Using AI in Education

I’ve read quite a number of articles recently about the use of AI in education. Specifically, there’s be a good bit of discussion around whether students should use AI in completing assignments. Strangely, it seems there’s a fair number of folks that believe that it’s perfectly fine for students to do this. I disagree.

School work, whether homework or in-class work has one goal: to help the student to ingest and process information in a way that aids them in recalling and using that information later in life or in other situations. In order for this goal to be acheived, it is imperative that they use that information, recalling it, applying it to different scenarios, looking for links to related information, and so on. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, in their book make it stick (ISBN:978-0-674-72901-8) points out that using information in ways that matter is the key to effective, long-term learning. Using AI to complete a task bypasses that process so that in the end the student learns nothing, despite earning an “A” in the class.

Why Would Anyone Choose to be Attacked?

I don’t remember now, what prompted me to think about this topic. It’s one that I actually jotted down some time ago in response, probably, to a news article or some other reading I had done at the time. But the question that I wanted to explore a little bit (this may be more a micro blog post rather than long-form) is in the title.

Learning Emacs Part 1

Emacs, if you’re unfamiliar, is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for editing macros in early computer systems. The most popular version, and the one that dominates the space today is GNU Emacs which was developed by Richard Stallman somewhere around 1976. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of its history but knowing that it has been around for nearly 50 years and remains a very popular editor, particularly among developers and others, like me, who are interested in exploring different technologies and appreciate the extensibility and utility of the program gives you a sense of why you might want to consider it.

Rural vs Urban Living

For most of my life I’ve lived in more suburban areas. And, since this is what I’ve known and am comfortable with, this is often my “go-to” when looking for a home.

In fact, my tendency has always been to lean rural. I once went looking for a home that I could “sit on my front porch buck naked and nobody would know or care.” I wanted that privacy. I wanted that distance from others. I am not a terribly social person so being out in the sticks where I don’t have to deal with neighbors has always had an appeal to me.

Toggling the Touchpad in OpenBSD on Lenovo X250 to Address Palm Rejection Issues.

So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be.

After some digging around I found a solution:

How to setup OpenBSD in i3 to toggle touchpad

Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh”