The intensive reading path…
Learning 1
I am an ICT trainer/ tutor at a medium-sized college. Due to the diversity in IT, I train in Software development and web design. The IT industry is fast-paced and as a trainer, you need to keep current. From a list of 10 questions from students, the probability of not knowing 20% or 30% is very probable. This, therefore, requires intensive reading for a wide knowledge base.
However, the upside, one meets different people from all walks of life. I have interacted with students, company managers, and staff from great companies. In life, we have people in different fields that find their areas mundane.
I once had a student, that was in the business field but his interests were inclined to ICT. He asked a ton of questions from the different areas in IT. I always had, ok not always, had answers to his questions. What specifically interested him, was my ability to get the right flow of ideas if one was to be taught and learn new concepts. As a result, just the other day, I was selected to a panel of ICT personnel to help review an examining body syllabus.
This exercise is challenging especially when you are not familiar with the curriculum. This meant I needed to study hard on both the current syllabus, new trends in IT, current syllabuses from different institutions worldwide and understand each topic and concept. I had to spend a lot of time to get the flow right and at the same time to be relevant and educative.
During my long reading and research hours, I realized the degree of change in topics is not vast, but in the content. Most topics were retained but the content to be delivered changed. For example, Networking has remained Networking since its inception, but the content has experienced enormous evolutions. The flow of topics was more of common sense than the identification of topics.
During the review of the Object-Oriented paper, for example, I realized class implementation was covered first before methods. It is not impossible, but not the best of flows for a new learner.
Learning 2
The abilities of networks and programming are uncontrollable, in my opinion. SDN is and will change how future networks operate. The decouplation of the forwarding and control plane is essential. Companies will save a lot of resources(time and cost) in upgrades and management. Most SDN controllers are Python-based. The basics of python are not sufficient and the integration is challenging.
Since the internet does not sleep, I have been studying SDN and python through resources from the internet. However, this is a relatively new area, and sometimes finding solutions to problems and the right material poses a great challenge. But today, I can authoritatively say, I have made progress.
These so far, have been my most recent challenging learning experiences.