Learning Blog Week 8

Week 8

  And now, the conclusion.  I like to think of this 8 week process as a learning journey.  It feels like a long trek across a foreign land with way stations set along the way to reflect on the journey and recalibrate the course.  I've enjoyed the experience, and I think I have a good account of my trip.  This week I completely abandoned the CodeAcademy tutorials for a radical new approach.  I simply asked my friend to help me make a website with Ruby.  Spoiler: we failed.  We sat down and got straight to work.  He quizzed me for a while on what I knew, what I didn't know and showed me some code from the Starfall website, which he curates.  I admit I was mostly lost during this process.
  After a time, we started in on our first bit of code.  That's when he really lost me.  We worked together, mostly me watching him type code and fumblingly explain what he's doing.  I will admit that I was pretty disappointed.  I had hoped that this experience could be like a cognitive apprenticeship, but I hadn't fully thought through the situation.  Cognitive apprenticeships aren't just last minute crash courses with an expert friend.  They require time and patience and a lot of work.  I didn't give myself enough time to learn from my friend's ample store of knowledge.  Indeed, my friend's knowledge of Ruby far exceeded my ability to keep up with, but I wouldn't say that the experience was a waste of time.  I think rather than an ending point for this blog, I should have made this the beginning point.  I wonder if I'd asked my friend if I could just help him as he builds websites if that would have been a more satisfying experience.  Could I have done like the apprentice tailors and picked up enough code by doing menial tasks for my friend to learn to program my own site eventually?  More importantly, would this have made the process more enjoyable? I find nothing gives knowledge as much memorable context as friendly humor.
  The major drawback to my learning journey was that I just didn't enjoy programming.  Each week I'd get a feeling of dread when I thought about having to do my coding activities... though writing the blog was actually quite enjoyable (Maybe I should have learned how to blog for my learning activity?)  I wonder if this is a function of how my brain works, or if it's just that I've always enjoyed writing, and have never programmed before.  Writing is comfortable, there is a level of automaticity.  I don't have to think about the component parts of writing.  I just think of something I want to say, and then my fingers make it appear on the screen (or the page).  Coding required a lot more concentration.  I had to constantly retrieve information to my working memory, and then store it back away.  My schema for programming wasn't very well organized, and the relationships between the ideas and concepts were tenuous and constantly changing in ways I couldn't quite grasp fully.  I know our memories are dynamic learning machines, but it seems that when we have a firm grasp on a subject those changes are exciting and interesting as opposed to when we're still new to a subject and we can become easily confused as our memories expand and make continuous connections to just about every other thing we know.
  Reading through my blog entries I came across this passage in my first entry, "...that just because a person is a certain age doesn't mean that they will have the same success at abstract manipulation of information. In my case I felt like a bit child-like in my inability to fully work through the hypothetical situations in my mind. I couldn't see many of the end results. I don't have the automaticity or fixed schemes to allow my mind to work at full speed yet, where I can think of several children who have taken some programming classes who could probably work through the hypothetical situations better than I am able to at this point." 
  This was in response to Robbie Case's ideas building off Piaget's theories.  I have come a long way these 8 weeks in terms of finally getting a toehold on Ruby.  It's just enough to work through some abstract simulations in my mind, and then being able to manifest them in reality with only a few minor tweaks.  I was thrilled last week when my tutorial asked me to provide some code that would do a certain thing, and I thought about it, came up with something that seemed like it would work, and then wrote the code.  I only had to add one little bit of code that I hadn't thought about in my mind, but everything else worked.  That was maybe my biggest breakthrough during this learning exercise.  I feel like I was able to develop a little bit of procedural memory as well as the cavalcade of disembodied declarative memory fragments that I got throughout the 8 weeks of practice.  Things started to coalesce just a little bit.  I had a tiny little script there for coding a certain thing.  I finally was able to transfer a little bit of my new knowledge.  A near transfer, but a victory to be sure.
  And now the conclusion to the conclusion.  I have learned much about myself, how I learn, how my mind works.  I've come to realize that I have a great aversion to negative consequences and that I can sometimes limit myself because I'm afraid to fail.  I came to the startling realization that I don't even know how much I don't know, and then found myself even more startled to realize that that is a good thing!  It is a wonderful thing to discover the boundless potential of human knowledge.  In this very tiny subsection of all human knowledge, namely computer programming, I realized that what I don't know is the most wonderful discovery of all.  It's wonderful because it means I have the potential to learn so much more and the way to do that (I am coming to find) is to become immersed.  I don't know if I'll ever become encultured into the ranks of the codemonkeys, but I think there is room for me to learn from them.  To observe, to copycat and then allow those experiences to marinate in my mind.  Then, to internalize them and make them my own.  To let them connect to all the other things I've learned.  
  Above all else, I think I've learned that learning is complicated.  It isn't just a response to stimulus, and it isn't just the memory function of the brain.  There is more to learning than just the physical development of the brain, or of the maturing of the mind.  It isn't even fully explained by our interaction with our culture and surroundings.  All of these ideas and concepts can give us insight into a still somewhat mysterious process that happens all the time and without our conscious decision.  We are constantly learning and restructuring what we've learned.  We're constantly sorting out the disequilibrium in our minds, and incorporating what we sense around us.  We are never done learning, and we don't have to strain to do it, but we can focus that learning to be constructive and fun.  We can learn to do almost anything if we muster the motivation and work, work, work, toward it.