One small step for man

This is the next in my series of oven-related reflections. I’m coming to understand how different a mud oven is from a microwave oven. The latter heats just the item you want. Usually this is a small item, its heated quickly (seconds or minutes) and the oven is cold afterward. Kiko Denzer writes about super-insulated ovens, I’m learning to bank coals to one side behind a wall of pre-heated fire brick. Each strategy keeps the oven warm longer.

Last weekend we came into a bounty of salmon, a result of the Palouse Prairie School celebration . We had friends coming over, a former miller, and I decided to make bread. And a casserole with the salmon, and why not a fruit crumble. Things got further out of hand when I decided to smoke some of the salmon (I mean, I’m around, doing chores, tending fires, why not run the smoker at the same time?) My smoking does not get the meat very warm, so I’ve usually finished in the oven on low. Then my wife remembered one of our guest’s food allergies and decided to make a second fruit crumble.

So, oven is 550F by 4PM, bread goes in. Bread out in 20 min, spuds, casserole and first crumble in at 5:40. Trade for second crumble while we eat. After cleaning kitchen, fish into 250F oven till bedtime. Oven still 250F an hour later when fish comes out and still 150F the next morning. Kiko has posted a nice summary reflection on his firing experiences, importantly, he describes the value of drying his wood in the last heat of the oven

In the traditional potluck, guests cook at their house and bring finished dish to the party. What about bringing raw food and baking it? Guests could bring more food than would be eaten and take home leftovers. Some items could be baked during/after dinner and taken home whole. If we understood what to do in a 200+ oven overnight, the host could put something (roast?) in at bedtime.

The following is an invitation to Centers of Teaching and Learning (CTL)

Preamble
We are looking at updating our website. Again.

The last revision used Oracle tools to make a site that was readily modified by the whole staff — an attempt at content management to eliminate the webmaster. It worked to an extent. We also moved some of our content into the university wiki — an invitation to the campus to contribute to our efforts. But our staff still say they can’t find the stuff they want to help our faculty.

More recently we have been thinking about Web 2.0 strategies for learning, summarized here. This has me thinking about how our CTL could be working differently. Further, I suspect that all CTLs are working on roughly the same problems — assessing learning outcomes, accreditation, large classes, integrating the newest technology, course evaluations, advancing our own professional development, etc — AND all are understaffed for the amount of one-on-one effort required.

We recently enjoyed the help of a post-doc with expertise in survey research who made a collection of public domain survey instruments, with annotations and some bibliographic references about each. We also have our own collection of course evaluation instruments and another collection of rubrics. Each is filed in its little cubby somewhere.

One of the requests for our site redesign was have fingertip access to these surveys. And make that collection available to faculty who might wish to write their own surveys using the survey tools we support.

A large amount of the work of our CTL has no need of secrecy. As a public institution none of it can really be kept secret, but discretion is often advisable around data associated with instructors and programs. Some materials we use have licenses that restrict our posting them on the web.

Sticking with the obviously public content, how do we (all the world’s CTLs) use Web 2.0 tools and Learning 2.0 strategies to collaborate on the common problems we are addressing? I recently wrote a letter of advice to a Web 2.0 Learner. It offers some clues.

The Invitation
Join us in creating the world’s CTL. You will need to work differently and think differently, but my hypothesis is that, by changing some habits, you can learn to work more effectively.

The Strategy
1. Use Google. Someone else might be working on your problem. There are multiple ways to search using Google, including Google Alerts that will run a search and email you when it finds new results (works very well for highly targeted searches). Google’s Blog search and Alerts each produce RSS. You can also get 3rd party RSS feeds of regular Google searches.

2. Teach Google. Google learns from us. (Thanks Michael) The strategies below are all about using and storing links to teach Google.

3. Use Wikipedia. Google privileges Wikipedia highly in its search results. Find your topic there. If Wikipedia knows less than you, “Be Bold.” Not everything can be in Wikipedia, use it to point to additional key resources and communities, this teaches Google and since Wikipedia is where a novice is likely to start, it invites people to your community and resources.

4. Find your community online. Join them, use their tools. Can’t find a community, create a community space. In any case, tell Wikipedia where the community is.

5. Empty everything that does not need to be private from your file cabinet, hard drive, and file server onto the web. Put everything at URLs where it will remain stable over time. If possible, put copies where your community can edit them. Tell Google by linking to these resources.

6. Bookmark online, not in your browser. Use the bookmarking tools and tags your community uses. Post information about which tags in these systems are useful in your community spaces and Wikipedia. This helps your community and it teaches Google.

