Once Upon a College: He gets it

Thursday, December 11, 2008

He gets it

This is Obama's pick for Secretary of the Department of Energy? Awesome. The Lawrence Berkely Lab is a world leader in green energy, but also energy efficiency, which is the best bang for the buck in the first stages of any emissions reduction campaign. Plenty of green wonks out there would rather forget about efficiency because it's too unsexy, but I've said for years that we could probably get our emissions down 50% on efficiency alone. The $6-8 grand windows and insulation and new heat system retrofit on this old farmhouse, for instance, got emissions down 80%.

I've been using the LBL product "Home Energy Saver" for years in class and in energy audits. And the Nanosolar link is spot on.

What a great pick. And pithy too. No wishy-washy New-Agey "let's just be nice to everyone" character here.

The coal and oil dinosaurs will have a serious opponent in Dr. Chu.

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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

Thursday, December 11, 2008

He gets it

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What this is about

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