This is my peer review for group4’s learning resource, the link to the learning resource is https://chelseacrawford.opened.ca/.

First, I just want to say that is a really nice website you guys made, and I feel like this is just like a real course. One of the suggestion I want to make is that maybe try to have less text and more videos and picture. I understand that biology is all about big terminology and definition but I think it could be a lot more helpful to include some pictures and videos for each definition rather than just text. In this way, for people who have never study biology before could find it more interesting to learn. Another suggestion I want to make is that perhaps writing a blog article may not be the best way to access a student, why not give students some fun activity to do, something that they can relate to all the terms and definition mentioned in this course like a puzzle for matching the correct the term and definition to the pictures. I think that will encourage them to better absorb the knowledge. Overall I think you guys did a very good job.

For the last couple of weeks, I have gained a substantial amount of experience on cooking. I have mastered some of the most well known dishes among the northern region of China. I am very proud to say that I have become quite efficient at my knife skills during the past four weeks and I start to feel like I am a real cook now. Although I still lack the ability to determine the right amount time to prepare for each dish as I have mentioned before in my week4 post: https://haozhechi.home.blog/2019/06/09/week-4-post-learning-challenge/. But I guess this is a skill that requires a long time of practice to master and difficult to require in just about four weeks.

I must say that I learned a lot from Alex’s blog: https://alexdeweert.home.blog/ about how to create a successful blog. His every post is very informative and detailed and his usage of video, diagram, picture really attract my interest.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18rDED8Cbfmkh30ytOTtnqvqUQwoec2XC7O7HRtWxyoU/edit?usp=sharing

I do agree with the idea mentioned this week that technology is neutral, nowadays people rely too much on google, Wikipedia…, although it brings convenience to people it does have a negative side. When we are used to getting information easily from online resource we also give up on thinking which is one of the most crucial part of learning. Without the ability and urges to think on the subject by yourself, we would just be remembering the materials which happen so often in today’ age and it is something I myself have been guilty of doing so.

For this week’s challenge, I decide to try making one of the famous dish in northern China region the Cold Rice Noodles.

During my research of the recipe for this dish I discovered a great website that contains vast recipes of special dish in each different region spread through China. (links below)

https://www.meishichina.com/

In this website, it provides you with a detailed recipe of how to make the dish and allow you to share your cooking with others. For this dish it is really easy to prepare, think this as a Chinese salad, the main material is the cold noodle which can be purchased in almost all convenient store. Mix it with sliced cucumbers, chili oil, peanuts… and you have yourself a traditional cold rice noodle(you can choose your own dressing base on your own likes.

reference

https://home.meishichina.com/recipe-459876.html

For this week, I have tried to master another traditional Chinese food, egg fried rice. It is probably the most common dish known to Chinese people, and it takes little effort to prepare.

The most important aspect of cooking the egg fried rice is the preparation of rice. It is extremely important that you maintain the right portion of water and rice before you put the rice into rice cooker, and this makes all the difference. The reason for this caution is because once the rice is ready it will be fired in pan for a amount of time, and you need the rice to be wet enough to endure that time so that when it is finished it won’t shrink too much and rune the flavor. I have struggled with this during the week, and I still sometime mess up the portion. Hopefully I could master this in the following week.

Another interesting thing I would like to mention is that as I looking through videos online about egg fried rice, I came cross multiple different variations of egg fried rice. However, no matter which specific way they used to cook this dish, all of them can be classified into two group base on the color of the rice which is either white or golden. If it is white rice you want, then you fry the egg and rice separately if you want it to be golden then you fry them together. (personally I prefer the white version)

On last week, I have mastered some of the basic Chinese food including scrambled egg with tomato and rice fried with egg, which are easy to prepare and easy to learn for beginners. For this week’s learning challenge, I decide to further challenge myself on cooking some more complex dishes. The dish that I decide to learn this week is called Stewed Drumsticks with Potatoes, which is a stew with potato and chicken, it is a very popular dish among the northern region of China and can be found in all ranks of restaurants.

The biggest challenge that I am facing this week is on preparing the ingredients, which is very crucial when cooking this dish. For some reason during the first couple of times that I cooked this dish, the chicken tastes weird like it is under cooked and that smell even spread to the soup. At first I thought that I probably didn’t wash the chicken thorough enough. However that weird smell still won’t go away and it didn’t help even if I removed all the chicken skin before I added the chicken. When I looked back at all the videos I found out that I missed one important step when preparing the chicken. In the videos, the chicken were rinsed two times separately, after the chicken was boiled during the first preparation stage, they were fished out and rinsed a second time with wine before they were added to other ingredients. This mistake relates me to one of the ideas we talked about this week, the misconception of learning. When I was watching the videos for the first time, I actively skip the preparation part for I had this preconception that it would be the same as the other dishes that also involves chicken and it would not alter the flavor too much. It turns out that for every dishes, even involves the same ingredients, different steps in preparation could greatly influenced the flavor of the dish.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YP9bqxbmSU

For this week’s learning challenge, I intend to learn several different recipe for cooking traditional Chinese food. Cooking is always something that I wish to learn, as a matter of fact my father has been a chief his whole life, and he always complained that I didn’t inherit his skills as a cook. So it will be nice if I can surprise him next time I go back home.

The main approach I am going to take is through watching YouTube videos and repetitively practice the recipe on my own. Base on the dual coding theory of memory that was initially proposed by Paivio (1971), that basically states that learning through receiving information from two or more channels could be more effective than through just one channel such as reading a recipe from a cooking book, where we just receive information through the visual channel.(It should be stated that receiving information from too many channels simultaneously could be potentially counterproductive) A video allows me to learn cooking from both visual and auditory channels, and I would be able to connect that two sets of data when I am practicing by myself.

During the practice, I will use take advantage objectivism and behaviourism to maximize my learning efficiency. For a cooking recipe is similar to a math formula, each components like the temperature, time and amount of spices could greatly affect the taste of the food. By strictly following each recipe, I could enhance the effective transmission of knowledge as mentioned in objectivism. Also after finished cooking, the result of my cooking will serve as an immediate “reward or punishment” mechanism as in behaviourism since I will have to eat whatever I cooked up. Based on the taste of my cooking, I would be able to reflect on the steps I took while making it, revise it the next time and further improve my skills.

Reference:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/theories-memory.html https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/section-3-2-behaviourism/

Hi, fellow students and course instructor from EDCI335.

My name is Haozhe Chi, I am an international student from China. I am a forth year student in major of statistics, and this is also my last year here as a student of UVIC. I chose this course as an elective for my degree, and it is something completely new to me, I am very excited and certainly looking forward to learn some useful skills from this course.

Learning experience

In my second year as a computer science student in UVIC, I took a very interesting course called STAT 225, it was a course required by the computer science program back then and it was the first time I got in touch the statistics theory and how people use it to help people making better decision in the real world. It was such a fascinating experience, I eventually changed my major to statistics.