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.

son of SQL

Who knew that I prefer the world in 2-D? Relational databases are a labyrinth I can't seem to navigate my way out of. It's not that I don't know whether to turn right or left. I don't know if I'm upside down, which exit I'm supposed to be heading for, and I forgot how I got into the maze in the first place!

I think part of it is because I'm new to it. If I spent some time with it, I'd probably feel more comfortable with it. But, SQL (and relational databases) are in many ways non-verbal-- which is my strength. And my weakness is spatial orientation. I can remember, quite vividly, driving back from California on a Sunday night, sitting in the passenger seat, insisting to my friend that we were driving parallel to I-10. It was Phoenix, it was one o'clock in the morning, and no one was out except us. I was almost frantic; I wanted to get home so badly and I was so sure that we were never going to make it back to the freeway because we were running parallel to it.

And then we got to the on ramp. I felt internally disoriented now. Like a slap in the face, I was reminded once again that spatial orientation-- not my strong suit.

This is what relational databases look like to me:

Only maybe insert a few more going in at different directions.

So using MySQL under these conditions is just a wee bit difficult. Mostafa says, we can be precise with our MySQL queries. Sure, if you know what the heck you're doing!

The written examples in our Assignment packet helped me tremendously, especially because I chose to use the database provided, and I could use the examples as a template. I'm verbal: I saw the words, could see the pattern in the words, and could eke out a few queries that way. And there's nothing like seeing the query results table come scrolling up the screen instead of, "Error. You are a dummy and I can't understand what you are trying to tell me."

So, yay for the scrolling results, a small feeling of victory, and one step closer to wrapping my mind around MySQL.

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.