Dear all,

Back in July 2017 I started a conversation on the discuss list about
alternative Git/Github lessons that exist in the Carpentry community [1].
So many of you responded with suggestions about how you have dropped the
Dracula example or augmented it with episodes on things like Git GUI or
Github and more. Thanks very much to everyone who responded.

One of the first lessons I was pointed to, was Steve Bond's (copied on this
email) lesson [2] which was originally forked from the SWC git novice
lesson, but introduces Github and constantly show how to do things both in
git and github.

Last week we ran a workshop at NWU where we trialled Steve's lesson. I
chose this lesson as it was mature enough to use off the shelf (Steve had
put a lot of effort in to make sure the lesson is refined).


Feedback from the workshop:

   - It was great to introduce the power of local repositories and connect
   that with online repositories and collaboration.
   - The lesson makes version control much more accessible even for
   learners who are not yet comfortable on the commandline.
   - The switching adds cognitive load but we went very slow and got good
   feedback.
   - I veered off the script to spend some time introducing all the things
   that can be clicked on in the Github interface and people found that very
   valuable, but I don't know how to incorporate this as an episode in the
   lesson making it practical?
   - We didn't get to the collaboration part even though we had time to
   spare as people's brains were fried by late Friday afternoon. We ended the
   workshop on a high. The lesson includes screenshots for every step of the
   way so I recommended people referred back to the lesson when they get to
   collaboration and conflict resolution.

Afterwards a colleague did a short demo of how she uses Git from RStudio
and another colleague showed the same for his text editor (Visual Studio
Code [3] - available for Mac, Windows, Linux). This was really helpful to
show people how they can use even better tools to be more efficient and
adopt version control easier.

I'm wondering if the community would like to try out Steve's lesson as
alternative to Dracula and provide some feedback? Maybe this is a low
hanging fruit waiting to be picked and solve some of our git
teaching/learning problems?
Steve already did most of the work...

What do you think?

Thanks,

Anelda

[1] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/
discuss/2017-July/005319.html
[2] https://github.com/biologyguy/git-novice
[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq
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