[ExI] Greener Urban Environment

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of Dave Sill
Subject: Re: [ExI] Greener Urban Environment

 

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 4:55 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com <mailto:atymes at gmail.com> > wrote:

Yeah, yeah, "beware of student loans beyond what you can repay".

 

 

Student loans are a weird case: no one really knows what will be beyond what the student can repay.  Those are super high risk loans.

 

 

>…There's a lot more to it than that. Traditional education, where students sit in classrooms and teachers/professors lecture, does not make good use of technology, the student's time, the professor's time, the resources used, etc…

 

Thanks for that, ja, right on.  There must be some way to use Skype or equivalent to have class discussions about matters suited to that kind of learning.  But for all the traditional stuff, there is no point in having realtime professors droning on.  There are good end runs that don’t run up all those bills.

 

 

>…Spike's experience with the Khan Academy provides a taste of what is possible with today's technology: substantially better education at a fraction of the cost.  -Dave

 

Ja.  I do urge you to go in there and look around.  Khan added a course on human physiology.  A lot of us here are math and physics hipsters, so go in, find something you don’t already know, such as the physiology.  Here’s an example of what I learned yesterday: trace your path if you are an RBC in the inferior vena cava, describe where you are in chronological order and what happens, your condition, such as: you go into the right atrium depleted in oxygen, go thru the tricuspid valve, S1 occurs (the lub sound) as that valve slams shut behind you as you enter the right ventricle and the pressure rises, off you go shooting thru the pulmonary valve, and so forth.

 

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine/human-anatomy-and-physiology

 

I took a physiology course as a college freshman, but this series of short lectures is better than that, way better, it’s free, I control it, I can rerun it, excellent visuals, highly qualified instructors, I don’t need to go live in an austere dorm room or in a century-old house with seventeen men (oy vey, spare me) I don’t need to search for a parking spot, no huge tuition bills, no loans, none of the negatives.  

 

With this plan, I don’t get laid.  But that wasn’t happening at college anyway: we were tech geeks, before Bill Gates made it cool.  It was pretty much all men on that end of campus.  The women didn’t like us.  We were too busy with studies, we spent too much time pecking away at those little plastic typewriters with the TV screens, we were just too weird.

 

OK well this is what we did, the geeks revenge: we have created an opportunity for the cool guys to not get laid too.

 

And better still: it’s free!  Go there, see it please.  Choose any ten-minute lecture, listen and comment.  Oh evolution, what a time to be alive.

 

OK now, we have all this opportunity to learn cool stuff at a lower-end college level (do go look at that excellent physiology course) completely free on our own schedule, and we can easily foresee this paradigm climbing up into upper division courses.  Modern people can learn online all the stuff we ancients learned the traditional way at enormous expense.

 

We are still missing one big ingredient before this paradigm completely dominates college level education: getting laid.  OK two big ingredients: a uniform objective system for credentials, a degree equivalent system perhaps, one that covers both those who go the traditional route of education and those who use the online resources, as well as those who do both the online education and get laid.  The person or company which successfully figures out how to do a useful and universal credential system will make a cubic buttload of money.  Oh it makes ya hurt just thinking about all the filthy lucre to be made here, ooooh a good hurt it is.

 

Suggestions please?

 

spike 

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