I appreciate and am honored to be chosen to participate in Switch 2021. It has been an intense but rewarding first week. Learning Python and the introduction to Machine Learning has created the same intense desire to learn that I had for Mathematics when I first went to college.
I was introduced to Machine Learning this week. I thought it was something mysterious and complicated. It turned out that not only is it understandable, but I have experienced it for years! I first recognized it when I noticed ads on websites I visited were showing me things similar to items I had recently purchased. I contemplated why it was happening and concluded that my purchases were being tracked and it made sense from the seller’s point of view because it captured my attention and made me want to go shopping again (I didn’t, but thought it was a clever sales pitch). After reading this article What is machine learning? By Karen Hao, Nov. 17, 2018, I realized that I was experiencing the visible result of machine learning. Cool! I’ll never watch a movie on Netflix again without think about the algorithm that is being used.
“We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge” – John Naisbitt
This quote appealed to me because I didn’t understand or couldn’t see the scope of information that is out there to be discovered and the dearth of knowledge to use it. I’m hoping when I take the skills I learn this summer back to my classroom I will open up the world of Computer Science to my students. Who knows, I may be teaching students in this generation to open up that knowledge to understand information that is available to us.
We also learned how to make a good presentation from Kyung Bae. I was especially interested in this because when introducing new skills, I give a PowerPoint presentation. I already do some of the suggestions she gave, but I learned so much that will help me in the classroom and in our presentation.
That wraps it up for this week, talk to you next week!