The first year of the University of Tasmania's Graduate Certificate in Timber (Processing and Building) (also known as the Grad Cert Timber) has come to an end and the School of Architecture's Centre for Sustainable Architecture with Wood (CSAW) is gearing up for the new units taught in 2012 and the new year's student intake.

You can find more information about the University of Tasmania's Graduate Certificate in Timber (Processing and Building) at their website.

What is a Graduate Certificate?

For those who don't know about courses such as this, some background is in order. A Graduate Certificate is a four-unit course that generally focuses on a special area of knowledge or skill.

The Grad Cert Timber follows this general pattern but focuses on two connected areas of knowledge and skill; firstly processing the raw material, logs, into timber and engineered wood products, and then using timber or wood products in building, either structurally or architecturally.

A broad, practical, online course

There are five timber units available under the course: an introductory building and wood science unit, and then two specialist timber buildings units: Timber in building construction and Timber and durability in exposed applications, and two specialist timber processing units: Board processing: Hardwood and softwood, and Engineered Wood Products. An elective management unit rounds out list.

The course is taught predominantly online. Recorded lectures are available each week, as are technical readings and assessments: either quizzes or more detailed written assignments. Sometimes, movies of building projects or mill operations support the lectures.

The course is available to anyone with an interest in timber in the building design professions, the building industry more generally, or the timber and wood products industry. Also, students can access the course from anywhere, though at the moment, they have to be from Australia and New Zealand to enrol.

Understanding and using wood - some basic questions

The first year of teaching this course has brought forward some interesting points that I would like to introduce here and discuss in subsequent blogs. These include:

• What knowledge do people generally have about wood -about its character and performance as a building material
• The uptake of online learning, particularly the way students and others are using online content
• The regional influence in timber use around Australia. As the course's students come from all around Australia, and potentially New Zealand as well, the differences in perspective on wood use is quite marked

Today, I will start with the first point but only really touch the surface of it.

What do most people know about wood?

To start, establishing a level of assumed knowledge about a subject is important for any teacher preparing and delivering a course. Every teacher has to decide what they assume the student already understands (and they don't have to teach) and what the student doesn't understand (and they do have to teach). There is no point asking the students, because, to paraphrase Rumsfeld, they don't know what they don't know. They are also pretty good at actively avoid admitting what they know they don't know.

In the end, I followed a quote from the head of the CSIR's timber section in 1936, H. Boas who wrote that:

Though timber is a material of such fundamental importance in construction, and though it has been recognised since the earliest history of mankind, there is no material about which so little is generally known, and about which so many fallacies are widely and tenaciously held.

I assumed that students are generally uncertain about wood and this has worked out pretty well.

However, this forced me to ask: why is this the case? Why are they uncertain or hesitant, and why do some aspects of timber production and use have a sense of black art around them?

For me, the reasons for this are:

• We get wood from trees and trees are natural living organisms, and
• Trees have been around for us to use since humans first evolved.

Let's just look at the first of these today.

The variability and complexity of wood

Trees are natural living organisms. They have evolved over millennia to survive in the soil and climatic conditions found around the world. Understandably this has generated a lot of variability in the timber in each tree and between trees, both of the same species and of different species.

Most people understand this, at least intuitively. They know pieces of local hardwood will be different from each other and certainly different from pieces of pine.

If we think of all the different species that we know: blackwood, black butt, spotted gum, western red cedar, Tasmanian oak - we could make quite a list. And we know each of these species is different and each has particular characteristics that go all the way back to the tree.

This is a lot of variability to come to grips with.

Now, lets compare this degree of variability with other building materials that we use on a day-to-day basis, like steel and concrete. Humans manufacture steel and concrete, and we have deliberately standardised these basic products internationally. As designers or users of steel, we know that steel will have generally the same mechanical properties in each of its principle directions and these properties will be the same with product from around the world.

Timber isn't like this. It is variable in almost every sense, and when we get product from species from around the world, we see more differences and variability.

So, to return to the original observation that students seem uncertain about wood. It seems that students can have an intuitive understanding of timber but the obvious variability and diversity in the material (and in the ways we can use it) generates uncertainty when you get down to specifics.

For better or worse, this variability is one of the fundamental joys (and difficulties) of working with wood.

You can find more information about the University of Tasmania's Graduate Certificate in Timber (Processing and Building) at their website.

Labels: