Personalised Training Plan

Coding 101 (part 9) Python and the Web

07/05/2016 By debkr

Python and the internet data playground:
The internet is a giant data playground just waiting for us to explore it. This part of the Coursera Course I’m studying (see refs below) covers how to collect data from the web so we can easily record, manipulate and analyse it.

This is where the increasingly-common terms web scraping and parsing come in. (Scraping refers to collecting data from the ‘net, while parsing refers to reading and analysing strings of data/info from the web, just like our previous examples of reading text from files.)

We’ll get to access data using web APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and learn how to handle data in different technical formats like HTML, XML and JSON. So this is definitely where things will start to get exciting. [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 9) Python and the Web

Simple Tagging Engine (updated using tuples)

07/05/2016 By debkr

My simple Python Tagging Engine has now been updated to incorporate learnings about tuples, and incorporates simplified ways of sorting and returning counted values from a dictionary. Code and simple documentation available on GitHub: https://github.com/debkr/blog_tagger.

Coding 101 (part 8)

03/05/2016 By debkr

A quick recap:
We’re cracking on well here, going through the Python course on Coursera as taught by Dr. Chuck (see footnotes for more info and links). We’ve looked a strings and how we can slice, dice and extract data from them using find and split functions. We’ve gone on to learn about files, and proceeded to open and read data from files, both as strings and as lists. We’ve been able to index lists using integer values from zero upwards. Then we’ve gone on to look at dictionaries, which are mini two-field databases of key/value pairs referenced using their keys. And all throughout we’ve been learning about and using various kinds of loops or iterations, conditional statements, and functions (both built-in and defined in-program).

And now for something completely different:
All these things were familiar to me from programming in school and as a maths undergrad (albeit a little rusty!). But now we come on to something completely different, something I hadn’t heard of before: tuples. I’ll call tuples the big brother of lists as they’re very similar to lists: they’re basically another type of collection of things. [Read more…] about Coding 101 (part 8)

Ed Tech PTP: Summary Syllabus

03/05/2016 By debkr

My newly-established EdTech Personalised Training Plan includes the following streams:

1. Information Theory Stream
2. Learning/Development Stream: how humans learn vs. how machines learn + developing machines to augment human learning
3. Collaborative Learning Stream
4. Innovation Stream
5. Agile Methodologies Stream
6. Educational Technology Stream: to review the technological and presentational innovations shaping education and L&D

Refer my earlier post “Learning About Learning” for some background on this new/additional PTP.

Ed Tech Resources (work in progress)

03/05/2016 By debkr

Below is a list of resources for the Learning/Development Stream of my newly-established EdTech Personalised Training Plan (this list is a work-in-progress).

Courses:
Learning to Learn module on Coursera, Univ. of California, San Diego

Learning About Learning

03/05/2016 By debkr

As I’ve been going along in this mission of discovery that is my mid-life career-change search, I’ve come to realise just how important Learning & Development really is to me. It’s become a key area for me to look further into – especially in response to my wholly-positive experiences of MOOC’s so far and in relation to my budding interest in all things programming- and technology-led.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the ideas Accelerated Learning and Augmented Learning (specifically in relation to an ongoing developmental Programming Project). In brief, this is about how machine learning and artificial intelligence can be used to help and empower humans, rather than just be there to make rich people more money and put more people out of jobs and into long-term unemployment or underemployment. [Read more…] about Learning About Learning

Building a Tagging Engine in Python using Dictionaries

01/05/2016 By debkr

I started playing around building a Tagging Engine in Python using Lists but now I’ve studied a bit more – particularly Dictionaries – I want to see how I can perfect what I was working on. Here are a couple of key things I added/changed in this program over the version I was working on earlier.

1. Using a dictionary instead of lists for faster counting and simpler recall. This is straight forward, using the get method as taught by Dr. Chuck (see Coding 101 part 7 for more details).

words = dict()
for word in wordlist :
____if word in excluded : continue
____words[word] = words.get(word,0) + 1

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