Move to Tumblr

After a short conversation with a friend last night, I decided to move my blog to Tumblr. He said "blogspot is like hotmail". Well, I guess he's right. Guys, this is my new address: http://annezhou.tumblr.com/. Check it out!

205 trillion options for your learning!

Today's post will start from an interesting experiment conducted by a Human Computer Interaction professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In his experiment, he gave both students and educators a math problem in three different formats: story, equation and the narrative of the equation.

• Story: Tom plan to share his 26 bottles of beer with 4 friends. In order to make everyone get 2, how many bottles he should leave for himself? 
• Equation: (26-x)/4=2

Now guess which student group gets higher correction percentage? 

Unfortunately, I pick up the wrong option as most of the educators do. :( Different from educators' judgement (equation group may be easier for students to understand), story telling gets higher correction percentage! He does this experiment in both high schools and universities across different countries and gets the same result. (The difference between storytelling and equation may be less significant in college level students) 

Prof. Kenneth Koedinger, presenter of the seminar considers this as a "linguistic phenomenon". In his point of view, the equation is an "information chunk". For those who know the rules (like the educator), it is easier to understand; but if you don't know the chunk, you cannot solve the problem immediately (like the students). He uses an analogy for the students' difficulty in this situation: imagine you're playing chess. It is hard for someone who doesn't understand the rule to know how to get there. That's exactly what happened here--the gap between the educators and the students. In order to overcome that gap, he suggests a "data-driven" learning method. He believes that educational design is better based on accurate cognitive models of student knowledge and learning. And accurate cognitive models are best built by combining constraints from computational modeling and from statistical models of student performance data. 

I'm also amused by his PowerPoint about "instructional complexity": basically, there are 205 trillion options when you decide to design your instructions. So educators, do NOT expect to pick up the "right" method from all those options. Time to do your data mining job!

P.S: Last week, Stanford Computer Science department announced CS+X combination major option. For now, X could be English or Music. I think this is a perfect interpretation of the "linguistic phenomenon". 

Seminar at Stanford HCI

Last Friday, I went to a GREAT seminar hosted by Stanford Human-Computer Interactive Group (HCI). The presenter Mira Doutcheva is  a senior research scientist at Adobe Systems. Her work in Adobe (and also this seminar) is focused on: 1) how to lower the users' barriers with the help of creativity support tools and 2) how to help designers and developers to build these tools to support the information need. Check more detailed information here.

The tool called "Pixeltone" makes me extremely interested. Check its introduction video here and see how cool it is!

Of course it makes those complicated steps to accomplish a task become much easier with help of audio instruction.  Assuming you are an experienced photoshop user, you have to go through AT LEAST four steps ("edit-color-red-apply") to change the color of a shirt.  But with Pixeltone, it only takes two ("define a shirt"-"change it red"), even for a beginner. But I see its great potential to get over the "natural language" problem, which is a big challenge for most of the designers. You cannot expect your users to know what "rinse" is for the first time, and it may take them so long to figure out what does that mean. (Unfortunately, "rinse" is not the only "Designer's Language" they need to figure out).

So the mechanism of PixelTone is that it analyzes the users' data by breaking the syntax of the sentence. For example: "Make the shirt bright" will be "Verb+n.+adj." in the database. The computer will search the database and find the correct action next. That means you don't have to find the ONLY correct path ("edit-color-red-apply"). Just leave the work to your computer. But remember: Be nice! Don't expect your laptop know what you mean by "make it heavenly" :)

Wikipedia Education Retweeted and Followed Me!

Well, this should be a GREAT reason for me to start blogging. It's been a very busy month for me: move from Beijing to the bay area, try to adapt to new environment and know more people. Most importantly, start my new journey in instructional technology. 

There are many interesting projects going on right now, but the most exciting one is that WE WILL RUN A USABILITY TESTING PROJECT WITH WIKIPEDIA!!! YAYYYY!!!!! 

Wikipedia launched a new program "Wikipedia Education" last year, to help college students better use wikipedia as a tool to collaborate with each other editting one research topic. They call it "the end of throwaway of assignments and the beginning of real-world impact for student editors. Whether students are writing a new article or improving an existing one, they will develop many writing and researching skills as in the traditional classroom. The biggest difference is they're writing to a more broad audience on the platform of Wikipedia (Not just for their professors). Doesn't this sound cool?

