One small step for man

I’ve been waiting for a chance to continue with the ideas from the last post. I decided to make potato herb bread today, despite the weather. Its been cold and dry for most of a week and was about 20F when I got out to the oven at 10:30am. Pealing the plastic covering off gave a surprise — a layer of ice condensed between plastic and oven.

• 11 AM fire lit
• 1 PM still frosty outside, installed R-19 cover over much of the oven
• 2 PM pulled out most of the fire, pushed some coals to the back and placed a brick in front to shield. Should have put the brink in the oven an hour earlier to warm
• while to oven soaked, I tossed an unstuffed chicken into the Weber, as planned. This time, the coals were not smokey — they were really just coals, so I dumped on a handful of alder smoking “chips” more like really coarse sawdust — huge cloud of smoke almost immediately. I placed chicken on aluminum foil to protect if from the heat.
• The chicken got stuffed with wild rice brown rice, plus onion, and herbs
• 2:30 PM the oven was 300F when the food got in, including 3 sweet potatoes. It started to snow
• 3:55 PM going to pull in the food, it smelled nicely smoky when I peaked at 3:40

Reflection-in-action: the small baking dish I used for the chicken was too shallow and the fat from the chicken was overflowing when I tried to slide it out.

Reflection, the oven cools off too fast in this environment, I either need to learn from Kiko Denzer’s new book about super insulating the oven (Kiko’s new book promises this) or get it into an indoor setting. One thought is to build a new one in my greenhouse.

I’ve been thinking about integrated living for awhile. (most especially on this project where I was trying to understand design choices in a Norwegian Stabur, and more recently trying to learn to use my oven) and yesterday I made the best I’ve ever had. I thought I’d share the recipe because it connects to integrated living. As you read this, play John McCutcheon song, “Water from another time” that talks about someone before to you saving a bit of water so that you’d have it to prime the pump (and you should do the same).

Soup from another time

Have your mother-in-law cook turkey for Thanksgiving, take the gravy with giblets and some of the white meat.
Go to the cabin and make Turkey noodle soup with some of the gravy, meat and assorted veggies; save the leftovers.
Roast some beef, but find its tough. Cube and make beef veggie soup; save the left overs.
Make ravioli with commercial spaghetti sauce doctored with lots of sautéed garlic; dump the leftovers back into sauce jar.
Make Bubble and Squeak, grate too much cheddar cheese, save the extra cheese. (Alas, we do this recipe from scratch, rather than from left overs.)
Make chicken korma over white rice; save a leftover serving of rice and topping.

In large pot combine all ingredients above (except cheese) with enough water. Simmer slowly until hot. Stir in cheese. Eat with bread; save the leftovers.

Today I have been making potato bread in and around my other Sunday chores. I cut corners and used instant mashed potatoes; should have boiled extra spuds for the Bubble and Squeak and saved a cup. With the bread I’ll bake the last of our pumpkins to make pie later in the week. BTW, turns out its much easier to clean a pumpkin that has frozen solid and then been allowed to thaw enough to be cut but with lots of ice crystals still inside. The guts are just not gooey (work fast, they thaw quickly).

This reflection is intended to help me remember the satisfaction of these experiences and to encourage me to move forward towards tighter integrations (for example the pumpkin seeds just went into the toaster oven, when they could well have been toasted in the residual heat of the mud oven if I were using it for the bread and pumpkin. (I’m not using it because its outdoors and we are having 20 mph (gust to 40) winds and the air temp is 32F., need to have a baking shed heated by the oven. (maybe partly baking shed, partly sauna?))

John Gardner blogs in Washington: a [Clean] Tech Capital? about his reflections on a question: “Can Washington take a lead role in solving [green tech] issues…” and he offers some evidence about important resources needed to answer his question in the affirmative: “political will, experience, community ethic, talent” but he seems to conclude the situation is great but not enough.

Here is where I think he starts to switch to reflection-in-action, assaying some next steps: “literacy in the issues, inventory our assets, identify strengths, develop our ethic.” He ends, “I am convinced Washington will play a major role in this all too important part of our future lives. I just don’t know yet exactly what it will be.”

What I think is missing is he doesn’t ask his readers to help in his learning nor do I see what next move he sees for the university. Literacy might be a place where WSU plays a role, as might be developing the ethic, and we might contribute to developing the experience & talent of the next generation. Its clear he is thinking about these problems, but it isn’t clear that these musings are asking for help to developing his thinking. Do you think I got the analysis right?

I’m motivated to this analysis because we have been working on a similar deconstruction of the blog of George Hotz, the hacker who first unlocked the iPhone. In Hotz’ blog we are seeing a portfolio of his learning, and we see him telling us what he knows, what he conjectures, what help he needs, and what he thinks his next move(s) will be, including at times doing an assessment of risk, payoff, and resources. This is interesting both because it illustrates the sophistication of a 17 year-old problem solver, and because he illustrates how he gathered additional resources (via his blog and elsewhere) to help with his problem. More insight into our analysis of Hotz, or other examples of learning during adaptive problem solving are welcome.

I am doing these reflections in preparation for working on my portfolio. I’ve started with some exploration of my thinking here and I’m trying to get more explicit about doing (and how I’m doing) reflection, for example here. I think my next move needs to be to look across the collections of my work and do some selection/ reflection to bring out themes and evidence of my leadership and learning.

I got a late start today on the oven. I got a fire going with lots of prunings, mostly 1″ diameter and less. When I came back to check on it, flames were a foot out the top of the 4 foot stovepipe!

The problem I decided to work on was the ways to use the Weber grill. I dug out coals into the Weber grill (one of the 18″ diameter ones). Covered, with vents open, the grill threw off a huge plume of smoke. I had started a roast by searing it in a cast iron pot and I put the roast into the Weber to smoke. The smoke was not the best smelling, because I had some pine and what-not in the fire, so I didn’t leave the roast more than 10 minutes. (It added a better smoke smell to the meat than the fire indicated.)

BUT, the idea I’m having is to make sure I use cherry and apple prunings in the late stage of the fire, so that those are the coals I’m pulling out. Then the meat goes into that smoke for 20 minutes while the oven soaks and then the meat goes into the oven to roast. I suppose that spuds could go into the Weber too, maybe cut and oiled.

The other experiment I’m trying is leaving some fire in the oven. I didn’t burn the fire long enough and its only 275F in there. I pushed all the bigger coals to the back and put in a couple bricks between the fire and the front of the oven. This reduces my cooking space by half, but the bricks block direct heat from the still flaming coals from reaching where I would bake. Since I got this late start, I’m only going to cook a thermometer and a couple spuds tonight, the roast is in the conventional oven. Next time, roast chicken maybe.

PS. The spuds cooked nicely. The temp fell to 225F (maybe 212F) as the oven remained damp the whole time (steaming madly under its leaky tarp, now supplemented with another layer).

It snowed last night and is still snowing lightly this AM. The Weber is covered, the oven is clear of snow.

Dinner was great, baked halibut w/ herbs; baked acorn squash and spuds, bread and pumpkin pie. Pretty well filled the oven.

Log of the process:

• 2:15 light fire with lots of 1×3 and 1×1 size material (7-8 of the 1×3). dark smoke, creosote smells. tried putting on the oven door, but the smoke got worse.
• 2:45 clear smoke, finally got all that wood burning well. Door propped ajar, coals are white hot. Should have started with 1/2 the amount of wood until the oven started to warm.
• 2:55 soot burning off the inside of the oven, added 3 pieces of wood 2.5″ diameter and 14″ One piece proved to be green and hissed for 15 minutes.
• 3:00 still cold and damp on the outside of the oven
• 3:15 still cold and damp outside, clear smoke, all wood burning well or already coals, added 2×6 and 2×4 elm pieces (these were a mistake, as we will see). Wooden oven door is charing where cob is not protecting it from the fire’s heat. (Cob will need repair by February)
• 4:20 fire all raked out into metal trash can, burned paint off can, burned oven mitt. Too many coals
• 4:25 swabbed brick with wet rag. Closed damper in flue, put wet rag on inside of door to make it seal tighter. Rag over chimney as extra damper. Its very hot in the oven, thermometer goes to 600 and is pegged
• 5:10 put in fish, pie, spuds and squash. Bread shaped but still rising.
• 5:20 bread in, 400 degrees. Oven is steaming from roof, chimney and door.
• 6:00 everything out, oven still 325

Reflection-in-action

• Start with a smaller fire to begin warming the oven, adding wood incrementally. Stop adding wood more than an hour before oven is ready, the white hot coals will continue to heat the oven for quite a while.
• Get a Weber grill to catch the hot coals, plan food to BBQ on the grill while the oven is baking.
• Have a plan for what to do with a hot oven when the baking is finished. At 10PM oven is still 225. Crackers? Slow cooked roast?

Reflection
Much as I discovered some of the vertical integration that comes from hewing timber and doing timber frame joinery for building (in terms of the by-product scraps), and in a similar vein, the vertical integration of using scraps from my sawmill for heating, I can see that there are integrations to be made with this kind of small-wood burner, the size wood the oven burns is a size I’ve always thought was too small to be useful - which is important to note.

There are also integrations to be made among the kinds and timing of foods that are cooked in the oven.

Were the oven in an enclosed space the waste heat would also be significant for heating. Waste heat in the flue might be used to warm water, though my current design would require a pump to move the water up to the chimney and back.

The other night I was pondering my resume/portfolio and concluding that I needed to have a better handle on project proposals and project summaries — forms of reflection-in-action.

This morning I was reading the preface to The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, which struck me as an example of the reflecting I’ve been trying to understand. They are looking back, noting a problem, which formed the basis of their question for further exploration. The book is the evidence they are presenting for how they framed and then addressed the question.

Eight years have passed since Laurel’s Kitchen first appeared, and in that time our approach to whole-foods cookery has evolved considerably. For one thing, we’ve learned to bake bread.

It’s true that back in 1976 we talked a good bread story. And we probably did know as much about baking with whole-grain flours an any of the other people who were writing books about it.

But over time, we became increasingly impatient with the occasional disasters Laurel mentions, and not quite so ready to blame them on factors out of our control. So began the long and painstaking enquiry that resulted at lat in The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, which, as it turns out, may be more of an apprenticeship than a book.

The book is presented as a milestone, not as a reflection-in-action. Those intermediate reflections-in-action must have existed, working and failed recipes, thoughts for next steps. We don’t see those in the book, though there are references to examining the work of others, who serve as context, evidence, mentors, etc.

I was in Laurel’s because I wanted to make some bread in my new oven. This is therefore a milestone item in my portfolio: the oven is ready for baking. In addition to bread, I want to do a pie, some fish and an acorn squash. Those are the questions I’m asking — can I bake them? Data, conclusions, next steps will follow.

I spent some time before writing this remaking the categories of by blog. Pushing things under major headings and making a new set of headings for My Portfolio. This post goes under Milestone, much like the preface to Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, but less developed because the milestone is smaller.

I’m struggling with the problem of my resume (or now my portfolio) again. Looking back, I like the analysis I did a year ago thinking about a 21st Century Resume. It talks about forward-looking and backward-looking documents that serve as reflections about problems and their solutions. We see those same kinds of documents created by Hotz as he hacked the iPhone.

This kind of reflection captures Gregory Bateson’s notion about information “a difference that makes a difference”. That is, reflections about changes in the world that I made or plan to make — not just random speculation. So in addition to capturing reflections (be they grant proposals, articles (such at the one requested by Innovate), or blog posts, its incumbent on me to show that my reflecting was “reflection-in-action” (from Donald Schön). That is, I’m reflecting with the intent to make a difference.

This thinking helps me move further along the path in the previous post, where I was reorganizing elements on my paper CV. Beyond organizing the content, I need to make presentations of myself that are narrative, that show how these reflections and milestones connect to make patterns.

But collecting the necessary evidence is not easy. For an example of the problem, I joined CTLT in the fall of 2000. They were well into the process of creating an online learning environment called “The Bridge.” One of the key, and incompletely developed, elements of the program was a personal workspace. Unlike previous thinking about OLEs, this one provided a resource for the learner, the learner’s own, private domain, that transcended the temporal constraints of a course. One of the key limitations of The Bridge’s personal space was that it was totally private, the mechanisms to authorize others to parts of your workspace were never realized.

