Calcium White

“When it was built, the American presidential residence in Washington, DC, was coated in a damp-repellent mixture of slaked lime and glue, and people started to call it the White House. Tombs were likewise brushed with lime to protect them from the ravages of the weather.”

This is how the section on calcium compounds begins in Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. (You're reading the fourth blog post on this book, here are the third, second and first.) What an interesting pair of facts – I did not realize that the reason for the white ‘paint’ had to do with the damp-repelling aspects of calcium oxide, more commonly known as lime. Actually calcium oxide works well as a desiccant because of its ability to absorb water. Apparently that is why it was used in burials, reducing the process of putrefaction and decay by absorbing moisture.

We are most familiar with a different white compound, calcium carbonate, also known as limestone. This is the white of chalk, majestically displayed in the white cliffs of Dover. (I’d like to see them with my own eyes someday.) The author makes the interesting observation that we think of writing mainly as black ink on white paper, but many centuries ago it was likely much easier to use white chalk to write on a dark surface. I first taught using chalk on a blackboard, but now use dry-erase markers on a white board. I’m not sure which is worst – chalk dust or organic fumes from the ink or solvent cleaner. That being said, the markers of today do not have the characteristic smell of its predecessors, and good quality white boards do not require frequent treatment and the solvent cleaner.

Chalk powder can be used as markers for any surface where their white contrasts with practically anything on the ground but snow. I learned that the Italian word for calcium, calcio (which spell-check annoyingly changed to ‘calico’ – good thing I noticed), is the same word for football (or soccer for U.S. folks). The author writes, “both meanings derive from the Latin calx, which is not only literal lime but also a metaphor for a goal, an achievement marked perhaps by a chalk line crossed.” Interestingly the root word also gave rise to calcination, meaning roasting in air, a word introduced by the alchemists. Calcination allows one to make lime from limestone, driving out the CO₂ from chalk (CaCO₃) to form lime (CaO). I bet you can write a balanced chemical equation for this process, now that you know the chemical formulae!

I’ve often used calcium carbonate as an example in my non-science major chemistry courses. It features prominently in the topic “Acids and Bases” because of its many applications as an acid neutralizer. I have a standard antacid demo with three flasks containing hydrochloric acid at a pH mimicking stomach acid. The flasks are mounted on stirplates, each with a magnetic stir bar. These give the aura of some exciting lab experiment – students every year think the magnetic stirrers are nifty gadgets! A drop of acid-base indicator is added to the solution. (I typically use bromothymol blue for this demo.) I get three student volunteers and each of them gets a mortar and pestle to grind up their chosen antacid. The students then get to wear safety goggles and lab gloves, and at the count of three they add their powdery substance to the flasks. Everyone watches with bated breath, but usually nothing happens. That’s because the reaction takes time (5-20 minutes depending on the starting material).

At this point I usually continue with the lesson, but the students (especially those in the front row) are keeping a close eye awaiting the colour change as the calcium carbonate neutralizes the base. In the meantime I’m describing why limestone near lakes acts as a buffer against acidification, and the process of liming a lake to prevent its pH from dropping due to acid rain and other processes. It’s also a good time to talk about the sources contributing to acid rain. We also talk about eating chalk if you were having acid reflux but your antacid was nowhere close at hand. At some point, one of the flasks will change colour before the others, leading to a flurry of excitement and cheers. It’s also a good time to discuss what an acid-base base indicator is, and why it changes colours based on pH.

In my General Chemistry course (for science majors), the decomposition of limestone into lime, while releasing carbon dioxide, is one of the early examples in “Equilibrium”. That’s because in this particular case, the equilibrium constant of the reaction is equal to the partial pressure of CO₂. It’s also a good initial system to discuss aspects of Le Chatelier’s Principle. Lime does come up when I’m discussing lattice energies, but up to this point I’ve failed to say anything interesting about it in class. Maybe I’m too focused on the principles behind lattice energies that I forget that calcium oxide is interesting in its own right.

The author pontificates: “Whiteness is freedom from colour and an escape from the rainbow chaos of life. Lime’s whiteness is a scourging simplicity, the purity of an ideal, the finality of a death. Whiting is the action of adding a layer of lime-wash, yet it is also a subtraction, a gesture towards liberation, a brushing away of the earth and the earthly, a disencumberance, a literal lightening and also the lightening of a load. The cleansing and preserving action of whitewashing ritually repeats the throwing of lime into the grave with the corpse. Our bodies decay, our bones are left, picked clean and bleached of all colour. We fade to white.”

