Ongoing Investigations

Tag: reflections

  • Answering the Challenge

    Maren challenged me to take part in a sort of blogging chain mail challenge, answering questions about my blogging process and my history with the blog.

    I don’t post on here very often (my most recent post is from nearly a year ago, yikes!) but answering some questions seemed like a simple and quick way to get back in the blogging rhythm.

    Tagging Taylor to keep it going!

    Why did you start blogging in the first place?

    I would say I originally started blogging “for real” when I was a Digital Scholarship intern at Carleton. We had a blog for all the DS interns to share their work — hosted on DoOO, actually! — and one of my job responsibilities was that once a week, I would research a recent digital ethics question or topic, and write a short post summing it up for the library (with citations of course).

    I really liked it because it felt like a way both to learn and to put my thoughts together. And because it was a regular responsibility, it meant I wasn’t too precious with it — doing the research and getting the post out was the main thing.

    What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

    I use WordPress to manage my blog, mostly because that’s what the DS intern blog used, and so it’s what I’m used to. It was really convenient to be able to take an export of all my research posts and then import them directly into this blog (though I did have to do a bunch of tag cleanup…)

    Have you blogged on other platforms before?

    Sometimes! When I was younger (a lot younger, so much so that I wouldn’t even know where to find this stuff anymore), I played around on Blogspot for about a week and then got bored. More recently, I’ve used Ghost as part of my work for Reclaim, since we use that for our monthly newsletter and our breaking news announcements blog.

    How do you write your posts?

    Usually I’ll skeleton out my thoughts as an outline, adding in notes and thoughts as I have them. Once I feel like I’m done with that, I’ll go back and either write start-to-finish or grab a section where I had a lot of notes and thoughts and write that. There’s a lot of jumping around in my process, so even when I do draft a post, a lot of times it never gets finished.

    In terms of where I draft, I do that in WordPress. For a while I was writing in Obsidian or GDocs or whatever other word processor was my choice at the time, but copy-pasting into WP was a huge headache. I don’t really like how the FSE means that the word processor looks like my blog theme, though — I find it distracting. Though that’s probably a sign that I should change my blog style, TBH.

    When do you feel most inspired to write?

    Usually towards the end of the day, when I can get my thoughts in order.

    Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

    I might let it simmer for maybe fifteen minutes. Anything more than that and it’s up and gone. I spend enough time noodling around in the drafting phase that I don’t need a post to sit for any longer than necessary.

    What’s your favorite post on your blog?

    I wouldn’t say I have any particular favorite posts, but I picked a couple of ones that popped into my head fondly for one reason or another:

    • Working from Home? Hardly Working – This is one of the research posts I wrote for Carleton, back during Spring of 2020 when school had just gone remote. It’s a collection of work-from-home resources, and I had a lot of fun researching them and hoping that people would find them useful.
    • The Finger-painting Approach – This blog post was me reflecting on building a very crappy HTML/CSS site, giving myself permission to make something that was not only unpolished but actively bad. It’s something I wish I felt comfortable doing more often.
    • The Persistence Project: What It Was, How It Went – A short summary of one of the projects I worked on as a DS intern, putting together resources to help the library get people to think more deeply about the longterm life of their digital projects. I credit that project with a lot of how I think about archival and preservation today.
    • Monster of the Week in 2022 & 2023 – This post turned two a week or so ago. I’m including it on here mostly because I very rarely let myself do non-work blogging on here, so it’s fun to look back at a post that’s purely hobby.

    Any future plans for the blog?

    The more I look at it, the more I feel like I should probably change my blog theme. So that first, and then we’ll see. Maybe a new theme will get me more hyped to write.

  • What I’m Learning from Learning French

    So there are people way more equipped than me to talk about How To Support Learning. But following up on my post from a couple weeks ago about what makes self-directed online learning difficult, I wanted to think about how to ease some of the issues I was talking about.

    The two things that came to mind are defining the why and finding community.

    I know I can’t shut up about Duolingo, but it’s the thing I’ve had the most success with, so I’m gonna keep chattering about it. I mentioned in my last post that I was getting frustrated with Italian, feeling kind of stagnant — my grammar wasn’t great and neither was my vocabulary. There weren’t exercises available to me for composition/writing/speaking, only for comprehension/reading/listening.

    So in the past two weeks or so, I’ve switched to French.

    And it’s really working! I’m doing more lessons in a day, making noticeable progress through the Rookie section of the course (the overall course is more than two hundred units, yeesh — I’ve finished about 2.5). I’m not in anything advanced yet, starting from total basics, but I’m feeling more motivated than I have in a while.

    Why?

    Well, the first part is probably just plain old novelty. Switching things up reinvigorates me, and I can get excited about something new because it’s easy to feel like I’m making progress when I’m still in the beginner phases, before I reach the frustration plateau of “not complex enough to feel like I’m really achieving anything but still complex enough that I don’t really get it”.

    But parts two and three — the why and the who — are the reason I picked French, and the reason I’m excited. And they’re sort of the same reason.

    I didn’t actually pick up Italian to talk to people. Of the few people I know who understand Italian, there’s not really anyone in my life who I would regularly use it with, either because they’re not particularly practiced either or because I see them very infrequently. So I didn’t pick up Italian because of community, but because a character I was playing in my Shadowrun TTRPG speaks Italian, and I thought it would be neat to try. Which isn’t the worst reason in the world, but it wasn’t as if I was going to use Italian in the game, just that I was going to learn it in addition for fun. No further purpose.

    But unlike Italian, I have several friends whom I talk to regularly and who also speak fluent French. I can speak French around the house, and get feedback on my pronunciation and grammar. Like I said, I’m still in the little leagues, so my vocabulary is limited, but “Are you eating? I’m eating with you,” and “Look! A dog!” feel like they’re pretty applicable to everyday life nonetheless.

    Having a community of people who you can use your skills with, to have fun with them and get excited about stuff, to learn from and to learn with, is a huge boon to learning. Understanding your own goals helps you stay motivated and remember why you’re doing it. And if those two things can overlap, so much the better. In any case–

    Au revoir, arrivederci, and see you next time.

  • Learning to Learn; or, Online Barriers for Total Beginners

    Coming off of Reclaim Open, one of the things I’m thinking about is online resources for self-teaching beginners. When we were interviewing people for the documentary, we asked people what they were glad the internet had now, in the present, that it hadn’t had in the past. And a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot — talked about how there’s a plethora of learning resources for beginners on just about any subject. Which got me thinking about the learning resources that I’ve used and the tutorials I’ve tried to follow.

    There are so many things that I want to learn. I’ve got a post in the works about teaching myself to draw. About a month ago, I hit a milestone on my Duolingo streak (800 days!). I used to practice guitar, though I’ve fallen out of that habit in the past year. For a while I was experimenting with some of the beginner guides to Unity. I have an abundance of tutorials and resources on various topics bookmarked — a beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails, Codecademy, HackerRank, etc. — which I’ve used… at some point in the past. I keep a list of topics to research that only gets longer and longer.

    All this, and I still feel like a dabbler in everything. Part of it is that I’ve put aside topics for long periods of time (almost everything except Duolingo, honestly). That’s naturally led to skill atrophy and forgetting what I was doing, which means difficulty picking up where I left off. But for the one thing I have stuck with, I don’t feel like I’m getting any better — my Italian is beginner-level at best, with a poor grasp of grammar and difficulty remembering vocabulary when I need it.

    So I’m thinking: what are the differences in the resources I’ve looked at? What do they require? Where do they go together, and where do they fall short?

    The framework I’ve got in my head right now for self-teaching is structured vs unstructured learning resources.

    Structured resources are things like Duolingo or Codecademy, a series of tutorials designed to build on each other. Unstructured resources are more like the Youtube video tutorials that exist for drawing or guitar, and their related practice tools (guitar tab websites, figure drawing photo banks).

    Structured resources are designed methodically by one group in a way that emphasizes logical progress from point A to point B to point C. There’s a general focus on fundamentals first, then building up to more advanced concepts, with exercises designed to practice each new topic. The exercises are usually short and easy enough that lessons can be completed in 5-10 minutes max, to encourage making learning a routine and habitual practice. The focus is on progressing through the course.

    Unstructured resources means that there’s a wide range of sources from various unconnected groups, which all specialize in different topics. Learning is self-directed, since there’s no clear path connecting everything, and there are few if any pre-built exercises (a given resource might have 2 or 3, but none of them hang together). Learners can focus their studying in their weakest areas, or specialize in the topics that most interest them, and the lack of pre-built exercises means that their learning goals shape what they’re working on — which means that there’s more intrinsic motivation to learn, since they’re tailoring their practice to their own interests. The most common advice I hear for people who want to learn guitar is “Pick a song you like, and learn to play it.” There’s simplified versions of just about every song out there so beginners can learn the most basic version, and once they have that, they can try something more advanced. It’s learning by doing.

    With structured learning, there’s issues of pacing, attention span and motivation. Short, easy lessons are designed to keep attention and build routine, so you can do a little bit every day, but if you do only a little bit every day it might feel like you’re taking months or years to get anywhere. That damages motivation, which is doubly bad because you’re working towards proficiency but not a specific intrinsic goal; that makes it extra-hard to measure progress.

    Curated and designed exercises may also not be right for all learners, or self-structured online learning may create certain pitfalls. For example, one major issue I have with Duolingo is that because of the way its lessons are structured, there’s no way to have exercises strengthening true composition (written or spoken). There’s options for translating back and forth between your native language and your target language, but there’s nothing along the lines of “Write a paragraph about your favorite book” or “Talk about your most recent vacation”. That’s a major barrier to fluency, since being able to read and listen in your target language is only one half of communication, and it’s the less challenging half.

    With unstructured learning, though, you still get pacing, attention span and motivation issues. This time the issue is that it’s hard to know how much time to spend on certain topics, and where to start or how to build on them. Dumping time into something while feeling like you’re stumbling in the dark trying to figure out what you need to do next is a sure way to damage motivation, which can in turn make your attention focus elsewhere.

    Exercises for unstructured learning can also feel repetitive, since your resources only give you a few. Everyone says the way to get good at drawing is to practice figure drawing, which is true — I have definitely improved as a result — but I don’t know how to vary it up to keep learning fresh or which details to pay attention to in order to practice most effectively. And if it’s not repetitive, it’s chaotic — everyone has an opinion, and everyone disagrees. Who do you listen to, and how do you cut through the noise and really decide how to spend your time?

    This is a long way of saying: I’ve never learned to teach, and I don’t know how to learn to learn. Because self-structured learning is way different than learning in a classroom, or in a group, or with a mentor. There’s no external framework to keep you accountable, or to provide feedback, or to provide any of the other benefits that come with a learning community.

    When it comes to self-directed learning, there’s so many principles I keep hearing about — resilience, goal-setting, failing forward, varying your practice, etc. — but all the resources I’ve found assume learners are coming to them with those principles already well-developed, and that all that’s left is the skill-building section.

    Which makes sense! Teaching your learners how to self-teach before teaching them what they actually came to learn, is an absurd thing to ask. But for pretty much everything I learned in school, I learned from other people; I almost never got practice teaching myself.

    So there’s a lot of beginner-friendly resources out there. And they’re great for if you have one or two specific things you need to learn. But for people starting in total ignorance who want to work their way up to overarching mastery, how beginner-friendly are they really?

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