Participants need to figure out how AI apps affect student assessment and evaluation

Artificial Intelligence in Education

Last Thursday and Friday, my entire department and I travelled by bus to Hotel Neo+ in Penang. Instead of being a participant, the management slotted me in to present about the effect of ChatGPT in assessment and evaluation of students. Being mostly early adopter of a lot of online tech – except LiveJournal and TikTok – the management thought it was up to me to tell my colleagues about how prevalent artificial intelligence (AI) will change — is changing — the education landscape. The first workshop was about assessment and evaluation in general, ran by a person from UUM. My workshop was scheduled for after dinner. I began by going through my AI-generated slides. A few days before, I used beautiful.ai, a site that uses the ChatGPT AI to help users automatically generate full slides! It was not perfect, but it was enough for a fake presentation. Then, I moved […]

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Minecraft

Cousins Play Remotely

I wish that when I was growing up I could play like this with other kids. Irfan has been creating, crafting and exploring in Minecraft with his cousins. Which cousins? All of them. The latest to join is Rania. With Irfan, she has crafted an entire homestead in their server. Because she’s still 6 years old, her playtime is limited, but they do get into a lot of adventures online. Rania’s even played with Rafiq all the way on the other side of the planet! Besides Minecraft, Irfan and Rania also explore Roblox environments. Wonderful how technology allows us to play games together even thousands of kilometres apart.

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Some Hisham

English Theatre Arts 2021 Final Week Video

I was given a mission to run the English Theatre Arts co-curricular course once again this semester. After seven weeks, we completed the entire run. Like last year, yesterday morning we carried out the seventh and final week  performance under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this semester after preparing for a live online performance the students who are on campus informs me that there  would  be an internet outage until Tuesday, three days after our performance day. Within 12 hours, the four theatre troupes led by their directors, produced full videos of their plays. Each student acted at their respective locations recorded  it and sent it to the editor. After the editing, they sent it to me in time for a livestream session. In a worse turn of events, unlike last year, I was unable to connect to YouTube live to livestream their video. This was after a […]

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Command line input

A Virtual Eye For OBS

Finally OBS Studio virtual camera works! The Story So Far… I have been using OBS Studio to record classes online. I post these recordings on YouTube so students would be able to review the class. The students would do well to review the lesson delivery, activities they did and instructions I vomited out my piehole. I had been attempting to use OBS Studio for another thing, which is as a virtual camera to be used in Google Meet or Discord video chats. There are a lot of neat things you can do with it such as live transitions, camera switching (if one had more than a single camera), overlays and neat filters as well. In Recent Days… I have been having problems with installing the plugins that would allow me to use the OBS screen output as a virtual camera. I cloned the two different modules required, obs-v4l2sink and v4l2loopback, […]

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Mint 20 Cinammon

Mint 20 is Here

I noticed that there as a Mint update notification at the system tray yesterday. When I looked it up, it was the upgrade to 64-bit Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon. Its codebase is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS codenamed Focal Fossa. Since this is a Long Term Support system, I decided to upgrade ASAP. It took two hours or so, and in the end I was running Mint 20:

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Close up

Theatre Arts Final Livestream

The English Theatre Arts co-curriculum class of 2020 have finally reached the end, which meant it was time for the final performances of their plays. The first and second classes in past years performed live, the former in a classroom and the latter on stage, for their seventh and final week. However, the third class were unable to perform live on stage thanks to the Covid-19 outbreak. Not only it was forbidden to hold mass gatherings (such as a stage play), most of the students if not all were away from campus at their respective hometowns under light lockdown. So I decided for the students to write screenplays instead of stage plays, then film their parts separately. Each troupe had a director, writer and video editor as part of their non-acting crew members. They submitted their scripts for assessment and their videos so I could organise a livestream of their […]

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MEKA2

Images of Week 11

Remote teaching using Google Meet is quite satisfying in its own way, though I do still prefer live face-to-face meetings. The online sessions are enhanced by sharing screens of the slides I have to present, links to videos the students need to view and Google Forms that required filling in. Here are images from Week 11 of the semester; one screen capture per class throughout the week.

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Tokyo Street Night

Desktop of a Street at Night

My latest desktop on this Linux Mint machine is “Tokyo Street Night” by an artist named arsenixc. I love the colours on this piece. It overlays a sense of peace over what could be a bustling street. Click on the image below for the bigger picture pop-up. Click here to see the image at its DeviantArt page. Bonus: Here’s the same street in the day and at sunset.

