Create My Story

This is the metaphor for a good story in China: Phoenix’s head, which means a fascinating opening; pig’s tripe, which means a rich content in the body; leopard’s tail, which means a simple but powerful.

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Photo by Jim Champion License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Photo by ed glickman License Attribution 2.0 Generic

I’m so glad to learn from Alan Levine who shared with us lots of fresh ways of storytelling. Group random presentation introduced by him, which is an activity to create a story according to random pictures by group members,such as http://Pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/, is pretty cool for motivate students and stimulate creativity.

Story Telling With Data is also interesting for me. In China, people usually think the students who are good at math aren’t good at language expression. By contract, students who learn Chinese well can’t learn math well. Using the method of telling story with data undoubtedly combines Math and Chinese to practice both logical thinking and expressing. It’s really a good idea for Chinese education.

Like many of my classmates, I was also inspired a lot by 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story. The first time I thought of doing something on-line to tell my story. Then I looked through all my cat’s photos in these years and picked out some of thousands of them, created a photo slide show with caption. I chose the tool PhotoPeach, and my final product is as following:
Migua’s Changeable Life

I also found that my classmates had more and more creative ideas of telling their stories, such as Jackie Sakatch’s Playing with Puppet Pal 2, and Shaela Kuntz ’s 365 & 1 Second.

Story telling is such an attractive way of communication that help people to learn from each other!

Lu (Shandong) Cuisine

Map of China

Picture by Cacahuate, amendments by Peter Fitzgerald and ClausHansen, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic.

Lu is another name of Shangdong province in China. Lu cuisine is usually put on the first position of the eight cuisines in China because of its long history and deep influence. However, in recent years there are some disputes of the order sorting among Lu, Chuan and Yue, as the latter two cuisines developed a lot in the world.

As marked in the map, Lu cuisine was originated in Shangdong province, middle-east of China. One of the oldest Chinese book Shangshu (Book of Documents) recorded that Shandong province area began to use salt since at least Xia Dynasty (c.2070 – c.1600 BCE). Another ancient book Classic of Poetry also mentioned that in Zhou dynasty (c.1046-c.256 BCE) , people in Shandong began to eat fishes in Yellow River. In fact Shangdong province has a good geographic location close to mountains, river and sea, so there are various raw materials to be used in Lu cuisine. In addition, as Confucius’s hometown, Lu cuisine contains a set of old royal recipe, which is greatly influenced by Confucius and his family.

The distinguishing feature of Lu cuisine is “fresh”. Similar as the Chinese character “恕” which is combined by “如”(in compliance with) and “心” (heart), the Chinese character “fresh” is “鲜”, which is combined by “鱼” (fish) and ”羊” (lamb). In fact, there was a famous cooker named Yiya in Shandong during 771 to 476 BC created a cuisine named “lamb inside the fish”, using both fish and lamb to cook for the most fresh dish. According to this tradition, most Lu dishes have salty and fresh taste, with the purpose of highlighting the raw materials’ taste.

Introduction to Shandong Cuisine, NTD’s International Culinary Competition

Here I would like to cook a simple but famous Lu cuisine named “Scallion Lamb”. Although there are various recipes, I choose the most simple one as the following (refer to the 10th recipe in Scallion Lamb in Chinese searching engine Baidu Baike)
Ingredients:
Lamb (250g), scallion (2 bunches, only white part), salt (a small amount), soy sauce (1 tablespoon ), cooking wine (1 tablespoon), white sugar (1 teaspoon or less), starch (corn or tapioca, 1 tablespoon), cooking oil (3 tablespoons).

Ingredients of Ingredients

The English Label of Cooking Wine, and the Alternative Tapioca

Step 1:
Slice the lamb (around 0.3cm thickness, 4 cm length), and shred the white part of scallion.

Sliced Lamb and Scallion

Step 2:
Mix sliced lamb with soy sauce, salt (I didn’t add any, but you can add according to your favorite), cooking wine and starch. Leave them alone for 30 minutes.

