Eighteen months after retiring from my position as head teacher at a highly respected and prestigious European international school I decided that it was time to start practicing what I had preached for so long to my students - life-long learning, education as a goal in and of itself rather than a means to an end. The internet has so much content from which to learn, education does not need to be formal, it doesn't need to take place in a university, it doesn't need to be guided by one person or organisation and it doesn't need to cost anything. There are some very accomplished and highly professional people out there. I started my journey looking at the programming language Python with a free online course offered by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I hadn't got very far into it when I realised that, in order to progress, I needed to have a knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In those days I didn't quite understand the reasoning for this requirement, but the knowledge gave my journey some direction.
This was back in May 2022, now it is close to the end of September 2023 and, at 69 years old, my learning journey continues. Whilst I would not describe myself as skilled, I have gained some level of proficiency with HTML and CSS, a little less with JavaScript and may well return to Python at some stage in the future. What is the most important thing I have learned during this time? If I have an idea of what I would like to do, but no idea of how to do it, somebody or some organisation on the internet has produced a video or a document that addresses that exact point; they are considerate enough to be sharing it freely with anyone who wants to learn and anyone can find it and share in their knowledge. And if it doesn't work ... try someone else, it is important to know what doesn't work as well as what does!
These are just some of the organisations and people who have helped me on my journey without even knowing that I exist. I just want to say a gentle 'thank you' to them.
Thank you to all of you mentioned here and to others who I abjectly failed to mention, I really do appreciate the help you have all freely and unwittingly given to me.