A DH learning pattern

Our #lafdh #squadgoals

Yesterday, we met a fantastic group of folks taking our DH workshop at Lafayette College. As must be done with all such events, we made a hashtag: #lafdh

We spent yesterday doing a few activities focused on computational thinking. As workshop leaders, our goals for the day were to help folks build confidence to push beyond their current comfort levels, and to try out some new ways of working. We also offered folks a learning pattern - kind of like a pedagogical approach, but more learner-centric - for the DH-style mantra "more hack, less yack."

Think of it working at a variety of scales where you are trying to overcome anxiety/build confidence, build skill, acquire knowledge, and (re)consider the value of something new. It could be a piece of software or hardware, a new process or practice.

The Learn-by-Doing learning pattern goes like this:

• Use the thing
• "Read" the source code and/or (cultural) logic of the thing
• Put what you have read into your own words
• Make some changes to the thing and see what happens
• Make something new based on the thing by modifying or building on it
• Reflect on what you learned

As with many such patterns all of it is best understood as a cycle or recursive process. In fact, the first three are kind of an internal loop too. When I'm learning to code something new and trying to figure things out, I repeat those top three in rapid iterations for some time usually before moving on to number four.

Today, we'll try to move this pattern into the realm of "habit" for our participants. On deck: processing text with Python!