Category: learning stuff

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Coding along

I decided a few months ago to pursue coding more deeply, and to that end I purchased a bunch of courses on Udemy.com (fortunately, I found a deal, because they can get expensive!). The one I am currently working on teaches you how to build a clean, gorgeous website using Bootstrap. I love Bootstrap, it is so fast and fun. The class also taught me how and why to start using GitHub, and I just set up my first public repository, meganclancy.github.io. I think I actually said “Eeee!” out loud when I first saw that it was working! I know it is pretty nerdy, but I love learning this stuff.

I can’t decide if I should do the in-depth Javascript class next (I have some experience with Javascript, but it’s been a while since I used it for anything, so I need to brush up), or instead dive into the course for dynamic websites, which involves scripting with PHP and mySQL as well as Javascript.

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Big data, little data

As part of my learning-new-things endeavor (I don’t think you should ever let yourself become stagnant), I’ve been doing a little bit more with Python. Specifically, I am working through this Codecademy course on using APIs in Python. The reason I have for wanting to learn this stuff, besides personal enrichment and keeping my brain busy and blah blah blah, is that Marvel has recently released their API to the public. I am a big ol’ comic book geek, and I think it would be cool to pull their data together in interesting ways. Do sales go up when Marvel teams up Cloak and Dagger with Spider-Man? How many times did Jack Kirby draw Uatu the Watcher? How many times do Marvel characters attend Empire State University? et cetera. See? Data can be fun, I swear.

Speaking of data, another thing that looks interesting is the Introduction to Data Science course by Dr. Bill Howe on Coursera. I’m a little hesitant to sign up because it notes that you need to have the equivalent of two courses on Python and SQL, and I haven’t had formal coursework on either of those topics. However, I have a month to get up to speed, so I’m going to give it a shot. What are you learning these days? Have you ever taken a Coursera course?

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Programs

I am doing so much EndNote training these days! So. Much. It’s actually pretty enjoyable, though. EndNote is a citation management program (there are lots of them out there, see Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, Reference Manager, etc.), which is an application that lets you keep track of what you’ve read, organize the reference or PDFs of the papers themselves, and then insert those citations into a paper. It can update your bibliography according to style type on the fly. As you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to create a bibliography by hand, this is incredibly useful.

I like teaching EndNote more than most of my other subjects because it’s practical–I know that when I send someone off into the world with more EndNote knowledge, that’s going to help them in a concrete way. If I teach a student how to use a database, that may be helpful…or they may never use it again. Everybody likes productivity tools, though.

A colleague and I are also working on a systematic review. I’ve never done one before, but I’m learning a lot. You have to do a huge amount of reading before even beginning to understand the question that the review is trying to investigate. This is actually pretty fun, as it turns out. Then you have to come up with an exhaustive search and think of ways to replicate that search across different databases (this part is not so fun). We’re embarking on the next step, which is abstract reviews, next week. It’s interesting to see the whole process in action, it’s very (wait for it) systematic.

Recently, I moved across town. Moving is so stressful and exhausting, but I’m closer to most of my friends now and live in an actual house instead of an apartment. Perks! Next up on the list is getting a new-to-me car to replace my aging, beloved miata.

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Back to the land of the living

I have not posted here since October! This is because my job has become very, very busy. I’m my library’s trainer for EndNote, Zotero, and Reference Manager (although people here only seem to want to learn about EndNote), which takes up some time. I’m also training nursing students on CINAHL, and learning a lot about genetics. The most interesting thing I’m doing these days is answering clinical questions for various physicians and researchers–this involves doing a thorough search of the medical literature and summarizing the most relevant and important articles. In order to do this well, I’ve been reading about what goes into making really solid experiments and how to tell when articles are leaving out important details when reporting the results of those experiments. To be clear, I don’t think that the authors are being dishonest! I think it is sometimes hard to tell what your own project may be missing, or how you *should* have set it up in an ideal world versus how you actually did set it up in the real world. It’s interesting, seeing research in action.

