Professional Development
I have never seen a metric describing a life-long learning although I hear the term quite often. If there is a set of criteria, I think that I would fit it and go well past what might be common.
I am an avid reader and coder. I have found the opportunities available over the past 15 years to be fascinating. Creating digital learning tools and methods for the instructor and student has been a particular interest of mine. So much of our learning is assigned with little regard to our current knowledge and the customization of the learning experience is rarely adapted in real-time. I think great advances will be made in this area.
Hence, I spend much of my free time learning about modern technology - multi-tiered architectures, AMPP, MEAN, etc. My specific interest is in applications using PHP, Python, mySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, Node.js, and Javascript libraries. I already am very familiar with HTML5, CSS3, W3C, and general JavaScript. I also spend a fair amount of time refreshing my education knowledge and keeping up with training trends.
When I was in college, very few technologies were well developed and required extensive time and effort to develop a fully functional server based program. With the development of cell phone app technology and cloud services, the barriers to developing programs are minimal. Now, time consuming manual operations and large amounts of data can be stored and organized easily. Nearly every week I think of a process that could be made more efficient with a simple database tool. I love spreadsheets and text documents but a database system can do so much more!
For information about the type of books I am reading, then please check out the Self-Directed Learning section of my Education page.
My Current Learning Activities
Starting in 2016, I began learning PHP and mySQL to modify WordPress content management systems (CMS). After seeing how far the technology had advanced and the development of open source platforms, I realized that many of the time consuming data-based processes could be developed easily.
I had used multiple administrative tools during my early career, but more often than not, the tools did not accomplish all the functions that everyone needed. Hence, I decided to learn how to modify open source projects and one of the most common architectures is HTML/PHP/mySQL.
Here is a list of the programs that I am looking at:
**Not yet installed on test environment
About 15 years ago I use to think that JavaScript related web solutions were not the best method of solving frontend design problems but everything has changed with Google and Facebook supporting JavaScript in origin solutions. I now use Javascript and jQuery on a fairly common basis but am still surprised by some of the syntax that works. To speed up development, I have also begun using Bootstrap and Foundation frontend frameworks and am working slowly to introduce data visualization tools like D3.js and highcharts.js.
My previous experience in web-based programs was with an HTML5/CSS3 interface, PHP logic, and a mySQL database. This learning activity is to become acquainted with the next generation version of web-based programs by still using an HTML5/CSS3 interface but instead using a javascript based runtime of Node.js and a javascript library like Express.js. I will also include Angular.js in the near future so I have an understanding of MEAN development.
I have currently made simple applications connecting to the database and am researching the best practices for securely submitting data to the database and whether these methods differ from common PHP practices.
I am currently using bitbucket.com to archive and track my current programming projects. The goal of this project is to gain competency pushing and pulling and using other commands to manage my coding projects. This website is actually made completely through using git to upload the master HTML5/CSS3/JS project to a shared web folder on their server. The development of this website is only for practice with Git and I hope this is my last non-content management-based systems that I make.
My current experiments have centered around changing the ILIAS eLearning platform but I have also began testing Moodle and Canvas as potential alternatives. My goal is to access which LMS is setup the best for making custom changes. I am already familiar with how to interact with Blackboard and Canvas because I have previously worked with them and read books/tutorials about interacting with their user interfaces.
Just simply put, I like project management methods.
I have not started on this project but I want to be able to create incridible data visualizations. R and Python both have many tools that can be used to accomplish the goal.
I have been researching the different methods used to train adults. Most of the models apply common sense but it is interesting to compare and contrast the different models because the conceptual reasoning is often very different.