Tag: ethics

A day of photographing comics

This morning, after picking up groceries form the supermarket, I spent time photographing the batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I’d written yesterday. That took me past lunch time.

Then this afternoon I had another two classes of the Art topic. At the beginning of one, when I said today’s topic was art, a kid asked if we were going to talk about comics. I had to say no, but I’d put it on my topic planning list and see if I can come up with a lesson about comics. I’m not sure off the top of my head if I can fill a lesson with that, but maybe…

Tonight is face-to-face board games night. I have time to write this before I go because we’re starting an hour later than usual at the request of tonight’s host. So I don’t have any reports on what games we played yet. I’m planning on going to the Thai place near where I used to work to pick up some dinner on the way, since it’s only a couple of blocks away from the host’s house. I’ll be taking Scully tonight too, so everyone can see her.

New content today:

Ethics of teasing

In this morning’s face-to-face volunteer ethics class at the local school we started a new topic: Teasing. A few of the students were away at a rugby event, so there were only 10 kids in the class. The material goes through some scenarios to look at the questions of what exactly is teasing, and whether teasing is ever okay or not.

With that number of kids, it was easy enough to let the conversation progress organically, with kids speaking one after another, without me having to enforce hands up before speaking. It was a good discussion, and the kids generally converged on the idea that teasing between friends who are peers is okay if it’s done in a friendly, joking manner, but in other cases it’s bad – such as when done to deliberately hurt someone, or when done by a person in authority, or by someone who’s not a good friend.

I managed to fit in another 2.5k run today – my first since last Friday. I was a bit hesitant early because the weather was cold and showery, but it cleared up mid-afternoon so I could go out in the sun, though it was still a bit chilly.

Spring is on the way in the foliage though. Magnolias have been blooming for a few weeks already, but now cherry blossoms are popping up everywhere, and azaleas too.

New content today:

Thinking critically about art

I spent much of today writing the new week’s lesson for my online ethics & critical thinking classes. This is more on the critical thinking side – the topic being Art.

I start by showing the kids a picture that “I made”, and I ask them if they would call it “art”. In the three classes I ran tonight, everyone said yes. Then I reveal that I made it by using the online AI art generation program Craiyon. I share the web page live and type in a prompt and show them how it generates pictures. Then I re-ask the question – now that they know the picture was produced by an AI system, is it still “art” or not? Can a computer program produce something that we’re happy to call art”?

Then we talk for a while about the meaning of art. I show a Picasso painting from the Spanish Civil War period, when he produced a lot of artwork with sad imagery. I ask them what feeling they get from it, and many of the kids so far have said sadness. Then I explain why Picasso painted such images, because of his reactions to the war. And ask if knowing that makes them appreciate the art any more. Most of them agreed that it does.

Then I go back and ask is there any possible meaning behind the AI-generated art? If not, does that automatically make it inferior to human-produced art, or not? What if you can’t tell the difference? Does it matter?

And then I go into some possible uses for AI-generated art. And ask the kids what they think it means for the future of human artists.

There’s more to the lesson, diverging into a few other different themes, about destroying art, and whether famous/historical/significant art should be free for the public to view or not. I think it’s a good lesson, and it’s more fun and less stressful for me to teach than last week’s topic on cloning.

New content today:

Cloning pets

I finished up the last lessons of the week’s cloning topic today. In the very last class I raised the same question I’d asked in all the others: Would it be okay to clone dogs or cats if people wanted a new pet that was like their old one? And then I mentioned that the company Viagen exists and has been doing this for 7 years.

And one girl in this class erupted: “Oh my god! I have to clone my dog! I didn’t know they could do this! I’m going to tell my parents! I don’t care how much it costs!”

…

Okay… I hope her parents will be able to deal with this!

And this evening was lecture 2 of the image processing course at university. We covered image and video formats and then some basic image preprocessing operations. This is the easy stuff before we get stuck into full-on image filtering next week.

