I need ‘stuff’ to imagine with
Can you learn how to program or even think about programming if you have not got the ability to imagine what it looks like? I think yishay and me have come to the mutual conclusion that even if you can I can’t.
Writing my last assignment 4 was difficult for me, in fact I could not do it. I could not get past as yishay described it – a certain level of abstraction. In my post ‘trying to think what this essay really is’ (Nov 2nd) I got near to it at one point ‘Diane comes up and ‘turns up’ the multimodality’ – but what next – I could not as yishay wanted me to ‘describe what happens, how does Diane ‘turn it up’ what is it ‘a button’, what exactly happens, how can the button be turned’. I can usually imagine but in this instance I had no kind of ‘stuff’ to imagine with.
This is interesting for me, as it makes me think much more generally about the idea of learning and the importance of being able to imagine the finished product (whether it can then be realised is another matter). Working with a system, a grammar and language and way of thinking about interaction that is outside of my usual one highlights what being able to imagine the finished project might actually require (for me at any rate) and involve.
So our meeting today consisted of this discussion and the decision to return to sitting around the computer together working with some basic html and java. This felt great – back to the certainty of something new. The idea being that if I can better understand how the programming works – kind of build a vocabulary (both of words to communicate and think with, but also dynamic visual examples to think with and share) to imagine with that I might be better able to imagine what the essay might look like, could be.
So with this new starting point in mind, we went through the html web page that I had made in assignment 4.1 and yishay explained how to understand (interpret) the online validation software. We looked at sites around html, looked at websites and viewed their source (I find the moment where you ‘flick’ over to the source code a really interesting one – where I am suddenly trying to match one language – what is on the web page as designed – to another – the lines of source code. Like all bilingual people I wonder how yishay or other programmers see the webpage – if they can translate it into code – and vice versa – if when they see the lines of code they see the resulting webpage? For me these two things are entirely distinct and barely connectable – in this sense I guess learning is, as with any other specialist knowledge, learning how to make new sense of the everyday through the specialist literacies and practices that learning programming makes available – well that is my task – to make some connections and start to build a page.
I learnt a number of new terms that I will add to my glossary later (hoping to beable to write a book on ‘how to pretend to be a programmer’ by the end of all this:
Event handler
Commented out
Div
Styling definition
The relationship between head and body
The meaning of the expression ‘font is depreciated’
Writing my last assignment 4 was difficult for me, in fact I could not do it. I could not get past as yishay described it – a certain level of abstraction. In my post ‘trying to think what this essay really is’ (Nov 2nd) I got near to it at one point ‘Diane comes up and ‘turns up’ the multimodality’ – but what next – I could not as yishay wanted me to ‘describe what happens, how does Diane ‘turn it up’ what is it ‘a button’, what exactly happens, how can the button be turned’. I can usually imagine but in this instance I had no kind of ‘stuff’ to imagine with.
This is interesting for me, as it makes me think much more generally about the idea of learning and the importance of being able to imagine the finished product (whether it can then be realised is another matter). Working with a system, a grammar and language and way of thinking about interaction that is outside of my usual one highlights what being able to imagine the finished project might actually require (for me at any rate) and involve.
So our meeting today consisted of this discussion and the decision to return to sitting around the computer together working with some basic html and java. This felt great – back to the certainty of something new. The idea being that if I can better understand how the programming works – kind of build a vocabulary (both of words to communicate and think with, but also dynamic visual examples to think with and share) to imagine with that I might be better able to imagine what the essay might look like, could be.
So with this new starting point in mind, we went through the html web page that I had made in assignment 4.1 and yishay explained how to understand (interpret) the online validation software. We looked at sites around html, looked at websites and viewed their source (I find the moment where you ‘flick’ over to the source code a really interesting one – where I am suddenly trying to match one language – what is on the web page as designed – to another – the lines of source code. Like all bilingual people I wonder how yishay or other programmers see the webpage – if they can translate it into code – and vice versa – if when they see the lines of code they see the resulting webpage? For me these two things are entirely distinct and barely connectable – in this sense I guess learning is, as with any other specialist knowledge, learning how to make new sense of the everyday through the specialist literacies and practices that learning programming makes available – well that is my task – to make some connections and start to build a page.
I learnt a number of new terms that I will add to my glossary later (hoping to beable to write a book on ‘how to pretend to be a programmer’ by the end of all this:
Event handler
Commented out
Div
Styling definition
The relationship between head and body
The meaning of the expression ‘font is depreciated’
posted by carey at 9:53 AM
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