B4023-5 Education: The Virtual University

The Virtual University:  Today, boys and girls, let’s do a little thought experiment.  Imagine for a moment that a young woman - let’s call her Rachel - gets into her automobile and drives ten miles to a “commuter” university.  The school has few on-campus dormitory residents; most drive from elsewhere to attend a day’s classes.  Rachel parks her car in a large parking lot, slips on her backpack of books and laptop computer, and begins the half-mile  (about 800 meters) trek to her classroom building.  Notice, if you will, the absurdity of locating a parking lot that far away from the building.  Many would ask, “Whatever were those architects thinking?”

 
    Rachel enters a large lecture hall and takes a seat along with several hundred other students.  The lecture hall is shaped like an amphitheater, and the lecturer is seen by Rachel as a very tiny dot way down there at the bottom of the room.  The lecturer is nearly invisible.  And if it weren’t for the projected image of the lecturer on the adjacent wall, Rachel would hardly be able to see the person.  Moreover, the voice of the lecturer must be amplified to be heard by others at the higher end of the lecture hall.
 

    When the lecture begins, Rachel notices that many of the students around her are chatting with one another about things that have nothing to do with the content of the lecture.  Their gossip is a major distraction to her.  The lecturer, too, is a chirrupy little bird who can hardly be understood.  Rachel strains to hear and comprehend the lecture.  All in all, it is a very frustrating experience for Rachel.
 

    After the lecture, Rachel retraces her half-mile walk back to the parking lot.  It is now raining and Rachel is getting soaked.  She utters soft blasphemies with each step, generally aimed at the deranged miscreants who laid out the parking lots, but audible to anyone else who might be listening.  She gets into her car and drives ten miles back to her home.  She is absolutely furious.
 

    Well, what’s wrong with this picture?  In a word: everything.

    It may have been useful to arrange a lecture hall like Rachel’s back in the nineteenth-century.  But surely the internet-connected twenty-first-century has no need for brick-n-mortar lecture halls and all the attendant paraphernalia necessary to sustain that obsolete model of education.  Today, a well-produced lecture could be recorded in a sound studio, edited and packaged in an attractive video.  Such a video could be viewed from the comfort of the student’s home via the internet, at any time she so chose to view the video (and as often as she chose to view the video again), without the attendant driving time and mileage, or distractions of gossiping fellow students.  Since the amphitheater lecture does not provide for any interaction between the lecturer and the students, why is it necessary to travel to a specific location to hear the lecture?  And why is it necessary to burden the student with the fixed costs of support personnel when technology exists to present an exactly similar video lecture without all those lawn-mowing, parking lot-plowing, food-service folks?
 

    Am I suggesting that internet videos replace all university lectures?  Hardly.  Many university-level courses are not conducive to video broadcasting.  Laboratory courses in the sciences, for example, require brick-n-mortar facilities.  But the same is not true of many other areas of study.
 

    Nonetheless, I await your “Yeah-Buts.”

A Rose for Your Rose Garden

Happy Independence Day!

B4023-4 Education: Field's Law (2)

Education: Field’s Law (2):  A university campus expands in a concentric manner.  Additional buildings are added, along with their supporting infrastructure (parking lots, sidewalks, etc.), beyond the “core” or original campus.  Many universities have an identifiable older building that was the first classroom building on the campus.  Usually, that building has an architectural distinction that might be called “Venerable, Ivy-Covered Brickwork.”  The newer buildings almost always fail to replicate the look of the original building.

 
    As the university campus expands, important things happen to that older building.  If the older building is WWII vintage or older, it probably had a stand-alone boiler house, with coal-fired boilers used at one time in its history.  Later, those coal-fired boilers were retrofitted with natural gas-fired burners, and the building was heated for a number of years using that technology.  But as the university expands, a central heating plant is constructed to supply steam to various buildings on the campus.  In time, that stand-alone boiler house, next to the Oldest Classroom Building, is torn down because “it is no longer needed.”  It is at that point that Part Two of Field’s Law kicks in.

    Field’s Law, as you might remember, states that the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.  As the university campus expands - and becomes less dense - whole armies of support staff are needed to keep the place tidy and in good repair.  And while a campus might expand arithmetically, the fixed costs expand logarithmically.  This is true of every concentric expansion: the bigger the “footprint,” the higher the fixed costs.”
 

