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.

I'm going to tell you a little story about myself and then I want you to guess what kind of learner I am.

When I was in 5th grade, Rubik's Cubes were all the rage. Naturally, I needed one. I loved that little thing. In the first minute I had it cut open from the its plastic wrapping, I had turned it every which way. I liked to solve sides at a time and make little checkerboard patterns. The ultimate solution always eluded me, however, which frustrated me to no end. My dad bought me a Rubik's Cube solution book. It was about 60 pages long with diagrams, none of them color. I didn't get past page two. 

One day at recess I noticed one of my classmates with a perfectly solved Cube. I knew he'd had it a while, so I asked him to teach me how to solve it. He got out his pocket knife. We could carry pocket knives to school then. "I pop out the pieces," he explained. I asked him to pop out my pieces because I wanted a perfect Rubik's Cube again. He complied but managed to break one of the little squares a bit, so that it always fell out if tipped the wrong direction. Also, he scuffed up the white stickers so much that we had to take them off, creating one black side. 

But I had my perfect cube again. I loved making little checkerboard patterns that were mirrored all over the Cube. I didn't twist it every which way again, though I had kids grab it and do that (a yellow piece always dropping and the kid crying in alarm, "I didn't do that!"). But of course by then I knew how to reassemble my little broken Cube.

I did feel guilty about tearing it apart and "cheating." I felt that I was punished for that when the one little yellow piece breaking. It also wasn't so much a puzzle as a gadget to make colored patterns with. However, I was no longer frustrated. Only defeated.

So, the moral of the story? The type of learner I am?

An impatient one, for starters. I like to start out by doing and then stop once I get the feel for something to read up on it. I like big picture somewhere along the way to help me understand why I am doing the small steps. Unfortunately, with Rubik's Cube, I could never see the pattern of the twists and turns: why when I twisted it this way, that would be the result. I suck at spatial orientation. So I sucked at Rubik's Cube.

If I had ever seen an animated video showing me the Rubik's Cube pattern, I may have done a little better, as I am a visual learner far and above verbal and tactile. But I doubt it, because it would still involve too many moving parts (literally), something I have trouble with when learning a concept. However, I do remember the animated TV show Rubik, the Amazing Cube, in which three Puerto Rican kids fight bad guys with the help of Rubik, the flying, talking crime-busting cube. It must have been the absolute dumbest TV show ever. Good times.

So I try to take advantage of various videos, diagrams, and images to help me understand a little better and see the patterns that help form the big picture. Sometimes it works, sometimes I have to talk my self out of mind-implosion from TMI and not enough patience to let it settle in. 

I wonder if Rubik knows how to convert decimal to binary, or create a subnet ID? Probably.

Peanuts, Castle Wolfenstein, and Me

Accessing the remote desktop and playing with commands in the terminal brought back some memories for me. I can still recall Computer Basic class, my freshman year, writing little programs that calculated compound interest and that repeated my name infinitely. Also, playing Castle Wolfenstein if we finished early. We were on little Apples with dark brown screens and amber text (weeeee, not the usual green, we thought we were cool, but we so, so weren't). So typing in commands, yeah, I can remember that.

Of course, what I'm doing now is a bit more complicated than

10 HOME

20 PRINT "Valerie Kittell";

30 GOTO 20

Or whatever Basic was, I can't really remember any more. I got a C in that class and am still pretty bitter about it because I really, really tried and my teacher just sat there at the front of the room reading paperbacks.

Anyway, command lines. My usual technique when starting something new is kind of a cross between Linus and Lucy. By that I mean, like Linus, I start by trying to learn more about what I'm doing. But I temper that with a bit of Lucy, and try to jump into the action a bit sooner than Linus would.

So, I went through the Arthur Griffith tutorials and took notes as I listened. That took forever, I gotta say, but it always does if you try to take notes during reading/video watching. But since it usually helps me learn better by writing down (I have to know what I'm writing), I kept at it. The Learning the Shell articles I printed, as Bruce suggested, and that's where Lucy came in! I opened the remote desktop and  worked through the Learning the Shell sections as I read, referring back to my Arthur Griffith notes (and using Arthur Griffith's voice to "speak" the text in my mind). And Linus popped back up as I added more notes to a new Command Line page, which may or may not end up being useful as there are no doubt better lists already online.

I was just grateful Charlie Brown didn't ever show up. That's when you give good faith, honest efforts but the world conspires against you. I did have one incident regarding the mv command, trying to move a file from one directory to the other. I figured it out (Linus-style, by researching on the Internet) before I resorted to Lucy's solution (drop kicking the computer). Overall, I was fairly pleased with my rudimentary understanding and performance.

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