Hard Cider – Batch 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/14/2008 - 15:47Yesterday, we opened one of the bottles of the batch 1 fizzy cider. It was very fizzy, spewing out of the bottle. We took a couple bottles to a party to share. Today, we racked batch two of the hard cider we made.
With that, I want to try and capture a chronology and some of the details of our cider production and consumption, as well as some of the notes about project.
For our first batch, we started with five gallons of fresh cider on October 25. We added some cider yeast, which I had not activated and let it ferment for twenty-four days. We then racked the cider and let it settle for four more days. During the racking and the subsequent bottling, we probably lost a little due to spillage, or cider that got thrown out with the dregs. We also siphoned off a few pints for testing.
With that, we ended up bottling twelve twenty-two ounce bottles of hard still cider, or about half of the cider. We also bottled nine twenty-two ounce bottles that we added two ounces of fresh sweet cider to. This was so that the remaining yeast would have a little sugar to ferment to make the cider fizzy. We also bottled four twelve ounce bottles with one ounce of fresh sweet cider. Some of this was so that we could open smaller bottles to test to see if the cider was fizzy enough.
Yesterday, three weeks after we had bottled it, we opened one of the twelve ounce bottles, and it was incredibly fizzy. The bottles that we took to the party were also incredibly fizzy. We decided we would use less fresh cider for batch two of our hard cider.
We started our second batch of hard cider on the day we bottled the first batch. This batch is six gallons. We used Belgian ale yeast for this batch. I properly activated the yeast this time, but only allowed it to work for half an hour to an hour, instead of three hours before adding it to the cider. The cider fermented for twenty-two days this time. It was still fermenting a little and we racked it off to our secondary container. Like with the first batch, we siphoned off a little bit for tasting. It is sweeter and more fruity flavored.
This time, we were going from a larger container, and so we ended up bottling eleven twelve ounce bottles directly, without them going through the second fermentation.
Between the cider we’ve given away, drank at home, and used in cooking, we are now at seven bottles twenty two ounce bottles of hard still cider from batch one, seven twenty two ounce bottles of hard fizzy cider from batch one and three twelve ounce bottles of hard fizzy cider from batch one. The hard fizzy cider is marked with a purple dot on the bottle cap. We also have eleven twelve ounce bottles of hard cider that has been through only the first fermentation from batch two. They are marked with a black Y on the cap.
Later in the week, we will bottle the rest of batch two and determine if we want to add any additional sweet cider, and if so, how much.
So far, the hard cider production process has been fun and has produced some good cider. It will be interesting to see how the ciders age and what we decide on doing next year.
Graffiti and the Public Sphere
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/13/2008 - 12:38A week or so ago, Rick Edmonds wrote a piece on The Biz Blog at Poynter Online entitled, Freewheeling Comments, Traditional Owners Create Paradox of Topix where he looked at Topix and particularly the ongoing battle between Hartford’s Mayor, Eddie Perez and the Hartford Courant’s use of Topix.
A few days later, Heather Brandon tweeted, “@luiscotto was wondering if Courant and Perez admin came up w agreement about serious investigative articles not allowing for comments”. I responded to Heather by noting that people can still post comments elsewhere and noting that the New Haven Register had changed it’s policy to require registration. That makes a lot of sense to me. Dropping comments altogether doesn’t.
This caught the attention of Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, who sent me a tweet pointing me to a Topix blog post last January entitled, Anonymous Comments – By The Numbers.
Let me start off by giving Chris major props for being on Twitter. I believe that a lot of organizations would be much better off if their leaders had their ears a little closer to the ground, and could hear rumblings like the discussion about comments in Hartford.
Yet I found the blog post to be a bit lacking. The gist of the blog post was that Topix analyzed around 83,000 comments and found that 6.7% of those submitted by unregistered posters were rejected and 4.4% of those submitted by registered posters were rejected. Yet the 50% higher rejection rate was justified because anonymous posters submitted three times the content.
So, where do I think the problems are with this study? It is hard to choose where to start. First, it isn’t comparing a system that doesn’t require registration with one that does. It is comparing people who chose to register versus those who don’t on a system that doesn’t require registration. There is an untested assumption that the number of comments would decrease if registration were required. That might be true. Even if it is, the question remains, to what extent.