    Fast food restaurants, on the other hand, expand by incremental expansion.  New restaurants are built in new locations that have no organic connection to older buildings (other than corporate advertizing and corporate “ware” - cups, packaging, etc. - that give a consistent look to each franchise).  In times of economic distress, corporate-owned restaurants can be closed on the basis of profitability alone.  The least profitable locations can be closed, and the corporate enterprise as a whole is strengthened by doing so.
 

    The same is not true with concentric expansion.  It is not a simple matter to shutter university campus buildings.  Because of the interconnected utilities, it is often impossible.  Even thought it might be desirable to shut down the central heating plant because of the enormous costs of operating such a facility, usually there are no “back-up” heating systems (boilers, etc.) for all those separate buildings.  Field’s Law states that “the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.”  But it also states that you cannot get back home again if those steam lines are too long.  The university is stuck with running everything - with those high fixed costs - or shutting down the entire campus.
 

    And they thought they were making a wise move when they bulldozed the boiler house next to that ivy-covered classroom building.  Instead, they may have taken their first steps to the “Point of No Return.”

B5005-1 Reasoning: The Phlogiston Theory

THE PHLOGISTON THEORY: If one places a great deal of faith in science’s purported aim of “explaining” nature, then one is left with the task of defending those explanations of the past which explained a great many things and yet were subsequently found to be spurious. The Phlogiston Theory, for example, failed to explain, in a satisfactory manner, a great deal of diverse phenomenon which today is subsumed under the heading of oxidation reactions. Even though the theory had the initial advantage of appearing to explain things by that all-inclusive essence of phlogiston, the prominent short-coming of the theory was, specifically, its failure to really explain anything.

Now, if science has as one of its aims that of explaining things, then this phlogiston theory must be reduced to the realm of non-science. If this can happen to the theory of phlogistons then all theories are vulnerable to a similar fate. In other words, all of science is suspect. And you may safely assert that this is certainly the case. In fact, you may assert that it must always be the case in science: science is an epistemological effort which cannot stand on settled “truth”. Instead, it is an endless search for more accurate, more precise “truth”.

But, where does this leave the scientist? Isn’t he then in a position where everything he believes to be true must be doubted per se? That is, is science reduced to a series of “I think this is so, but I don’t know” propositions? If it is, then how does one make any theory truly credible? What makes a good theory sound if it is always subject to doubt? Isn’t the test one of what can be done with the theory, rather than what cannot be done? Remember: what cannot be done is believing in the theory with complete certainty. Spurious theories fail, not because they fail to explain satisfactorily, but because they have little use in the practical application of science - what can be done with a theory is the crux of the test, not what area can be effectively enveloped with intelligible explanations.

The phlogiston theory, then, fell into disrepute, not because it failed to explain things, but rather because it did not adequately describe things. This adequacy of description is not to be confused with accuracy of description, for, the oxidation/reduction theory which effectively replaced the phlogiston theory is itself subject to correction and amplification: as of the present date the theory is adequate for our purposes, even though it might not fit all cases with some standard measure of accuracy. What made the phlogiston theory so nebulous was an “essence” which was supposed to leave a reaction when, say, a candle was burned or an “essence” which arrived to account for the gain in weight of a burned (oxidized) substance. This dealing with what is now seen as oxygen moving into a gaseous end product (which explains loss of weight in a burning candle) or into a solid end product (which explains the gain in weight in metal oxides - dealing with this “essence” in such an imprecise manner - lead to apparent contradictions: candles lost weight when burned and metals gained weight when burned; the “same” thing certainly could not account for both reactions, so men thought.

As long as men thought in terms of “essences” and phlogistic elements moving into or out of reactions, the area of concentration remained too broad for any practical application. How does one harness an essence? What, for that matter, is the “essence?” It was in answering these questions about essences that the essences were identified as oxygen or oxidation reactants and which, then, limited the context of experimental materials to more amenable procedures. With “essences,” alone, the context, being too broad, would not allow an experimenter to manipulate any of the variables, since the variables always remained indeterminate. Once such things as oxygen or oxidation reactions were recognized, the each reactant could be varied.