But there is a glimmer of light: “Human intention lined in white is not always grimly fateful. Herman Melville in a chapter-long digression from the hunt for Moby-Dick meditates on how ‘whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue on its own, as in marbles, japonicas and pearls.’ Two of these three, it is no surprise to find, are calcium white. Japonica is the exception: white in nature where it is not mineral – real white horses, white bears, white elephants, the albino and the albatross – is attributable not to calcium but to the arrangement of organic matter in cells in such a way that it scatters light of all colours.”

Big Data, Ed-Tech and Precogs

Reading Kevin Kelly’s book (The Inevitable) motivated me to rewatch the 2002 movie Minority Report. The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. The year is 2054; an experimental unit named Pre-Crime has been operating in Washington D.C. for six years and has reduced murders to practically zero. How did they do it? They have precogs, individuals who have extrasensory perception (ESP) skills allowing them to see murders before they inevitably take place. The precogs are a “hive mind” linked to computers and data, and as one character says in the movie: “Don’t think of them as human.” They rest floating in a pool with as little to disturb them as possible. They are fed nutrients and their cerebral activities are linked to Pre-Crime’s sophisticated computer system.

For a 2002 movie envisioning the future, Spielberg did a fantastic job. The featured tech includes a combination of things I’ve written about recently: virtual reality and augmented reality, connected to and drawing from a huge database (the Internet!). Big data is combined with the visual streams from the precogs, allowing the main protagonist played by Tom Cruise to conduct a virtuoso investigation. As he waves his hands in the air, different streams of information are constructed and displayed for the team. It’s like watching a maestro conduct an orchestra. (The Iron Man movies borrowed heavily from this imagery.) While we are still a long way off from 2050, we are well on our way to developing that sort of tech.

The precogs provide one stream of data into a huge computing database, that allows pinpointing the day, time, location, and actions in a future event. One way to think about this is that with enough data, someone observing past behavior could make reasonably good inferences as to future behavior. If you didn’t do well on a pre-test, skipped class, didn’t take notes, didn’t do the homework, didn’t study, then you’re likely not to do well on the exam. Humans connected to the internet be it via wearable devices, mobile phones, or sitting at computer terminals, are constantly giving up more and more of their data to this database. A sufficiently strong A.I. just might be able to piece together some aggregate future behavior based on past behavior in comparison to a huge database from hundreds of millions of individuals. This A.I. may even be able to assign a probability value from the pre-calculated statistics.

This past week I received yet another spam e-mail from ed-tech. I usually delete these without reading it, but since I had been pondering the precogs, I decided to read the e-mail. This one was from Pearson and was advertising its adaptive learning platform, Knewton, integrated into Mastering Chemistry. I have some idea of how these systems work (I’ve mentioned Knewton in a previous post); I read some of the initial literature surrounding ALEKS before it became proprietary. Earlier this year I also read a white paper (can’t find it now) taking stock of where we are with adaptive learning systems in higher education.

I watched the short embedded video advertising Pearson’s product. Not surprisingly, I didn’t learn anything new from a technology standpoint. However what was more interesting was the sales pitch. The A.I. system gauges your starting point by asking you questions (you solve chemistry problems) and based on your mastery or lack thereof, the system shunts you along particular pathways that are personalized for you. They have been personalized based on an ever-growing training set – the big data and the analytics. Every choice you make, key you press, even the time you take working on a problem, all that is added to the database. If there was an eye-tracking system, I bet they’ll be gobbling up that information too. In Minority Report, that’s how advertising works. As Tom Cruise wanders through the subways and the shopping mall, ubiquitous eye trackers scan him, personalize his ads, and make suggestions.

It’s not a big stretch to “classify” students (based on their performance in these adaptive learning systems) into categories of academic competence. Pearson and other companies are already supplementing other parts of student tracking and advising (this is a major push) and selling their products to the Student Affairs part of the university. They are probably going to make inroads into Career Services as part of their encompassing strategy (maybe they already have!). Soon the system will be helping students sort through potential careers based on academic potential, extracurricular activities and any other information it will happily gobble up into its big data analytics algorithms. With more data, it can assign probabilities that a certain individual will end up in a certain career. (It can probably already assign an exam score probability.) Or make a probabilistic prediction that an individual will take certain actions. Starting to sound like a precog yet? A hive mind, perhaps?