Perhaps the bigger issue, as Howard Owen put it in a response to Chris Tolles on his blog, “I think there is a difference between ‘acceptable’ and ‘accepted’.” A person identifying themselves as ‘Jason’ pushes this further with “Why is it that ‘acceptable’ or even ‘accepted’ are now the standard as opposed to excellent or exceptional?” There is a lot of content on Topix that may be accepted, but isn’t particularly acceptable, and is very far from being exceptional.
Another person addressed my first concern by noting that one organization he was at actually saw an increase in participation when the forums switched to requiring registration.
It could be that anonymous comments promotes traffic, which is good for the business side of things, and Rick Edmonds notes that Tolles expects Topix to become cashflow positive in 2009, but the bigger question is, is it promoting better discourse and citizenship.
I responded to Tolles via Twitter noting my concerns about his methodology and assumptions. He responded saying, “if you have a better study, happy to read it. :-) implementation is the only truth”.
I have even bigger concerns here. Tolles’ Topix makes its money off of user-generated content, for which he does not compensate the writers. It may work with people who aren’t willing to put their name to their words, but I’m not doing gratis research for Mr. Tolles. Nor am I inclined to follow him down a solipsistic rabbit whole believing that “implementation is the only truth”.
So, I don’t have any research to respond with. Instead, I would like people to consider a different angle. To the extent that we wish forums at newspapers to extend the public sphere, which I recognized is an assumption Tolles may not in his case be willing to grant, then it might be beneficial to look at other aspects of the public sphere.
Newspapers still publish letters to the editor, and most newspapers that I know of require writers to positively identify themselves, not only by name, but usually by location. To the extent that the writer has any particular ax to grind the newspaper likes to provide that information as well. Is there some reason for the vast difference between what newspapers consider acceptable for letters to the editors and what they consider acceptable for comments on their forums?
Then, let’s look at public hearings; at most public hearings, you need to be identifiable. Many of them require that you sign in and identify yourself before you are allowed to speak. Finally, the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics calls on journalists to “Identify sources whenever feasible”. Registration systems for comments are very feasible.
This does recognize that there are times that it might be beneficial to the identity of a commenter hidden. Here, I think about whistleblowing. Yet a whistleblower should know better than posting a comment on an online forum and responsible journalists that deal with whistleblowers need to make sure that whistleblowers don’t do things to endanger themselves. It is far to easy to track the Internet address where the comment came from.
If anything, anonymous comments might best be viewed as another form of user generated content in the public sphere, graffiti. Granted, there is some graffiti that is masterfully done. There is some graffiti where the artists identifying themselves, in terms of some pseudonymous signature or style, but much graffiti is anonymous and does little to further public discourse.
Topix has an interesting potential for the future. It could become a profitable venue for distributing digital graffiti, or it could fight a harder and more nobler battle to become a profitable venue which expands the public sphere. I hope they will consider the latter. Until then, I’ll probably save most of my commentary for my blog.
Road Trip: Random Recap
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 23:09I am back from a long drive down to Virginia to pick up my two older daughters from college. On the way down, I listened to a fair amount of Sarah Vowell’s book, “The Wordy Shipmates”, about the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Company. It is fascinating and well written and made the long drive down in the rain, which fortunately never turned to freezing rain along my trip, go much more quickly.
I arrived in Staunton, VA at around two in the morning and went quickly to sleep. In the morning, I arose, and spent much time with my daughters as they loaded their stuff in the car and we ran some final errands before driving back to Connecticut.
We had some time to talk, and I talked about technology and blogging, and they talked about their classes. However, they were tired from their semester and spent much of the trip back resting.
Before going down to pick them up, I purchased a small FM transmitter that plugs into iPods, so we could listen to their iPods on the trip back.
Other parts of the trip included time thinking about the nature of comments on blogs, and more importantly newspaper sites, which I hope to write more about later, as well as further reflections on teaching technology in public schools. One thought that I want to compare is how at least one part of teaching technology today, is perhaps the twenty first century equivalent of teaching penmanship.