We had a meeting with the project manager at Wikipedia education last week and there are so many interesting areas that we may step into. For example: How to help professors to create their own course page on Wikipedia before writing tasks are assigned? Is the tutorial helping students learn wiki editing rules effective? Is there a format (text, video, audio, etc) students prefer/more effective? Hmmm..., I cannot be too aggressive but it's really hard to hold my curiosity. 

Well, I will keep on blogging our progress on this project. Please check the wikipedia education website and offer me your opinion. Everything will be deeply valued! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program

WuYi Rock Tea Making

Since we have already introduced two kinds of Wuyi Rock tea, one of the most famous Oolong teas, it is time to talk about the Oolong tea handicraft. There are four main Oolong tea areas, Northern Fujian, Southern Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan. They follow very similar procedure but the slight difference determines their flavor difference. 

Step One: Leaf Pickup 

There are three pickup seasons in one year: spring, summer and fall. Timing is important because leaves too tender will be over-cooked in the "roast" and "bake" step. 

Step Two: Green-making (ZuoQing, 做青)

Green-making, sometimes translated as "fine manipulation of green leaves" is one of the most important steps in the oolong tea handicraft. Craftsmen first dehydrate fresh green leaves under the sun. Next, they shake the dehydrated tea-leaves with controlled speed/rhythm, literally translated as "green-shaking"(YaoQing,摇青). In the ancient times, craftsmen shake by hands, but now machines are more commonly used. The green-shaking step is to help the aromatic substances in the stalk to go into the leaves. This unique technique makes the oolong tea intensively-aromatic. After the green-shaking step, the green leaves will be spread and cooled by air. This is called "cool green"(LiangQing, 凉青) . It is important to keep the leaves spread, so they could keep on losing water. 

Shake green by hand

Shake green by machine

Step Three: Green Roasted (chaoqing, 炒青) & Rolling (Rounian,揉捻)

During the "green-making" step, leaves have already been fermented. When temperate goes up in the step, it stops the tea from further fermentation. That's why oolong tea is called "half-fermented" tea. Usually, craftsmen put the "post green-making" leaves into a big iron pot to roast them. The tea will keep on fermenting until 80C. After that, the enzyme stops oxidation. With continuous rolling, leaves will turn into green and yellow. The green color comes from the chlorophyll left, while the yellow color comes from the result of the initial oxidation--theaflavin. As the fermentation/initial oxidation proceeds, the thearubigins increase and the theaflavins decrease. That makes the unique feature of oolong tea "green leaf with red trim". In another word, the red trim comes from the complete oxidation. 

Roast Green

Step Four: Bake tea leaves(HongBei, 烘焙）

This step is to get rid of the unclean flavor of the tea leaves. First, spread the tea leaves evenly on different layers of bake basket; Light the charcoal in the bake-hole. The bake process is like when you stew a soup. You have to keep the fire very light, so it lasts really long. The longest bake process takes 12 hours. Maybe that's why the rock tea is so precious. If we know the whole process of the rock tea making, we may respect and enjoy every sip of it! 

Bake Basket

Bake Hole and Charcoal

WuYi Cinamon Tea (Wuyi RouGui,武夷肉桂)

Region: WuYi Mountain, Fujian province
Category: Oolong Tea
Shape: Streak/Cord-like, firmingly curved
Color: Brown-green
Color of the soup: Orange, clear
Smell: Spicy cinnamon
Flavor: A very rich and mellow flavor with bittersweetness
Color of leftover: Yellow leaf with red trim


Wuyi Mountain is a very famous mountain in Northern part of Fujian province. The crust movement (due to volcano) developed into its unique "three pits, two gullies(三坑两涧)" landform long time ago. This kind of complicated and diverse landform, which is called "micro climate" by tea connoisseurs is a perfect environment for tea tree's growth. Also, it is believed that Wuyi Mountain has "36 peaks, 99 rocks" and under each rock there're different kinds of tea trees. The peak prevents the tea trees from overly-sundry in summer or the extreme coldness in winter. Besides, soil is another important factor in tea trees' growth. Iron in the volcanic rock has been weathered away into Wuyi rock and soil, and that's what the Wuyi rock tea's name comes from. 

A is WuYi Mountain, in northern part of FuJian province.

Wuyi Rock Tea is a general term for the category of Oolong tea that produced from the WuYi Mountain. It is famous for the unique "Charm of Rock(岩韵)", a rock aroma that makes the tea flavor very rich and mellow, along with the sweet taste after original bitterness. It is considered to be the best category of Oolong tea and a lot of tea conoisseurs' favorite. 