7. Blog. When you have on a problem invite the world to think about it. Report your solutions, too. Make links in your blog posts to the resources you found. Keep a blog roll of resources that you find valuable. This helps you, your community and teaches Google.

8. Comment on other blogs. Provide both feedback and guidance. Add links in your comments, these teach Google.

9. Write reviews that synthesize and link several resources or your current solution. Post this review where your community can best find it, which might be your blog, your community’s space or Wikipedia.

10. Create custom Google searches. This can focus the search experience for your faculty and community. It also teaches Google.

Possible Objections
Wikipedia can’t be trusted. If the Wikipedia pages you need are wrong or are changing, garden them.

I don’t have time for this. Make this your work, not extra work

My stuff is not good enough to be online. Get over it. If you dare share it with anyone, put it online. Refine it as you go. Keep both versions, blog about what you learned and why the new version is better. This is your learning portfolio, it helps you earn credibility in your community.

I don’t have a web server. Where I can put my stuff? Use free online resources.

Proposal for our CTL Website
This discussion started from a need to revise our unit’s website. It proposed that we collectively create a planetary CTL web resource. Given the above, what should our campus CTL site contain?

As a starting hypothesis, and to be blunt, our website should contain only the things that keep our budget from being cut.

That means the site needs an Intranet where we can securely share with select members of our campus the data and reports related to our collaborations with them.

We may also need a public repository where we can dump our files online.

The site also should provide information about the problems that our unit is working on, and who the partners are in this work, and the value this work is providing to the University — what have we done for you lately? This might be a learning history or a showcase portfolio. This information should be rich in links and other clues to find more information. Some of the links should be fed into the site as RSS from the activities above.

The site should provide one-click access when that is politically valuable, but it should not strive to be an A-Z index, rather our site should have a custom Google search, and hints about what problems that search has been optimized to address.

Our site might have public resources if they are politically valuable to us, but we don’t want turn our site into a content silo, rather the preference should be to link to resources stored elsewhere. We should strive to collaborate with other units and host resources in the most appropriate places (For example, campus-centric technology help in the campus help resource. (And we should remember to make our custom Google search look there.)) We should also collaborate with our communities and put resources on off campus sites if that gives the resources more global value.

Objections
Faculty should find the resources they need by browsing our site.
Maintaining links and resources takes time. Unless having those links is protecting our budget, we should spend time on things that are more essential. Further, we are probably better off assuming (or helping) faculty use Google than being information architects. Social bookmarking is quick and has other payoffs. Feed the results of your social bookmarking to your website. Use search.

I don’t want to put our content in places we don’t control. Wikipedia is based on the hypothesis that “we are smarter than me.” Its seems to be working.

There won’t be much left on our site. So? See the hypothesis about protecting budget and political value.

Our technical and web staff won’t have jobs. Keep your staff focused on your intranet needs.

In If you have a problem, ask everyone (CORNELIA DEAN
NYTimes, July 22, 2008) says:

“John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing.”

The idea in this article is that by gathering other perspectives, diverse ones, it is possible to solve problems that you could not solve yourself from your perspective. This is analogous to the story on 60 minutes about the inventor with a new approach to treating cancer.

Palouse Prairie School was awarded a charter to open in 2009 using the Expeditionary Learning (EL) model. Pupils will work on integrated problems (metaphorical expeditions into unknown territories to solve a real problem and perform a community service [the philosophy behind Expeditionary Learning, a trade name, has its origins in Outward Bound Expeditions]).

So where does “ask everyone” play in an EL elementary school? The pupils need to gather perspectives to work on their problems. Perspectives will enrich their learning. And enhance their problem solving.

The strategy for gathering perspective may be as simple as taking the problem home to the dinner table, “Mom, how can you help my class think about this problem?” or more sophisticated, by posting the problem on the Internet.

In the latter case, a Web 2.0 strategy is important. How can a school child hope to get help from some stranger somewhere in the world? 1. By linking to others (especially the way blogs do, called ‘trackback’), 2. by using key terms that Google will recognize, and 3. by having a ‘reputation’ to raise the rank of the student’s post in Google’s results.

Tracking back gains attention from a specific person. Its part of a process of saying ‘I read your stuff’ which is the kind of flattery that might get someone else to read you.

Reputation is earned, by being linked by others, which means, by doing or saying something worthwhile.

Tracking back takes thoughtful reading. Being linked takes saying something worthy of another’s mentioning. Both skills are, I think, desirable in a 21st century learner.

If a school had a blog, and it engaged the world thoughtfully with that blog, and friends of the school started linking to the blog posts because the ideas were worthwhile, the reputation of the blog would rise, and the potential of gaining help on a problem (ask everyone) would increase as well. (Not that you make a blog post and wait — you need to be active, finding a community that you think can help and engaging it.)

How does this work? I took the title of the NYTimes article and stuck it into Google and found that Cathy Davidson had responded to the NYTimes with a blog post on participatory learning. Having found Cathy and HASTAC blog, I had also found the term ‘participatory learning’ which has some interesting Google results but no Wikipedia entry.

Were children working on a problem, and found nothing in Wikipedia, that would be a prompt to create the page, even just a “stub page” in Wikipedia terms. A Wikipedia page serves as high ground (in a Google search sense) for the concept and from that page one hopes to find links to key resources and communities, perhaps even ones created by the students. Here are more ideas on how to think about wikis for learning.

The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU has been thinking about how to use some of these ideas to transform University education. We are asking how to help students engage the world in authentic assessment of the student’s work. I can point to examples like 17 year-old George Hotz hacking the iPhone (for my purposes the hack is less important than the blog where he shared the blow-by-blow problem solving and got help) and Margo Tamez who, along with her Apache Nation in Texas, is taking on US homeland security over the idea of a border wall with Mexico. I think these ideas can be brought down to the level of the elementary school and challenge children to engage in authentic problems in a global context.

I’ve been trying to make headway on understanding a 21st Century Resume, thinking that it should not be your father’s paper resume. But recently I’ve had a couple “send me your resume” requests, so here it is in all its paginated glory: Nils S Peterson CV.

I’m choosing categories for this post. Milestone is obvious for a noted setback. Reflection-in-action seems an appropriate guide to what I should be doing, but it is Assessment that caught my eye. Clearly, it is assessment that is the goal of keeping a document like a CV. In my experience reviewing job candidates, a CV is a cumbersome tool for assessment.

So, I have added a new section to my CV, at the bottom, Community Activism. My wife’s summary: you defeated WalMart, Saved the Bus, and Chartered a school. But the reflection, and I hope your assessment, is what did I learn doing those things?

I joined the NoSuperWalmart effort in December 2005 hoping to get a chance to apply my ideas about blogs to community organizing. There is a blog, but it did not become a key piece in the communication strategy. I found myself in a role of spokesperson and part of the inner leadership circle, but the communications strategies that carried the day were email, newspaper ads, and handbills.

A year later, I got a better chance to explore the nexus of online and local community organizing. The conclusion that I draw from this work is that the web can be integrated into a local community’s political organizing. It requires effort to make the site participatory (with multiple perspectives) and authoritative (with data that has been collected about the problem and is open to inspection, support or refutation).

My most recent activism has revolved around gaining a charter for Palouse Prairie School in Moscow. This work has been conducted mostly offline, but its given me a chance to think about how to merge the content management of two blogs and Google Calendar into a web site. It not right yet, but its a step beyond the NoSuperWalmart effort.

What I think I’ve learned in those efforts is feeding into a series of blog posts I’m co-authoring regarding transforming the grade book. What we are arguing is that a community assesses its members (and a university education should assess students) by applying a set of broadly agreed criteria across a span of the member’s work. We are exploring the mechanisms by which the learner gathers, organizes, learns from, and demonstrates that assessment. The result will not be a CV, it will be a portfolio and the public assessment of that portfolio. Not a showcase portfolio, but a learning portfolio.

The CV is a showcase, and not even the best one, in that it is a catalog of everything without organizing narrative. What would be more interesting it seems is to showcase an accomplishment and the learning history leading up to it, as George Hotz did in his blog/portfolio on cracking the iPhone and Margo Tamez did in her portfolio on her efforts to prevent a US-Mexico border wall.

I haven’t baked since my last episode where I burned the floor boards under the oven. I’ve been thinking about how to warm the oven and dry it without overheating the floor. What I tried, with fair success was putting 8 broken red brick on the floor, end to end, with a thumb width between them to let air flow under the fire I would build on top of the brick.

I started at 9 AM with a small pine fire, then slowly added charcoal briquettes. I kept things going with bits of wood and more charcoal, but never very hot. After noon the outside was warm (uncovered and in the full sun, ~50F by then). I measured the surface temperature with a hand-held IR thermometer. The highest reading was 117F on the top, 85 on the sunny side, 75 on the north side.

