misc

discussion continued just now; on the seminar we are supposed to present during tutorial next week. Had a headache on the way to school, as i was shuttling around in cwp to transfer money between banks. Finally got the battery for my doorbell too.

ZW came up with the itinerary for the seminar ppt.

As usual i'm the 'merger' and coordinator. Timeline~

GEK1531
the evening lecturer is the 4th and the last speaker for the Cybercrime module. He is Mr Tony Chew, a Director from MAS. Yes, Monetary Authority of Singapore.

this section has been edited to reinforce my opinions with examples - to avoid unnecessary trouble. I'm a responsible blogger ;)

authoritative lecturing
thought he was alright, but he sounded very authoritative. He was really full of himself when he told everybody in LT25 this (roughly): "if you don't listen to me in class, you will fail the exams. (duh) If you don't do the tutorials, you WILL fail because 50% of the materials will come from it (duh!!!)"

against the university open learning culture
worse still, i don't know whether he's trying to offload some work meant for him - "if you didn't read my additional materials, don't ask me questions and i will only entertain you if you ask me based on those materials". Wow. Additional materials from God?

The friend in front really wrote the above.

assumptions and distrust
then he gave us a 30 mins break. Why not end the lecture and tutorial quickly? His reason was that we have not done our tutorial, so he gave us more time to do it. Wtf? We became his little students in the nursery!

lack of empathy and consideration
during the mass tutorial, he picked a particular row of students and asked the peep answering his question to stand up. -.-"

since the topic was on the internet banking area, there were questions like 2FA (2nd factor authentication), OTP (one time password) and etc. GEK1531 is a general education and cross-faculty module and there are surely students who're not from School of Computing, or simply do not trust Internet Banking. When the poor student couldn't answer, he had to make fun of the student (while he/she was standing). The guy couldn't answer how DBS' internet banking worked, and he remarked "you mean you have not used internet banking"?

SHEEEEESH!

everyone almost couldn't stand him because he sounded like a discipline master. He is speaking as a distinguished guest in NUS, not some primary or secondary school. Even in poly, lecturers were very humble and willing to go a step lower or further.

etc
he had some odd laughing noise - much like Prof Yu CS, the first speaker. Everyone laughed not because he was funny, but his laugh was really odd.

i learnt some new stuff from this lecture despite so many negative points. Now i know that the security device (that DBS token, for example) makes use of symmetric encryption to encrypt the current date/timestamp into a ciphertext, which the bank will do the same on their side. After the lecture i went down to clarify some concepts, which he answered but had the look of "you should know".

i'm going to give my feedback when the course feedback system is available. By and large i feel that his teaching pedagogy is outdated - i'd compare it to the Israeli way of training soldiers; training soldiers up by breaking them down and then building them up again. SAF have already changed, so must Mr Tony Chew too.

ps: the Israeli way of "breaking" soldiers meant the terrible punishments or training exercises, eg. change parade, 1-min field pack out-and-in, stand-by-universe, blah blah. Even tedious body exercises and swearing of your mother and father are banned in BMT nowadays. Of course the SAF's 8th core value still applies - "you can do anything but don't get caught".

I'm going for the campus concert!
DIEDIE must get tics!