ethics – Page 14 – dangermouse.net

More ethics planning

Today is my last day off before resuming teaching online ethics classes on Outschool tomorrow. I think I mentioned that I’m starting a new class for older kids, ages 13-15, adding that to my existing class for ages 10-12. This means each week I need two new lesson plans instead of just one. I have four weeks of brief outlines ready to go, and by yesterday I’d written the first lesson plan for each age group.

Today I got ahead of the game by writing the second week’s lesson for each of the classes, so now I have one of each up my sleeve. I’m going to try to stay a week ahead, to give me some slack in case of emergencies. This year’s second topic for the 10-12 group is “Buying and Selling 3” – the third in a series on this topic because I had so many ideas and questions that it filled two previous lessons with enough left over for a third one. And the second topic for the 13-15 year olds is “Free Will and Determinism”. That one should be really interesting to discuss with the kids.

Apart from that and going on a big walk with Scully and my wife, I didn’t do much other than some house cleaning. I also took down the Christmas fairy lights that had been strung up in the living room. Here’s Scully on the walk today, in the Greenwich Point bushwalk section:

One piece of news that I came across today was about something that has strongly influenced my projects over the past several years. The comic Darths & Droids wasn’t the first movie screencap webcomic – it owes its existence to the example set by the first one: DM of the Rings. This is a comic created by Shamus Young as a parody of the Lord of the Rings movies, as if they were a Dungeons & Dragons game. It directly inspired me and my friends to create Darths & Droids, which was the second of what has since become an established subgenre of webcomics with dozens of examples.

DM of the Rings was completed at 150 strips. I have long since had a downloaded collection of the comics on my computer, for posterity and reference. One small thing that bothered me about the comics was the fact that Shamus did his screencapping with software that left the frames vertically stretched in the wrong aspect ratio – so all the characters appeared thinner than they should. Also, being a product of the 2006 Internet, the comics are quite low resolution images.

Unfortunately, Shamus Young passed away in June last year. but today I learnt that his children are working on a remastered version of DM of the Rings. They are taking his original comics and recreating them at high resolution, and with screencaps in the correct aspect ratio. You can read the story about the remastering, and enjoy the first high-res remastered strip here: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=55070

Also check out that awesome page banner!

New content today:

Last classes for the year

Today I had my last four online ethics classes for the year. I’m taking three weeks break over Christmas, and will restart classes on 2 January. Some of the kids actually seemed a bit upset at missing the next three weeks, which was kind of sweet.

I also got news on next year’s schedule for the Data Engineering and Image Processing courses that I’ve been tutoring for the university. Both are changing next year: Data Engineering will be Monday like this year, but moving from a 6-9pm class to 3-6pm. And Image Processing in the second semester will be staying at 6-9pm, but moving from Thursdays to Tuesdays. Both of these changes will mean shifting some of my ethics classes. I currently have one at 4pm Monday which will need to change in first semester. But the bigger issue is the Tuesday evening, when I currently have three classes, that will need to move from August. Hopefully it won’t be too hard for the kids to move to a different day, and I have plenty of time to organise it.

There was a nasty storm today just before lunch time – actually during one of my classes. Fortunately I’d seen it approaching on the weather radar and had already closed the windows, because it was nasty when it hit. Absolutely torrential rain, and really strong winds – for about ten minutes, and then it basically stopped. The storm was the lead article on the evening news, as it had caused significant damage across Sydney, ripping roofs off some buildings and knocking some trees down. Within an hour later it was sunny again.

New content today:

The last face-to-face ethics class

Wednesday morning is when I have had my face-to-face ethics class, every school week for the past 6 years, apart from when it was interrupted by COVID lockdowns. Today was the last ethics class of this school year, and I have decided not to return to the classroom next year.

I still enjoy it, but I wanted to regain some time in my week, and I wanted to go out with a good class. I felt like if I did another year it would be my last and I don’t want to come back next year and end up with a class of kids that are not as engaged and have worse behaviour than the group I had this year. Essentially, I’m going out on a high. I informed the ethics coordinator for the school about my decision a few weeks ago. They’ll miss me, obviously, but hopefully they’ll train new teachers and will have a full set of classes running again next year.

