On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 04:14:13PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> I pulled this out explicitly because the student viewpoint on this is
> *correct*. I need to explain why and how we change that.
>
> Stewart Stremler wrote:
>
> >>>have never heard of source control. In a university environment, likely
> >>>already strewn with disperate systems, adding one more to the mix might
> >>>turn folks off. I would think that 'Save your work to your Z: drive' is
> >>>a
> >
> >I had students that mumbled and groaned and called me names; one group
> >came to me and said that they figured I was a complete prat, and then
> >the night before the assignment was due, they typed "rm * .class", and
> >weeks of work just vanished.
> >
> >And then they did "cvs update" and only lost an hour of work. Instant
> >converts!
> >
> >These are the lessons that students *need* to learn.
>
> The students groan about this because they have a different viewpoint
> than the instructor.
>
> Initially, the students regard source control as a "code dropbox" for
> turning in assignments. Nothing more. *This* is what they are
> complaining about.
>
> From their point of view, they have to learn "Yet another stupid
> dropbox system that doesn't work." You would be *appalled* at how many
> instructors use horrible dropbox systems that don't work.
>
> I only learned this *after* teaching my class last year when one student
> said, "CVS was the best dropbox system we ever used. It actually
> works." He got practically universal agreement from the rest of the
> class. Never in a million years would I have thought of source control
> as a dropbox system, but it is. And it is a good one.
>
> They way around this is a little bit of marketing:
Maybe you need an SCM guest lecturer from the real world, and yes, I
have someone in mind, and no, it isn't (necessarily) me.
--
Lan Barnes
Linux Guy, SCM Specialist
Tcl/Tk Enthusiast
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purposes.
- Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.
--
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