Preface

Before talking about all of the assignment’s points, I think it is important to look at my reasons for taking the course. I’m graduating this semester Insha’Allah, and one of the main things I grew to like over the past few years was a schedule that ends before assembly hour. The reason for that is that a lot of the time I have rehearsals, recordings, and other things I’d have to do in the middle of the day, so I’d like the freedom of not having to skip classes and such for that. My schedule was really solid for the past few semesters. I’d usually do the first 3 slots/classes each Sunday and Monday and call it a week! I’d even do my gym sessions before coming to Uni, and things would be pretty good. This class was meant to fill my Monday 8:30 slot. That is the only reason I took it. The choices I had were basically between this and like economics or business or some other probably workload-heavy course. I couldn’t really find many reviews on Rate AUC (from my memory at least?) so I just thought, what the heck, it can’t be worse than taking an intro to business class with hyper-competitive business majors trying to declare while I’m just chilling!

I think the nicest thing about this course was the initial introduction and first impression I got. I’ve never received a pre-course survey before asking for my opinion, what my preferences are, what would make me comfortable. I really appreciated that. I also really like the concept of the snacks in class (as a big gum enjoyer)! The way the professor conducted the class, the emphasis on just being good people, having a good learning experience, and taking each other into account and being generally gentle towards each other is a stark difference from a lot of the other courses I’ve taken in Uni (even as a music major, can you imagine?). There’s a lot of great things I think went on in the course, but I think the continued commitment of the professor to accommodate us, teach us, and introduce concepts that we’d otherwise probably not really learn about is the best thing about this course. Letting us annotate the syllabus in case we had questions, I could go on and on. You get the point.

Now that we’ve set a little base, I’d like to tackle some points one by one. I’m pretty forgetful in general, so I’ll just be looking at canvas and remembering a lot of the things we did and see the things that struck out to me the most.

What Have I Learned?

Its pretty easy to claim that I’m an unbiased person, or that I don’t say or do anything problematic, but this course has taught me that a lot of (rather common) things that are in our society are really insensitive towards people sometimes. A simple example is using “fala7” as a derogatory term for example. It sets a precedent of prejudice against a specific group of people in Egypt and alienates them in our head (this wasn’t specifically mentioned in class, but many examples were given like stereotyping races, micro-aggressions, etc.). What I’ve learned from that is that I need to be aware of the kind of jokes I make, and the kind of jokes I allow my friends to make, and to not be okay with them. Throwing out derogatory slurs, being disrespectful, or being bigoted is something I don’t aspire to be, and a lot of it happens on a small scale. It ends with the “death by 1000 papercuts” kind of way, where a lot of small things add up to just make you look like a bad person – or even just be a bad person. I wasn’t really aware of how simple things like that could be really hurtful, so I will be applying that advice to myself from now on Insha’Allah.  Something I would use in my career would definitely be using AI to create things, not just games. I think it could be used as a medium of communication to prototype something to showcase what I’m trying to do to some software developer or friend in music. I think it just provides a friction free-surface to explore, and I quite like that. Creating the game was easy, so I’m going to be testing out how I can apply it to my workflows (only the ones that require no creativity!). Soliya provided me with a lot of experience that I think I’ll use for my social life  (doesn’t count as an assignment I guess, but I think it improved my social skills the most!). Interacting with pure strangers that share (allegedly) nothing in common with me was a big step up for me. Granted, it wasn’t as hard as I expected, but I think I would be less afraid to travel abroad for a masters now, for example, since I know I could cope with dealing with people of different cultures. I also learned that people will be different than me, and that is okay. Some people in Soliya had really different opinions than my own, and its super easy to simply think they are wrong and that I am right, but I think in the end respecting people’s freedom of opinion and expression is generally important. This is especially true if we live in a secular society that strives to protect people’s individual rights – the same rules that would govern and protect me are the same rules that govern and protect them too, you know? For my academic life, I guess it is similar to my career life in which if I do any research in the future I could leverage AI tools that we used in class in order to skim the internet for topics instead of doing it manually through google scholar or something. Other than that, I don’t think anything really comes to mind in that regard.

What Would I Show?

I think my favourite 3 assignments were the Lina Mounzer reading, the ALTCV, and the AI in your profession assignment. I think they give a nice overview of the course (and maybe the playing games assignment too :)). The links are below. I think those encompass a lot of the nice things about this course. Empathy (through the games), Critically analyzing AI (the AI profession assignment), and the ALTCV (personal expression!). This is what I would show on Rate AUC Professors if I was recommending this course, or if I were just showing it to friends.
https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/omar-ayoubs-altcv/
https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/video-game-reflection/
https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/ai-in-music-omar-ayoub/

What Would I Change?

Honestly, maybe more checkpoints for big assignments. The thing with students is that if you assign something a week in advance or a month in advance, they will tend to do it in the last 3 days to the assignment. But, implementing deadlines for checkpoints (especially in the AI in your profession assignment) could have been good. There could have been a deadline for filling a form with interviewees and scheduling a meeting, a deadline for those meeting notes, and a deadline for the reflection. I think if it were spaced out a week and a half between each checkpoint it would have been good.

I also think people shouldn’t be allowed to heavily use AI to write these blogposts. Reflections are supposed to be human. How can a machine express how you feel? I don’t even touch AI tools while writing these, I don’t know how some people could just write all of them using it…

Lastly, I think that enough disclosure should be given about the AI tools we choose to use in class. Their effects, where they come from, who owns them, that kind of stuff is really important. The podcast that talked about google really opened my eyes, and I’ve kind of gotten the ick from using Gemini (not like anything else is much better), but there was a class where we looked at like 6 or 7 AI tools for research, but we didn’t really know much about them. Maybe there could be some element about them that would make me opt out of using or participating in that classroom activity for example. It isn’t that deep, but sometimes it is. I didn’t know that Peter Thiel had some hand in OpenAI for example. Really scary stuff.

What Kind of Person Should Take This Course?

People who want to learn more about themselves, others, and don’t really care about the grade they get.

What Digital Tools Did I Like?

Well, very obviously, I like the blog! I don’t know if this counts as a digital tool, but the ability to read people’s work, thoughts, that kind of stuff was really fun. I love creative work, and this is just another way of creative expression. I was really happy to learn that this was how we’d do our assignments throughout the semester. Its really cool to document older student’s work too. I think if I ever do any academic work (like teaching) I’d really like to make students submit their work on a portal where people can also listen in to what other people made. Its a really neat idea.

I liked using AI to make games. I used a tool called GitHub Copilot (my friend told me about it after I talked to him about creating games in class) to create my game. It gives you access to models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and it integrates with the code editor you use. It was a little more friction-free than Gemini, and I already had some coding experience from doing music tech stuff (albeit not that much) but I got going pretty quickly. Though I did try to use Gemini first to create a prototype game and it failed miserably (though it worked for everyone else?!).

I really liked the 6 projectors we had, and how we could display different things on them and use them for activities. it was really tastefully integrated and I liked that. I think I’d love to teach in a classroom like that one day if I ever taught. I guess we learned through it not about it but eh. It really stood out to me. While in spirit of talking about the classroom. I loved the chairs we had. They’re so comfy. I wish they were everywhere.

I like Unsplash, its neat for getting free to use photos which I regularly struggle to find. Sometimes I need them to integrate into album covers, and as an artist I try to respect copyright law as much as I can because I wouldn’t like it happening to me, you know? I had this other website that I used to use but it was honestly garbage compared to that one. I’ve been using it for the past while, its really nice :).

Lastly, I would say that a lot of the research tools we used like NotebookLM, ResearchRabbit, etc. were cool. I’m thinking of doing research soon (I’ve got a neat little idea) so It might be useful to see if its been done before.

The Creative Part

I do not read the assignment all the way through before starting it, and did not see the end point about creativity in presenting. Oops. I spent like 4 hours writing this reflection, I don’t really want to scrap it, so I’ve decided I can (try) to write a little 30 second snippet of music in honor (?) of the course as some expression I guess. I don’t really care about the 1 point but I can’t be an art major and not do the creative part of the assignment!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QjmuEFnRnvfkZamLodYPlamE26hGi0mB/view

The lyrics are about self expression or something. Something I really liked about the course. Its a bit rough, and I didn’t really warm up before singing. I had fun though. Thank you for this semester, I had a lot of fun 🙂