I taught the special “end of year” class for the kids this morning, in which we reflect on what we’ve done during the year, and the kids answer questions about what topics they enjoyed the most and why, and if they felt they have grown and changed during the year. They’ll all be going on to Year 7 and high school next year – the biggest change in their school careers. And… today is almost certainly the last day I will ever see any of them again. At the end of the class I wished them the best for their high school years and beyond. Every year I’ve felt a bit sad internally at this point, but the kids seem to take it in their stride. There are some really clever and mature kids in this class and I think they’ll do well. If I’ve made some positive difference to their lives, then that’s all I can ask for.

After the class there was a meeting of ethics volunteers at a cafe near the school. I saw the coordinator there, and she thanked me for my years of volunteering. She had a large envelope for me, which contained a certificate of appreciation for having taught 5+ years, and a pin with the same award written on it. I met a new guy who has just completed his volunteer training and will be starting next year, although he won’t be taking my Year 6 position – he wants to teach Year 1 (since his son is in that year).

After a bit we went back over to the school, which was putting on a special morning tea in the staff room for all the volunteer workers – the ethics and scripture teachers, as well as people who staff the school canteen and uniform shop and probably a couple of other volunteer positions. The principal gave a speech of thanks to us all, and there were finger foods and drinks. I filled up on some things (I’ve never gotten out of the habit from when I was a poor university student of taking advantage of free feeds), and that did me for lunch.

I got into a conversation with an older lady, who asked me what volunteer work I did. When I told her I taught ethics, she asked me about it, and was very interested as I explained how the classes work. The she said she wondered if she could do it, it sounded more interesting than making sandwiches in the canteen. So I introduced her to the ethics coordinator and said we might have a new volunteer! They exchanged contact details and so hopefully I managed to recruit my own replacement for next year. She seemed genuinely interested, so I hope she does the training and it works out.

Back home around lunch time, I did a walk with my wife and Scully, before going out for a 2.5k run myself, and finally preparing dinner before three online ethics classes in a row. It feels like a full and busy day!

New content today:

Comics and critical thinking about holidays

This morning I concentrated on writing and making new Darths & Droids strips. At lunch I took Scully for a longish walk to the good bakery. Near it is a fish & chips shop, not the nearby one that I usually go to, and when I tried it a while back it was very good, so I got some fish & chips from there. Oddly, it didn’t seem as good as the other time.

This evening I had the first three classes of this week’s new ethics topic: Holidays. This is a special topic for the last class of the year, as I’m taking some time off over the Christmas period after this next week. It seems a pretty straightforward topic so far – I don’t think there were any particularly amusing comments form the kids so far.

And of course I’ve been playing with ChatGPT a bit more. Literally:

A ChatGPT conversation where I play rock-paper-scissors

🤔

New content today:

Reporting and teleporting

This morning I worked on my report for the Photography Standards meeting I attended at the start of November. I finished it by lunch time and sent it off to Standards Australia. Next week we have a meeting where I will go through the report with various Australian experts from different institutions, universities, and so on. We’ll also be discussing hosting an international meeting in Sydney in October 2024. I’m hoping we can get that happening, as it would be good to have the international delegates come here again.

I had one more class on the ethics of teleportation today. This is a really fun class, because the kids are really being made to think about strange things that they’d never considered before. Today, of the four kids in the class, when I asked how teleportation would change the world, three of them thought of fairly obvious useful things, while one kid kept coming up with evil uses such as sending bombs, or weapons, or sneaking into secure places. Another kid said, “What if someone appears in your bathroom!!”

After that class I had some admin tasks to do on Outschool. I needed to post in all the classes that I’m taking some time off over Christmas, letting parents and students know the last class date for the year and when classes will resume in January. And then I sent messages to the parents of eight former students who were older/more mature, and invited them to enrol in my brand new class for January, Critical and Ethical Thinking for ages 13-15. I created a coupon for any returning students to use for a free first lesson.

