Lab Assignment W2

My Position On The Debate

In response to the debate about whether or not humanities students should learn how to code, I agree with Donahue’s agreement that humanities students should not learn how to program. This does not mean I think that humanities should never learn how to code. If you have a desire to do so, I believe you should learn how to code. I believe having prior experience in coding is not needed as a humanities student. Many people don’t everyone has experience in coding and it isn’t a field that they want to pursue. If a prerequisite of coding experience was required for humanities students, it would put that expectation on the students who don’t want to engage in that side of humanities. Learning how to program can be difficult, and it is not something everyone wants to learn. I don’t think that is fair, especially if the students don’t have an interest in coding and are interested in the humanities.

“Learning to program should be no more and no less enabling than reading Derrida.” – Evan Donahue

Donahue, E. (2010, May 28). A “Hello world” apart (why humanities students should not learn to program). HASTAC. https://web.archive.org/web/20220516075231/https://www.hastac.org/blogs/evan-donahue/2010/05/28/hello-world-apart-why-humanities-students-should-not-learn-program

From my interpretation of this quote, Donahue expresses that you should not force anyone to learn how to program just like one shouldn’t be forced to read about the philosopher Derrida. I completely agree, while there are many benefits of the interlap of Humanities and Computer Science one should not be the prerequisite for the other.

My Experience With Coding

I have some prior experience in coding. I have taken a few CS courses at Carleton, and learned to code in Java and Python. I am also taking an Intro To Web Development course where I am learning HTML, CSS, and JS in addition to what I learned through this class. My prior experience helped me understand some of the logistics of HTML and CSS and helped my experience with the tutorials flow somewhat smoothly. I also have some previous experience using HTML, but it has been a while since I worked with HTML. The structure of HTML looks familiar, but I am getting a refresher by learning the different components. I think that HTML was easier to understand than CSS. Using HTML was straightforward, but CSS was difficult to navigate because of the rules and the various ways CSS can be added to HTML. Overall, I had a great experience using HTML Dog tutorials.

I have provided some code from what I learned:

<html>
<head>
    <title> My first web page </title>
	
</head>
<body>
	<h1 style = "color:#954535" > My first Blog Post! </h1>
	
	<h2 style="color: #2AAA8A"> About me!</h2>
	<ol>
		<li> i am interested in reading books </li>
		<li> i like crocheting in my free time </li>
		<li> my favorite colors are green and brown! </li>
		<li> i am learning/have learned how to speak amharic, french, and korean </li>
	</ol>
	<h2 style="color: #834333"> My Stance On the Debate</h2>
	<ul>
		<li> this includes information about my stance </li>
		<li> more information about my stance </li>
	</ul>
	<h2 style = "color: #96DED1"> <strong> My Experience With Coding </strong> </h2>
	<ul>
		<li> my previous experience with coding </li>
		<li> my experience with HTMLDOG </li>
	</ul>
	<textarea rows="5" cols="20">Input your own experience!</textarea>
	<p> did you like this blog post?? </p>
	<select>
    		<option> YES!!</option>
    		<option> No :( </option>
 	</select>

</body>
</html>