In her third year at Hogwarts, Hermione elects to take Arithmancy – mathematics that predicts the future. How about algorithms that predict the future based on big data? I hereby invent the word Algorithmancy. (You heard it here first!) I’ve speculated that Advanced Arithmancy is akin to theoretical Physical Chemistry. Algorithmancy would be what I do as a computational chemist – I apply theoretical models in physical chemistry to make predictions on how ensembles of molecules might evolve taking into account their intrinsic “chemistry” but also the “environment” they are in. I happen to study the origin of life using computers, but might I also be originating life in a computer? We call it artificial intelligence. But is “artificial” the right word? Maybe it’s just a different kind of intelligence, one that we don’t understand and seems alien to us even as it grows exponentially feeding on vast networks of data. Alien intelligence may be the new A.I.

Flight of Death

I’m exactly three weeks behind working on the daily New York Times crossword puzzle. My wife and I started doing these maybe seven years ago. When we first started, we worked on them together because we couldn’t finish them alone (even the easier ones), and it was also a fun activity we enjoyed. Now that we’re both quite experienced, the Monday through Wednesday ones are a cinch that we work on individually, and complete with no trouble. Thursday through Saturday, we start on them individually and then help each other if someone gets stuck. My spouse enjoys doing the puzzle on her iPad, while I still prefer paper and pencil. Why are we three weeks behind? Early on, due to traveling, we would occasionally miss some days, and would be slow at catching up. However, being behind allows me to print out the puzzles up to three weeks in advance, so if I’m taking a trip, I have enough puzzles to keep me happy!

Since we’re three weeks behind, some of the puzzles we’ve worked on this week are Halloween-themed. Thursday puzzles are usually strongly themed, and have some sort of a twist to them. The Oct 27 puzzle was lots of fun, even though it took me a while to figure out the catch. I won’t reveal it here, for those who might be working their way through (but, like me, are somewhat behind). I do want to talk about one clue in the Friday (Oct 28) puzzle. The clue was: Fictional character whose name is French for ‘flight of death’ (13 letters). Since I don’t know French, I skipped thinking about this early on, but after I had worked out some of the letters from other clues, the answer came to me in a flash: Lord Voldemort. It’s been fun to see an increase in Harry Potter clues of late. Potions master Severus Snape showed up not too long ago. We’ve actually been three weeks behind for at least the past three years, if not longer.

The clue got me thinking about the meaning of Voldemort’s title. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought about this before. Perhaps Voldemort chose his name ‘Flight of Death’ as a sign that he would cheat death. He did boast that he “had gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality”. This would explain his efforts to cheat death, or perhaps steal from death. The French word vol can also mean theft instead of flight. (I looked it up.) ‘Theft of death’ sounds clumsy though. Maybe ‘flight’ works better. [Upcoming Spoiler Alert!] His approach, though, was to split his soul into several pieces and hide them carefully in magical objects. Since I’ve been thinking about word meanings, it made me think that the Greek word for soul is psyche and therefore psychology is the study of the soul. So a psychology class is where you learn about the workings of the soul. If there was a Dark Magic wizard school, its Psychology course might teach you about the act of splitting your soul, and committing great evil in the process. Scary thought. Note to self: Be careful of any Psychology professors at a School of Magic.

But since Potions is my arena as a chemist, this got me thinking about the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone. I am planning to have students propose the invention of a new potion in my chemistry class next semester. The final project will be writing a section of a potions “textbook” that suggests what ingredients are needed for the potion and how to make it, based on scientific principles with a dose of fictional creativity. (This semester’s invention of new elements project is proceeding reasonably well. I just read drafts of the submitted project proposals.) My guess is that some sort of life-giving or life-enhancing potion will be on the list proposed by students. What should go into such a potion? This turns out to be a difficult question. Vitamins? Free-radical absorbers? Amino acids? Other “molecules of life”?