I took Scully on a couple of walks, and I spent some time this afternoon going through and editing photos from my trip to Europe in June, adding some to my travel diary. I still have several more days’ worth of photos to edit from that trip. This was our hotel in Würzburg:

Oh, and today was the first day of summer here, but you’d hardly notice it, as it was chilly and overcast all day. The Bureau of Meteorology released a summary of the spring just ended, and it was unusually cold and wet. Sydney had almost double the average rainfall for the months August-October. In terms of average temperature, it was the coolest spring since 2003, and in terms of the maximum temperatures, it was the coldest spring on record – i.e. the lowest maximum temperatures ever recorded. This is the effects of a third La Niña in succession, combined with a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which reinforces the cooler/wetter effects. They’re predicting our summer will be unusually cool and wet as well. For the third summer in a row.

New content today:

Kids on whales and teleportation

Face to face ethics class at the school this morning: I started a new topic, which is on “Circumstances”. It’s built around the idea of discussing whether eating whale meat is okay. The very first question to ask the kids is: What do you know about whales? The lesson plan assumes that the kids will say things like whales are intelligent, they communicate with one another, they have social groups and help one another, and some species are endangered. When I asked the question, “What do you know about whales?”, these were the first three responses I got:

Their milk is the consistency of toothpaste.
When they’re lying dead on a beach, their intestines explode.
They lost 3-0 to England this morning.

Yeah, it was one of those classes. It was a lot of fun, and honestly I was enjoying the discussion as much as the kids. I moved on to telling the kids that in Norway, you can find whale meat in restaurants and supermarkets, and asked if it was okay that the Norwegians eat whale meat. Now, the whole lesson plan seems to be predicated on the idea that most of the kids will say no, and give the whales’ intelligence and endangered status as reasons. Because much of the remainder of the lesson is questioning them about cultural differences, and then giving an example of the Inuit who had to hunt whales to survive the long winters with no other food, and asking if they thought that was okay, as a contrast to saying that modern Norwegians shouldn’t be eating whale meat.

But it didn’t work out that way, because several kids said they thought it was fine to eat whale meat. If Norwegians think it’s okay, then that’s their culture, so no problem. We discussed this a bit and I asked them why they thought this. I asked what if Australian supermarkets started stocking whale meat, and they said that would be fine too. I resorted to doing a show of hands, asking who thought eating whale meat was okay, and every kid in the class put their hand up.

Well, that kind of derailed the whole thing about the Inuit and setting up a situation where eating whale meat was a survival necessity. I went through it very quickly, because there was kind of no point and it didn’t lead to any interesting further discussion. I ended up going through two whole lessons worth of material, and having a few minutes over at the end to pose additional questions that I could think of related to the situation. It was definitely interesting and quite a fun discussion, but I really had to think on my feet.

Tonight I had three online lessons in a row about Teleportation. The first was very stressful as someone had signed up a student below the suggested age range, and their English was fairly rudimentary, so I had to slow the whole class down a lot. I’m going to have to write to the parent and recommend they unenrol as the class is too advanced in material and required English skills for their kid.

Thankfully the next two were better. Class 2 had a very intelligent discussion about the potential issues and ethics of teleportation. Class 3 was also fairly intelligent, but with a touch of fun as well. In that one I asked what bad/evil things people could get up to with a teleporter that can’t send living things. One girl said:

Ads! You’d get millions of ads delivered direct to your living room!

I also set up a situation where a teleporter malfunctions and there’s a copy of the person at the origin and the destination and asked what should be done. Two of the girls in this class said:

Kill both of them.

New content today:

Jogging logging

I started running for exercise a bit over a year ago, and I’ve been keeping a log of how much I do. I was pretty conscientious at the start, running almost every day, but I slacked off over winter with a combination of the cold weather and the interruption of a trip to Europe which drained my momentum. But I’ve picked up again and am now doing 2.5 km runs 3 or 4 times a week.

Today I decided to use my spreadsheet to add up how far I’ve run in 2022. As of today, it’s 462.5 km. I’ve already done 37.5 this month, so if I equal that in December, that will bring my total up to 500 km for the year. So that’s my goal.

I mentioned this to some friends, and one of them said:

Looks like you’ve been keeping a… running total.

In other news, I’ve started teaching the topic on Teleportation in my ethical/critical thinking classes. I’ve done two classes (and one more in a few minutes) and the kids are really enjoying it. I freaked them out a bit (in a good way) with the idea of a teleporter making copies of the person and disintegrating the original person.

