For our next exercise, we’re going to skip ahead to Chapter 4 of How Learning Works (which is about integrating skills and knowing when to apply them) and Chapter 5 (which discusses goal-directed practice). What I’d like you to do is work up a small example of how you combine two or more of the things we teach to solve a problem you actually encounter in your own research. For example, you might use regular expressions and a shell script to pull dates out of legacy data files, or get SQLite to dump the SQL needed to reproduce a database and store that in version control as a way to keep track of your data.
Here are a few things to think about as you’re doing this:
- Stories about how you use this in your own scientific research makes both you and the material more credible (and more interesting) to our learners, so think about the story you’re going to tell around the things you’re teaching.
- Try to include at least one blind alley in your story: “I started to do X, because it was the simplest answer, but then I realized Y, so I did Z instead.” This is an example of the meta-cognition that we’re trying to help them develop (and also shows them that everyone struggles with some of this stuff, which helps build their confidence).
- The “two or more” part is important: we want to show that these tools and techniques are mutually reinforcing. Please note that “here’s how I grew this small script into something larger” counts as one of the techniques we teach (in fact, it might be one of the most important things on the list…).
Please try to have something posted by Friday, January 4, so that we can have our kick-off meeting for 2013 the week of Jan 7-11.