Web-Based Instruction Revolutionizes Environmental Systems Analysis

For university teaching in general, and specifically for the transdisciplinary curriculum of “Environmental Systems Analysis”, web-based learning procedures provide excellent opportunities for socially induced understanding and consensus building. This chapter describes how the social processes emerging in a five-level web-based negotiation game may be conceived in such a way that these form a sequence of growing and decaying intensity in various modes of social interaction. Similarly to individual learning in a classroom, a procedure could be applied to collective learning, namely to social procedures among humans who are starting to create institutional networks for combating global climate change – one of the most urgent tasks at present. A coordinate system of the four main social archetypes of action, namely “information”, “team”, “debate”, “integration” is symbolically called soprano, alto, tenor and bass; these four basic dimensions of social action tend to peak one after the other along a suitably designed gaming procedure.