to reduce primary energy consumption, to improve buildings energy efficiency and to increase the energy production from renewable energy. As a result, several actions relevant for GreenMetric were performed: the renovation of old chiller and substitution of new energy efficient LED, the implementation of Smart Building Systems (BEMS) for HVAC plants and the adoption of an OpenData policy for energy consumption, the increase of renewable energy production, mainly due to three cogeneration plants, and the adoption of a university policy in order to buy only renewable energy from the current Distribution System Operator. Moreover, UniTo took several efforts to improve or to design elements of green buildings in a partecipatory way. Finally, during 2017, the Environmental Sustainability Action Plan was set-up to plan future actions related to five sustainability fields: Energy, Food, Green Public Procurement, Mobility and Waste.
Lexicon definition is one of the main bottlenecks in the development of new applications in the field of Information Extraction from text. Generic resources (e.g., lexical databases) are promising for reducing the cost of specific lexica definition, but they introduce lexical ambiguity. This paper proposes a methodology for building application-specific lexica by using WordNet. Lexical ambiguity is kept under control by marking synsets in WordNet with field labels taken from the Dewey Decimal Classification.
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