Once Upon a College: March 2020

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Monday, March 23, 2020

EC20123 movies: US, UK, and Norwegian oil in the 1970s

EC2023 week 10 movies: oil and the middle east

EC2023 week 10 slides (set # 1)

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Corona slump macro update

The macroeconomic lessons offered by the C-virus pandemic continue. See below:

And, as predicted, an update on libertarian responses:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-coronavirus-economic-stimulus-reelection-bailout/2020/03/18/280a1a12-6947-11ea-9923-57073adce27c_story.html

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Unofficial first video for online GL4003, PS3003, and EC2123

I say this is the "unofficial" version because after making the video I realized I was wearing my scruffy old farm-work sweater with the hole in the elbow. But it's lambing season here on the farm and so that's how I dress. I was bottled feeding a lamb earlier and got lamb replacer all over a better sweater.

So I guess I'll have to make the video again before I post it "officially" to Canvas, wearing slightly tidier clothes!

But here you are, for all the diehards who know that the blog is still my go-to. I'm still experimenting with formats and applications, but this is an early preview of how I plan to teach online for the rest of the semester. I'm also testing how easy it is to post You-Tube to the blog, as well as how well students can access the materials via computer and/or cell phone.

I'm planning to use You Tube video-lectures much like this, as well as narrated PowerPoint slides, which will be available either in PowerPoint or YouTube versions, and various kinds of online-discussion/commentary for the participation portion of each class. The Canvas page for each course will have the official list of assignments, organized via the announcements page. If you have or get the Canvas ap for your phone, you'll be able to access all the YouTube materials on your phone, which should be a convenience to you.

Like I said, I'm just getting started here. I have the rest of the break to work this out. The official start date for the rest of the semester (week 10 through 15) is March 30th.

Watch this space for more to come, as well as via Canvas.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Videos for GL 4003 today

Monday, March 9, 2020

WAPO contrasts messaging on COVID 19

Scientists all around the world are watching with dismay the politicians get it wrong again and again. When will we learn this lesson?

Remember, folks: "Nature bats last" may be a slogan or even a bumper sticker, but it's also a fact. Humans like to convince themselves that they are all powerful creatures, but we don't have the last say.

Thursday, March 5, 2020

PLIOMAX and other analogs

PLIOMAX: the international effort to determine the Pliocene sea level highstand, has its landing page linked below. This is an example of an effort to explore climate "analogs" in order to determine key parameters of global change in the next few decades and centuries. An analog might be a geological era or event that offers a good guide to the planet's behavior under similar conditions of forcing and coupled circulation.

You may remember that Hansen et al 2016 depended heavily on the Eemian analog for sea level rise and the future of the WAIS. Analogs stand in some contrast and/or tension with models, both GCMs and Ice Sheet Models. This was carefully expressed in Hansen et al 2016.

http://pliomax.weebly.com/outreach.html

The video we watched is here, and there are a couple other good ones below.

What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College