Brief Reflection

As the semester comes to an end, I thought that a brief reflective on the class might be in order. I signed up for the class in part because two of the librarians I met during my internship (and incidentally two of the librarians who I most respected) showed me how they used basic html skills as a part of their jobs. It seemed like a practical thing to learn, so here we are.

I’m not really sure what expectations I had of the class in general, but I certainly expected html to be more difficult than I found it to be. Going into the class I had this grandiose expectation that html was going to be overly complicated, and that it was going to be repellant to newcomers. I’m not really sure where that idea came from, except that my brother is a computer science major, and whenever he talks about his classes I have no idea what he’s saying. Once I started learning html, though, I found it to be less difficult than I imagined. It is still nit-picky and detail-oriented, but those are things I’m relatively good at, so it worked out okay.

Learning CSS has been harder, but I’ve narrowed that down to a couple of factors. First, the textbook devotes more time to “showing” and less time to “doing” than it did with html, and I learn better through practice. Second, we’ve devoted less time to it in class, for a number of reasons. Again, that’s less practice.

Altogether, though, this class has been more hands-on than many of my classes, and it seems to be practical as well. Every good library has a website, right?