Learning Blog Week 6

Vygotsky

    This week was a pleasure both in my coding projects and my weekly reading.  I quite enjoyed Vygotsky's own words, though I found some of the time got a little bit lost.  The beginning of the article, when he's talking about language and how it changes the way we think and process memory gave me pause.  I am right now learning a language.  It is a programming language, and it isn't the first language I'm learning, but I think having the experience of gaining language has given me a little bit of a hint of what Vygotsky is talking about when he says "In this new process the direct impulse to react is inhibited, and an auxiliary stimulus that facilitates the completion of the operation by inderect means is incorporated." (pg 40)  More on this later

The Experience

  This week my lessons were on Hashes and Symbols.  My task was to build a data base which can be added to, subtracted from and edited.  This made me so happy! I finally found an assignment that might give me a tool to use in real life!  (Read last week's blog for more on this).  I was really excited to take my first real steps into programming a program that I might use.  For this assignment we created a movie database which attached ratings to movies (5 stars, or two thumbs up or whatever) and then you could sort it by rating, or title or whatever.  Despite my enthusiasm, it turned out to be as difficult and as frustrating as any of the previous weeks.  I'm just not detail oriented enough to keep all the minutiae straight.  (I was hung up by a comma for an hour!!)  Anyhoo... I was excited, but the task was pretty tough for me.  I decided I should not toil in frustration alone!  I called my expert friend, who was in the mountains of Idaho camping!  No cell service.  Ok, so I turned to the next best thing (maybe the first best thing!) the discussion forums.  There is a button on the bottom of each instruction which links you to the discussion threads for that topic.

This takes you to a forum where you can ask a question which is then open for anyone to answer.  There are CodeAcademy moderators who comb through and answer questions, and most importantly are the already existing threads from people previously moving through the Ruby class who have the same questions as you do, and have already received answers.  The last time I tried the forums it took a long time to get a response... this time I just looked for questions that looked like my question and read the answers.  So much quicker as I was able to get several responses right away.  It was really helpful to look through the code examples that people posted into the threads and compare what I was doing to what the experts, or fellow travellers in some cases, were doing.
  This is where I talk about the Zone of Disparate Knowledge... I mean, the Zone of Proximal Development.  Vygotsky was very thorough in his explanation of learning, development and the relationship they share.  I appreciated the step by step building of learning vs. development, then learning = development and finally learning + development = ZPD.  In regards to my coding experience (not just this week) it becomes quite obvious that what I know (even now 6 weeks in) is just the tiniest drop in the bucket of what knowledge is available to me.  My actual developmental level, as an adult who has never seriously coded before was pretty low.  Even as an adult!  The computerific mind requires some serious work for those of us who don't think in maths.  It requires a retraining and a development process to force our brains into certain kinds of thought.  Anyway, I feel like my brain is like a giant cruise liner... it can turn around, but it's not easy and it isn't fast.  So, it's hard to really quantify where my baseline was in terms of an actual developmental level since my brain is quite mature (I'm 32) but doing something new.  I guess the best way to say it is that I had the capacity, but not the experience.  My brain was a big empty barn, and the complete world knowledge on Ruby was a giant pile of manure just outside.
   How the ZPD applies to me... finally!  So, cruising the forums all week I learned a lot about how programmers interact with each other.  I had seen this when chatting with friends about programming, but I felt like I was immersed in it as I forced myself to interact on the forums.  I put questions and even took a stab or two at answering some other folks questions.  I felt for the first time the enormity of the collective knowledge, and my miniscule hold.  But!  I also felt the expansion of my miniscule corner.  It felt it expand, and it did this as I tried out expressions... like array and variable and boolean.  (I like that last one... it's nice to say outloud... boooolean).  Communication is elementarily social, and I saw how the language I was learning changed the process I used to make choices.  Now, the process described by Vygotsky is pretty simple, and I'm not saying that the process, you know, this thing: 

  I'm not saying this change in structure, only that the X had changed.  This change in X, the inhibitor, helped me understand how the process works.  By simply having language we process the world in chunks rather than as a whole.  We label everything, give it a value, quantify down to constituent pieces.  Learning a programming language hasn't given me these abilities, but has change the value of those pieces.  So while I'm betwixt stimulus and response my auxiliary stimulus has changed and thus my response has changed as well.  For the better when I'm programming.  In the beginning I felt a little bit of a pre-language impulse response on my part.  At first I couldn't understand what I was looking at... it was all so foreign sitting there on the screen.  I didn't have the language to deconstruct it, so I just began typing whatever fragments I could find... though I'm sure this was even filtered through my pre-existing language-knowing mind.  Now I spend a lot of time in that X trying to abstractly solve how to code things, which sometimes work, and sometimes don't.  

    In the end, I was able to expand my knowledge, learn and develop enough to create this

  Which isn't the website I was hoping to be working on right now, but might be a step in that direction.  I feel like being around an online group of folks who, collectively, have a much larger knowledge base has helped me develop and learn much more quickly and deeply than if I were simply toiling on my own.  I see Vygotsky's ideas of external/social learning becoming internalized in my own mind.