The problem is that we don’t really spend much time thinking about what it means for something to be life-giving in a positive sense. The negative or reverse problem is what we think about: How to beat illness, how to cure disease, how to slow down aging; basically it boils down to how to slow down the ravages of death at least for a short time. This is Voldemort’s namesake quest – how to flee death. From a scientific standpoint, we know a lot more about death than life. At the molecular level, the machinery eventually “breaks down”. Entropy wins. A potion might aim at slowing down telomere shortening, or enhance the recognition and destruction of cancerous cells, or enhance the immune system’s capability of destroying foreign malevolent invaders, or provide a chemical concoction that reduces DNA/RNA copying, transcription and translation errors. Living “better” is often defined as being free of disease. Even the famed elixir of life does not ultimately cheat death. You have to keep taking it, like a medication, to control the otherwise chronic processes of aging. All this brings up age-old philosophical questions: Why do we live? What is life’s purpose? What does it mean to live the ‘good’ life? What is life?

What do we do when faced with difficult questions and puzzles we can’t answer? Sometimes we punt to an easier question. What is one way I enjoy life? Being able to do the crossword puzzle! I’m already looking forward to working on the Sunday (Oct 30) puzzle tomorrow. It’s now become part of my brunch routine. Sunday puzzles are also strongly themed, and much larger than the 15 x 15 grid of Monday through Saturday puzzles. Maybe it will be Halloween-themed, but maybe not. I will enjoy it, in any case!

Virtual Reality U

As the online education market continues to expand, I wonder what the next big thing will be. At the Minerva Schools at KGI (Keck Graduate Institute), all students “attend” class via a fully online portal. The system is essentially a souped-up Learning Management System (LMS) with built-in video (somewhat like Google Hangouts) and tools developed based on the literature coming out of cognitive learning research. Interestingly, the students, at least in their first year, all live together in the same space, but take their classes online with fixed class meeting times, somewhat like at a bricks-and-mortar college. The instructors, though, might be anywhere in the world logging in at the appointed fixed meeting times.

Based on promotional video snippets from the internet, the interface looks like a Google Hangout with custom features. Everyone in the class sees each other as a talking head. Students can collaboratively jot down ideas or work on a problem on a Google Docs-like interface. But there isn’t much physical motion beyond that. It’s typing and speaking in turn. What if you could have a classroom similar to an environment I first saw in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulates virtual items in the space around him? One could imagine a virtual reality (VR) setup with advanced sensor technology allowing you to experience something similar.

Furthermore, what if our high-speed internet connections could be fed directly into the VR stream? We might be able to see and interact with others seemingly as live 3D avatars moving around in space without bumping into each other while we collaboratively manipulate digital objects. Could this be Third Life, the 3-D version of Second Life? Instructors could be right there in the thick of things with the students. The entire class could be transported into a digitized environment, like the holodeck in Star Wars. Art museums, historical sites, even virtual science labs, could all be interesting educational environments. As a chemist, it would be amazing to be in a simulation where we could viscerally observe the swirl of millions of molecules. Or perhaps enter the crowded busy environment of a cell resembling a supercity on the micron scale. We could find ourselves atop Mount Everest or walking the surface of Mars.

This could be Virtual Reality U, a new wave immersive university experience that preserves first and foremost the relational part of learning between teacher and student, but overlays that bringing the wonders of the world viscerally into your living room. Or for a more tactile experience, I could envision commercialized spaces containing sensor-laden physical objects that can be overlaid with digital information. Play and learning come together in a visceral experience. The Learning Lab of Tomorrow could far surpass the learning labs of today.

As A.I. agents become more advanced, and more difficult to distinguish via a Turing-like test, such learning labs could be populated with resources of knowledge that can answer questions and aid in learning new things. I imagine Jarvis from the Iron Man movies as an indispensable aid to science research. The world’s knowledge is being interconnected into a sprawling gargantuan system. All that web surfing you’re doing – it is training multiple A.I. agents. Every time you click, when you make a post, when you ask a question, when you answer a question, when you tag or caption a picture, the A.I.’s are being trained. Believe it or not, you are writing code, every time you access the internet. Not in the way you imagine an old school code-writer but by how you interact with this web-like system.

Welcome to V.R.U. The future is here. Maybe.

Filtering Attention

I’ve read a number of futuristic books in the last two years, as I’ve been trying to learn more about artificial intelligence and technology, and their potential impacts on education. It’s difficult to predict the future, which perhaps opens the doors to rife speculation. I am midway through Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. He discusses a number of broad and inter-related trends that could take place within the next thirty years. Actually, he feels more strongly – he would say these should or will come to pass, hence the title of the book. They are inevitable.

