Published on 10 April 2012
Today, I added all of the codes that were given to me in the Simulating Language course at the University of Edinburgh to my CoLitt Github. I took this course between January and March 2010, and it is still being offered at Edinburgh - I talked for 45 minutes last night with a friend of mine who is taking it. There are some modifications to the course - more with neural networks, some stuff about priors that I don’t remember, but it is essentially the same. In essence, the teachers hand out lots of code, tell you to fiddle around with it, and that’s how you learn.
I’m not sure I approve of this technique, which is one of the reasons I loaded the code up. The main reason, of course, is that I am for opening up notes wherever possible (I loaded my notes in, too). I think that the more access you have, the more likely you’ll use that access, the more you’ll learn. Back to the technique - this teaches you how to manipulate code, but it doesn’t teach you how to code per se. Today I was asked a question that a CS child could answer (I’d rather not embarass myself by admitting what it was.) But because of the fact that I learned haphazardly, I couldn’t answer. Had I taken a CS course at any point, I would have been able to. I’ve still got a long way to go.
I’m not saying I disliked the course - I loved it, I recieved my highest mark in it, I’m publishing my essay from it in a journal (admittedly, a journal for undergrads), and because of that course I went on to do my dissertation in that field, which lead me to go to Kyoto and to Germany. But, I wish I had had access to the code more, that I had been taught how to program and not how to ‘break something then fix it’. In any event, I hope this is useful to someone out there.
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