Scorched Pumpkin Pie

It's that time of year again. Hallowe'en. Punkin' time. My father-in-law had some wonderful pumpkins, just like he has had for the past decades, just for me. Of course, having a teenager in the house means that no one is interested in making a jack-o'-lantern any more. He just wants to watch the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on DVD....

So what else do you do with a pumpkin? Germans like to pickle bits of pumpkin, my friend John makes a spaghetti with sliced pumpkin fried in garlic (it is really delicious!), and oh yes, there is pumpkin pie! Of course the recipe just states "1 can pumpkin". No such thing on the shelves over at Kaiser's. Yes, I know. KaDeWe has canned pumpkin. 4,95 € a can (used to be 4,95 DM). At that price, I make myself.

So "all" I have to do is cook down the pumpkin. I do this every year. I think: this year I will do it without spritzing pumpkin all over the kitchen. Something always goes wrong.

The first two batches in the pressure cooker were fine. Peel the pumpkin, remove all the yucky inner stuff (save and pull out the seeds!), cube and stuff in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes. Then drain. And drain. And drain some more. I swear, pumpkins consist of 75% water....

So here I was, feeling like a real pro. Had 4 cups of mashed pumpkin already produced and was on the last batch. However, I managed to not close the pressure cooker right. After I wondered why it wasn't spitting at me, I re-fit the lid and let the pressure cooker get to work. I unfortunately decided to pass the time doing email/Skype/surfing. I didn't need to prepare pumpkin for the next batch. My olfactory organ let me know that something was amiss.

Yep. Scorched Pumpkin.

Yuck. I was able to save a cup or so from the middle, the rest was already carmelized (there is some sugar in the pumpkin). I remembered that my Mom had this recipe for "scorched pumpkin pie", that is, you first deliberately scorch the pumpkin, then you continue. Since I had a nice mess of scorched pumpkin, I dug for the recipe and set in.

Lillis Weber’s Scorched Pumpkin Pie (9“ pie) (1965)

1 ½ cups purée pumpkin
2 eggs
¾ cup brown sugar, packed
¾ cup evaporated milk
½ tsp ginger
¾ tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
2 tbsp boiling water
½ tsp salt
¼ cup 12% cream

Set oven to 450° F. Cook pumpkin over direct heat, stirring until it is dried out and slightly caramelized (scorched but not burned). Remove from heat. Beat eggs, stir in sugar, milk, spices (blended to a paste with the hot water). Stir in pumpkin, salt & cream until well blended. Bake 15 min., then reduce heat to 300° (open oven to drop temp rapidly) and bake 25 min. longer. [Needs longer if you don’t scorch the pumpkin enough - dww]

A 40-year old recipe! And you know, I have tried this before (cf. the nasty comment I wrote on the card). But I never had the patience to scorch the pumpkin enough. Now, with a pot of scorched pumpkin, I just had to add the rest of the ingredients and bake.

The lickings were great. The pie smelled absolutely wonderful. My mouth is watering. Lucky Achim, gets the pie as a birthday present tomorrow (if I can keep the teenager and his goony friends off of it). I hope to get at least a sliver for myself ......

You mean that is not a learning goal?

I was at the GMW05/DelFI2005 conference in Rostock and primed for a fight. I am sick and tired of all this "learning objects" nonsense, I was determined to ask hard questions of every speaker.

One speaker gave a very detailed and involved desription of their XML-based Learning Object system for "generating learning units". Yeah. (description below disguised to protect the guilty). On the screen it was plain to see:

Mitochondria

("Learnziel" is learning goal or objective in German).

I raised my hand and said that I was confused. How could just "Mitochondria" be a learning goal? I would expect things like "knows a definition of mitochondria", "can draw a picture of a mitochondria", "can name the parts of a mitochondria" or even "can isolate mitochondria from cells" to be a learning goal. But not just a noun! The author did not understand my question....

In the coffee break two grad students approached me. They noted that they had always been told that the learning objective was the topic covered in the "learning object". They are working in eLearning, but had never thought about this before. I explained Bloom's taxonomy to them. They were enthralled. Had never heard it, but thought it made enormous sense. Noted that this taxonomy did not fit with what they were currently researching....

Computing people act like they invented didactics when it comes to eLearning. Big surprise: there is a lot that has previously been written. And no, most of the texts are not on the Internet.....

The Election Secret

Since I am now a German (and voted in my first federal election Sept. 18), I also volunteered for election service. I really like organizing and counting things - but man, this was very tiring, concentrating on checking identies all day. Seems as soon as I decided to check whether the identity documents were valid, I found some that ran out long ago. My colleague found it was not a problem, but I decided to at least make the people uncomfortable, they should get themselves new identity documents pronto - not the least reason being the new biometric junk to be added to them from Nov. 1.

There was a lot of problems about the question of the elections being secret - many people wanted to take their kids into the voting booth with them. But that is not allowed, so we had to prevent people from doing so. One woman flew into a viscious rage and threatened to call the police after she voted and then hung around behind the voting booth letting her kid play with all the toys that were there (we were in a kindergarten and had tried to block off the toys, but they just climbed over and crawled under). Goodness, I see that the boy is a handful, but you needn't take it out on the volunteers running the voting show.

Many men - husbands, sons, fathers - of veiled women were quite uneasy having their womanfolk voting without them watching. The couple that has stuck in my mind, however, was a German couple. He took both ballots and was marching off to the booth with her. We insisted that they separate. He handed her her ballot, pointed to the "CDU" box and told her - here, that's what you vote. They each went behing their own booth, he was done very quickly (need we guess what he voted?). She took her time, and when she came out she had this slight Mona-Lisa-like smile on her face. She then put her ballot in the box with a triumphant little pat. How I would have liked to know what this woman voted!! I hope she voted for any other candidate than the one her husband told her to!

Three Objections to Learning Objects

I was actually on my way to bed last night when I discovered someone (Mike) had started a Learning Object entry in the German Wikipedia (Lernobjekt). As his source he gave a studen't term paper on LOs, repeating all the rubbish that is published about LOs.

LOs are just what compter scientists think learning is all about, because their extremely narrow view of the Real World (tm) consists of just seeing technology, not human beings. Learning is percieved as being the consumption of digital tidbits, preferably sugar-coated ones. There is almost no understanding of the didactics and pedagogy that take place in a learning situation, or that learning is quite different in primary, secondary, teriary, and continuing education. For all the nonsense written about it, there is now way to specify mathematically who a learner is or how she learns or what she needs to know. Luckily - we are, actually, human beings and not bots.

So at midnight I changed all the "is" verbs to "is said to be", added some doubt and one reference, and then started in this morning bright and early looking in earnest for more references. I found Brian Lamb's "Oh No! Yet Another Learning Objects Presentation" which links to Norm Friesen's "Three Objections to Learning Objects".

This is a wonderful paper, published in the non-virtual world at McGreal, R. (Ed.). 2004. Online Education Using Learning Objects. London: Routledge. Pp. 59-70. It includes many good quotes from other obscure but dead-on right papers. Let me summarize his objections:

Objection 1: What's a learning object, anyway?

He is so right - if you collect up all the definitions of LOs and put them together, you get everything but the kitchen sink, kind of like EMACS.

Objection 2: Where is the Learning in E-Learning Standards?

My usual crack is that standards are so important because there are so many of them. Not everyone gets the joke. I had a thesis student try and use SCORM to export eLearning material from one learning management system and then import it to another one, both purportedly SCORM compliant. She failed, although her efforts were valiant. I did not tell her that I didn't think it would work. I wanted to see someone who believes that this will work because it is a standard, after all, test it. It could just be cranky me that thinks that SCORM is useless. Of course, maybe she missed just the right place to set a check or she was holding her tongue wrong. But if someone who has studied computer science successfully is not able to make it jump through hoops, how is the social studies teacher going to make out?

Objection 3: Education in a Militarized Zone?

"Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American military-industrial complex" - this is exactly a feminist objection to a lot of what passes for science in computing. Here we have "learning" being reduced to learning the one true correct way of pulling the trigger, if you will. A soldier is trained to be interchangable, to follow orders without thinking. Education, on the other hand, is supposed to traing people to think critically. Okay, maybe I am old-fashioned, but I want people to learn to sift the evidence and think for themselves, that is the point of what I do.

I love Plutarch's description of education:

"We must encourage [each other] - once we have grasped the basic points - to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting - no more - and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind ."

Thanks for the paper, Norm. I shall quote it all of next week at the GMW2005 conference. Maybe I will print out copies to hand out. I am planning on attending all the Learning Objects sessions and asking each speaker if they have empirical evidence of their claims of reuse and lower costs and better education. What a bitch I am!