Yet each of these topics requires much more thinking than I’m ready to do after a long drive.
Road Trip
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/11/2008 - 16:00It is a gray rainy day in Connecticut. By December standards it is warm but by any other standard it is cold and dreary. I rest on the couch. In a few hours, I will drive down to Virginia to pick up my two older daughters from college. Before that, I will go to the technology committee meeting at my local school. Our large orange Maine Coon Cat curls up next me, seemingly approving of my decision to nap during the day.
Road trips can be fun, seeing new things on a leisurely drive, but this trip will be done in the dark and won’t be particularly leisurely. The trip back is likely to be much more fun as my daughters and I catch up.
I expect my time online will be fairly sparse for the next couple of days, but I still hope to get a little content up each day.
With that, it seems like a good opportunity to post an email that I had sent to a mailing list of educators that use Second Life for education. One person had started compiling a list of blogs about Second Life, and another person suggested there must be a more Web 2.0-ish way of gathering the list, something like tags in delicious, a wiki, etc. I wrote my response, which was well received, and I’ve been meaning to add it to my blog for sometime. Since the content is sparse right now, and the email fits nicely with some discussions about the technology committee, here is my snarky response:
With a more technologically savvy group there might be a more 2.0-ish way. But even with that you would probably need lots of communication ahead of time to deterime which tag to use. Then, to reach out to people, would probably need to explain what del.icio.us is, how to sign up, how to tag your own blog, or other resources you find valuable.
Then the discussion would drift to how to use the feed from del.icio.us, how to add it as a blog roll on one's on blog, how to important into various blog reader software, like bloglines or Google Reader. A side discussion explaining what RSS is and how feed readers work would evolve. Someone would ask for a feed reader in Second Life and a minor religous war between BlogLines users and Google Reader users would ensue.
This would probably start a discussion about OPML, which would need further explanations and start off yet another minor religious war over protocols and open source. Someone would be bound to point out hacks to get del.icio.us feeds available as OPML. Others would point out that ma.gnolia.com already supports exporting OPML and uses OpenID and hence would be a much better solution than del.icio.us. Others would then complain about OpenID being too complicated and not widely adopted. Others would point out that Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AIM among others are starting to support OpenID. OpenID purists would point out that Microsoft's OpenID is only in testing right now, and that Google is running weird modifications to OpenID that makes it not really true OpenID and probably unlikely to work with ma.gnolia
A side discussion would evolve about OpenID, Second Life and OpenSim. A hard core geek would point out a hack to make Second Life and/or OpenSim appear as an OpenID provider. Then there would be a discussion about services working as an OpenId provider and not an OpenID consumer. Someone would set up an Away message and the thread would get diverted once again.
Somewhere in the middle of this, someone would say that they've already built a pretty good list, and if people would just email their URLs they would add it to the list and be done with all of it. This would lead into a discussion about using email to accomplish a task versus using more 2.0-ish ways. A meta discussion would ensue....
RINSE, REPEAT
Enjoy! More when I get back.
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School Technology Plans – The Virtual Fridge Door
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 20:30Recently, I attended a committee meeting for our school district as it works on its new three-year technology plan. It was an interesting meeting, but very disillusioning. I’m an old geek who understands the importance of infrastructure and the difficulties involved in implementing and supporting a robust infrastructure, but the discussion about infrastructure seemed a bit much, and the question of how it affected the what and how of our children’s education seemed particularly lacking.
This was exacerbated when I asked my daughter about her use of technology at school. She explained that they only use computer briefly during ‘technology’ on Wednesday mornings. She said she only plays games to learn words and numbers, but don’t really learn anything else. There are other options for using the computers during free periods, but without sufficient Internet access, she’s just not interested.
Granted, my daughter may be an outlier. She has an email account, an IM account, accounts on various web based computer games and on Twitter. She noted that her teacher doesn’t even know what Twitter is.
I also realize that the permissions I give to my daughter is probably much more expansive than what many parents give their children. Yet it seems as if things are particularly lacking in terms of technology at the school.
The policies are excessively restrictive. They have policies for very limited Internet access for children in grades four through six, but as best as I can tell children in kindergarten through third grade do not have access to the Internet.