I played a role in the retirement of The Bridge. It was a loss, a defeat, because it successor on our campus was WebCT, which had a teacher-centric, term-limited perspective. Personal space for the learner was lost. At the time I did not place much emphasis on the lost feature.

Enter SharePoint. The university was adopting it for administrative productivity reasons, but it also had a MySite feature that captured The Bridge’s personal space and added all the functionality that was never implemented in The Bridge.

I spearheaded an effort to understand SharePoint enough to get CTLT and ITS to implement it as a resource for the university. The personal portfolio and collaboration space of the MySite is catching fire in multiple places in the university.

OK, so here is the problem — what goes into my resume or portfolio from this story? I didn’t put the personal space into The Bridge, I recognized (but didn’t document) its importance. I recognized that MySites had the same feature. I argued, probably nowhere in print, that the university should implement MySites. I was a cheerleader for the explorations by CTLT staff and their colleagues into SharePoint portfolios, but did not do much of the important technical or intellectual work. I co-authored a white paper about some of these ideas, but it does not capture the difference that I made at WSU, though the white paper might yet be seen to make a difference itself. Closer to the mark is this summary of the history of SharePoint at WSU. It documents that a change was made, but doesn’t show either the seminal role of The Bridge or my agency.

So how do I capture the evidence of my past work, my learning? If I were writing project proposals I would have forward-looking reflections. If I were writing publications of my work I would have backward-looking reflections. We have tried to institutionalize these documents in CTLT, but we tend to rush along with the work and not create them.

FacOps started it. They needed a document management solution that could serve as an integration platform for the wide range of data sources that they use to manage WSU facilities. They were running the 2003 version, and evangelizing it in various ways. FacOps, ITS and several Colleges that had started exploring SharePoint hosted the “SharePoint Summit” in the summer of 2004. ITS’s contribution to the show was a demonstration of how SharePoint could be used to re-implement the functions currently served by Oracle in myWSU. What I saw in that demonstration had some big implications for CTLT.

1) The myWSU demo had a link to a SharePoint site for a class and I realized that if SharePpint could be used for a class site, that potential would be discovered by some of the Colleges beginning to host it. I argued that the potential existed for Colleges to begin using SharePoint for classes and CTLT needed to be prepared to consult with faculty and/or provide students with helpdesk support. My subsequent exploration of SharePoint with the help of Roxie Mitchell from Microsoft (winter 2004-05) convinced me that SharePoint could serve as a Learning Management System at least as sophisticated as “The Bridge” [an LMS that CTLT had created in 2000 and was retiring in favor of WebCT (now Blackboard CE)].

2) The other exciting piece of the SharePoint Summit demos was the MySite feature. When developing myWSU, we had looked at Oracle’s personal site and collaboration tools. They did not seem completely developed when we looked (2003) and the licensing costs prevented WSU from acquiring them. The SharePoint Portal tools were coming as parts of centrally purchased licenses, which changed the cost. Since the licensing resulted in zero cost to Colleges, individual Colleges might launch their own portals with mySites. WSU’s history with the adoption of Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange made me believe that College adoption of Portal and MySites was probable. Exploring this idea with those colleagues, I found that the challenge for Colleges to give students MySites was that the students might use College resources for non-College purposes. That suggested that students needed access to MySites as a central resource — and a role for CTLT to play.

Concurrent with these events, CTLT was exploring the Open Source Portfolio (OSPI) tools, looking for an ePortfolio platform to offer the university. The SharePoint platform as ePortfolio was more appealing than OSPI for several reasons: 1) support and scalability, 2) overlapping skills/training (if faculty were being moved to SharePoint for enterprise-wide business reasons, the skills they learned would transfer to ePorfolios without needing to learn another tools 3) worldware (skill students built in SharePoint would more likely be applicable on the job than skills built in OSPI. 4) Personal control of a collaborative resource that was outside of any course, and could span a student’s career at the university (and possibly beyond).

