Trivial Matters

Yesterday I visited the campus of Oregon State University (hence, no post yesterday) and met with the head of the Physics department. I’m finally going to go back to school full-time and finish my degree.

The first thing I did when I got there was to visit the school of engineering and take a tour of their part of the campus (Engineer Row) and I was amazed at all of the technology in use. There were computer labs everywhere, and wi-fi in every corner. The lecture hall was expansive and up-to-date. Engineering students got a chuck of web and server space for personal use. During the full campus tour the tourguide told us that the library offered computer repair services including doing a full back up. All of this is free (or included in the tuition).

The last thing I did was meet with the physics department. After we discussed my options, he took me on a tour of the classrooms used by the junior and senior students. It was a stark contrast to the engineering classrooms and buildings that I saw earlier in that these were very simple rooms. There was a chalkboard in the front and whiteboards on all of the other walls. Each desk had a standard desktop computer (to be shared between three students) and those were mostly for doing computer modeling.

I asked the guy if they had looked into using smart boards. In my last few years int he Air Force, they had caught on like wildfire, and soon every instuctor had to use one for teaching. (I thought it was overkill at the time, but there had been some use when we were looking at electrical schematics and the like, and I thought that they would be great for a physics classroom.) He told me that they had something better and motioned to the stack of loose dry-erase boards. Apparently, if a student has a question, they can write it out on the board and take it up to the instructor. He also told me that paper was discouraged because people will write too small, but with dry-erase, they tend to write bigger.

It was interesting that in a field which serves as the cornerstone for technology, the people who teach it still resort to old-school methods. Yet, it works. I realized that in the time it would take for me to try and write out an equation on the computer and send or display it to the instructor, I’d already have an answer simply by writing it down with a big, red marker and holding the board above my head.