It's strange. This is probably the most productive two consecutive days I've had all year as far as paperwork goes. And I did it with yet another bad case of the colds (and swollen tonsils).

Saturday was a busy one for my students... rushing their assignments to meet the 8AM deadline, and then take their exam online 12 hours later. Meanwhile, I was doing my own rushing with the LVM 202 course manual, and later on checking the MMS 173 assignments. I was so unusually psyched that I was still rearing to go past midnight, so I went ahead and checked their exam papers right away. I finished at around 5AM Sunday.

I wasn't gonna sleep long, though... there was still Game 3 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals to watch in less than four hours. The throat still hurt and I could barely get up, but it was worth it. I got up early enough to witness the dissection of the Magic by the Celtics.

After that, it was back to business and I went back to the exam papers. Good thing I did, as I was able to catch a few checking errors of mine. And one of the students wanted feedback, so I fixed that for everyone, too.


All that's left to wait for now are their final projects. Heck, I can probably give their grades on the spot on our last F2F session if I wanted to. I wonder how many times the BAMS students have experienced receiving their grades as expeditiously. I've never been as prepared to conclude a course as I am right now with MMS 173 and I feel good about it -- swollen tonsils notwithstanding.


In the meantime, all I can do now is keep the discussions going even if it no longer has a huge bearing on their grades. Perhaps it will still help them in their projects. It's better than me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for someone to ask for help.

I hope everything goes well this Saturday. It'll be a nice way to cap off this rough summer.

In the meantime, I've earned myself a day to not worry about anything...

I showed the MMS 173 the basic things they should know about image editing -- levels, color balance, cropping... that stuff. This was easy enough. Lately, I took it one step further by showing them a few of my favorite techniques complete with my own sample takes.

By the chapel at Corregidor

Orton Effect for a flower

Fake HDR - Ferris Wheel (Brisbane, QLD, Australia)

Well, that was fun...

As for their own tries, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem in following the tutorials I referred them to. However, this exercise has shown that the real challenge is for the students to develop a better sense of knowing when and where to apply these techniques. I'm afraid that will only come with enough practice. And at this rate, it's going to take much more than what remains in this summer class.

MMS 173: "Forcing" my students to blog

This was something I had planned since the beginning of the class. Ironically, I forgot to personally tell my students about it. Twice.

The "deadline" for their first course related blog entry is almost upon them as I write this. I'm glad to say that more than 3/4 of them complied. Then again, after I said that it's graded, it's not like they had much of a choice.

Of course, their thoughts on the course is important and will influence how MMS 173 will be handled in the future. But something else about these blogs are of greater interest to me at the moment.

Just by their first blogs, I have learned quite a number of things about these students of mine. The most obvious things would be the ones they wrote about. But the real interesting bits were how they wrote their entries -- the things they chose to emphasize, the things they left out, their choice of words, their overall tone... More on this later. Ah, BAMS students, you really are a very interesting lot.

Anyway, I had originally planned on giving a "perfect score" for just posting a blog. But now, seeing how some students worked harder than others, I realize that it wouldn't be fair. So, now I score in private...