I am so sorry Charles because this problem is too much for me as I am not an accountant. I will mention that landfills are filling up with e-waste some great tonnage an hour in the USA is produced every hour(I heard 40 tons) and there are studies that in fact since 1990 paper use has increased (paper less office report at Statistics Canada). I once told persons supporting persons with disabilities that if they bought someone a computer make sure to buy them a printer. It seems to me at this point that AOIR is not helping the e waste problem by encouraging the latest and greatest e stuff that will become the e waste of next week. Free geek may have your answer www.freegeek.org I have been a teaching assistant for some professors who used mostly electronic mark recording sheets and others who use paper copies. The paper copies were used for security reasons and the professor who did this had used computers for years.... Well she kept electronic records but on a non-networked computer. Asking yourself, "What is the carbon footprint?" or like questions, seems like doing yoga mediation and trying to connect the different methods with the rest of the universe. Sorry I could not be more helpful but the question really needs to be asked. On 4-Sep-08, at 6:52 PM, Charles Ess wrote:
Hi all, a colleague who is responsible for sustainability initiatives on our campus has asked me if I knew anything about the following:
a careful, quantitatively oriented analysis of the comparative costs - both direct (e.g., consumption of electricity, toner, etc.) and indirect (costs of manufacturing and distributing paper, computers, monitors, etc.) - of a) paper-based techniques in teaching and learning - e.g., 5-page lab reports in a composition book turned in weekly, to be read, hand- marked by the instructor, and then returned to the students, vis-à-vis b) comparable (at least roughly) paperless techniques - e.g., written work produced and turned in electronically, graded and commented electronically, and then returned to the students electronically?
I know that the advent of the paperless office has been heralded for at least three, going on four decades, coupled with the proclamation of the imminent death of the book, etc. - and that for many good reasons (besides, in my case, sheer curmudgeonly Ludditism), paper and books retain their unique places and roles in learning (and elsewhere). So I, for one, would argue strenuously for the ongoing importance of what Naomi Baron so nicely encapsulates in her recent book _Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World_ (Oxford U.P.) under the heading of written culture (thanks, Naomi!), even if paper and books might be comparatively more expensive from a material and environmental standpoint.
But however one views these matters pedagogically, etc. - the question is a good one: does anyone know what the comparative costs really are?
Many thanks in advance for any pointers listmembers can provide!
- charles ess
PS: I'm using ch. 9, "Gresham's Ghost: Challenges to a Written Culture" in my Freshman class to introduce them to my arcane insistence on their developing their own commonplace book - and thereby as an introit to further work in Plato's Phaedrus as a way of helping us develop a framework for thinking through the relationships between our technologies of communication and our conceptions of our selves, our relationships to larger communities, etc. I recommend the chapter - and the book at large - heartily! - c.
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