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.

We last left our intrepid heroine on the brink of disaster, lost in Linux's Labyrinth, a sinister lair riddled with rabid daemons, ports to nowhere, and sockets with jaws of steel. In search of her companion, Apache Web Server, our plucky heroine must battle the evil forces that threaten sudo shutdown at every turn...





If our heroine had directions, written in HTML, to help her navigate the treacherous labyrinth, it might look like this -->

She wouldn't make it past port 22 with that bit of unhelpful information. Our heroine would have to make her best guess as to which port is that port, where is there and what thing is that thing. The HTML jacks up her adrenaline with all the bold and the italics and the large font, but that's about it.



Our heroine would do much better with directions written in XML, because metadata is included within the document itself. Should she want to know which port to avoid, well, it's

Luckily for her, our heroine had previously taken two courses which helped prepare her to understand XML: Organization of Information followed by Cataloging. Her cataloging instructor spent a couple weeks exposing the class to XML and working with it a bit. She was able to reread those sections in Lois Chan's Cataloging and Classification in order to remind herself what she had previously learned.

This is not to say our heroine remembered everything from the cataloging course. As a visual learner, and one who usually learns better through a person than an inanimate object such as text, she used Mark Long's lecture series in UA CBT almost exclusively. Mark Long's lecture is pretty good, because he explains what he's talking about as opposed to merely reading the slides.

As an adventurer, and one who is fond of derring-do, our heroine attempted to learn more about XSLT through w3schools. After perusing through that, and HTTP Request, and XPath, our heroine determined that the best use of her time was to prepare for her work with Apache Server. (Never fear! Our heroine has not been defeated by XSLT, much like the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution, she's run away to fight again!)

And so, our heroine reviewed the basics of what she had learned last semester, and solidified her understanding of what XML can be used for, and dabbled a bit in more advanced XML-- mostly via video, with a dash of w3schools thrown in. 

She felt confident in her basic understanding of XML, ready to tackle the dangers of Linux's Labryinth! Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion to our story: "XML Marks the Node;" or "XARGS: Revenge of the Gnomes."

Torpedoed!

So, this week one of our assignments for class was to design and post a basic web page. I've been dabbling in HTML for a few years-- took a community college web design class and tweaked the web page I used for my class when I taught school. Last year, for 504, I created a simple web page and was able to not only revisit some of what I already knew, but also dabble a little bit more with CSS. What nearly killed me then tried it again this time.




Float.


I suck at float and one of the reasons is that I don't do much with HTML or CSS on a regular basis. I have to retrain myself to a degree each time I tackle a web page. For this assignment, I looked at what I had done last summer and revised it. I had used div to float my picture and caption then and it when I looked at it again this summer, it looked ugly. Not to mention that apparently I had another div class for a second image that was not in my html (and a background image property that I didn't have either). So besides editing and changing the content and some of the style, I deleted some of the extraneous stuff.

Oops.

When I refreshed the page, my picture slammed back over to the left side of the page. The caption went from red italic to blue roman (matching the rest of the text). Any and all edits I made in CSS were not recognized by the HTML page. Just to make sure I had the right page open, I changed content in HTML. It showed up in my web browser; I knew the CSS was the problem.

For almost an hour I researched and looked at examples of floating, and everybody's got a different way of doing it. Some use one class, some use several. I tried everything. Finally I decided that since I only had one picture, I didn't want to use a class anyway. I wanted to use an ID. As I was doing that, I noticed something very peculiar... and it was the hideous

 

curly bracket of death.

What I had been researching, in a macro-analysis of the problem, was what I had done wrong with the code. I'm not brilliant with CSS or any aspect of web design. I make hideous mistakes all the time. I knew I had made one this time, too. What I should have been doing was reading what I had typed-- or rather what I hadn't typed-- a little more closely. Open curly bracket: yes. Closed curly bracket: oops.

I closed the #dm section of my css with a curly bracket, refreshed, and... We have a floater.

I can't tell you the sense of satisfaction of seeing a doofy little picture move from left to right. It's embarrassing in the grand scheme of things, but boy did I feel like I accomplished something.

Oh, I also cleaned up the caption's style and learned how to place margins in the body of the web page. So, in the end it was OK, I guess, that I spent so much time looking for something I didn't need to know.