Dear All,
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 09:00:29AM +0200, Lex Nederbragt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Bruno Grande just published a blog post on this approach to teaching
> git by having learners set up their online presence using GitHub Pages,
> and contrasts it to the current SWC git-novice ???Planets??? lesson. I
> do not agree with all he is saying about effectively teaching git,
> but he does have a few interesting points:
>
> http://bgran.de/teaching-git-using-github-pages/
> <http://bgran.de/teaching-git-using-github-pages/>
having just taught git using the planets lesson, I understand the concern
that the scenario is contrived. However, I do not believe that creating a
blog is a good alternative for these reasons:
(1) Not everyone is comfortable with writing something at perhaps just a
few minutes notice and then putting it into the web-wide public. Personally,
I'd do it reluctantly, make a very strong mental note to myself to take
down the thing after the lesson, and dislike the lesson for having to
remember that. And if I managed to forget, I'd not only blame myself, but
apportion some blame on the lesson as well.
(2) A central purpose of SWC is to enable people to collaboratively develop
software for scientific computing. In this context, writing blogs is not the
main use case. Two specific issues that I consider important are:
a) blogs are typically personal, so it's difficult to motivate a
scenario where contributions from team members result in a conflict
b) blog posts are typically written with a time stamp and then not
revised, so it's difficult to set up a plausible scenario for
showing diffs and checking out earlier versions.
(3) Starting with setting up a local repo and pushing that to github later
makes much sense to me, both didactically and real-world wise. Starting
with github seems a rather backward way to go -- as far as I recall, all
my github repos that have any content of substance have existed outside
of github for a substantial amount of time before I put / pushed them there.
(4) In the workshop I just ran, we swapped github for bitbucket, because
the host wanted a cloud option for the participants that they could use
for collaborating but without the www-wide public potentially watching.
With the planets lesson, that was no problem but any lesson that uses
github-specific features would not allow such changes that easily.
It seems to me that the current git lesson is, to some extent, the result
of squaring the circle of teaching revision control to learners who possibly
have just barely written the first few revisions of their first shell script.
This perspective could suggest to develop alternative git lessons that extend
the scenarios used in the shell, Python, R etc. lessons.
Best regards, Jan
> Best,
>
> Lex
> _______________________________________________
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