Rewiring Education: Student-Led Curriculum Programs for a More Sustainable and Just World

Digital infrastructure underpins contemporary economic and social life, yet it remains invisible. This is a problem for the digital infrastructure industries: data center and subsea cable companies are deeply concerned about the next generation of their workforce. This is also a public problem: as sectors increasingly depend on digital infrastructure and services, a basic literacy of these infrastructures is needed to ensure continuity of service, sustainability, and resilience.

A critical challenge in this discipline is the growing workforce and training divide between industry operators and academic institutions. Digital infrastructure designers and operators primarily gain expertise through hands-on experience in real-world projects, often independent of formal educational programs. While this practical approach is invaluable, it has created a substantial gap in formal education on digital infrastructure.

In this presentation, we will describe our course, “Building A Sustainable Internet,” which we designed, proposed, implemented, and are teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. This is a unique class, developed and taught by students for students, that dives into the hidden environmental costs of internet infrastructures. In it, we tackle the problem of how to solve sustainability while also balancing pressing issues of social equity, geopolitics, and security. The course introduces students to new technologies and policies that could make the internet more sustainable, equitable, and resilient for everyone. So far we've taught the course for three semester to almost 500 students from 60 different majors. In the presentation, we describe the course, as well as our process of drawing from science and technology studies to make sustainable digital infrastructure accessible for a broad range of students across disciplines.