On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 08:55:03PM -0700, Juan Nunez-Iglesias wrote: > I couldn't disagree more, and this point of view certainly strays far > from my interpretation of what we learned in teacher training.
If you're accusing me of being a heretic, I've been called worse things ;-) > I think a *core audience* of SWC is researchers who know "real" software > engineers use git, but don't know why. They are motivated by their > curiosity, and they could certainly benefit from git and other things we > teach. Right, *could* benefit, but that largely depends on them. I'm always willing to help someone who *wants* to learn. I go above and beyond the call of duty to help anyone who is curious and motivated. > If the instructor answers such a question with "maybe you shouldn't be in > this class", well, at best we can expect to hear about it in a > "demotivational story" a couple of years down the line when they do their > teacher training. I don't think I would word it that way to the student ;-) > It is part of our responsibility as teachers to show them why git solves > a different problem than Dropbox and why it's useful. Giving such a comparison requires a knowledge of both tools. When teaching a tool, it is our responsibility to know that one tool. It's not our responsibility to know anything whatsoever about dropbox or anything else. I don't need to know about Windows to teach bash, I don't need to know Excel to teach R, and I don't need to know Word to teach LaTeX - even though a beginner might think all these comparisons are natural to make. If they're happy using something other than what I'm teaching, they should go and continue using it to their heart's content. They'll come back when they realise there are things they want to do but can't do with their current workflow. When teaching, say, Git, it should be enough to say "these are thing things you can use Git for, and now I'm going to teach you those things". I don't think it's reasonable that a lesson should become a competition between Git and Dropbox. As Lao Tse said, "when you do not compete, who can compete with you?" ~ Tim _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
