Reflection on Online Data Collection
This assignment was to build a small web-based application and database to gather data online. It was easy for me because I have worked on applications that do just this in the past. The actual technologies being used were new to me. I already know ASP and Perl very well but had only done a small amount of PHP. I know other databases, Access and SQL Server, very well but had never used a MySQL database. However, knowing other similar languages and understanding the concepts helped a lot and I was able to complete the assignment quite quickly. That was handy because the deadline occurred while I was off on a jaunt to Ethiopia in March (not the best timing as regards MITE, but it was for compelling personal reasons that I won't go into here!).
What was more interesting for me in this unit of the course was to see how the instructor approached it, as he had a short time to help a group of people of mostly non-technical backgrounds get the skills necessary to collect data online. I missed the first teaching session (I was busy trying to get my Flash assignment done before heading off to Ethiopia, as well) but the material was available in the form of a website accessible through WebCT. I really liked the materials - they helped the learner build up the web form and the PHP script to process the form data, step by step. The required code was provided and in a way that the learner didn't necessarily have to understand every line of code and what it was doing.
Database access was also provided and the learner didn't have to know much about the relational database model to grasp the concept that the form data was being stored in a table in the database.
I think this way of teaching worked well, given the short time available. Certainly, many of my classmates, who had never seen anything like this before, had a working web page by the second (and final) week of the unit. Though I also think that perhaps there was too much reliance on 'copy and paste' of code blocks without need to really understand what the code was doing. Anyone who wants to use PHP and MySQL to build a bigger application for their Meta project will have a further learning curve to ascend.
As for myself, I learned a little more about how to use the MySQL admin interface and a few PHP scripting tips for working with a database.
Overall, this to me was a quick and easy assignment. If I'd had more time (i.e. not taken myself off to Ethiopia at that time), I might have gone more in-depth and built something I might use again.