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New laptop

New Gear From Atok and Opah

Although having accepted a new job, there are many problems that we have yet to overcome. One of the biggest perils to my final semester in my attempt to finally earn a Bachelor’s degree (even though I’m married) was that the old laptop, who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever. (Or not; you can never tell with these techno-organic life forms.) Its hard disk drive gave up the ghost a month before we moved up here. I have a whole semester of assignment writing to complete and no new-fangled electronic typewriter thing to do them with. Not to mention, no money to buy a new one. Then one day, Atok and Opah Irfan sent me a package at my office (because being out in the sticks, we were not certain if the post office would deliver to the right house) and in the box was a […]

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I will eat your eggs before you could eat mine

This Pangolin is Precise

So it came to pass that if I needed to use the new Bamboo Pen graphics tablet, I had to upgrade my operating system. Long story short: I decided on totally replacing my ArtistX 1.0 OS with Ubuntu’s latest Long Term Support distro, which was 12.04 also dubbed “Precise Pangolin”. After installing the sucker, I finally came face to face for the first time… with the Unity desktop! Click on the thumbnail above to see the desktop, including the Dash HUD. Searching Ubuntuforums.org, I discovered how make a 3rd generation Bamboo Pen work with the Precise. I also reread on how to set up the Benq scanner using Snapscan’s binary file so I can scan using Sane or GIMP. Finally, I installed MyPaint I found on Ubuntu Software Center and discovered that it worked great with the Bamboo. Below is my first doodle-type sketch using the tablet in conjunction with […]

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The box too wasn't made of bamboo

Arise, Newer Graphics Tablet; But Not So Fast!

Once upon a time, I bought a Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. With its stylus I made many a drawing, til its USB cable died screaming. Actually it died quite some years ago. In the interim, @plasticstitch had told me he had an unused Bluetooth-connected Graphire tablet and sent it by air mail to me where I made many more drawings. This device acted finicky with a Linux operating system, and I was using an Ubuntu distro. One day I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 by dint of installing the Ubuntu fork named ArtistX 1.0, and the device refused to talk via Bluetooth to the tablet. Today I bought a new tablet, a Wacom Bamboo Pen. Its matte-black housing looks sleeker than the silver-hued Graphire. I’d prefer to have purchased a Wacom Cintiq 24HD, but the Bamboo Pen is the only one I could spare cash on. Incidentally it’s the cheapest […]

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Promeffeus

Wallpaprometheus

I appear to have a new wallpaper for the Artist X 1.0 desktop. Click to expand it. It’s that ship sent by Weyland Industries. S.S. Lollipop or something. Can’t wait for the movie. I’m not saying it’s ALIEN, but it’s ALIEN.

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Calibre Ebook Reader

I have discovered and installed the free ebook reader and management application named Calibre to read books and stuff! Apart from reading ebooks, Calibre can also manage your digital book library, search for ebooks in various locations from the Amazon Kindle store to Feedbooks.com and synchonize with a mobile reader such as my smartphone. Seeing that I’m pretty OCD about book cataloguing, I’ve used Calibre to ensure all the books’ metadata, cover image and such are meticulously entered. Thanks to Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, I now have quite a lot of books in the queue to be read. Calibre also has a list of DRM-free ebooks on its website here Below is the ebook management interface screencap. Click on the thumbnails to view larger images. [[popup:calibre-capture01.jpg:(thumbnail)::center:1]] Here is the interface used to edit the ebooks’ metadata, displaying E.E. Doc Smith’s Triplanetary. Calibre could search the metadata and cover image online […]

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Hishgraphics H

Amarok 2.0 Woes… Then a Solution!

A few nights ago, I decided to upgrade the Ubuntu operating system from 8.10 Intrepid Ibex to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. (Yeah, yeah. I should be at 10.04 Lucid Lynx right now. I’ll get around to it.) Everything went along swimmingly with the applications I’ve had installed… until I ran Amarok. Amarok version 1.something had been automatically upgraded by the OS level-up to version 2.0. The user interface looks somewhat different. But more important than that, there was no sound! Upon executing the application the systray warned me, “Phonon: KDE’s Multimedia Library. The audio playback device HDA Intel (AD198x Analog) does not work. Failing back to default.” Playing any songs, a warning would pop up, “Too many errors encountered in playlist. Stopped playback.” When I played the same songs using Totem, they worked perfectly. So I did a some Googling and discovered this solution which worked. 1. Create the file libphonon.conf […]

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Where's the Ojoster Sector?

Ubuntu Miscellanea

Three things come to mind. Flash Problems I’ve been having some problems with browser-embedded flash files. Those of you who notice my reluctance to click on Youtube links during chat will be pleased to know that I’ve gotten Youtube working on this browser, as well as the new Photobucket user interface. It took me quite a while to hunt down the solution at the Ubuntu forums. There were several false leads, but finally flash is free to be fully-utilized by Firefox. What I did was to input the following commands line-by-line on Terminal and follow whatever instructions that was displayed. sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla sudo apt-get remove mozilla-plugin-gnash sudo apt-get remove adobe-flashplugin sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree Never Doubt The Weather Applet This morning when I sat down at this computer, I saw that the gnome-clock weather applet said it was raining. I looked out the window […]

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Sequence of Events

I have a few backlogged blog entries to make, and here is the sequence of events detailing why they were delayed: 1. Thursday January 22, 2009 – Allie’s 6-month birthday. Lots of picture taking occurred. 2. Friday January 23, 2009 – my laptop screen dies in the mid-afternoon. Connecting it to an external monitor shows that the laptop itself is fine. I drive to Best Buy, stand in line forever, only to have the Geek Squad (f*ckers!!!) tell me that a) my laptop warranty ended November of 2008, and finally they come around to say that they don’t fix laptop screens. Please call someone else. They suggest a company. (Don’t even get me started on how angry I was that I drove all the way to Best Buy to have them give me this bullshit. What kind of Geek Squad doesn’t fix laptop screens?) So I get back in the […]

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