Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

These two entries (including the one in the student accessible version) are, by the way, being typed out in the aforementioned Fujitsu Life Book, which I'm now using practically for the first time in half a year, when my Windows Millennium Edition originally installed in this machine conked out on me.

Thank God for external hard disk enclosures or I would not have been able to retrieve all my data before reformatting. Now it has Xubuntu installed, courtesy of Ryan, a DVD player with all the codecs, and an open source office compatible writer.

Anyway, on to more technical stuff left over from last week's hectic activities.

In my Computer Architecture slash Assembly Language class, we've been on the topic of one dimensional arrays, and how they are represented in the low level programming language.

For the past three meetings we have been in the computer laboratory, at the request of one very vocal student about them not getting the full benefit from just the lectures.

I was expecting more from the students just because they are COmputer Science majors, but in fact, they had more working against them than the past four "generations" of Engineering students that I've taught the same subject.

First, their expertise in high level languages made them resistant to a lot of the quirkiness of Assembly.

What's strange though is that the students don't have the same problem with adapting to other high level languages for making databases and web pages.

It could also be because my teaching style in programming is not the kind they've been used to in the past three years, especially with my assumptions about their previous knowledge on data types and algorithms.

I even teased the students about just meeting in the lab and uploading the lecture in a file that they can read, and they also pleaded against that; I guess there's still something to be said about having some interaction with the lecturer.

Especially after their own traumatic experience with the system administrator who was also their teacher in their Network Centralization class, who didn't lecture at all and asked them to research on everything, and they didn't learn a thing.

Session 2051 gives what the students are asking for in a class, but only up to a certain point that they're not being motionlessly spoonfed. Class dismissed.