Kelly writes very lucidly, and I think he’s on to something. I buy very few books. (Currently, I’m reading a copy of his book from my local library.) I would say it’s because I’m cheap. Why spend the money on a book I can easily access for free? And I might only read it once. Kelly might say that I’m part of the inexorable move towards sharing/renting and reducing the number of physical objects we own. The march of technology is making this inevitable. I do however purchase things that I think I might reuse. Kelly’s book is now on my list for my next bulk book purchase because I’d like to regularly refer back to his inevitable predictions. Every chapter I’ve read so far makes me stop and think. I’ve even stopped midway through a chapter several times just to mull the ideas in my head. It is rare for me to do this reading a “popular” book that seems breezy in its prose, as compared to a more dense academic treatise – where I’m forced to go slowly to make sure I understand what I’m reading.

I would like to highlight one of the recent chapters: Filtering. (All his chapter headings are one-word “trends”.) For perhaps the very first time in history, anyone with a decent internet connection, can potentially access the Library of Everything anytime. That’s a crazy thought. The entire world’s knowledge, ever-growing, and accessible to you in the blink of an eye. The architects of the ancient Library of Alexandria would be astounded. They thought their library was impressive (and it was at the time). It would attempt to house all the world’s knowledge in one place. Who would benefit? Those who lived close by and had access. Scholars from all over the world would come for such a trove. Egypt would be the wonder of the world.

Knowledge has since increased exponentially. (Whether wisdom has increased is a different story.) Storage and distribution, however, was complicated. The great libraries around the world carefully stored their treasured troves. Copies were made where possible, and increasingly so as the technology became available. But today, digital copies live in a distributed cloud. Destroying that knowledge would prove difficult – it’s not so easy to take down a SkyNet. The ancient Alexandrian library was not so lucky. All it took was a fire – and many precious manuscripts were destroyed, perhaps lost forever. Today, nothing gets lost, and may even return to haunt you. That is, if you or anyone else can find it.

The information explosion has led to the problem of finding what you are looking for. That is where Filtering comes in. With increasingly sophisticated filters, algorithms that can apply the filters speedily as they wormhole their way through the vast index of information will help you find what you seek. Who would have thought that proprietary algorithms would form the backbone of a billion (or perhaps trillion) dollar industry. (It’s all math!) But the algorithm makes choices. We can’t drink from the firehose. How do the best search engines try to filter out all the noise so they can give you exactly what you are looking for, in the shortest time possible, and in the fewest clicks? Because if your current search engine does not do this very well, you will move to another. It’s a cut-throat world out there for the algorithms too. What are the search engines and filters fighting for? Your attention.

Kelly writes: “From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become. […] Our attention is the only valuable resource we personally produce without training. It is in short supply and everyone wants some of it. You can stop sleeping altogether and you will still have only 24 hours per day of potential attention. […] The maximum potential attention is therefore fixed. Its production is inherently limited while everything else is becoming abundant. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.”

The author follows this up by estimating advertising rates. Then he describes how AdSense works, which is both interesting and scary, and what the future landscape for the ad wars might look like. All this made me think of my students; joined at the hip to their mobile devices. They are being bombarded by attention seeking content, all the time. It is difficult to compete with well-targeted attention grabbers, which might be much more interesting than learning chemistry. It’s no wonder that many university faculty ban mobile device use in their classes. (I don’t.) At the moment, the majority of my students still pay attention and participate in class. But that may change. Even if I come up with better ways to engage the students and make my classes more interesting and more relevant, I might still eventually lose the battle for attention. That being said, I believe that deep down humans crave genuine unmediated relationships (even if they don’t always behave that way), and therefore there will always be a place for live interactions between teachers and students. I think it is still the best way to learn at a deep and long-lasting level, so such teaching-learning relationships will continue. My worry is that it will become the province of the economic elite.

If technology continues to drive the evolution of human attention, this suggest two potions that could be created (I’ve been thinking of examples for my upcoming class next semester – a potions for muggles course!) One would be a potion that eliminates the need for sleep without adverse physical effects – the ur-caffeine in a brew that tastes and smells even better than your present favorite coffee. The other would be a potion that packs in more sensing ability per unit time. That feeling you get when time slows down? (I’ve had it three times in my life, all just prior to potential road accidents.) Your adrenaline and other systems are kicking in. You’re taking in all this sensory information and it seems clear and lucid even though things are happening in a split second. There would be a market for the potion that would do that. It would be the scary new drug of choice – a dream for content marketers and those in the business of selling experiences rather than physical objects.

