Given how much we like to explore new foods, Sarah sent me a link to this great food blog called 101 Cookbooks which features some really awesome recipes. I made this rockin’ quinoa recipe for my mother and can’t wait to try these banana cookies with Sarah. Furthermore, the blog has numerous categories and even features a whole section on gluten-free dishes! Also of note, the garam masala tofu scramble and skinny omelletes.

Link to it with this button:

The entire piece left me feeling really intrigued by the challenges of effectively integrating technology and education. The paper is very well researched and although I can’t articulate it,  I reached the last page of this paper feeling really good. Maybe it had to do with the enlightened view taken by the authors. Their writing is crisp and their outlook seems appropriately upbeat given the richness of the material and subject matter covered in the paper. The document bursts with elegant and thought-provoking stanzas:

Design based research is a methodology for the study of function. Often referred to as design research or design experiments, it is concerned with the design of learning processes, taking account of the involved complexities, multiple levels and contexts of educational settings. The primary aim is to develop domain-specific theories in order to understand the learning process.

Such succulent gems of insight are plentiful in the opening sections as Mor and Winters set the stage for a comprehensive reflection on the essences of design, science and learning. They are realistic about how “The complexity of classroom situations does not lend itself to the procedures of laboratory research” as they ask “To what extent are we driven by a pure quest for knowledge, and to what extent are we committed to influencing educational practice?”.

The paper continues into a very stimulating overview of design patterns and their application in the many areas of education. Though I have always liked the idea of design patterns in software, I have never been so enthralled by a discussion about the essential elements of design patterns. Also, this is the first time that I’ve heard of design patterns being used as a tool for analysis instead of construction and planning:

An important characteristic of a design pattern is that it has three facets: descriptive, normative, and collaborative. It is an analytic form, used to describe design situations and solutions, a meta-design tool, used to highlight key issues and dictate a valuable method of resolving them, and a communicative tool enabling different communities to discuss design issues and solutions.

The esteemed writers are careful to explain their thought processes without letting their comprehensive coverage become tangential. They expertly work in a mentioning of the political agendas of design pattern construction for city planning and network routing protocols to help illustrate their observations of how values influence design.

This paper is awash in fascinating pointers to further exploration and while I fully intend to follow up on some of their citations, something of immediate interest is a link to a very cool site called the Pedagogical Patterns Project which established a repository of educational design patterns. I need more time to explore but what they have seems to be very cool. It’s clear that I’ll refer back to this paper frequently as I strive to better understand the interactions of education and computing.

Mohan begins with a very logical stance on the dual subjects of technology and education by saying that “Some of the most cost effective and appropriate ways to use computers and modern technologies is to have close contact between the teachers and the taught.”. When I read this and the text before it, I wondered if all I would get would be a concise exposition detailing those business issues in India which dealt with college students. Instead, I got a whirlwind overview of select “reskilling” efforts thought (by Mohan) to be significant in the scope of the paper.

The paper is written in a casual-yet-technical style with a tone and focus that instantly reminded me of Thomas Friedman’s many commentaries on the Indian tech sector. In fact, some of his more entertaining points might just be a tongue-in-cheek salute to the importance of education in a culture commonly associated with outsourcing:

A mixed approach to valuing staff by developing skills, providing interesting and motivating work while recognizing their individual contribution, alongside benefits and perks, will mean that you are an employer that employees don’t want to leave.

If this paper were any longer than it is, I would advise people to move along and skip it in favor of more detailed works. That being said, the topic was narrowed significantly and as such, could be considered to have an reasonably-appropriate length in addition to it’s generally generally-upbeat discourse. In fact, I actually found myself giggling at some of Mohan’s informalities and clear showings of enthusiasm.

While I favor dynamically-typed languages (like Lisp, Ruby and Python) as a matter of personal preference, I have tremendous respect for statically-typed languages (like C and Java). In my humble opinion, some of the most interesting languages are those which allow one to switch between the paradigms as need or desire dictates. Take for example, Haskell’s type annotations or Common Lisp’s type specifiers (particularly declare). The former allows one to annotate Haskell function definitions with type information to enforce type constraints while the latter can be used to turn off Lisp’s dynamic typing system when trying to do something special like optimize certain functions.

After I discovered all of this and determined that I think it’s pretty neat but not something I have the time to pursue right now, my interest has been rekindled by a recently delivered presentation entitled Types Considered Harmful. Perhaps it’s also time for me to re-read another famous type-system paper, Java is not type-safe.

While I have tried to be precise, please excuse my informal approximations for certain items. I figure if fancy cookbooks can say “a pinch of salt”, I can abstract this convention to suit my own needs. This recipe is highly scalable and may be doubled so long as proportions are preserved. That being said, discriminating and/or experienced cooks will most likely tweak according to taste.

Ingredients:

• 4 shoulder cuts of lamb with bones. Cut most of the meat off of the bone and trim the fat. I advise removing as much of the fat as possible and cutting the lamb into thumb sized pieces.
• 1 large onion - coarsely chopped
• 5 cloves of garlic - diced
• 1 large carrot - diced
• 2 stalks of celery - loosely chopped
• 1 medium tomato - cubed
• 2 bell peppers - chopped (yellow and red will look best)
• 1 can of chickpeas
• 2.5 cups of broth (you should have enough to cover the other ingredients. I used chicken broth)
• 3 tbsp tamari or extra dark soy sauce
• 2 tsp cilantro (coriander leaves in the UK)
• 2.5 tsp of curry powder
• 1 tsp of chili oil
• 10 cumin seeds
• 1 tsp of ground coriander
• 1 tsp salt (sea salt recommended)
• 1 handful of fresh basil
• 1.5 tsp of ground black pepper
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast

Saute the onion and garlic in the bottom of a pot with some olive oil. When it begins to become translucent, add 2 tsp of the curry powder (keeping 0.5 tsp in reserve) and stir constantly for another minute. Add the carrot, celery and lamb pouring the tamari sauce over the ingredients and stirring to coat with the mixture. Season with the salt, black pepper, coriander and basil before adding enough chicken broth to cover everything. Increase heat to maximum, bring to a boil and add the cilantro, the tomato and cumin seeds. Stir and let simmer on low for 30 minutes stirring every 10 minutes. After 30 minutes, drain and add chickpeas with the remaining 0.5 tsp of curry powder and chili oil. Stir to combine and continue steeping for another 30-45 minutes before slowly stirring in the nutritional yeast to help thicken the mixture and improve the consistency of the broth. After another 5-10 minutes of simmering, remove from heat and serve over a darker starch like brown rice or quinoa. This is great with a cold, dark beer.

Now, while the examples in the essay are extremely enlightening, I still feel that certain, poorly-thought-out interfaces are beyond help. At the very least, it made me think twice about the importance of the margin and padding properties in CSS while giving me a whole new outlook on the apps I use every day.