USING ACTOR NETWORK THEORY TO EXPLORE SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES IN AN ENGINEERING & SOCIETY COURSE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the use of Actor-Network Theory as a tool for exploring the complexity ofsustainability issues in a core Engineering and Society course for second-year students in a large,multidisciplinary engineering program. In the course, Actor Network Theory, which is a method for analyzing sociotechnical issues with an emphasis on the concept of power and its distribution, was introduced to the students through a series of learning activities and an assignment, initially encouraging the students to apply the approach to a system within their own life. Subsequently, the approach was used to analyze complex sociotechnical issues, for example, the use of Coal-based energy in Nova Scotia, and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline dispute in the Wet’suwet'enterritory. This paper describes our approach to introducing Actor Network Theory to engineering students, the benefits and limitations of the approach, and the efficacy of the approach for exploring sustainability issues. Other instructors may consider the introduction of ActorNetwork Theory through courses in Engineering & Society and Engineering Design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".