Experiences. That’s what the affluent increasingly want (or are willing) to pay for. Kelly thinks this is the last bastion of where the money might flow, because over time the cost of commodities in most any industry approaches zero asymptotically. Kelly writes: “Paradoxically, our attention to commodities is not worth much. Our monkey mind is cheaply hijacked. The remaining scarcity in an abundant society is the type of attention that is not derived or focused on commodities. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences – which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.” Luxury entertainment, concert tickets, spending at restaurants, personal coaches, babysitting, home-visit health care; all these are going up in cost and price. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t worried about being out of a job. Since I’m good at my primary vocation, teaching, I can access the lucrative personal tutoring market. Chemistry, physics and math are in high demand. Students and/or their parents are willing to pay. (At the moment, I prefer to spend my free time doing other things instead of trying to make more money.)

The author also discusses issues that come up with filtering, such as opting to live in your own bubble or echo chamber. Just look at the polarized political landscape today, not just in the U.S., but in many other countries. There are ways, though, to broaden one’s landscape – in fact, there are algorithms that do so. Kelly ends the chapter on a positive note by viewing filtering as a route to self-actualization. I’m less sanguine about his conclusions. But it did make me think about how, in the pre-Internet world, choices were limited by constraints – and one could argue that our choices in life makes us who we are. In our brave new world, choices are filtered by algorithms, but ones that can be “trained” by us (and technology is moving towards filtering by personalization). It also made me think, as one who studies prebiotic chemistry, that the chemical evolution of life can be modeled as a large-scale complex filtering process. What were the chemical algorithms of those filters? Ah, a new idea to focus my attention!

The Shifting Ground of Higher Education

I recently read Joanna Williams’ Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought. I decided to read this before tackling her latest book (on my to-read list), Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity. While Consuming Higher Education is about the rise of viewing higher education as a commodity, especially with the introduction of university fees/tuition (previously practically free in many countries outside the U.S.), what struck me most were the author's clear and incisive comments on three trends: (1) assessment, (2) the social mobility argument, and (3) the increased language surrounding personal transformation.

I would not do justice to her prose by paraphrasing; so this blog post will be mostly quoting from her book along with some minor comments from me. If you find any of this interesting, I recommend reading her book in its entirety to experience the strength of her arguments. The author is based in the U.K., but the book covers both the U.K. and the U.S. in detail, with occasional mention of other systems. Let’s dive in first with Assessment and Accountability.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) was established in the U.K. as part of the 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act. The QAA is involved in “regulating institutions’ teaching and assessment practices. In the process of such regulation, the student experience inevitably becomes homogenized, as individual lecturers are expected to comply with demands for courses to be taught in credit-bearing modules with predetermined learning outcomes… Perhaps more damaging is the assumption that lecturers cannot be trusted to provide students with an appropriate educational experience without outside regulation.”

[UK lecturer = US college-level instructor]

The conclusion is damning: “Yet there is little evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to suggest that academic standards have risen in British universities since the establishment of the QAA. Despite academics expressing disgruntlement at an increase in bureaucracy, there is relatively little criticism of the aims of the QAA, as the need for regulation is accepted…”

In the U.S., there are increasing calls for ‘accountability’. As chairman of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, John Boehner asked over a decade ago: “What are students, parents and tax-payers getting for their money?” The author quotes an academic administrator who asks “How can we measure in a valid and reliable way, the nation’s investment in higher education? […] What benchmarks should we use to signify the value of higher education?”

The conundrum here, as the author discusses, is that “there is an assumption here that the value of education can be measured, and that the only issue is determining the correct tools to carry out this assessment of inherent worth. When education is conceived as more than just employability skills or a service to business, it is inherently unquantifiable. There is a risk that the focus on measuring the worth of education fundamentally alters that which is important about its content.” This reminds me of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the act of measuring a particle affects its motion leading to a potentially different end result. But it’s a scary thought; that the introduction of assessment measures, with attached carrots and sticks, may fundamentally alter educational aims.