By Spring 2006 CTLT had formed a partnership with ITS where ITS would deploy, and CTLT would provide user support for, SharePoint 2003 Portal (and MySites) for all current students and employees. At the same time we collaborated to create a SharePoint LMS offering — with the rationale that if faculty had MySite, they would (and already have) used it for their classes. The problem for the institution with classes in MySites is that its harder to provide central support (such as automatically arranging the student enrollment) and providing backup for records retention (since quite likely that the institution will have no knowledge of the class in the faculty’s MySite). Bellevue Community College was a year ahead of WSU with SharePoint MySites, and was having this experience. Thus, the MyClass LMS offering was initially motivated by “self-defense” against classes in MySites.

SharePoint for classes, while powerful and using the same SharePoint skills and training, is limited because it lacks a gradebook for sharing scores between instructor and student and a quiz/testing tool, which is popular as a testing strategy in some online courses. SharePoint is presently better suited to courses with discussions, project collaboration, or for courses where the instructor needs to share documents to students and the interaction otherwise takes place in the classroom.

Previously I posted on David Wiley’s Open Ed online course. I decided to drop in on the course and see what was happening. I found Alessandro’s post of his frustrations with the course, with David Wiley’s reply:

Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up.

I think its important to surface an assumption going on here and look into some alternatives, especially in light of what this course is about (or maybe what I read “Open Education” to be about). David talks about reading and responding to each student, as if that is his role. Students talk about the “dry” readings and their posts as summaries of those readings.

What if instead, David had framed the course differently — A few general readings to start things off, and a request for each student to propose an open-ed project that interested them and that they would research. However, rather than working alone, students would be asked to form teams among the class members, selecting among the proposed projects the one that they found most interesting. My friend and former colleague Stephen Spaeth designed a distance course (Decs 340) using that concept. The students were all older, working, and had authentic on the job applications for the ideas of the course. Theron DesRosier places this design idea into a broader context when he talks about bringing the outside world into the class.

In addition to working on projects, students would weekly post about readings related to open education they were finding that aided their projects. Some would delve into learning objects, others into copyright and licenses. The topics of the course would get “covered” but driven by the authentic work of the students. The learning of any individual might not be as wide as the course survey, but it would be deeper and more lasting.

Wiley’s student Karen Fasimpaur has proposed a project that I think fits the notions above when she writes (outside of class!?) about her project idea to create a kids dictionary. This looks like an open education activity, when she asks “How could this be hosted to best facilitate mass collaboration?” [Frankly, I’d like to get involved in such a project, and I’d start by suggesting that kids working with parents and teachers could be the authors. Other dictionaries would be a resource to them. I’d also endorse Karen’s inclination to use a wiki for the reasons outlined here.]

I see notes in the course that it has been redesigned in the latter weeks of the semester to give students more reflection time. Perhaps it could still be modified to give students more peer-critique responsibilities as well. A rubric such at the one in WSU Critical Thinking Project might be adapted to provide the framework for the peer feedback, and (for next offering of the course) even the framework for the instructor assessment.

Digital Ethnography wiki asks:

What are we DOING to change how we are teaching? If you have any great examples of how you have changed up your classroom (or “classroom”) in ways that are more in tune with the information environment in which we all now exist, please comment. I am looking for examples that span all the possibilities

This is the group lead by Micheal Wesch that has created a series of provocative videos including:

• Information R/evolution,
• The machine is us/ing us, and
• A vision of students today.

So Wesch and company asks us “what we are DOING to change how we are teaching” and I want to rephrase the question to talk about learning — because the “Vision of students today” video really suggests that the learners and the learning are contextualized differently.

By way of answer, I’d point to these pieces of CTLT work (in no particular order):

• ePortfolio contest (last year and this year)
• Beyond LMS (white paper and collaborative space)
• Decision to move content from the CTLT website to the WSU wiki where the community could contribute and material could be variously tagged
• Thoughts about wikis for learning
• Or these ideas about re-thinking the role of the land-grant university

What do you think? Am I on the right track to shift Wesch’s focus from Teaching to Learning? Am I missing examples, or are these unclear?