First, Learn to Boil an Egg: Towards a Pragmaticist Vision of the Physical Sciences

The potential usefulness of analogies drawn from physical chemistry in thinking about education is demonstrated by example. The pace of technological change means that knowledge acquisition is undergoing a phase transition from a kinetically-controlled process, where a primary role of the educator was in catalysing the rate of knowledge acquisition, to a thermodynamically-controlled process, where the rate of acquisition is essentially instant and the focus of the educator must be on facilitating the structuring of acquired knowledge into a coherent framework. The author reflects on the implications of this phase transition for the higher education sector in general and a regional Australian university in particular. The strategies employed by the author and his students in a fourth year chemistry coursework unit are shown and presented as a possible model for adaptation to the thermodynamically-controlled learning environment.