Modular design coupled with learning outcomes “may encourage students to adopt a ‘shallow’ or ‘surface’ approach to learning which focuses upon the need to meet course requirements and fulfil assessment criteria in a way that circumvents the need for a deeper understanding of content… The need to meet learning outcomes encourages students to approach assessment tasks in a formulaic manner, providing sufficient information to demonstrate accomplishment without necessarily having developed a deep understanding of intellectual content… Students start to expect knowledge served up in easily digestible bite-sized chunks… A modularised structure promotes the idea that higher education is about collecting module credits, almost like stamp collecting, rather than developing a coherent intellectual overview of the chosen discipline.” Reading this has made me a bit more circumspect about praising the robustness of modular design, and reminded me about the importance of larger-scale coherence when teaching chemistry.

Social mobility is touted as a key benefit of higher education, and the language of equal opportunities can make it difficult to start a reasonable conversation about whether something else is being sacrificed. The typical argument made is that opening access will provide “opportunity for socially disadvantaged groups to enter the professions and other high-paying jobs, and that this will lead to income redistribution and the creation of a more socially just society.” It would be political suicide to question such statements.

However: “Such political consensus comes at a price… an erosion of the broader purpose of the academy in relation to the pursuit of knowledge, truth or scientific advance. There is a danger that a narrow focus upon social mobility may deny education a sense of purpose beyond employment prospects and income differentials. When universities downplay the importance of subject knowledge, students are left with little choice other than to position themselves as investors in their future employability and consumers of an educational commodity. When academics no longer exhibit a desire to struggle intellectually with challenging new knowledge or, importantly, to inspire the next generation to seek to do this, students instead seek satisfaction in the short term. Seeking both future financial returns and short-term satisfaction consolidates the student experience into a consumer experience.”

“More worrying to those concerned with academic standards is the assumption that what matters… is not students’ achievement but the progress they have made from the intellectual starting point… This relativises the concept of academic achievement and further changes the aims of a university. No longer is there an expectation that the pursuit of knowledge is good for improving society’s understanding of the world; rather what is important is now the ‘journey’ individual students have undertaken. This transforms the role of the university away from… [students] engaging with subject knowledge… [but] instead a more therapeutic mission to encourage students to participate in projects of personal transformation.” While I hope that students are transformed by their education, the language being bandied around these days (especially as units ancillary to academics have an increased voice at the administrative table) should give us pause.

All this is to say that we should keep our eyes wide open, as the ground is shifting beneath us in the world of higher education.

Creating a Potions Textbook

Reflecting on writing my blog over the last two years, one of my observations was that publicly writing down my intentions of trying specific new things in my classes encouraged me to actually carry them out. Call it some form of self-imposed accountability. I’ve hinted multiple times at having a chemistry class themed around Potions, possibly even writing a “textbook” about how magic relates to chemistry. Maybe I need to build this into one of my classes.

Next semester I am teaching a section of Chemistry and Society, one of the courses aimed at non-science majors fulfilling their core science requirement. Last year, I themed the class and final project around Water, more specifically the science and pseudoscience related to water products. A previous iteration was themed around forensics back in the heyday of CSI. I’ve also taught a version related to my interests in the origin of life. Perhaps I could do one on Potions. I think the students would get a kick out of having the first Harry Potter book be optional reading for the course!

The idea of course is to get students involved, and somehow combine that with getting an early version of a textbook written about chemistry and magic. So here’s the idea I have been toying with. We learn the basic chemistry principles as usual, but with a strong theme towards why this is important to create potions. Fairly early in the semester, I query students on what Potions they think should be created. (I did this once in one of my classes. Here were the results.) The final group projects would be to write Potion recipes for the desired potion using the principles of chemistry they have learned. They would need to justify why their chemical mix might have the desired effect, how they would obtain their ingredients (which might require more chemistry), and what reaction conditions will be needed to produce the desired potion. In the meantime, I will write early sections on the “theory” of potions that relate to the chemical principles needed to help them with their final project. Just thinking about it makes me excited!

