A note about learning:
People learn in different ways, some are visual learners, please excuse the
the metaphor I'm about to use, I do not mean it in the derogatory sense of
the phrase, but this is at the most innate level a "Monkey see, monkey do"
type of learning. People who learn this way are often as qualified, or more
so, in their chosen discipline, than their peers. Then there are
"By Wrote memorization" learners, the operative phrase here is
"Practice makes perfect" and lastly there are the conceptualizers, these
people are, I suspect, not satisfied to turn loose of a concept, until
they have figured out a way to weave it into all prior understanding of
similar things related to that concept.
We all have a little of each of these people in us, and the type of learner
we are is related to how much of each of these types exists within our
make up. Read that, what ever your predominant learning trait is, determines
the type of learner you are. I will be up front with you, and disclose that
my learning traits, range in order of greatest significance, to least
significance, Conceptualizer first, Visual learner, and lastly when all else
fails, By Wrote memorization.
What does this mean to you:
You know I wish on the course outline colleges would print not only the
material the course covers, but also the professors name, E-mail addy, and
above all what kind of learner he considers himself to be. Now why do you
suppose I would want that last piece of information. Well how good of a job
do you think a teacher who was primarily a By Wrote memorization
learner would do teaching a course that required conceptual learning.
I'm sure he could in fact teach it, but I assure you it would not be pleasant.
On the other hand how quickly do you think a conceptualizer would become
fatally bored teaching a "Drill" class.
I alone composed this course from scratch. It has my finger prints all
over it, not to mention voice prints. Since I am primarily a conceptual
learner, it stands to reason that any course I teach will also be based
on conceptual understanding. I omit things all over the place, but you
will if you carry out the experiments see and understand them in ways
words just cannot do justice to. I won't expect you to memorize ninety
equations, in fact beyond telling you what the relationships are, I fully
expect you to invent the arithmetic yourself. If you are a
By Wrote memorizer, go buy a book that teaches the discipline as a
list of equations. No really, I'm not kidding, if you expect drill you will
be very disappointed in this course.
The Audio:
Some, perhaps many, conceptual learning cases, myself included, find reading
a chore. We do it, but we don't have to like it. I'll elaborate, many of
us found reading useful, only because it facilitated the ability to write
stuff down on paper, we draw diagrams, make little notes, and rather than
invent our own written language we use one that has already been worked out.
Reading written words, distracts us from focusing on the diagram and following
the flow that it is trying to convey. This web site attempts to solve this
by verbalizing conceptually intense portions of the course permitting
you to focus on the drawing, as the audio lecture explains the diagram in
front of you on your screen, some times while asking you to move to another
diagram. The text I provide for you, is not exclusively for reading,
although it does provide that facility, to give you a general preview of
the material that will be covered in much greater depth in the MP3 Audio
while it is downloading, which can take quite a while. No the most important
thing that reading the text does for you is, allow you to know what you
don't have to take notes on. Taking notes during a lecture course, can
distract you from paying full attention to the lecture. If you know in
advance that you already have the notes in a downloaded file, you simply
set up a regular expression search to find that note, cut and paste,
and without typing anything more than the RegEx, and clicking on the mouse,
you instantly have notes, that are one hundred percent accurate, verbatim
copies of my web page. If you are squeamish about plagiarism read the
DSL License info below, you have certain rights to the content of this
course. I don't want you to feel in anyway like a Pirate, as you clip
sections out for your own use. If you feel the need to post my text on a
site of your own, read the rules of the DSL License they are extremely
liberal regarding this type of thing.
This is a hands on learn by doing course. I don't expect you to have a
solid mathematical background, but I do expect you to be good at figures.
By that I mean, given a scientific calculator, and enough time, be capable
of solving problems of the sort that pouring filled glass fulls into a
two Liter soda bottle, could allow you to know how many ounces the glass
when full holds. However I don't expect you to be able to figure out
how much radiator fluid must be drained to make room for adding the same
quantity of antifreeze to set the concentration of antifreeze. That type
of problem requires systems of simultaneous equations, and if you never
got that one, never fear, in electronics we have found a way around that
type of problem, it is called Thevenin's Theorem I cover this in
lesson 008. What I do expect you to be able to do, is to take concepts,
and relationships, that are normally expressed as simple algebra, and with,
or without algebra, solve them. Giving you the concepts, and what
relationships are at play, if you have a head for algebra, you will form
the equations as you were trained, if not you should still be able to connect
the dots arithmetically, without algebra.
Computer Skills:
This is a computer based course, of course. Hmm, fancy that. I assume
rudimentary familiarity with standard Unix / Linux tools, or
if you use some other Operating System, to be enough of a Power User
to know how to copy my whole web page onto your machine into a matching
subdirectory of your machine. And after that is done, be able to perform
recursive string searches, what I referred to earlier as
regular expression search as I do not provide an exhaustive table of
contents or an index of any kind. This is not a dead tree course, if
I were writing a book I would have a totally different attitude about such
things, but this is a computer based course, of course. Being a computer
course as I encounter bugs in the experiments, or misinformation
I can correct these errors. I do this sort of thing all the time, so from
time to time, you should invoke whatever magical incantation is required
to cause your browser to do a Complete Reload and if things
have changed download the new version using the webget command, replacing
all files in the process, from that directory leaf, that have changed.
To see the dates, and sizes of files inside my web site point your
browser to
http://www.zap-tek.com/webpage/Elect
This is the main branch to all the lesson units, and you can, from there
see all that has changed on the electronics course, you can also if this
is your first serious foray into my site use webget, wget, getleft, and
a myriad of other similar programs to download my whole site in mass.
Be Careful make sure to tell the wget, or what ever program
you have chosen to run, to stay on site, otherwise you may
inadvertently be trying to download the Whole Internet and I
doubt you have that much space on your hard drive. :-)