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.

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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