For 17.10.22

Outlining

First, spend a good hour learning how to learn Outlining in MS Word. This is important because:

  • Homework. All of the weekly exercises that you will share with your classmates and me on Dropbox must be in .doc format: get it right in the first couple of weeks and our lives will be much, much easier!
  • Tree Structures Outlines are an important data type and among the most powerful ways people think about complex things: spend 15 minutes or so reviewing my Outlining to Think: training to use them now will prepare you to work with them elsewhere.
  • Learning Learning how to learn a new application is an essential skill in itself: if you can learn an ugly program like MS Word, you will have for a lifetime many of the skills you will need to learn many other applications

Learning how to learn

We all have different cognitive and behavior skills and in various combinations. Those of us who grasp such technologies readily do so, I like to say, as “boys with toys,” and until the 1990s at least most IT people were boys, designed these systems to suit their intellectual styles and interests — and many of the rest of us were left out of the game. You might scan the cartoons on Kathy Sierra’s “Creating Passionate Users” blog to learn how one of the leading women writers, editors, and educators began to change all that in the 1990s and, not incidentally, look at the Dropbox/HFDA/HFDA 1, the Data Analysis text we will study in detail later (where she was the series editor) to see how differently IT has been taught since then, including, discussions of context, social relations, concepts, examples, principles … there are many ways to skin a cat, and your task is to find your way.

  • Watch videos. For starters, watch the video I introduced in class, Dropbox/Videos/Outlining Tutorial, lynda, and if that works for you then learn how to look for similar videos by searching for “ms word yourquestion YouTube” and where you will likely find many dull repetitive videos before you find ones accessible for you. If you go this route, transform this specific technical problem into a learning problem by writing up: a) what you did, b) what you learned, c) what you think about it, d) what you did or might do differently
  • MS Office Support. Definitely take some time to learn how to learn from Microsoft’s help files — many of them excellent and in any event they are a standard reference — by searching for, for example, the shortcuts for quick access to the print and outline views, as I showed you in class, by looking up “ms word support shortcuts” and scanning like you do a dictionary to find the shortcuts for this particular thing: when you learn this skill, you’ll be able to find just about anything! Here, too, transform this specific technical problem into a learning problem by writing up: a) what you did, b) what you learned, c) what you think about it, d) what you did or might do differently.
  • Take your time with this, look up just a few things to start, and look at this work as learning learning skills for a lifetime, and write this up as a series of challenges and victories: this writing up is really for you and not simply solving a problem or getting the homework done!
  • When the homework is not fun, you are doing it wrong. Go walk the dog, do something else, and maybe best of all: call a partner (misery loves company) and find some way to “own” the homework, make it personally meaningful, and that means transforming “my” assignment to yours.

So, as we write up in class:

  • Do it
  • Reflect on your learning

Explore resources: look for your best ways of learning

  • Follow Dr. B’s Outlining advice on brucespear.info
  • Search for helpful videos on the web
  • Work with a partner

Revise your notes for you and your class mates

  • Review what you did
  • Review what you learned about learning

Revise and reflect on our first data analysis exercise

The purpose of this first, simple exercise is not really about data — that we will get to extensively in the last 6 weeks — but about workflow, including :

Revision

As we began to see in the revision of Noah’s notes in class, create an outline of your first notes by using the different headings to help you sort, re-order, and make sense of what you did and learned and then tell a couple of brief, rather personal and personable stories that will help you: a) check your understanding, b) clarify your thought, and c) remember.

  • Tell a brief story of what you did, for example, “We found that if plotted where people came from using a map we could see …,” or “We thought we’d average and then group the semester levels so we could figure out the average, youngest, and oldest class members …
  • At various points, transform your notes into an outline with sub-heads for different sections in headings 2-3, discussion in heading 4, and quotes and notes in headings 5-6 — as I showed you briefly in class
  • Tell a brief story of how you did it, for example, “First we brain-stormed a number of ideas (list), then settled on two (explain why these two), then agreed to meet over coffee to get to know each other and explore the meaning of this exercise (and of life!) and where we explored where we had seen things like this before, differences in culture and style, etc. …,” “and Friday I drafted my Driver/Navigator part so I could share it on Saturday

About revision

  • Brainstorming with others if often necessary and usually fun and you end up with long lists that are all over the place
  • Polishing to make something that looks good in a standard presentation is about making believe you are an expert, narrowing things down to what you are sure of
  • Revision is about reviewing what you are learning and how and what it might mean, and revision is fascinating, smart, and fun when you give yourself time and license to make it fascinating, smart, and fun: don’t wait until the last minute “to get it done,” do schedule 15min to an hour two or more days ahead to explore and make it, well, fascinating, smart, and fun!
  • talk/write, write/talk are the governing behavior metaphors here: writing is much, much easier if you’ve discussed things with a partner so you know you’ve tested your ideas and that they make sense and when you write as if you are preparing to speak to your partner and classmates: if someone looks at you funny for talking to yourself, just say: “I’m from New York!”

Look up for fun (no need to write up) some of the following (specific assignments over the next weeks)

  • The Kantor Model we talked about
  • The 5 minute Oracle/US Foods video we will look at next time in some detail
  • In OneNote, collect everything I’ve sent and you look up like this.
  • Save all the links I’ve given you and which you find as labelled links, bookmarks, on a Word page, save as .pdf, navigate to this .pdf and save it as your default startup page

Thinking

Warm up the “long view” by scanning the following models and lifting your eyes off the page to ask: “where have I seen this before?”, “how can I wrap my mind around this long view?” No need now to write this up, we’ll make specific assignments: this is to help you gain some perspective on where we are going and why.