In class writing 9/29/2008

Think about a recent conversation you had with another person, or a group, in which you learned something new about a topic you were unfamiliar with. Write about your thoughts on the difference between learning through conversation with another person, versus learning by reading about a subject.

One recent conversation I had was with my roommate about renewable power and nuclear energy. I am an electrical engineering going into power (ECE concentration) and he is a nuclear engineer. Since my current research is involving Solar Energy and he worked at a nuclear plant over the summer, we had quite an interesting dialogue on how energy should be created and the trade-offs/benefits of each one. You can always learn about stuff from reading books, articles, or research papers, but it’s quite different from learning through conversation with other people. When you interact with people, you can draw from a much wider reference point. While articles are limited to the topic, you can address multiple aspects of a topic when talking with a person. For example, while comparing energy generation between nuclear power, coal power or solar, you can examine just the efficiency. While solar is abysmally inefficient, in some respects so is nuclear (a large majority of the energy is wasted in unharvested heat). This doesn’t address many other aspects of the positives or negatives involving the various systems that can be brought up in conversation.