Mixing

Step 3:
Put cooking oil into the pan and wait for hot, then put the mixed lamb slices into the pan and stir-fry.

Oil in the Pan

Step 4:
When the lamb turns the color to white, put scallion pieces into the pan, keep on frying until the scallion turns soft. A small amount of sugar can be added into the pan now.

Lamb Turns Color

Scallion Turns Soft

Step 5:
Turn off the fire and dish out.

Dish Out

Tips:
Fire should be turned to the highest, and total stir-frying time should be around 4-8 minutes, depending on the size of the lamb slices and the amount of the scallion.

Chinese Cooking Speed-up Program

With a totally different type of cooking methods, Chinese cuisine looks mysterious and attractive to some Western people. According to different geographical origins, Chinese cuisine is divided into eight culinary traditions (or Eight Great Chinese Cuisines): Lu, Chuan, Yue, Min, Su, Zhe, Xiang, Hui. Each division has its unique feature from the raw material, cooking process to the flavor.

Picture by Cacahuate, amendments by Peter Fitzgerald and ClausHansen licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic.

Photo by Steven G. Johnson lcensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Photo by LONGS licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Eight Cuisines of China

In the serial blogs of “Chinese Cooking Speed-up Program”, I would like to introduce the historical background and representative dishes from each division of eight culinary traditions. More important, I will choose one typical dish from each of them to display the detailed cooking methods. To ensure the easy and reasonable learning, I’ll cook them by myself and try to apply on some Western cooking methods. The purpose of this program is to help people who are interested in cooking Chinese food to realize an easy-to-try experience with simpler ways than the complicated process usually introduced by many Chinese recipes. Meanwhile, viewers can have some basic knowledge about different types of dishes in China as well as local culture.

If there you have any questions on Chinese cuisines, please feel free to leave your comments. I’m not professional but I’m glad to learn together with you.

What I Have Benefited from Technology

This week I would like to share some personal experience about technology in my daily life recently. Undoubtedly technology has increased convenience and funs to my life from various aspects.

My Cat’s Illness
The first benefit is about my pet. I brought my cat from China to Canada but soon after that I found there was a tumor on his back as the following picture.

I worried so much but as I was not familiar with this city at that time, I didn’t know where to find help. At that time I thought of a forum named “North American Pets”. There are some people with veterinarian experience are ready to answer pets’ owners’ questions on the forum (it’s a Chinese online forum but unfortunately it has been closed now). Therefore I sent the picture to the forum to search for help. Only couple hours I got the response to confirm this tumor isn’t illness but a tick on the cat’s body, as well as detailed treatment in the following link: information about tick on Maine government’s official website . In China we lived in an apartment without a yard, and tick isn’t distributing broadly, so I have no idea about this bug. Finally I removed the tick as soon as possible and another one several days later.

My Son’s Reading
My son is enrolling in pre-kindergarten and one day he brought back a brochure with books’ introduction. He was so willing to read many of them but our family can’t afford so many books’ expense. Therefore I used Regina Public Library’s website to search for those books and requested them online so that we could get them directly in the library without looking for them everywhere. Finally I just purchased some books we couldn’t borrow from the library for my son, and he was happy to read every book he wanted to read.

Purchasing Travel Insurance
As we haven’t applied for immigration yet, I have to purchase travel insurance for my family members at present. However, I felt very confused as I was also a new comer. After google, I found a helpful website which can compare all the main insurance online very clearly:Visitors Insurance CA . What I need to do is to input my family members’ information and choose one company from a simple and intelligible form. This convenient tool saved my time greatly.

