Pause for thought
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Thoughts
Its that time of year when perhaps there is a lull, a pause, a slow down in your work or simply between academic years and you’re taking a break. You look out of your window and find that it’s raining, the droplets having hit the window moments ago to now run down the glass on another stage of their journey from sky to ground. But what of your journey? What will you do next? What’s on the list that you’ve told yourself time and time again “I’ll do that tomorrow!”. But that can bring stress and pressure upon yourself and that’s not good for learning something new. Therefore, perhaps, just perhaps, pause, take a deep calm breath and think, a moment when time seems to stand still and you realise that you can alter your path at this moment in time.
For me, JavaScript and its oddities has always illuded me! I still want to try and get my head around it, especially given how Moodle has adopted a reactive user interface pattern (moodledev.io/docs/guides/javascript/reactive), essentially a state driven event machine design pattern. That concept being the entry point that I hope will be the seed that sparks the understanding of how it all works.
I’m also getting interested in the Internet of things (IoT – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things) and have bought a Raspberry Pi Pico W (www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/), so would like to get back to my C++ days and have some fun!
And lastly there’s social media. We’re all aware of recent events pertaining to high profile platforms, so where does that leave us? Where is the control and ownership over what we publish? What happens when in an instant all of that disappears? Years of effort gone in a flash. Therefore what is the solution? I don’t actually have one, yet, not that fills the gap of providing popular global exposure and interaction that draws people to your own platforms and sites because they’re interested in the same subjects. And so a time to watch that space as it awaits to be filled.
Conclusion
What do you think please?
- Moodle 4 Security – A Review – 16th April 2024
- A little bit #fab – 16th March 2024
- Static framework – 16th February 2024
I have never been able to get into Javascript. I did a course on Khan Academy, at the end of which I could draw a frog and make it jump around the screen but never took it further. There’s just something ugly about the language that stops me warming to it. In contrast, I started fiddling with Python when I had some spare time last summer and fell in love with it.
Oh totally Robin! JavaScript has always phased me out for some reason. I’ve dabbled with Python a little, with indentation scope it always seems to remind me of COBOL, something I did in my second year of College and really enjoyed it. I also have a Raspberry Pi, which I mostly use as a development Git repository server as that makes moving code between Moodle installations easier, so cherry picking etc. And as a backup too. But can do Python GPIO stuff too. The key thing is coming up with an idea in the first place, that you can then use as your learning goal.
Interesting post !
I might add “AI” to that ?
It seems the world has gone AI crazy, and the marketers are feeling unless they have the term “AI” in their produce name, service description, or latest email then they are ‘behind the times’.
I think a lot (most?) of these people are the same people who told me “Google Wave will change the future and email is dead.”
Yeah, right.
Many people just do not bother to investigate below the surface, and use their own brain power to critically evaluate technology. They simply copy and adopt behaviours – just like a 6 year old in the school playground.
Thanks Stuart. Totally AI crazy! I quite liked “Google Wave”, now taken over by Apache -> https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html – but the key thing is that it was and still is to me, essentially eMail, just a means of grouping conversations, which interestingly enough, I now use in Thunderbird – https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thunderbird – where it’s called ‘Message threading’. I’m not a fan of AI until I can be convinced that it is a good thing for society. We have perfectly (most of the time) good organic neural networks out there, so if its not broken then don’t fix it. Rather that the machine remains the tool to undertake the repetitive tasks that cause us to make mistakes.