Work
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Makizushi Class
For the past year, Nam and I have been arranging sushi roll-making events for university students and schoolchildren. This video is a typical first attempt of trying to stuff too much into a roll. I would say 75% of people end up making this mistake the first time. But hey, if you don’t make mistakes, you never learn, right? It’s been a lot of fun just trying to do our jobs well.
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Random kitty
I just yoinked him at work. Building 4 (the English Program) at Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University
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Work Man Ship?
This is a solar-lighted walking path at my university. I’m very happy they renewed them, since the old ones were not lighted and were a constant tetanus hazard, but, this type of shoddiness really bothers me. I’m pretty sure they will wither leave it as is or attempt a cosmetic fix, but I will check again soon to see if they’ve done anything. The reason this bothers me is that I’ve seen the result of an improperly support column coming loose from its anchors. It killed some unlucky guy buying groceries and injured several others at a covered market right near our house, during a fierce windstorm. The support columns…
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Someone brought a puppy to class
They were nice enough to put a nappy on it.
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Lost in a Thai Forest
Well, the forest behind the English Program building at my uni, anyway.
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OpenAI Educator Guide
OpenAI has released an official guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom: Teaching with AI It’s nice to have something official posted, at least. There are some new resources in there that I’m slowly trying to get through. The official answer to the question, “Do AI detectors work?” is: In short, no, not in our experience. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8313351-how-can-educators-respond-to-students-presenting-ai-generated-content-as-their-own I asked ChatGPT the same question, and its answer was: AI detectors, specifically those designed to identify plagiarism or academic dishonesty, can be effective in detecting instances of copied or improperly attributed content. https://chat.openai.com/ So who knows better, the parent, or the child?
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A Message to the US Ambassador to Thailand
On September 29, 2023, Robert F. Godec, Ambassador of the United States to Thailand, visited Mahasarakham University to open a new wing of the American Corner, at which Mina and I have been helping run open conversation classes. If the ambassador’s social media ninjas happen to see this post, please convey a message to him that I was unable to complete when a VIP entourage suddenly appeared: The best historical book in English regarding the Issan region, and Mahasarakham in particular, is The Far Province by Francis Cripps. There are several editions; try and get one with photos and you will see how much this town has developed in 60…
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dotter
I guess you could say this was taken at our new (side job) workplace. Mina and I have been brought on as facilitators for Chit Chat Corner, a program sponsored by the American Embassy in Bangkok aimed at providing an English language conversation space for the community at Maha Sarakham University’s American Corner.
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Chit-chat Corner
We have a bunch of new projects coming up at both my uni and Nam’s. I signed up for the premium trial of Canva and it’s saved me quite a few hours in Adobe… The built-in AI brush effect is pretty fun, too.
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Building 4 at RMU
The whole country is flooding from the heavy rains of the past week (a result of Typhoon Noru which had a completely different name in the heavily ravaged Philippines), but we are safe so far. Usually, our neighborhood floods when there’s heavy rains, but the drainage systems just in our immediate area have worked well this time around. There’s supposed to be more opening of floodgates upriver (mainly at the Ubolrat Dam in Khon Kaen) in the coming week, so it may get worse. For now, there are a lot of volunteers filling sandbags in preparation of more rain and rising rivers. My students coworkers haven’t lost their sense of…