Placenta encapsulation
About placenta, Chinese tradition is to bury it or cook it. However, I couldn’t accept traditional cooking ways, so I buried my first placenta. When I was in Canada, I found eating placenta encapsultion is encouraged by doula as it’s helpful to recovery and defend postpartum depression. Firstly I found this information just by google “placenta” with a picture-explained process of making it:Placenta encapsulation: See how it’s done. Then I tried google “Regina Placenta encapsulation” and found more details as well as local doula’s contacting information. However, when I tried to contact the doulas, most of them were quite busy during that period, and I need to spend around $200 for this service. Therefore I thought about making it by myself through the directions posted by other people online. It seemed such a difficult task but I was confident with the educational function of social media such as Youtube. Then I followed a nice video with logically detailed instruction and successfully made it.

As a result, I’m getting a good recovery and able to continue my 2 classes’ study very soon after the birth of my baby.

Halloween
To be honest, our family had never celebrated Halloween before as China hasn’t this festival. For integrating into local society especially my son’s enjoying in this festival, we decided to learn how to celebrate Halloween. Although our Canadian friend explained a lot and sent us Halloween safety tips, we still had lots of questions. A blog of an overseas Chinese artist, Jianxia Liu, helped a lot with lots of pictures of spending Halloween with her kids. We learned from their true experience in a totally unfamiliar festival as well as a new city. Because of similar backgrounds, we learned everything we need to know through that blog.

My Son’s Pictures in School
My son’s teacher is good at using email to keep contacting with parents. She sends us newsletter with all the latest and future activities. I appreciate it very much, as it’s impossible to get this opportunity to accompany with our kid’s growth so closely in China. During this process my son’s teacher uses a great tool named “smilebox”. She made slides using all the kids’ pictures and we can look through the slides online. If we prefer to get some pictures from the slides, we can download any of them into our computer. I extremely like this function which helps me to keep my son’s memorial moments in school.

All above experience increased my understanding about the interaction between social media and public education. However, one distinctive weakness is there is too much information need to be chosen. For example, when I tried to search for a reasonable instruction of making placenta encapsulation online, I found too many different videos even with many failed cases. It took me a lot of time to choose the best one to follow. In this process I spent much time on learning basic knowledge from different websites to ensure the basic process is correct. Although this is a good learning experience for me, I’m afraid some people who lack time or energy might choose a resource to believe randomly. Sometimes it causes the spread of rumors. How we ensure the reliability of online resources and how to learn more effectively among the sea of reliable and unreliable knowledge? I’m still looking for the answers.

Anonymity: Goodness or Evil?

As a distinguishing feature of on-line communication, anonymity is very common in digital era. What has it brought to us? I think it’s a question worthy of discussion. When I saw that picture of the baby and mom, I immediately thought of a famous case “Little Fatty” in China, which has similar process but opposite intention. A young boy’s picture was used by thousands of anonymity to make various funning posters.
The boy was called as “Little Fatty” and was known by public. He said it brought a great difficulties as well as feeling of humiliation and fear of being taken photos, but he and his family can’t find out who they should sue when they were ready to file a lawsuit. It was lucky for the boy to adjust his mood quickly to accept these and be used of being famous by that special way. As we know, sometimes this type of anonymity might cause suicide or revenge behaviors of the victim if he or she couldn’t balance the feeling.

On the other hand, we can’t ignore the benefits of anonymity. Kidnapping and selling people is a serious social problem in China, as many families without kids in rural areas prefer to purchase kids. In addition, some crime group use kidnapped kids as their tool of begging. Under this background, some people established an on-line platform named “taking photos at hand”, and called on anonymity to take photos for the kids on street suspect to be kidnapped. This platform has already helped some families to find their lost kids (Taking Photos At Hand Saved 5 Kidnapped Kids). However, there are also some mix-up happened sometimes. I remembered that I participated in a spreading of a photo with a young man and a little boy who begged in the subway in Shanghai. The anonymity who took the picture suspected the little boy was kidnapped as the young man treated him badly. The staff in the subway noticed this picture posted and delivered by thousands of anonymity and found them, but after checking their identity, the young man was the boy’s real father. In this condition, I wonder if anonymity even with goodness might cause trouble to some people. On the contrary, absolutely those families who lost kids need it very much as one hope. This results that when we are carrying goodness to help them, we have to undertake the guilty of the possibility of disturbing others by taking photos without others’ permission. Should people continue this action?

Malignant Tumours in Digital Citizenship Era

Last class we discussed digital citizenship, which is a worldwide issue especially the influence on teenagers. For example, I’ve heard about the misguiding of pornography websites to teenagers in China for several years. When ADSL wasn’t popularized in China, people used dial-up access with telephone lines. Some teenagers tried to look through overseas pornography websites and made their parents pay astonishing bills as opening those websites or downloading some contents charged US dollars in the telephone bills. Nowadays this news seldom happened as people needn’t pay for opening any websites, but there are still many pornography websites which need you to pay expensive membership fee. Here is some news from year 2000 to recent years. Visiting Pornography Websites Made Phone Bill Increase Crazily (2000), A Teenager Had with Pornography Websites Obsession Caused 8, 000/month Phone Bill (2004). 3,700 Million Pornography Websites are Threatening Teenagers’ Growth (2007), A Teenager Raped Little Girls After Watching Pornography Websites (2008), Middle School Students Spread Pornography Websites Each Other, Parents Leave Work to Monitor Their Children (2011).
Meanwhile, online games become another cancerous resources to Chinese teenagers. Many kids commit a crime for robbing money to buy their online equipments, and there are some teenagers suicide or kill others because of on-line game addictions. When Will the Kids Who are Addictive to On-line Games Wake up (2006)? A Teenager Became a Robber and a Killer for Updating His On-line Games (2009). How should I do when My Kid is Addictive to On-line Games and Wants to Drop out from School(2010). A 17-year-old Teenager Suicides as a Jumper after continuous 30 Hours’ playing on-line Games (2013). A Middle School Student’s Dad Tried to Save His Son in the Internet Bar for On-line Games’ Addiction (2013). A Teenager On-line Game Addict Really Kill a Person and Complained the Dead wasn’t as Strong as the Boss in the Game (2013).

When I searched these news, I was shocked as I have never imagined on-line resources could be such a serious social problem for teenagers in China. I believe it’s the same in other countries. I also agree with the idea of filter we’ve discussed in one class. In fact, filter has begun to be applied in some cities in China. Prevent Kids Looking Through Pornography Websites, Filter Software for Unhealthy Websites began to be Installed Free of Charge (2008). However, the number of free software was limited. Due to economic condition and unawareness of the danger, the filter software hasn’t been broadly popularized in Chinese families and many internet bars.

How to keep our kids grow healthily with getting knowledge and positive social connections through internet rather than negative effects is a crucial question facing by all parents. In my opinion, parents should spend more time with their kids and set up a good example by themselves without addicting to internet, as well as applying filters at home. Are there any more ideas? Hope everyone who sees this blog could contribute more solutions.

Doing More than Thinking

Last class we are so pleasant to have Sylvia Martinez as our guest to introduce lots of fresh things involved in technical inventions by students in class. When she explained ‘Makey Makey’, she mentioned that the soul of it is doing not only thinking, which I think is the most important to stimulate creativity.

Chinese education system encourage thinking more than doing, and Chinese teachers always try to hammer or fill knowledge into students’ minds so that they can remember and pass the written examination. Therefore, most students in China have no time to do something they like as they are always learning existed things. Small amount of students who are excellent in scientific knowledge might be fortunate to make inventions, but their purpose is to get rewards of some specific competitions (e.g. National Teenagers’ Environmental Inventions Competition, Middle School Students’ Water Technology Inventions Competition) . Absolutely it’s a misleading rather than a simple aspiration from their interests. As a result, Chinese people have less and less creativity, so that most great inventions in modern world (such as electric light, engine, television, telephone, airplane, computer, internet) have none relationship with China. This isn’t because Chinese people lack creativity. On the contrary, we have lots of amazing inventions in ancient time: 10 Amazing Ancient Chinese Inventions Comparing with modern China, ancient China hadn’t mandatory education system which forces students to accept education, and people can choose to learn or not to learn by themselves. That might be one reason why ancient Chinese had more creativity for useful inventions in practical life.

According to my opinion, how to encourage students to make something purely according to their interests is a crucial skill for teachers. As a metaphor I’ve used in discussion of one class, teaching is to light up the fire inside learners, which includes their interests and creativity. These factors are always inside the learners, but need to be induced by teaching.

On the other hand, is competition totally negative for creating? I don’t think so. If there are popularized inventions competitions across the nation to create a context of learning and making, or if the reward can provide some money to support the material used during inventions, students will be encouraged effectively to turn their ideas into reality. Taiwan is doing well in this point, as the government promotes students’ ability of creating from the whole society. As a result, Taiwanese students are active in participating in national even world inventions competitions, and got rewards in world competition as the video showed.

However, there is another question related with students’ inventions: should we encourage students to turn their inventions into commercial application? For example, many of us have known the news that 18-Year-Old Girl Wins Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award with Revolutionary Cell Phone Charger. This invention absolutely has a great potential of commercial application and will help to earn money. If this relationship with profit destroys kids’ or teenagers’ pure world?

Is Technology Increasing Creativity or Fettering It?

These days I was always thinking of this issue we discussed in the last class as I experienced some problems related with it during the daily life. For example, when I want to cook a dish, the first idea is to search recipes online. Although there are lots of different recipes for the same dish, I would rather take some time to look through, compare and choose one than thinking by myself. Finally the recipe is always the others’ recipe, not mine.
Another interesting thing happened in these couple days took me to a further thought about technology and creativity. When I and my husband tried to fill the birth certification application for our new child online, there was a blank we had no idea of how to fill it. Each of us had different ways to resolve it. I thought of searching for help from other persons with same experience in BBS or some forums online, while my husband tried to fill this blank by his own words in a short time. It’s interesting that comparing with me, my husband isn’t good at using technology to study and work. Moreover, he doesn’t believe in most online information out of some official websites. However, my relying on internet obviously hinders my own thoughts and wastes my time on distinguishing various information.
Yes, some people can use technology to show many fresh ideas. However, for most people who are not able to accomplish it, they might only be shaped in a type of software or a thinking mode of the inventors. People are keeping on accepting and learning by technology, but how can they increase their own new ideas by technology? Or, more important, how can they illustrate their ideas by technology without technical or engineering background?

Technology and Education in My View

Last class about the applications of technology in universities recalled me a piece of news recently: Peking University has begun to globally provide on-line courses through MOOCs platform. Here is the news link of the announcement in English: http://english.cri.cn/6909/2013/09/18/2702s788223.htm

Here is the news on the day they uploaded 4 courses. It’s interesting that all the 4 courses are taught in Chinese and only two courses have English captions. The university said they will try to find some student volunteers to translate all the courses into English captions in the future: http://www.chinanews.com/edu/2013/09-23/5310934.shtml
My question here is: If it is neccessary to teach these kinds of global on-line courses in English, not only provide English captions?

Peking University is one of the top 2 universities in China, and another one is Tsinghua University. I found Tsinghua University is also going to globally provide on-line courses like Peking University, and here is the news’ link: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1312546/peking-and-tsinghua-universities-offer-free-courses-online

As George mentioned in the class, China has invested lots of money to develop technology’s application in universities. However, there is still a long process for Chinese universities to catch up with western multi-medium and on-line courses, especially on-line courses. At present, there is not a typical multi-interacted platform popularized as a teaching tool in Chinese universities, and on-line courses are limited in video repeated playing. Some training schools such as some English language training schools have some forums for the interactions between the students and the teachers, but as the students usually need to pay lots of tuition fee for the training program, they are actually the customers. In this condition, there is not an effective system to encourage the students to learn on-line actively and transformatively.
However, new technology’s applications will be an unavoidable trend in China as the closer connections with other countries. According to the data of 2012, the number international students who came to China was 328,330, increased 12.21% comparing with 2011. http://www.cafsa.org.cn/index.php?mid=6
Meanwhile, much more Chinese students (1.14 million) was studying abroad in 2012 http://shanghaiist.com/2013/09/27/china_seeking_more_foreign_students_despite_recent_restrictions_on_working_while_studying.php.

To me, the study experience basing on technology shocked me the first time when I was asked to use UR course, as I have never contacted this kind of learning experience in China. Another thing is the advanced searching methods, digital resources, and reference list call-out on the library website. Through 3 semesters’ experience, I deeply feel the convenience of using technology in education, as I can check any study resources at any time and any place, without pen and paper. Some people who grew up in technological education environment might not feel surprised, but it’s really amazing for me!

I also love this photo, which illustrates the infinite possibilities of the perfect combination between technology and education.

Erin Lodes. Education. (Flickr)

Social Network Online: Point-to-Point vs. Radial

Chinese social network online has developed from classmates or alumni network actually. In 1998, the first alumni-connecting website “class.Chinaren.com” has been applied by many university students. On Chinaren, every class has their own forum, and people can search the year of entering school and the school’s name to join in their own classes. They even could search any person’s name to find their status of joining some classes. People were surprised to find that they could contact with their classmates or alumni who lost contacting ways for a long time through internet. From 2009, another on-line network named “Renren”. People can connect with each other directly instead of through a class forum’s platform. However, all the personal information for searching on “Renren” is still based on school and class’s name and entering year. However, it also looks like “Facebook”. As I have mentioned in class, people can’t use Facebook within Chinese territory, “Renren” is considered as Chinese Facebook.
Please see the front page of Chinaren Alumni

Please see the front page of Renren

No matter “Chinaren” or “Renren”, they achieved social network via the point-to-point connecting methods, as there is lots of limitation for strangers to join in the connecting circle. Blog, as another platform, filled the gap with a type of radial connection since 2005 in China. Blog should be closer with education, as it was very popular that some bloggers with professional skills put their knowledge on their blogs. This knowledge introduction attracted large amount of audiences to learn and discuss. Gradually, these kinds of blogs developed to some business model. For example, a girl who is good at skin-care or make-up can open a blog to introduce her experience and list some products she would like to recommend or use in the directed procedure she put on the blog. In this case, cosmetics companies are possible to provide sponsorships to a broadly influenced blogger who owns a certain number of audiences as most audiences are potential customers. This phenomenon exists in various industries such as tourism, catering, vehicle, electronic products, book, music, movie, software, etc.

Point-to-point Network

Resource: Baidu Pictures

Radial Network

Resource: Baidu Pictures

A question came into being: is point-to-point network or radial network more effective online? On the point-to-point platform, people might feel more comfortable to communicate deeply and in details. In the radial network, the bloggers might only display one side they want to show to the public, and the audiences seldom talk more about their personal life. However, point-to-point network can’t avoid narrow eyesight, comparing with multi-angle perspective among the radial network. This also derives the issue we discussed in class: “private blog” or “public blog”. Yes, we are able to keep both private blog and public blog. However, not everyone can handle both of them well at the same time. How to balance the willing to let off one’s private feeling and have more audiences is an interesting topic. On the other hand, if there are too many audiences, the communication with all of them or only most of them is a difficult task. How to deal with the relationship with the audiences is another considerable topic.

Undoubtedly, both of point-to-point and radial network are essential in virtual communities. Which one is better is difficult to be judged by simple discussion, or there isn’t a confirmed answer. However, we have to admit that as the larger influence of on-line network in the future, most people must face these issues and think more about them.