This class is definitely out of my comfort zone but I am very excited to learn the material and get more comfortable with the programming and computing aspects of this course. I feel it is going to be one of the most rewarding classes I’ve taken as it takes a practical approach to learning material that I’m interested in.
The hardest part of the course so far is keeping up with the speed of the course. I haven’t had much difficulty yet but there are people in the class more comfortable working with Ubuntu and python. If it were a course that graded me in my proficiency at computer science against others I would be concerned, but I feel like this course is designed for me to learn as much as possible and help contribute. We haven’t done much programming yet so I am following the material closely and have not had much difficulty.
I feel the class is going to pick up steam in the next week in terms of how fast we progress through the material and I am very excited. From my limited experience in this class so far, I think that a lot of the learning in this class is through playing around with the programs instead of a formal education. I feel that the material is going to get frustrating at times but if I keep a clear mind and keep playing around with things I can come to a solution.
When I was answering the survey, I looked up what collaborative data science was to get a better idea of what it actually was. I went to the following link and read through it to get a better idea: http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2013-05-28/collaborative_data-intensive_science_key_to_science_commerce_challenges.html