All the red points are the famous peaks in the Wuyi Mountain. 

The quality of the tea is determined by the area of the rock. The top Wuyi rock tea comes from "three pits, two gullies". When choosing the Wuyi rock tea, connoisseurs usually ask whether it is from the core producing areas(Zhengyan, 正岩), literally means the core rock area in Chinese. The best Wuyi rock tea is called "Big Four"(四大名枞), which is: the red rob (da hong pao, 大红袍), iron arhat (tie luo han,铁罗汉), White cockscomb (bay ji guan,白鸡冠) and water cockchafer (shui jin gui, 水金龟).

The cinnamon flavor of WuYi Cinnamon is not cinnamon additive, it is the tea tree's special character. It is believed that there are two most magic plants in the world, one is grape and the other is the tea tree, because they have many magic talents inside. As long as you apply the right technique (fermentation/bake,etc), it will help them to let it out. For example, the orchid-flavor narcissus tea, the cinnamon tea. For wine, there's even a metal flavor. There's also an artificial way to add flavor and that is flower tea, such as the jasmine tea. But it can also be beautiful. In the old times, they separate tea with jasmine until the timing for the blossom instant of jasmine. But nowadays, they usually choose low-quality tea to do so since the flower will help to cover the shortcoming of the tea. 

 The cinnamon tea on the left is from a famous brand called "Lang Yun" (郎韵）

Dried tea in a cool tea holder

The first pour of the tea, the soup color is much darker than ZhangPing narcissus

When drinking Wiiyi Cinnamon tea, don't forget to smell the cinnamon flavor before you drink it. There are "two smells" during the tea ceremony: hot smell after you pour the water inside, and cold smell for the warm cup  after you drink up the soup. You can hardly get the cinnamon smell by the dry leaves, but during the "teacup warmup" step (the step before the first pour), put the dry tea in the warmed cup and shake it, then you will smell the strong cinnamon right after you open the cup.  

Tea meditation:
Some tea connoisseurs call themselves "tea server", instead of "tea drinker". Before you drink the tea, there are several procedures during the whole process, from the original leave-pickup to sunburn, several rounds of fermentation and finally tea making. All these persons need to work together to extract the best flavor of the tea. Sometimes I feel this kind of relationship is like you and your "mentors", or I should say, all the people that help you find the special talents inside you. It could be your teacher, a friend takes you into a specific field, or just a random person. If we look at tea in this perspective, you will feel it's amazing how tea could turn from an ordinary tree leaf to a popular drink all over the world. So I really like to be called a "tea server" at this point.  

A cool tea house in Beijing

I've been volunteering working in this cool place for a while: record every detail of HuiLiang (惠量小院) by my video camera, make them into a consistent and beautiful story, and help more people know about it. That's how the "HuiLiang. ZHOU" studio comes from. 

Hui (惠) , blessing; Liang (量), accumulate. The founder says he wants it to be not just a tea house, but a place accumulate people's power and blessing. There are more than 50 classes in HuiLiang every week: Chinese tea, Chinese incense, Taoism and FengShui, Calligraphy, Chinese painting, ancient Chinese Classic etc. Since I need to collect my video material, I have visited almost every class and every time I am moved and amazed by the wisdom contained in the ancient Chinese traditions: 

"Different people have different opinions about drinking tea: some people focus on tea itself, some on the water, and more experienced tea drinkers will focus on the sunshine and soil that breeds the tea."

"You can find almost everything in life in a cup of tea. Take marriage for example, every relationship goes from the original intense love/taste to a more insipid state. Three factors affect the performance of the tea: the amount of the tea, the temperature of the water and the timing you get the soup. If you like a more strong flavor/intense love, you can make the first few pours very strong but it won't last long. You can also choose to put more tea, but even so, it goes to the insipid taste finally. Insipid doesn't mean boring, it means all the love finally goes to the specific/basic life, like eating, drinking, sex, etc. Just like tea is not necessity in life, but water is. You can choose to get a new cup of tea if you are bored (just like you divorce because you feel bored with the person), but it won't take you long to realize the next cup of tea will finally get insipid finally. "


Anyway, I will share more about the "HuiLiang.ZHOU studio" works in the future. This time, I'm going to post the two year anniversary gift I made for them here and hope you will like it.