Learning Notes

Purpose

Learning notes are designed to help you keep track of your own learning and to reflect on what you have learned and how. They can also help to identify road blocks to your learning. Because this is a small class, there is some flexibility on course content and schedule, so that we might be able to make modifications based on your experiences.

These learning notes **are not* intended to replace your note-taking or whatever you are usually doing to help you organize your thoughts. Instead, they are one way to take some inventory on what you are doing and why.

If you do them well, they will help you with the learning reflections.

Frequency

You can write learning notes as often as you like and they may include any observations on your own learning. Ideally, learning notes are crafted when you learn or shortly after.

For this course and for the evaluation, I expect at least weekly notes.

I will not grade your weekly learning notes for content, but I will review them and provide occasional feedback.

Learning Note Questions

Your learning note should respond at least to the following prompts.

We will review these to clarify and potentially make modifications.

  1. What did I learn about environmental/ social issues?
  2. What skills and techniques did I learn or improve on?
  3. What curious questions did arise and what stimulated them?
  4. What understanding questions did arise?
  5. What roadblocks did I encounter to my learning this week?
    1. What steps could I take to resolve them?
    2. What help do I need to resolve them?
  6. What are my next goals?

Submitting your Learning Notes

Important

You must submit your learning notes in either Markdown (.md), jupyter notebook (.ipynb) or plain text (.txt) text format.

You are very much encouraged to give your learning notes a formatted structure using markdown or the notebook.

Please do not upload Word files or similar, which won’t be displayed directly on GitHub

Part of the goal for these notes is to get familiar with some of the tools and to practice the general workflows that we will be using throughout.

Learning notes will be shared with meusing a private GitHub repository that only the individual student and instructor can see.

In the first learning note assignment on Canvas, you are asked to create a personal (and private) repository that will contain your learning notes, learning reflections, and anything else that you feel makes sense.

TipCreate your personal course repository
  • Create a new folder, which will contain all your ISAT 420 contents.
  • In that folder, create a new folder called Git_Repositories
  • Use GitHub-Deskop to create a new directory <ISAT420_<Name><Lastname>_Personal in the Git_Repository Folder
  • Push you repository to GitHub (make sure that you set the repository to private)
  • On GitHub, go to “settings” -> “collaborators” and add TobGerken
  • In your repository, create a folder Learning_Notes
  • Add your learning notes to this folder
  • Push new commits to this repository whenever you have something to submit (e.g. weekly learning notes)