About noon, I pushed the coals to the sides of the oven (off the brick) and added kindling and charcoal. My goal was to put more heat at the edges of the oven. Around 2PM I put in 6-8 pieces of mixed wood, mostly firewood scraps. By 4PM it was coals and I pulled out the red brick and the coals and allowed 30 minutes soaking Several of the red brick were hot thru my insulated fire gloves. I should have sequestered the coals with the hot red brick and left all that in the sides of the oven. An oval oven would facilitate this chipmunk-cheek strategy. Need to look back at how I thought the oven deck was too small and augment that by 6″ left and right.

I had repaired the inner face of my baking door by rebuilding the cob and had propped it in the doorway of the oven to fire the clay for awhile. I took care to put wet cloths in the door to get a tight seal and covered the chimney with a rag and a board and brick as well as shutting the damper. At 4:30, the thermometer read 450F, which seemed too hot for the bread in metal pans. I put a couple of the red brick back into the oven. They were warm to bare hands. And put the bread on the brick. It would have been better to be prepared with something thermally lighter to serve as hot pads. I think I have an old BBQ grill that could provide a 1/2″ spacer.

In 45 minutes the bread was beautiful and the temp read 350F (disappointing, given my first experience with how long the oven stayed hot. Did the earlier bonfire approach get a lot more heat into the mass?). I pushed the bricks to the sides of the oven and slid in 2 quiches. Twenty minutes later the quiches still were very runny, so they moved to the conventional oven.

With the quiche out, I put in a covered pyrex dish with a lamb shank that said it should be braised at 300F. The lamb came out at 8:30 and seems moist and completely cooked, but the temp has fallen to 200F. I think there is radiant heat in the oven that belies the air temp measured by the thermometer. Things cook better than the thermometer would make you think.

I still don’t want to make a massive foundation, next step is to design a better insulated floor that can take high heat and build another oven.

Its been cold and wet. Today was the second day of warming, predicted to reach 38F. I decided to bake again. Starting about 1PM I lit a fire, mostly pine firewood in pieces 2″ diameter. It was burning hot and clean by 1:30 and I kept poking in a few more bits to keep it going well. At 3:15 the bottom of the 2×6 floor was not warm and the top of the shell was still cool. There was a lot of water to dry out of the clay, despite the tarp covering.

We were going ice skating, so I loaded in several pieces of pine and put the baking door in place, with its two 1″ breathing holes. Even before we left there was a dark creosote smelling smoke. When we returned at 4:20 the fire was burned down to coals; it seemed fairly warm, but not hot. I tossed in 5 pieces of kindling and went off to prepare the bread (Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, the herbed potato bread) which had been in its first rise since 3:00.

By 4:45 the kindling was burned down. I noticed a thin whiff that seemed more like smoke than steam under the floor of the oven! Kiko warns that ovens on sawhorses fail by burning thru. The floor boards were warm, not hot and the outside of the shell was warm under the insulation blanket. I had remembered to put two bricks into the oven when I lit the fire and now I pushed all the coals to the chimney opening and put the bricks in front of the coals to protect the food from the radiant heat of the coals. I did not pull out the coals.

By 5:00 I had tossed in 4 baking spuds, 1 Butternut squash (halved and cleaned then re-assembled) and a pie plate with an acorn squash cut in 1″ wedges (Great recipe that I found on http://epicurious.com, the squash is cooked with oil, salt and pepper, then dressed with a lime/oil/garlic/herb vinaigrette.) I was letting the bread rise again and put two baguette loaves into the oven about 5:25. My hope was that I had allowed enough time for the oven to soak.

An oven thermometer just inside the door read 300F when the bread went in. I pulled the spuds and acorn squash at 5:50, one spud was not done. All had black burn marks. The bread seemed soft on the end near the door but there were toasty smells. I decided to turn the loaves end for end.

At 6:20 I pulled the bread, which was black on the bottom but seemed properly baked otherwise. The temp read 250F.

Conclusions. I managed to get the firebrick very hot but the baking door leaks too much air. This caused the bread to burn while the temp did not seem hot. Spuds and Butternut squash black spots confirm this hot floor. Baking in this oven in these conditions, I need to provide a container for the food to buffer the heat from the floor. The dish with the acorn squash was hot enough to boil the vinaigrette when I poured it on and it had some hard-to-clean stains from the baking process — but the food was unburned.

I also need to seal the baking door better to prevent the drafts that were making the temp read low. This probably also means plugging the chimney more than the damper does. And after that many hours of firing, I need to allow more soaking time.

The long range conclusion is that the oven needs a real foundation and better insulation. Kiko promised in an email to me that his 3rd edition of the book has instructions for a well insulated (top and bottom) oven. I need a roof as well (if not totally indoors).

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.