For dinner before the lecture I had ramen at a nearby Japanese place, which is fairly good. I had a bad ramen at a different place near the university earlier this year, so I went to the place that I know is good.

New content today:

Ethics of cloning

I had three more online ethics classes today on the cloning topic. There’s an interesting diversity of opinions among the kids in the classes on this. I ask if it’s okay for a married couple who can’t have a baby naturally to have a baby that’s a clone of the mother.

  • All the kids in one class: No. You shouldn’t clone humans.
  • All the kids in another class: Sounds fine, sure, why not?

I had a follow-up question ready, asking if it’s okay for a single woman to have a clone baby of herself, if she doesn’t want a husband/boyfriend. Obviously there was no point asking this of the first class, so I skipped it. I asked the second class, thinking some of them might object to single women having children. But they all said it would be fine.

We actually start talking about cloning animals and spend half the lesson on that before tackling humans. I ask about cloning farm animals, or endangered species, or pets. So far almost all of the kids have been surprised to learn that there is a company that has been cloning pet dogs and cats since 2015. Some of think that’s okay, while others think it’s a waste of money and people should just get a new pet instead of cloning an old one, and some think it’s bad because there are already plenty of dogs and cats who need homes.

By the end of the lesson we’re discussing why human cloning, which is feasible given our current technology, hasn’t been done yet (as far as anyone knows). How would a person feel if they grow up to learn they are a clone? Most of the answers have been pretty negative.

Also today I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school this morning. It was the last lesson on the topic of tolerating/respecting other people’s beliefs. It was actually really interesting because through this topic several kids changed their minds on one of the main questions: If Anna (a child) believes smoking is okay because her grandmother smokes and is perfectly healthy, should we respect her beliefs? And should we allow her to publish her beliefs in the school newsletter?

Initially the kids were mostly against these, as they all agreed smoking was dangerously bad. But through discussion about how to argue convincingly with someone, by presenting evidence in a polite manner, and letting people make informed decisions by presenting them with multiple ideas, they started to converge on the idea that they should respect Anna’s beliefs, and even let her publish them – as long as opposing evidence was also presented. It was very impressive to see.

The weather today was delightful. Sunny, and the temperature got up to 24.4°C. That’s the warmest day since the middle of May, and very welcome it was after the weeks of chilly winter conditions. This is a real taste of spring, and with flowers bursting all over the place already – magnolias, camellias, azaleas – it really felt like spring today.

And a final thing that happened today: There was a truck accident at the end of my street. A crane truck came down the hill on the main road and lost control, ending up embedded in a pedestrian island in the middle of the cross street (my street), which was planted with shrubs and mulch, so the truck cab ended up stuck deep in the soil and couldn’t be driven out. This blocked the main road in both directions for several hours, and traffic had to be diverted to quite a large detour. I don’t know if anyone was hurt in the accident, but from what I saw it didn’t look like any other vehicles were involved, and the crane driver should have been able to get out okay. The main danger would have been if a pedestrian was crossing the cross street there—like I do regularly—they could easily have been hit. So I’m glad I wasn’t at the time.

New content today:

Four classes in one day

I’ve had to move my Monday ethics extension class to Tuesday because of the university teaching on Monday, so today I had 4 classes instead of 3, which is the most I’ve ever done in a single day. I know it’s not a full 8 hours work, but it’s still exhausting!

At lunch I took Scully for a long walk, down to the Greenwich Point ferry wharf ( a longer walk than the Greenwich wharf, where we take her sometimes too). The weather was nice – sunny and not too cold. It should warm up a bit more this week too, bringing our first hint of spring.

New content today:

Art and weather

Today I spent time working on brief lesson outlines for upcoming ethics/critical thinking classes. I do this for classes 4 weeks in advance, so parents and students know what topics are coming up. I write the detailed lesson plans later, closer to when they are done. This week I was a bit behind, so I did two brief outlines, on the topics of art and weather. I’ve done art before, in January this year, but I had a new student join last week, and she specifically requested art as it’s her favourite subject. So I went back and looked at the previous lesson and came up with a bunch of new questions that I can ask.

