The readings and responses listed here should take you approximately 65 minutes total.
To start this assignment:
- Click the button in the upper right-hand corner that says Fork. This is now your copy of this document.
- Click the Edit button when you're ready to start adding your answers.
- To save your work, click the green button in the bottom right-hand corner. You can always come back and re-edit your gist.
Learning Fluency by Turing alum Sara Simon (35 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- Sarah said something like "disregard of rote memorization is the blunder of creativity." As a creator, I need to be more willing to put my creative itch aside and "learn by rote". Historically my memory is pretty good, a little random, but very specific. Maybe if I hone this as my first line of learning (rather than say, learning by doing) I'll have a lot more success long-term.
- A key take-away is that it's very common to do all sorts of things before landing in a long-term and steady career. This has been an insecurity of mine. But also, this article identified a strength I've never put a name to. The idea that understanding one thing increases the propensity to understand other things makes me feel a lot more comfortable about the future.
- I've never considered that the way we learn could be part of our privilidge as white men. I was definitely the kind of student she spoke of, classes bored me and I breezed through them, so I expirimented with teaching myself other things extra curricularly. (This even included a bit of HTML.) I think this actually hurt me quite a bit in college when I did start to struggle. I changed courses when hunkering down might have served me better, but I had never had to build that foundation of learning by rote, or flashcards, or in this case practicing hours and hours on the modes of different musical scales.
Use Google to go find at least one online resource detailing keyboard shortcuts and/or features that are built into Slack.
- What resource(s) did you find? Paste them below:
- Well google yielded this awesome one, so I'm going to try it for shortcuts
View all keyboard shortcuts in Slack ⌘ /
Also, a good one from Fast Company and one from <a href"https://slackhq.com/slick-features-and-capabilities-you-didnt-know-about-in-slack"> the Slack blog.
- What are three Slack shortcuts and/or features that stood out? How will each contribute to your productivity?
- Saving your place in a channel or DM by holding down the Alt and clicking the timestamp will help me to keep track of where I am.
- There are lots of good ways to search, broaden searches, and refine searches. This will help me reference material sift through a lot of content.
- I like that we can pin objects which I imagine will help in working on material with group projects and I like that there's markdown style format options.
What's the use of the staging area in git? on Stackoverflow (15 min)
The idea of the staging area is frequently one of the trickiest concepts to wrap your head around when you're first learning git. Read the question and answers (or do your own Googling on the git staging area). Then, create your own metaphor comparing the staging area to something in real life.
- Type your metaphor below: Git staging is like sound check for a band. Before sound check, you've wired everybody up, and maybe checked each individual line, but staging allows you to test each channel on each instrument before working with the whole band. It may help you identify a problem with your routing, where you've swapped the guitar and snare lines, or give you a chance to focus on more complex groups of instruments (like a drum kit). Staging is a tool that allows us to work with individual components at a time.
If you have any questions, comments, or confusions that you would like an instructor to address, list them below:
@GreysonElkins
Thanks for the thoughtful responses! I'm glad it made you think about how you can use your prior work experiences- software development is a field where people from all sorts of backgrounds and skill sets can be successful. There is so much involved with software development: team-work, communication, technical skills, design, ideas, strategy, planning, and the list goes on... that no one person has to be the 'best' at any one of those skills, you can leverage your personal strengths in ways that will benefit everyone, and there is potential for growth in every area.
I too found Sara's exploration of how male privilege plays into learning styles fascinating. Being self-aware about your own tendencies while learning will help you identify good, personalized learning techniques, but also perhaps some old habits that will take work to break. But this important work within ourselves will not look the same for everyone, so empathy of other's own learning styles is essential as well. I think it can help to talk about this stuff with a classmate also going through this! We all learn a ton about ourselves during this time, and it helps to build perspective hearing about how this looks for others.