What platform should I use? I don’t like the clunkiness of our gargantuan LMS, Blackboard, so I would like to avoid it. I haven’t actually used the wiki feature (although I have used Blackboard in several classes), so perhaps it is at least worthy of investigation since students have some familiarity with it in their other classes. My first thought was to use MediaWiki. I haven’t personally used it. Back in the day, my research group used AirSet, and we had a useful wiki on how to use the computational packages, basic tutorials on Unix, tips and tricks for text editors, more tips and tricks on how to optimize one’s computations, etc. Too bad the site went under. My wife (a librarian) mentioned the possibility of a LibGuide, and she also suggested Wordpress (which I have yet to use). There’s also Google Docs. Wise readers, if you have a suggestion with good reasons why I should use a particular system – please let me know. (Most of you readers know who I am, so just send me an e-mail. Or you can leave me your e-mail address on a comment to this post and I’ll contact you!)

Having students contribute to the textbook will hopefully increase their motivation. (Future classes could work on improving the book!) They would also get to work on their potion of interest, and hopefully learn a lot of chemistry about a particular desired phenomena and how it might interact with the chemistry in your body. There is also a “creative” aspect – they get to propose something novel (and fictitious) without being too bogged down in all the constraints. This is somewhat like the final project in my current General Chemistry class to design a new element.

Okay, now that I have written down this idea in this blog post, maybe I will have the motivation to carry it through. In the meantime, this semester isn’t over yet so I still need to focus on finishing well, both for my students and myself.

November G-Chem Elements Update

It’s time for another General Chemistry class update where I am threading the theme of Elements across the semester, culminating in a final project where the students invent and justify new elements. For my previous update, click here.

In October the students completed the third scaffolding assignment: “Invention of New Compounds”. Since we had just finished ionic and covalent bonding, and the properties of ionic and covalent compounds, the students had to propose a new compound based on known elements. What qualifies as new? An Internet search of the compound should not yield any useful information. Besides coming up with a name and chemical formula, the assignment required a description of structure/shape, physical properties, and potential uses of the compound (or why it might be inherently interesting). Students could choose to work individually or in small groups.

On the whole, students proposed a range of compounds. Some were very interesting, and others rather pedestrian. Many students (and/or groups) had trouble really thinking out of the box so they came up with simple substitutions where a known element was swapped with its radioactive “heavy” counterpart. Astatine, Tennesine, Seaborgium, Francium, all had their moment of glory! The students recognized that some of these elements were radioactive, and were therefore short-lived. Suggestions included being used as poisons and explosives.

It was a useful learning experience, because I realized that even when students proposed ionic compounds (and suggested properties in alignment), many drew me covalent structures instead of using the unit cell in solid-state compound description. (Admittedly, only one class period was spent on cubic unit cells while I rammed home Lewis structures over several class sessions.) Also because radioactivity was covered very early in the semester, students had forgotten that forming a chemical bond between a radioactive element and another element does not change its decay rate. I read several statements related to how non-radioactive elements would stabilize radioactive elements through chemical bonds. Students also had difficulty coming up with analogies to justify the properties they had listed. We went over these issues in class, so it was a good learning moment, not just for my students, but also for me.

The students have received their next assignment, a proposal draft of their new element. I assigned them into groups based on what I had seen from their work over the semester thus far, but I also took their preferences and some contingencies into account. The proposals are due in a couple of weeks. Here’s the first two lines in my instructions: “Your Final Project is to propose a new element, and justify why such a new element should be created. You may assume it is technologically possible but very expensive (this is what Tony Stark does in the movie Iron Man 2) and you are going to pitch the idea to investors who are also well-versed in science.” Then follows a list of parameters and things to consider as they come up with their new compound. Their final poster presentations will be in roughly five weeks. It will be a larger session because they will present at a symposium involving all the students in the living learning community (~110 students). I’m excited to see what they come up with!

Not related to the final project, I am experimenting with take-home exams this semester. While on average the students did well on the first exam, they did not do well on the second exam. (I give the students the full 2% associated with turning in the exam regardless of how they do. They take it under “exam conditions” as practice for the final exam, which is timed and closed-book.) I suspect that because it does not impact their grade, they did not study as hard for it. I took the opportunity to provide a learning moment (in the form of a pep talk) as to why they need to study as if these exams “counted” if they really wanted to prepare well for the final exam. The third exam is coming up this weekend, so I will devote half my Friday class to Q&A. I normally do this for the class-before-the-exam in my other classes when they are in-class exams. But I hadn’t done it this time around, so I need to go back to that practice. We’ll see how it goes.

Other than that, classes are going well. We’re somewhere around week ten, so there’s still five weeks to go in the semester. Whew!