For lunch I took Scully for a walk and went to the nice bakery. They had a raspberry chocolate gateau today, so I tried a slice of that after my chicken pie. It was very good.

An amusing thing that my friends and I have been doing the past few days is making AI-generated Magic: the Gathering cards, using Urza’s AI, a tool written by some fellow MtG/AI enthusiasts. It’s quite fun, and produces some amusing and interesting cards sometimes (among a bunch of random semi-rubbish). You give it a card name, and it produces all of the other text and artwork for the card. The flavour text is often the really good part. To get ideas for new cards I like to use snippets of the flavour text from the last card.

Some examples (link to permalinks of the cards I’ve generated):

One thing we’ve noticed is that it tends to produce a preponderance of blue cards, and few of any other colour. My theory: Blue cards have a broader and more general vocabulary on them, whereas cards of other colours are more specific and focused in their language. So when you type in some random phrase, it’s more likely to be a closer match to the blue vocabulary.

New content today:

Being a busy bee

I had a full day today. I started with my Year 6 ethics class at the local school. We’re in the middle of three lessons talking about tolerating other people’s beliefs, and today we explored what it actually means to tolerate something. Does it mean you don’t try to convince them they’re wrong? Does it mean you should try to understand the reasons why they hold those beliefs? Does it mean you don’t make fun of them? Does it mean their beliefs are as good as yours? This is a well-behaved group of kids, but this morning I had to encourage them to speak – I asked some questions and got silence a few times.

I did a 2.5k run when I got home. And then took Scully for a walk at lunch time.

The afternoon I spent writing up my report for the ISO Photography meeting I attended in Cologne last month. I have to send this to Standards Australia, prior to our follow-up local meeting, which is on Friday next week. This involves going through all my notes from the meeting, plus the various reports that were presented, and distilling it down to highlights and significant events. I completed it and sent it off… just before starting my three online ethics classes in a row.

So it was a very busy, but productive day.

New content today:

Thinking about superstitions

This week’s new topic for my ethical/critical thinking class is superstition. I spent the morning writing the new lesson, and had three classes this evening with the new material.

There’s a set-up story about a girl who has “lucky socks” that she wears when she plays soccer, and questions about why she would think this, and what might happen if she can’t find her lucky socks on the day of a big match.

Then I go into exploring what effects superstitions have – if they are harmless beliefs, or if they can have actual bad effects on people, or on others and society as a whole. And then we ponder the question of whether we should respect people’s superstitions, or if we should ignore or dismiss them.

Besides the three of those classes, I also had an extension class for last week’s Food topic, going through homework essay questions for one student. I normally do this on Mondays, but he needed to shift the time this week, so it ended up being today, meaning I had 4 classes in a row. Phew… that’s a big chunk of work.

New content today:

Back to school

The new school term started this week, so this morning it was back to school for me, in my volunteer teaching role with Primary Ethics. I’d missed the last two classes of last term, when I was away on my trip to Germany and the Netherlands. It turned out that the coordinator hadn’t managed to find a replacement teacher for my class, so the kids missed out on two lessons. So they were happy to see me again today. I think. Or at least I hope so.

We started a new topic on Beliefs and Tolerance. The opening lesson is about some kids discussing smoking, with one of them saying they think it’s not as dangerous as people say, and she might try it when she gets older. The discussion is around whether that girl’s belief should be tolerated or respected, and what the difference is between those things, if any. And if she should be allowed to publish her views in the school newsletter or not.

It was a very interesting and engaged discussion, with lots of the kids offering thoughtful ideas and comments. I’ve definitely got a good bunch of kids this year.

Other happenings: My back feels much better than yesterday. Not 100%, but definitely well on the way to recovery. I’ve been using the ice pack again a bit today.

And… of course it’s been raining. The forecast is rain showers every day for the next week. I don’t think it’ll be long now until we break the wettest year on record.

New content today: