learning curve

Learning anything new is a little exciting, a little tense, and a little frustrating. I definitely felt all three as I plodded through the units-- I say plodded, because the unit learning and exercises were fine and precise, and sometimes I felt as though I was extremely clumsy, like trying to knit with mittens on. Nevertheless, I have emerged from the course knowing a lot more than I did before about what goes on underneath the user interface of a digital collection.

Even using the word underneath with more confidence is a boon-- the layers of applications, protocols, scripts, and compilers makes more sense to me. At the very least, I should be able to talk to an IT person and have a semi-intelligible conversation!

As a former schoolteacher, I pretty much involuntarily use metacognition when I'm learning something new. I can't help but take a step back and analyze how I am learning something, and where I am in the learning process. I noticed that with almost every unit, I compared my learning-- not the content, but the learning process-- to when I learned HTML. HTML is the most recent computer language I've learned (and really only one of two, the other being BASIC, a language I was somewhat traumatized by in the 9th grade).

At any rate, when I learned HTML, through a combination of self-teaching and later through a Pima class, I got to the point where the syntax and vocabulary became second nature to me. Learning CSS (I kind of threw CSS in there with HTML as one of my two computer languages) was a little easier, having had experience with HTML. I'm no expert in HTML or CSS, but I consider myself competent. I could experiment a bit, using my understanding of the syntax and vocabulary. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but I was comfortable enough to try.

Another part of my HTML/CSS learning is that when I was finished, and I loaded the page, and something was wrong, I was confident enough to understand that I had the basic principles correct in my coding, but I probably had a typo somewhere. (With CSS I allowed that I may have made a mistake, but not a gross error.)

With the information and skills we've studied in this course, I'm definitely still a novice. I haven't acquired the familiarity with the concepts to be able to experiment much, or know that my errors are probably just typos and not a misunderstanding of the material.

But, novice is on route to competence, which is what we're aiming for (if I wanted to be an expert, I'd be in a computer programming school!). And I feel as though I'm ready to tackle the similar/brand new challenges of the advanced course. Because I know that the more I work with it, just as the more I worked with HTML and CSS, the less foreign and the more familiar the concepts will be.