The filters to protect the students are also excessive, and I’ve heard stories of teachers encouraging their students to do their research at home instead of on the schools computers because the students have much better access at home.
Reading through the policies, I’m not surprised. There are some down right arcane guidelines. They seem not to understand the scope of Fair Use when it comes to copyright, or if they do understand it, it is not reflected in the guidelines. They prohibit access to websites about tattoos. I hope that no student ever tries to do a project on the Maori’s or other aboriginal people in the South Pacific where tattoos are an important part of their culture, or on wedding traditions in India or Arabic countries where the bride is prepared for weddings with henna tattoos. For that matter, my daughter couldn’t do a report on how her mother prepared for my daughter’s birth. We decorated her belly with henna tattoos.
Yet even all of this still doesn’t approach issues of curricula. There were some good discussions at the meeting. I brought up Digital Natives. Others brought up digital storytelling projects and the New York Times article about becoming screen literate.
Let me start off with a discussion of media literacy and move on from there. From a traditional viewpoint of education, perhaps we should be thinking about helping our children learn how to gather, analyze and present information.
Our children are gathering information from a great variety of sources. Some of it comes in the form of advertising on television. Some of it comes from what they read in emails, IMs and web pages they’ve searched. As the Obama campaigns advertising in computer games illustrate, they are also being bombarded with advertising in places where digital immigrants may not even think of looking.
Students need to learn early, how to find useful information online, just as they need to learn how to find books in the library. Yet it doesn’t sound like that is being taught. How do you find a good source? How do you search beyond Google and Wikipedia? How do you know if the website you are visiting is truthful or slanted?
Once the data is gathered, how do students understand the data in the context of other information they are receiving? How do they analyze it? Then, how do they present it in a compelling manner? To what extent are students learning to select fonts and colors that compliment their message? To what extent are they manipulating sounds, pictures and videos to further help get their message across?
During the meeting, people talked a little bit about the amount of time that people can waste trying to get the right font, or the right color, and teachers talked about the first question always being about how large a font can be.
This is where I will diverge even further from what seems to be the prevailing opinions of people on the committee. I think that these sorts of explorations are valuable. I think they are a basis for a more constructivist approach to education, and I believe there is great value to this.
When my elder daughters were young, I told them they could play any computer game that they could write. I didn’t hold them to this, but I did start them on programming at a very early age, and they gained a greater understanding and appreciation about what goes into a computer game. They discovered things about programming, and math, as they experimented.
We need to encourage not only the efficient gathering, analysis and presentation of information, but we need to help students learn how to discover things, how to be creative, how to come up with hypotheses. I believe that a constructivist approach to this is very useful, and I would love to see our students start programming in kindergarten.
As students flourish with their own creativity, we also need to give better outlets to this creativity. The school should have a portal where students’ work can be displayed to the public. As an example, I have put up a project that my daughter did last year in Kindergarten as a Virtual Fridge Door.
Here we run into some additional issues. One is a school policy surrounding children’s privacy. Like so many of the other policies, this one is excessively restrictive. While I recognize that some people may not want any information about their children to ever appear online, I am not one of them, and I would like it if the school posted my daughter’s schoolwork online. I would like it if pictures from school activities could easily be posted online. At the least there should be no difference in policies about pictures, schoolwork or other information being published in local papers, appearing on radio or television and appearing online. Other schools have dealt with this by providing a blanket release, and I would be glad to sign such a blanket release.
Yet even for parents that don’t want to sign a blanket release, there are plenty of other ways that the schoolwork better online. My wife and I get PTO notices via email. We send emails back and forth with our daughter’s teacher. It would be great if assignments and materials needed for the assignments could be sent via email, or even better, made accessible at a secure school web portal.
This would also provide another way that a student’s work could be shared. If it was on the school portal, it could be made available at various levels of access; only to the student and the student’s parents, to the school community as a whole, or to the public.
So, while the school appears to have a fairly solid computer infrastructure and there are a few examples of good use of this being made in the higher grades, it appears as if technology is not being used anywhere near as affectively as it could or should be.