Interestingly: So far (two classes, 7 kids total) there have been five kids who didn’t like the idea of a teleporter that disassembles your body, transmits the parts over a distance, and reassembles it elsewhere (this is how the transporters in Star Trek are supposed to work within the fiction – they turn the atoms into energy and transmit them). They said they would not agree to use such a device. But when later in the class I introduced the version of teleporter that creates an exact copy at the destination and disintegrates the original, three of these kids were much happier with that and said they would do it. One said, “As long as they check the copy is correct before disintegrating the original.”

I wasn’t really expecting that response! It’s interesting the way kids’ minds work sometimes.

New content today:

Pondering about teleportation

It’s Monday, the day of the week when I finish off a week’s topic in my Outschool ethics classes. I finished off the Golden Rule topic with four classes, and in between I worked on the new topic starting tomorrow: Teleportation. This is one of the speculative topics, in which I get the kids to imagine that some science fiction or magical thing is real, and then use their brains to imagine what effects it would have on the world. I also wrote some scenarios such as what if a teleporter malfunctions and we end up with two people – one at the departure point and one at the destination. And then we get into the whole thing about whether teleportation would be acceptable if it involved making an exact copy and disintegrating the original. Should be fun!

That used up most of my day. I found a bit of time to work on editing some photos from my road trip to Orange back in September and uploading them to Flickr, then including them in my diary that I posted on my website the other day. I did the first three days and have two days to go.

Here’s a view of a winery that we visited on a rainy, foggy day:

I also realised that some of my older travel diaries involved road trips and could use maps added to show the routes, so I added those to my to-do list.

And this evening we had a power outage! The power went off at about 6:15pm. Checking the power company website on my iPad indicated that it was a suburb-wide outage, and they estimated about two hours to fix it. So I was a bit glad that I haven’t yet converted from gas cooking to induction, because it meant I could still cook Thai curry and rice for dinner. I had to light the burners with matches, but otherwise it was fine, and we ate sitting out on the balcony in the dying evening light.

The power came back on a bit before 8pm, fortunately before we had to get the candles out.

New content today:

Tuesdays are definitely my busy days

I had a full plate today. Because of other deadlines yesterday I needed to write my ethics lesson for the new eeek of classes this morning, in time for three classes tonight. The topic for this week is The Golden Rule: the principle that you should treat other people the way that you would like to be treated. I introduce the lesson with the Allegory of the Long Spoons, and then go on to explain what the Golden Rule is, and ask the kids if they think it’s sensible, and what might possibly go wrong with it. Then we go on to discuss cooperation and explore the snowdrift dilemma, a variant of the Prisoner’s dilemma. We talk about how this applies to real world situations such as driving on roads, or politicians running a country, and whether cooperation might lead to better results for everyone than being competitive.

After having run it three times, it seems like a solid lesson, and hopefully gets the kids thinking!

I found some time to write and make a Darths & Droids comic as well, and to walk Scully a couple of times. And that was basically my day.

Oh, I saw this news article, with the headline: Spell of nice, boring weather coming for eastern Aus. Yes, the fact that we aren’t expecting more flooding rain, or Antarctic blast cold spells, or gale force winds for the next few days is unusual enough that it merits a headline.

New content today:

A new ethics class for older kids

I mentioned the other day that I was thinking of starting a new ethics and critical thinking class on Outschool for older kids. Today I put together a class description and submitted the class to Outschool for approval. I expect it should be approved pretty quickly.

With the class description I included topics for the first four planned classes:

Crime and Punishment
Free Will and Determinism
How to Rig an Election
The Meaning of Life

Pretty ambitious, but I think I can pull it off! Assuming it’s approved, I’ll start scheduling classes to begin after Christmas, and leave them until then so new students can find the classes and enrol.

Here’s a photo of an Australian brushturkey that I managed to get extremely close to with my phone the other day.

There’s one of these (a different one to the photo) currently guarding a nest mound near my place. Whenever I walk past, it chases me, trying to drive me away, until about 25 metres from the nest. It’s very protective and chases everyone away, although it’s not aggressive and backs off if you approach it. Soon the chicks will hatch and it will abandon them to their fates. They’re really curious birds.

New content today: