Reflections on Online Learning

I mentioned previously that I have recently moved to Silicon Valley in California as my husband is a software engineer and is working in the hub of the tech world. While I wait out the wait for a green card, I thought I would beef up my brain and take some courses online. This past semester I have taken my first two graduate level online courses and I’ve learned some things along the way. Maybe I’m alone in these, or maybe my experiences are reflective of others’ - but to illustrate, I have compiled a list of pros and cons for taking online courses:

Pro: You can work at your own speed.

Con: All of a sudden it’s the deadline for a month’s worth of work and “working at your own speed” means working at warp speed. 

Pro: You can live anywhere.

Con: Living anywhere means sometimes you have to be awake at ungodly hours to attend a live review session.

Pro: You can speed up or slow down the lecture videos (You can! I discovered  this featured this semester…you just press the little gear/flower-like thing in the bottom right corner and select your playback speed!)

Con: It is really tempting to speed up every lecture video regardless of how poorly you understand the material and whether you can actually take notes at chipmunk heartbeat speed.

Pro: You can think a little longer about how you’re going to respond to the class discussion instead of blurting something out just to get participation marks.

Con: Your well-thought out response takes 1) forever to craft 2) lives for eternity on the the discussion forum, so depending on how long “forever” is for you, you may look like you blurted it out anyways and no one will ever forget it.


Pro: You don’t have to make small talk with your classmates before and after class.

Con: You begin to feel very isolated having not spoken to anyone in real-time for days - refreshing the forums to see if anyone has read your brilliant prose and responded.

Pro: You don’t have to get dressed…or even get out of bed to attend a lecture.

Con: You begin to question whether you are developing agoraphobia from never leaving the house.

Pro: You can finish an entire degree while working full-time.

Con: You haven’t slept or seen a movie in 5 years.

Re-learning grade school science

When starting this blog project, I thought, "what do I need to learn to be more successful in business?", and quantitative analysis and statistics instantly jumped to mind. I have been repressing my need to learn statistics for my desire to not learn statistics since high school math class.

So imagine my chagrin/relief when I was finally forced/able to take a research methodology course that included discussions of quantitative methodology and statistical analysis. It's like a general entry into the world of statistics, but not as scary as a full on stats course. Over the next few posts, I will write about some of the things that I learned about quantitative research methods, which is fortuitous timing because I have to study for the final exam.

First things first, I basically had to re-learn basic science concepts. It turns out that my grade 3 teacher lead me astray on the basic science concept, variables, when we were growing peas in science class and she said that the independent variables were the things that you manipulated to see how the plant would grow: like sunlight, water, soil, etc. Then she said that the dependent variable is the thing that you don't change - like the pot that the plant is in. WRONG. The dependent variable is the plant. It is the thing that changes as the independent variable is manipulated. 

I basically had to unlearn everything I know about science and then re-learn it thanks to her.

In addition to the independent variable and the dependent variable, there is also an intervening variable. The intervening variable is changed by the independent variable and then the intervening variable turns around and causes change in the dependent variable.

For example, we've all heard that people with higher levels of education have higher incomes. However, this can't quite be true because I have 7 years of university education under my belt and currently my salary is $0.00 because I don't have a job. The intervening variable here is occupation and the idea is that when you're more educated, you can get a better job, which results in a higher income.

Lastly, there are external, extraneous, or confounding variables which the scientist can't really control for but may still have an impact on the experiment. These are also called uncontrolled variables.

Another concept that I missed/forgot about entirely is the hypothesis. I remember it being a statement of what the scientist predicts is going to happen, which is somewhat true, but what no one ever mentioned to me is that hypotheses are always in pairs: the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis.

The null hypothesis is always stated in negative terms. "The independent variable will not affect any changes in the dependent variable", "the heat setting on my curling iron will have no effect on how long my curls last", "Miley Cyrus' cd sales are not related to Iron Maiden's cd sales". 

The null hypothesis is paired with an alternate hypothesis, which is basically just the null hypothesis stated in exactly the opposite terms: like reverse psychology, or what I would say in response to everything my brother ever said ever.

"The independent variable will affect changes on the dependent variable", "the heat setting on my curling iron will have an effect on how long my curls last", "Miley's cd sales are related to Iron Maiden's cd sales".

Why is it important to know about hypotheses and variables for statistics? Because when doing statistical tests with quantitative data, you have to have variables, otherwise you would have nothing to test. You also have to have a hypothesis otherwise you won't really know what your test results are saying.

Next up...what exactly is a beta coefficient and other things to know when reading published statistical research.

Review: Lean In - Sheryl Sandberg

One thing that I haven't mentioned yet is that I have only recently moved to Silicon Valley as my husband is here working in the tech industry. Unfortunately this means that I am on an H4 visa and unable to work for the time being. 

As a way to deal with the incessant boredom of being at home all day, every day, I have tasked myself with a few different projects:

1) Work on my business analysis certificate online
2) Complete Master's level courses in Non-Profit Leadership and Philanthropy
3) Write a blog
4) Volunteer
5) Make some friends

To tackle project #5, make some friends, I have joined some Meetup groups on Meetup.com, namely the H4 spouses support group in the San Francisco bay area. So far I've been to one meetup and have RSVPd to a book club meet up with these women to discuss Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In", which is a book I've been meaning to read anyways.

Honestly, I found this book depressing in some ways and uplifting in others. Even though Sheryl is an inspirational female leader who has managed against the odds to have a successful career and reach the all-mystical corporate executive suite, we can't all be Sheryl. Despite my belief that I have a lot of the leadership qualities and the same delicate balance of self-assuredness and complete insecurity that Sheryl seems to have, I will likely never be one of these women as I am currently taking off x years off my career to move to the USA, be with my husband, and wait for a green card.

I agree with Sheryl's advice of "Don't Leave Before you Leave" but at the same time, it makes me sad because the truth is that I have left and I feel as if I have disappointed myself even though the reasons I left the work force are excellent reasons and I would make the same decision again and again. I left for love and for the possibility of a family, which are both something I want more for myself than the chance at a successful and lauded career. It would be nice to have both though. Therefore, in the meantime, I will continue to professionally develop through projects 1-5 and hope that one day I can also have work-life balance.

So what did I learn from Sheryl and how can I apply it in my life?

"Sit at the Table"

I really like the idea of "sitting at the table", perhaps because I have never been one to sit in the corner of the room and not speak up. In fact, I was that person in your class that you wished would just put her hand down. And while I rarely have a hard time speaking my mind in a room full of people. I often beat myself up for it later, wishing I hadn't said anything at all because I probably sounded like an idiot. Sitting at the table is more than just speaking up at work - it also means allowing myself to feel that I do positively contribute to discussion and I have good ideas that I should take credit for.

On Promotions and Leaving before you Leave

I will admit that in the past I have not applied for promotions because I did not want my boss to have the struggle of having to say "no". I have also not applied for promotions despite my skills and experience because my employer knew that I was in a serious long-distance relationship (which I told them in my efforts to be personable and well-liked), and therefore I thought they would think I was not worth the investment. I left for California before I even left. Again, I don't regret the decision to move to California - but what skills and experiences could I have gained had I not left before I left? What could I have contributed to the organization had I been challenged up until the day I cleaned out my desk, instead of coasting in a job that I could do with my eyes closed?

"It's a Jungle Gym not a Ladder"

This concept was completely freeing and yet not at all surprising because life is just like a jungle gym. I find it fascinating to look back on my life up to now, wondering how it is that I got here: all the people I dated who taught me what I needed (and didn't need) in a life partner, the courses I took or didn't take in university, the jobs I found interesting enough to apply for and the jobs I didn't apply for but maybe could have gotten. I like the idea that life is a series of choices that lead you down one path or another...not necessarily better or worse in all cases, but just different. I also like the idea that there is more than one way to achieve a desired outcome and that that desired outcome does not have to be the "top". As a kid, I was happy just hanging upside down 3 feet off the ground and maybe it's okay to hang there for now and then explore a different part of the jungle gym later on. We do not all have to be the king of the castle or a dirty rascal.

What is a byte?

To start at the beginning, what is a byte?

Before we begin, I would like to thank Kor, for patiently explaining this to me again and again, backwards and forwards, until it got to the point that I could actually understand it and write about it. So here goes:

A byte is a unit of measurement for digital information. You can think of a byte kind of like a letter in an alphabet. In the English alphabet, there are 26 letters, and you could assign each letter a number between 0 and 25 (A=0, Z=25).

A byte is like a letter in an alphabet - except that the alphabet that it belongs to has 256 letters and they don’t really have names. They are just numbers. In the byte alphabet, for example,  we might make a word that has 5 letters. That would take up 5 bytes. Each letter can be one of 256 choices (instead of 26 choices in the English alphabet). There isn’t really a reason for that. However, a single byte is made up of a string of eight 1s and 0s (you may have heard of binary). A single 1 or 0 is called a bit. The choice of eight bits in a byte is arbitrary, however, there are 256 combinations of eight 0s and 1s in a string (or a byte). A byte’s size is convenient because each byte is big enough to hold one of many different types of characters: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. To make it more complicated, a byte’s meaning isn’t always the same. For example, in a text file, a “space” character might be represented as a certain byte value but in an image file, that same byte might be a black pixel.

To expand the above example, if we look a tiny 12 byte file and what’s inside of that file, we know that there are 12 numbers. Each of those numbers is a value between 0 and 255, but we don’t know what those values necessarily mean - that depends on the type of file it is, for example a text file (.txt) versus a image file (like a .jpg).

To compare this to literature, if we pretend that this 12 byte file is actually a tiny book with 12 words in it (where a word in this example = a byte) and each of those words has a meaning, but we don’t know the actual meaning of that word unless we know the context that it is written in. Like the word bear: a big fuzzy bear; or a load that we bear. The word looks the same from the way it is written, but means a completely different thing in the context.

Hopefully I haven’t lost you. So now that we understand what a byte is (and for that matter, what a bit is), let’s look at what all those byte prefixes mean.

1000 bytes is a kilobyte (KB). This photo of Kor and me is 147 KB. It was taken with my iPhone, uploaded to Facebook and then downloaded from Facebook (because I deleted the original photo off my phone), so I think that’s why the file size is smaller - less pixels.

1000 kilobytes is a megabyte (MB). A lot of photos taken with my camera are in the megabyte range. This photo taken with my iPhone camera is 2.1 MB. Granted, once this blog post is uploaded to the internet, I think the file size will be compressed. I’m not sure how that happens - so that is something else that I will have to add to my list of things to learn.

1000 megabytes is a gigabyte. A gigabyte is pretty big. To put that in perspective, one episode of the Bachelorette - Desiree’s season is 1.2 GB.

It goes up from there. Here is a handy article going into more detail about binary prefixes.

I wonder if I’ll ever meet a yottabyte...

Source

How do I even start a blog?

One of the most intimidating parts of this project so far is figuring out how to even start a blog. There are so many ways to do it, and Kor is like, “you should program your own blog, that would be a great project”. Which he is right, that would be a great project...except I wouldn’t actually be able to blog about the process of learning how to program my blog if I didn’t already have a blog. It is on my list of things to learn.

How do I even start a blog?

I needed to figure out what exactly a blog was and how to start one. Being as resourceful as I am, I turned to Google and typed, “How to Start a Blog”. I found a great article written by Mike Wallagher explaining the different blog hosting services like blogger.com or blogspot.com and initially I decided that I would take Mike’s advice and try to host my own blog. I know that Kor has some kind of server (not sure yet what that means - I will add that to my list of things to learn) somewhere that could probably host the blog (connect the blog to the internet so people like you can read it!).

However, I started trying to follow Mike’s advice, and it started with:

“In order to install your blog manually to any host, you need to know the following requirements:

1. PHP 4.2 or greater
2. MySQL 4.0 or greater
3. At least 1GB free disk space”

Woah. What? PHP? MySQL?

I messaged Kor and asked him if his server fit the requirements and then I realized that I didn’t actually know what any of those requirements meant. As part of my charter for keeping this blog is - “thou shall not rely on Kor to figure it out for you”, I figured I should at least know what “PHP 4.2 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater, at least 1 GB free disk space” actually means so that when Kor checks his server capabilities, I know what he is referring to. So, here is a tangent:

PHP 4.2 or greater: This is a bit of a rabbit hole because from what I can read, PHP appears to be another kind of programming language that can be embedded in HTML. Now, tackling languages is on my list of things to do and I think diving into PHP and how it relates to my blog is perhaps a bit advanced for me right now - so I’m just going to table this discussion for now and link back to it when I explore scripting languages. For now, I am satisfied to have learned that PHP does not stand for “Puppies Hugging Puppies” but instead refers to a scripting language for webpages.

MySQL 4.0 or greater: Again, as above, I think this topic deserves an entire post on its own and I will revisit this so that I can properly expand on what exactly SQL is, but for now my reading suggests that MySQL is a relational database software that allows the blog to be searchable/tag-able. I will check this with Kor.

So back off the tangent, I now needed to download wordpress and get started.

After downloading Wordpress and trying to install it I felt overwhelmed and thought that it was perhaps a bit advanced for me. My suspicions were confirmed when Kor responded,

“You don’t want to start with Wordpress. It is flaky, unstable and probably a bit advanced for you. You want to start with something like Google’s blogger that is linked to your Google+ account instead and then migrate your blog over to a wordpress site or something you program yourself later on.”

Was Kor’s opinion reflected in others? I searched “Pros and Cons of Wordpress” and found a great number of articles that reflected the same cons he was talking about but also the advantages of using Wordpress, also known as a Content Management System, or CMS.

Wordpress Pros and Cons - Anthony Eden

Pros and Cons of Joomla, Wordpress and Drupel - Bill Powell

Pros and Cons of Wordpress - TinyRedDesign

Wordpress versus Blogger - the Pros and Cons - Victoria, The Well

Okay, so Wordpress is a great blogging platform used by many around the world. It has a lot of plug-ins and a bunch of themes, but it also is targeted by hackers, can be flaky in the HTML and is perhaps a bit more complicated than where I’m at currently. Blogger also seems to have all the functionality of what I want right now. Kor is right (and he almost always is...except when I’m right).

I’ve made the decision to start my blogging adventure on blogger.com - the Google owned blogging platform. My intention is to eventually create my own website to host my blog on my own URL - www.employabilityproject.com, but for now, that site is still under construction.

My Secret

I am a smart, intelligent, confident woman with a secret - I know next to nothing about computers. I say that as a 26-year-old, who, as a millennial, obviously knows a fair bit about how to use a computer - but I have honestly no idea how they actually work. Computers, like electricity, the internet, and recorded music are magic as far as I’m concerned.

I have always been more interested in the humanities - languages, social studies, literature and how people interact with one another instead of math, science, non-fiction and how the world works. I completed a Bachelor’s of Arts with First Class Honours in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Calgary in 2009 followed by a Master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology also at the University of Calgary in 2011. My Master’s thesis was on mutual interest communities with a case study on Harry Potter fans. Yes, you read that right ;). You’re probably wondering “what in the world do you do with that?”, and yes, you do have a point. However, I have found that the things I am passionate about have usually turned out great and I ended up getting a job at the University of Calgary in the Research Services department working with researchers putting together grant applications for the past 2 and a half years. It was through this position that I was introduced to a business analyst and learned how much I would love to pursue a career in business analysis.

Here is why:

Business Analysis is everything I want in a career - working with people on large projects where you work to improve efficiencies, restructure, change and grow. My favourite thing about completing my thesis-based Master’s program was the assignment - “write a thesis”: pick the topic; conduct a literature review; write and defend your proposal; collect the data; analyze the data; write the thesis. I loved it all and I loved how I was in control of what I did every day. Self-directed learning and large projects invigorate me. With regards to business analysis, I love the prospect of interviewing people to determine their needs, documenting those needs, communicating those needs and coming up with solutions that will help improve work flow.

Here is what I know I need to work on to make that dream a reality:

I know that I already have a lot of the soft skills required to do business analysis well: I’m great with people; I’m an active listener; I know how to do interviews, surveys, focus groups and other qualitative research methods from my Master’s degree; I know how to do document analysis; I’m resourceful; I can write concisely; I’m constantly thinking of ways to improve efficiencies; I’m organized.

What I lack is technical knowledge, specific business knowledge, and quantitative/statistical analysis skills. I need to learn how computers are programmed. I need to learn the basics of programming languages. I need to learn what SAP means. I need to learn what exactly is a database. I need to learn statistics. I need to brush up on my math skills. I need to read more about leadership, business and management. I need to learn how the internet works. I know I need to learn these things in order to stand a chance of getting through an interview for my dream job, so the goal of this blog is to document my quest for employment self-improvement by exploring all of (and more) of the topics I listed above. It will be confusing, I may get things wrong, but if I know three things; I know that I remember a lot more of what I teach to others than what I read or hear; I know that the things that are the hardest to learn are the greatest opportunity for growth; and I know that I need a challenge.

Here are my goals:

1. I will update my blog weekly with a new post on a topic relevant to my employment self-improvement.

2. I will no longer pretend like I know what’s going on. If I don’t understand, I will ask, research, learn more, until I do.

3. I will not rely on Kor (my husband) to solve a problem for me. He can help (and I will need his help!), but the content of every blog post will be written and understood by me.

So here I go. Week 1 coming up: How do I ever start a blog?

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women