A sea of Learning

I had been waiting nine months for that Android Development Coursera class to be offered again.  How perfect, I thought, that it was going to be offered during learning theory... a perfect fit for my learning blog assignment. With that sort of anticipation you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the class was too advanced for me.

Last week I tried to find good websites and YouTube videos that would help me learn the java programming language.  I found a good resource in Codecademy learning the language but I was still struggling with the concept.

To my fortune I saw an advertisement for eight online programming classes on a "name your price" basis.  I was about to pay for them, seeing it as a good long term investment as well as a solution to my current predicament, when I figured out they were all classes on an online learning site called Udemy.  Udemy, like Coursera and Kahn Academy offer classes online; the benefit to Udemy for me is that classes are always offered whereas Coursera had a specific start date and timetable of eight weeks.  I searched through the catalog of classes and found three free courses that fit well into my goal of learning how to program Android applications.

Following the instructions of the Java Tutorial for Complete Beginners, I downloaded the three programs I needed and wrote my first java class.

The first thing I was introduced to were Strings.  This is a familiar word to me because of some technology sites I follow.  Whenever a new or update application is released they look at the source code and try to discover what hints to upcoming features are buried in it.  To do that they look at the strings.

 I learned that in Java you give strings names and attributes.  Once that is done when the string name comes up, the attribute is substituted for it.  For right now it seems like a lot code on the top just to get the results on the bottom but I know a basic understanding will be helpful moving forward.


Learning Theory Application

Motivation -
I am amazed at the learning resources available through the internet to those who continually make the choice learn.  Udemy's courses, YouTube's videos, Home Depot's DIY articles, and so many more resources are available to anyone with access.  The internet gives us access to a sea of learning if we have continuing motivation.

I was with a colleague during the week that home-schools their six children.  Their goal with the kids is to simple instill a love of learning.  Their school day is pretty unstructured, each kid has to do the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Outside of that they can learn whatever they want.  One of his sons is really into science experiments right now, he has an genuine excitement for them that is a fruit of intrinsic motivation.  I talked to him about Dan Pink's TED talk about motivation and how some successful companies give their employees self-directed time to do what interests them and have seen great products come from it.


Operant Conditioning - 
There is a strange form of negative punishment at play with my desire to learn the skills necessary to assist in the development in the LDS Gospel Library application.  I spent most of this week at a seminary teacher training.  As I sat next to some teachers that were using the LDS Gospel Library app on iOS devices I notices the content of the app is more visual appealing than it is on Android, especially when it comes to pictures.  Because iOS was adopted first, content on the app is optimized for it.  Android developers then take the code and alter it for Android.  It is a flawed process because some things don't get altered correctly.  The fact that the teacher sitting next to me had a picture on his page and I didn't bothered me a little.  That is a negative stimulus that I want to remove.