An Experiment on the Reuse of Learning Objects

I've been ranting for ages about the horrors of Learning Objects to anyone who would stand still long enough and listen to me. I had written a paper with a friend about the eLearning module that I produced and which we both have used, and we did not use the term because we both think this is hogwash and concentrated on collaboration.

The referees complained: we had not referenced state-of-the-art literature and we should have made proper learning objects. I went off like a rocket and started madly collecting published stuff on the dangers of learning objects. There is not much, but some at least. When I calmed down I managed to put together a pretty nice explaination, I thought, of why I find it rubbish, in a rather scientific manner.

The referee found it better that I said something, but continued on that Meta Data were the basis for reuse, etc. I immediately conducted a reuse experiment with the repository in question (which shall be nameless, this is not the point of my argument to discredit their particular repository, but to question the entire religion of learning objects).

The reviewer writes: "Metadata, if filled in properly, can be very beneficial for finding suitable material."

I responded: "I would love to see a paper on this - I have asked at every presentation I have ever attended that was given on the topic of learning objects if they are aware of any research into the actual reusability of metadata decorated objects. I always get a no for an answer. Any system presentation that I have visited and wanted to actually look for something using meta data has not actually had the searching implemented "yet". I strongly beleive that meta data is great - if done right, the way that libraries have been doing meta data for over 400 years now. That might be another paper to write....

I will be at the Metadata session in Rostock (GMW) with the expressed purpose of shaking a real example of reuse out of someone - or I will really have to write something about it! "

I had criticized the repository as only containing 23 objects, anyway.

The reviewer commented: "The numbers given for the XXX project are not correct. The repository actually contains a much larger number of learning objects than only 23. "

Okay, time to fight back. I now added up the numbers in parenthesis behind the 23 objects, assuming that this is the number of subobjects. I now get 57, which is still not a lot to crow about. I have changed the wording to be "less than 100".

Since I am teaching SE this semester, I decided that I would test the search capabilities on the meta data for the objects in the repository. Let's see, I need something nice about life-cycles for the first lecture. The search form offers me all sorts of fields (in German) that make no real sense to me. I don't know what they mean or how they were filled out. The first search should be over all fields, not just inside one particular field, this is something we learned in library OPACs long ago (I spent 4 years of my life developing software for libraries).

Bezeichner: Life cycle? 0 hits. Maybe German? Lebenszyklus? 0
Titel: ditto
Beschreibung: ditto
Klassifizierung: hmm, no life cycle. There's an entry on "Software Engineering General" that at least brings up a few entries, so the search really does find something occasionally. The names are not really promising, but "Introduction to SE" looks good - oh, just some Powerpoint slides. Somehow, I have never seen a Powerpoint slide as a learning object, but more of a reminder slip as to what was said in the lecture (or written in the book).

The download is a Zip file with a Powerpoints in a file name containing Umlauts that have now been mangled, an XML Manifest and a license. The manifest tells me a lot I don't want to know, and that this is an introduction. But it does not tell me if the introduction contains a life cycle model....

Hmm, the XML lists Mr. E as the author. But the slides say: Dr. W. / University of B. The properties in Powerpoint have a nickname / University of P. Oh oh, the slides contain a Dilbert cartoon that expressly states: "Redistribution in whole or part prohibited". If you purchase a Dilbert it will state so. So now, not only have I not found anything, I have just uncovered a copyright problem that needs fixing. But who do I inform? Oh, and no slides on life cycles in here.

Going through the learning objects (there aren't really that many) I find "LE 3.1 Prozessqualität" which actually has the V-model. That's something I might find useful. This was only findable because there
are not many learning objects in the repository.

See what I mean? Despite all of the meta data that has been assessed, I still can't find stuff that is actually there, because the classification by metadata does not use a thesaurus and a category hierarchy.

Sigh.

The King is *definately* naked!

Teemu Leinonen notes in his blog that Learning objects are rather naked kings. Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Learning objects have been grating on my nerves for quite some time now. I replied to him:

Amen! I heartily agree! I was at a seminar given by Cecile Crutzen whereby she explained why I feel so ill when I hear the term "learning object". (I was trained a software engineer and now develop e-learning materials, among other duties as a professor). The whole idea of the "learning" him or herself being an object that consumes "learning objects" to attain wisdom is seriously flawed for a number of reasons.

1) Learning is not about consuming knowledge nuggets. It is about discourse on and reflection about topics. Informal learning the new buzz word, anyway, may it completely override "LOB". Collaboration is king in learning, not a bunch of objects.

2) Learning materials have to be orchestrated or designed so that they are coherent, otherwise they make no sense. Not everyone uses the same notation and definitions, the same style of writing. So stringing objects together makes no sense.

3) The *subject*, the learner, has been compelety dropped from the discussion! This pseudo-objectivity (pun intended) means that we completely ignore the person who is to learn something, which should be the starting point of any instruction!

and on and on.

I have made it a point at every conference and presentation where someone rabbits on about learning objects and metadata to ask a pointed question: Do you have any data on the reuse factor of your learning objects. Not one single person, from the big-shots on down, has been able to answer anything but "no" to my question. Just recently I suffered an afternoon of a system presentation where you elaborately entered in metadata, but when you wanted to reuse something, you needed to have a good file name and a good file structure to find the stuff because the meta data was NOT searchable! In addition, the pictures KEPT their numbers, if they even bothered to have them ("Figure 2"), there was no way to renumber them.

Naked. And freezing.

Since his blog somehow does not post my wise words, I repeat them here. Any references to criticisms of learning objects are heartily welcomed.

The Virtual Conference - Wikimania

The Wikimania Conference 2005 was held in Frankfurt this past weekend. Unfortunately, I could not be physically present in Frankfurt. Fortunately, the folks at freematrix had set up an Internet Radio feed so that those of us who at least had an Internet connection could listen in to some of the talks.

Friday was extremely interesting because I had the radio feed running and mIRC open to #de.wikipedia and spent the time discussing what was being said during the talks with some folks that were on the channel. There was a bit of a cognitive dissonance associated with listening in English and writing in German, but it was a very interesting experience. I even was able to post a question by proxy (Thanks, Appleboy!), someone physically in the room and on IRC at the same time!

But of course, you missed the chatting during the coffee breaks. I was especially irritated at a questioner at the end of the third round stated that he thought the fine-grained censorship exercised now in China was "good" because it let so much other "good stuff" get through the filters instead of blocking the Wikipedia completely. WHAT? There is no such thing as "just a little bit of censorship". Either there is censorship or there is none. What if the little bit that got caught in the filters was everything he ever wrote? If they pretended he did not exist? Is he still happy? I would have loved to a) know who this was and b) give him a piece of my mind on the topic of censorship. But as it was, I just bleated on the chat.

Saturday was flakey - I had the choice of mIRC or freematrix. The folks on IRC noted that mIRC was a piece of §$%& and suggested many alternatives, none which I felt like installing at the spur of the moment, in addition to which I paid the fee for mIRC so I will use it, darn it! So I decided to stick with freematrix. They had a chat page connected to their IRC forum, this was great for letting the operators of freematrix know that a feed had died and one of them would willingly go kickstart a server which had gone to sleep or defaulted to off.

I got to hear three keynotes:
* Ross Mayfield explaining to me why I was drowning in email and that I really need a Wiki (he's right!)
* Ward Cunningham musing on the history of Wikis. I especially liked hearing the stories and how HyperCard fit into all of this - I teach HyperCard as an oddity precursor to the WWW in my Hypermedia course, lovely to have a nice story about how it was useful for the creation of Wikis!
* Richard M. Stallmann - what shall I say, if I could have made it to Frankfurt, I would have gone just to hear RMS, seeing as how I spent 7 years of my life living in EMACS, programming in a LISP-like language. His thoughts on intellectual property are, of course, radical. It was great that his talk was so nicely structured (he must have held it a million times already) that I could easily follow, even without the slides. I don't agree with everything he says, but I think I understand his reasoning a lot more now.

At the final session the Global Voices Session, there were many interesting tidbits to be heard. It was funny that this session seemed just as important to me as Stallmann's - but one of the people asking a question noted that it was a shame that there were so few people in the room. It was interesting that my perception of the talk was not colored by the fact of me choosing a not-so-popular topic or some such, but I just chose on interest.

Anyway, thanks to the freematrix team, that was lovely! You don't have a donations possibility on your pages, that needs fixing.... And the discussions in #de.wikipedia during or after the talks were so enjoyable, I felt that I had really attended a conference, even if it was only a virtual one and I don't have a name tag for my collection...