I’m also spending a fair amount of time learning about our Special Collections, which is fantastic fun. The history of medicine is so strange and fascinating, especially the local history here in the south and in Nashville in particular. I’m looking forward to designing an exhibit later this spring, as well. In the meantime, I’m spending time familiarizing myself with the collection, which includes all manner of medical texts from the 1500s onward. I’m particularly fond of our copy of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, which is a second edition.

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CINAHL

I’ve been teaching myself how to use CINAHL, the database of nursing and allied health literature from EBSCO. I’m not doing it because I am inherently interested in the database, but I’m learning it so that I’ll be able to teach a class on it. A class that’s this afternoon, gulp.

But you know what? CINAHL is actually pretty interesting. There are of course some things that I don’t like about it, but overall I think it’s built in a way that makes sense, and it can be used by people who are Good At Computers as well as by people who have to work, dammit, and can’t spend a lot of time learning a particular database.

While I am a pretty bush league teacher at the moment, I like teaching. And I’m pretty good at picking up something quickly in order to be able to teach it to other people. That’s a skill I didn’t even know I had until I recently started learning EndNote/Zotero/Reference Manager–I’m the new trainer for those programs at my library.

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Power searching with Google

I’m teaching a class about how to become a strong searcher using Google. I thought I knew a lot about Google’s search tricks, but I have learned an enormous amount in the past few days. For example, did you know that you can find a huge amount of local information merely by entering your zip code or city? So if I wanted to see what time the sun rises or sets in my neighborhood, I could just type “sunrise 37206” or “sunset Nashville.” You can also do this with movies and other kinds of events. There are so many ways to use Google, it’s pretty amazing.

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The home stretch

I’m moving into the last phase of this project, and things are getting exciting. I have two big things to work on at the moment: I need to add a lot of information to the research guide on usability, and I need to create the presentation I will be giving on May 8th. The presentation will cover the methodology of the usability test I conducted in February, as well as the information generated by the test and possible applications that information as the site is refreshed in mid-May. Public speaking makes me really nervous (and I am not very good at it), but I think that I can handle 20-25 minutes on this topic. Conducting the test was so interesting that I’m sure there will be a lot to cover.

I also finished the Udacity 101 course on creating a search engine in Python. I hadn’t had much experience with programming before, and I really enjoyed it. Parts of the class were frustrating and confusing, but I worked hard at it and I think I have learned a great deal.

Part of what made the course so enjoyable to me was that programming encouraged me to approach problem-solving in a different way than I usually do. I liked breaking a question down into its tiniest components, and using logic to figure out how to structure and approach the solution. It wasn’t necessarily intuitive, but I think it would become easier to slip into that mode of thinking with practice. I found myself puzzling over homework questions as I walked around the grocery store or tried to read a book. I’ve always liked logic puzzles, and I felt like programming was tapping into the same part of my brain. I might take the web applications course when it gets started later this month, if I have the time.

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Udacity

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the CS 101 course through Udacity. Like Khan Academy, Udacity seeks to provide education for free to anyone who wants to learn.  I’m excited to see where this new educational model goes, and what kind of students will take advantage of it. Although Udacity assumes that you have access to a computer and the internet as well as time to work through the courses, this can provide an amazing educational opportunity for nontraditional students. I looked through the forums yesterday, and it was wonderful to see the students who are taking the course–there are a lot of older, younger, and international students all learning together.

This particular course focuses on learning Python to build a tiny functional search engine in seven weeks. We are nearly halfway through, and I’m enjoying the course tremendously. I haven’t really done any programming since a C++ course I took in college more than a decade ago, but Python is not as hard as I thought it would be.

 

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Code Year

Is anyone else doing Codecademy’s Code Year? I’m really enjoying it so far, even though I’m a bit behind where I should be. I took one course in C++ in college, which I disliked (mostly because it was a huge class and, as one of only a few humanities majors, I felt left out), so it’s encouraging to be able to learn to code a bit on my own just for fun. Plus, Javascript, HTML, and CSS are all important things to have in one’s toolkit these days.