In the past few years, I have been reading about and intrigued with all the discussion about "Big Data." Being a math teacher, I teach the basics of data analysis, regression and some basic inferential statistics. However, I've never truly understood the predictive analytics that someone like Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com does with his election forecasts. So I've decided to take an online course, through Coursera, techniques in Big Data just for my personal growth, and perhaps I could bring some of the things I learn into the classroom.
The course comes in nine units, the first one being called "The Data Scientists Toolbox." This section is getting us all set up with the right programs that we will use and to practice using them in a very basic manner. As many of you know, I don't have much of an instinct around computers and tend to be quite intimidated by them and making mistakes and not knowing how to get around the my problems. So we had to install these programs called "R," a programming language and "R-Studio," the editor in which we will program. In addition we learned about Git and set up an account GitHub. This was all done through video lectures.
Along with three quizzes (multiple choice), each unit ends with a project to demonstrate our mastery of the tasks. This time there were four. Three of them I completed without much difficulty, but one of them stumped me. Usually, I am one to want to finish what I start but I was stumped and I was stressing over it. Honestly, if I would have stepped back and realized that I had very little riding on this, but I was simply reverting to student mode and wanting to "get it right."
Over the course of a couple days, I used my resources. I googled things. I read through the class discussion forums and even posted a question myself asking my fellow classmates about where I was stuck. Then this morning, when I was doing something else on my computer, I saw that there was a folder that had the document I was trying to figure out how to edit. I opened it and everything made sense.
The last part of this task was to upload the document to the GitHub. Earlier I was also having trouble with this as well and was getting errors that no one mentioned in the forums. I was in the weeds! But I methodically followed the instructions of the video someone posted in the forums and everything worked out. I'm not sure I could do it on my own yet, but I learned that typing the commands were the same as saving a program and then moving it into Dropbox, where Dropbox is the equivalent of GitHub.
It's crazy that at 45, I'm only now learning to trust that if I sleep on things that I will eventually figure them out. I need to not stress about getting things the first time around. I tell this to my students but I'm actually living it out in my own life right now as well. I'm also more confident now in my ability to work with these programs. Bring on Unit 2.
The course comes in nine units, the first one being called "The Data Scientists Toolbox." This section is getting us all set up with the right programs that we will use and to practice using them in a very basic manner. As many of you know, I don't have much of an instinct around computers and tend to be quite intimidated by them and making mistakes and not knowing how to get around the my problems. So we had to install these programs called "R," a programming language and "R-Studio," the editor in which we will program. In addition we learned about Git and set up an account GitHub. This was all done through video lectures.
Along with three quizzes (multiple choice), each unit ends with a project to demonstrate our mastery of the tasks. This time there were four. Three of them I completed without much difficulty, but one of them stumped me. Usually, I am one to want to finish what I start but I was stumped and I was stressing over it. Honestly, if I would have stepped back and realized that I had very little riding on this, but I was simply reverting to student mode and wanting to "get it right."
Over the course of a couple days, I used my resources. I googled things. I read through the class discussion forums and even posted a question myself asking my fellow classmates about where I was stuck. Then this morning, when I was doing something else on my computer, I saw that there was a folder that had the document I was trying to figure out how to edit. I opened it and everything made sense.
The last part of this task was to upload the document to the GitHub. Earlier I was also having trouble with this as well and was getting errors that no one mentioned in the forums. I was in the weeds! But I methodically followed the instructions of the video someone posted in the forums and everything worked out. I'm not sure I could do it on my own yet, but I learned that typing the commands were the same as saving a program and then moving it into Dropbox, where Dropbox is the equivalent of GitHub.
It's crazy that at 45, I'm only now learning to trust that if I sleep on things that I will eventually figure them out. I need to not stress about getting things the first time around. I tell this to my students but I'm actually living it out in my own life right now as well. I'm also more confident now in my ability to work with these programs. Bring on Unit 2.
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