B8005-3 Arguments: Clarification of Facts

THE CLARIFICATION OF FACTS: We could say that some arguments serve to clarify definitions, where ambiguity exists, by positing compelling, factual information, that effectively destroys the competing claim. To “win” this sort of an argument, thus, is to furnish decisive facts to another person. Illustration: a First Grade teacher had a particularly disruptive child in her classroom. She told the child to sit down - repeatedly. But the child refused. So the teacher flipped on the video recorder that had been installed in her classroom and she recorded the antics of the disruptive boy. Later, she called the parents of the boy and asked them to come to the school for a Parent/Teacher conference. The parents came, and when they were told about the disruptive behavior of their son, they vigorously denied that “their child would ever do anything like that.” Rather than listen to a series of anecdotal narratives about the relative saintliness of their child, the teacher asked the parents to watch a short video tape, as she turned on the video recording system. She told the parents she wanted to show them something before they made their counterarguments. When she played the tape of the child’s previous classroom behavior, the overwhelming evidence seen on the tape could not be refuted by the parents. The “facts” were just too compelling. The parents told the teacher that they would talk to the child and that they “would straighten everything out.” The next day the youngster showed up in the classroom with two black eyes and other marks on his face that indicated that the parents had, indeed, “talked” to the boy - by “hand.” The child sat in his chair, never said a single word, and never ventured out of his seat the entire day. He was a perfect angel.

B1006-6 Captain Ja-Boom Tisch

     Sometimes a comedian’s act is accompanied by a small band.  We see this quite often on late-night television programs here in the U.S.A.  The drummer in the band accentuates the comedian’s “punch line” with a roll on the snare drum, followed by a single bass drum thump, and a stab at the cymbal.  If you listen carefully, the effect sounds like “Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.”  Say that a few times out loud and you will hear the drummer’s “raspberry.”

     President Obama is the personification of that drummer’s flourish: “Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.”  Yesterday, at his news conference, he tried to explain an economic principle.  He struggled to put the concept into words because, frankly, he doesn’t understand economic concepts.  As my friend said, "Listening to him explaining economics is like listening to my old lady explaining how a nuclear reactor works."

     Captain Ja-Boom Tisch reminds me of a young man I met years ago who was attempting to teach industrial hydraulic maintenance procedures to a group of grizzled, old maintenance men.  He kept saying things to the men that were patently false or absurd.  The men hooted at his foolish suggestions.  Finally, a colleague told him to sit down.  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he said.

     Yeah.  Captain Ja-Boom Tisch.  Economist extra ordinaire. Have a seat right here, Mr. President.

B4023-3 Aesthetic Speed-Bumps on Campus

     Years ago, when I lived in one of those cold and snowy states in the Upper Midwest, I went to school in the middle of a corn (maize) field.  The school had been built on land that had formerly been an old  airport.  The land was so flat that your dog could run away and you could still see him three days later, as one wag put it.  And that was the problem: the wind swept across that land in the Winter without obstruction until it encountered the silly architectural speed-bumps there.

     In my opinion, many architects are supremely impractical people, and it often strikes me that they design buildings and structures, not for people per se, but rather for some strange notion of what is aesthetically pleasing.  On that corn-field campus the architects placed the parking lots 300 meters (about 1,000 feet!) from the school buildings - and if that alone wasn’t sufficient reason to strangle them for their impracticality - they also excavated the land and created sunken parking lots.  Good idea, right?  In the Winter, the snow settled in the parking lots and buried the automobiles there.  In the Spring or Fall, heavy rain turned those parking lots into lakes.  But it was all for a good cause: none could see the cars in the parking lots from the perimeter road.  For some reason, it was aesthetically pleasing to a quirky cadre of architects not to see automobiles.

     There were many Winter days when I trudged through the drifted snow and biting wind with a classmate or two and listened to their bitter complaints.  Almost always they wanted to choke the fool who designed the campus parking lots.  “No,” I told them, “Just put his office in the school building and make him walk out on this corn field every day for the next year.  He’ll get the idea that aesthetically pleasing has a much lower rank than practicality.”