Oooh, me back
Feeling my age today, for sure: a mixture of the cold (back to the arctic temperatures of last week after a much nicer weekend) and spending entirely too long this week slumped on the sofa, under (or inside) a sleeping bag, poring over my OU course materials. I'm making an effort this week to sit up properly and spare my poor spine any further unnecessary abuse.
The OU course is going rather well, though in fairness (and as Steen is fond of pointing out as she nears the end of her degree in humanities) this first course is 'only' a Level 1 course and therefore isn't anywhere near as involved as some of the other stuff I'm going to encounter down the road. Still, for someone like me who hasn't really done any study of any kind since 1995 (barring that web design primer I did this year as a warm-up), it's a nice way to slip back into the studying mindset. After the scramble to finish my project at the end of the web design course, I'm finding it a lot easier to manage my workload and keep on top of this new course - so much so that I'm more or less a week in front of where I should be at the moment, as opposed to three weeks behind, which is where I was back in October. It does help that the course is dealing with things that I actually find interesting and would therefore be likely to read about anyhow. The web design course was all very well, but for me it spent entirely too much time waffling on about design principles: such principles may be ultimately useful, but I think the course fell into the trap of focusing so much on a bunch of design tropes that the final project came as a massive anticlimax (plus I think they didn't give you anywhere near enough time to piece the project together, compared with the time they spent talking about design - it might have been more productive for the course to let you get your hands dirty with WYSIWYG web design (oooh, no HTML coding on that course - perish the thought!) right from the beginning, and let you piece together your site week by week using new design ideas, then spent 8 weeks talking about design, then a couple talking about the WYSIWYG editor provided, before saying, "Right, you've got a week to put together your site." A week may sound like a long time - especially for a site as simplistic as the course was concerned with - but when you work full time and are out several nights on the week in question, it's not particularly helpful... ;-)
Anyhow, so far so good. I got my first assignment back last week with a mark of 96%, so I must be doing something right. Since then, we've delved into coding and the actual physical components of computer systems, so we're actually dealing with the stuff I'm really interested in. I can feel my coder-senses, unused and disregarded for so long, returning to life. My coding skill set is ridiculously out of date - other than a smattering of assembler (which they didn't let us play with too much at technical college, it was just a bridge to high level languages rather than a means to an end itself), my most recent coding experience was with COBOL and Pascal, for goat's sake. I've longed to join the 21st century for a while now, and after teaching myself some basic C & Javascript, it's nice to feel that now I'm actually going to get to do something with it all and develop my skillset a bit further.
I've always been fascinated with programming and the inner workings of computers. It seemed to me that I had the poor fortune to be taught by people who didn't understand that fascination, rather than the cool tech teachers you sometimes read about who had the same kind of enthusiasm and did their best to encourage it in their students. No such luck for yours truly - it seemed for the most part (my programming teacher at technical college was a real character - it's a real pity that the rest of the mob there weren't cut from the same cloth) that I was taught about computing by a bunch of business-obsessed stuffed suits and tweed-wearing nerds obsessed with logic tables and binary maths. Some of this stuff is all very well, but it's not how you hold the attention of young people who want to get involved in computing (unless, of course, the young people involved are business-obsessed stuffed suits and tweed-wearing nerds, and I confess there were a few of them in my class). Some of us are just not cut out for the 9-to-5 cubicle-bound grind. A classic case of the mentality Gerald Scarfe illustrated so aptly with his animation of the teacher feeding the kids into that massive mincing machine that he put together for Pink Floyd's The Wall.
I'm nearly at the point of submitting my next assignment (due shortly after the New Year), where I get to actually do some coding. Now if there was a course that consisted of little else than getting my head down and putting together something in Visual Studio, I'd be a very happy camper. Still, before I know it it'll be time to decide what course I'm doing next, so who knows? :-)
The OU course is going rather well, though in fairness (and as Steen is fond of pointing out as she nears the end of her degree in humanities) this first course is 'only' a Level 1 course and therefore isn't anywhere near as involved as some of the other stuff I'm going to encounter down the road. Still, for someone like me who hasn't really done any study of any kind since 1995 (barring that web design primer I did this year as a warm-up), it's a nice way to slip back into the studying mindset. After the scramble to finish my project at the end of the web design course, I'm finding it a lot easier to manage my workload and keep on top of this new course - so much so that I'm more or less a week in front of where I should be at the moment, as opposed to three weeks behind, which is where I was back in October. It does help that the course is dealing with things that I actually find interesting and would therefore be likely to read about anyhow. The web design course was all very well, but for me it spent entirely too much time waffling on about design principles: such principles may be ultimately useful, but I think the course fell into the trap of focusing so much on a bunch of design tropes that the final project came as a massive anticlimax (plus I think they didn't give you anywhere near enough time to piece the project together, compared with the time they spent talking about design - it might have been more productive for the course to let you get your hands dirty with WYSIWYG web design (oooh, no HTML coding on that course - perish the thought!) right from the beginning, and let you piece together your site week by week using new design ideas, then spent 8 weeks talking about design, then a couple talking about the WYSIWYG editor provided, before saying, "Right, you've got a week to put together your site." A week may sound like a long time - especially for a site as simplistic as the course was concerned with - but when you work full time and are out several nights on the week in question, it's not particularly helpful... ;-)
Anyhow, so far so good. I got my first assignment back last week with a mark of 96%, so I must be doing something right. Since then, we've delved into coding and the actual physical components of computer systems, so we're actually dealing with the stuff I'm really interested in. I can feel my coder-senses, unused and disregarded for so long, returning to life. My coding skill set is ridiculously out of date - other than a smattering of assembler (which they didn't let us play with too much at technical college, it was just a bridge to high level languages rather than a means to an end itself), my most recent coding experience was with COBOL and Pascal, for goat's sake. I've longed to join the 21st century for a while now, and after teaching myself some basic C & Javascript, it's nice to feel that now I'm actually going to get to do something with it all and develop my skillset a bit further.
I've always been fascinated with programming and the inner workings of computers. It seemed to me that I had the poor fortune to be taught by people who didn't understand that fascination, rather than the cool tech teachers you sometimes read about who had the same kind of enthusiasm and did their best to encourage it in their students. No such luck for yours truly - it seemed for the most part (my programming teacher at technical college was a real character - it's a real pity that the rest of the mob there weren't cut from the same cloth) that I was taught about computing by a bunch of business-obsessed stuffed suits and tweed-wearing nerds obsessed with logic tables and binary maths. Some of this stuff is all very well, but it's not how you hold the attention of young people who want to get involved in computing (unless, of course, the young people involved are business-obsessed stuffed suits and tweed-wearing nerds, and I confess there were a few of them in my class). Some of us are just not cut out for the 9-to-5 cubicle-bound grind. A classic case of the mentality Gerald Scarfe illustrated so aptly with his animation of the teacher feeding the kids into that massive mincing machine that he put together for Pink Floyd's The Wall.
I'm nearly at the point of submitting my next assignment (due shortly after the New Year), where I get to actually do some coding. Now if there was a course that consisted of little else than getting my head down and putting together something in Visual Studio, I'd be a very happy camper. Still, before I know it it'll be time to decide what course I'm doing next, so who knows? :-)