Why and How Educators Use GitHub (alexeyza.com) 49 points by alexeyza 18 hours ago | 18 comments [http://alexeyza.com/blog/2015/09/10/embracing-participatory-culture-in-education/]
Comment by tibbon 10 hours ago: [10258913] When I was teaching at General Assembly, I pushed to us to use Github for all of our assignments, workflow, etc. Homework turn-ins were pull requests, feedback was given via comments per-line that any instructor (or student) could make, etc.
The process to get students fluid at the basic flow took a few days, but after a while it was great and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. Any programming course using this is obvious, but I'd even do it for non-programming things if I could get the student trained on it in a minimal amount of time.
The only roadblocks with git are that there's so many basic ways to screw up,
which are hard to fix. Let's say a student does a git init in their ~/code
folder that holds all of their git projects... and then makes a bunch of
commits, and then can't figure out why they can't push to github. I wish there
were some better failsafes to prevent such things, but they happened by accident
once a week at least.
Comment by alexeyza 9 hours ago: [10259241]
Thanks for sharing your experience!
In fact, the blog post doesn't include all the details, but some of the
educators we interviewed were not from CS. You can see a table describing
all the participants in our research paper (the link is provided at the end
of the blog post).
Just like you, I believe it is completely possible to use this for non CS
classes, and still gain all the benefits. However, like you said, there
should be a basic understanding of Git.
Comment by tibbon 7 hours ago: [10260044]
One of the hardest things to overcome (even in a programming class) is
the _why_ of doing things in Git. Many of the things we do seem
arbitrary to students who are just learning. Why do you make multiple
commits? Why use branches if you're the only one using it? Why make
decent commit messages? I just want to turn in my work!
Many of git's capabilities seem esoteric to students, and for someone
just starting indeed they are (students aren't managing a huge FOSS
project, just their homework).
Comment by sanderjd 6 hours ago: [10260338]
Maybe you don't need to do some of those things for assignments?
They are all intended as aids in maintaining a long-running software
project with many contributors, which is a very different use case
than personal homework.
Comment by tibbon 5 hours ago: [10261169]
Oh very very true. They start becoming more useful for group
projects.
We taught what what needed, but students (in learning to be self
resourceful) will often google things, try tutorials, read on
stack overflow, etc... and sometimes get themselves turned
around. Git is a big piece of software to understand completely
I guess, and even if you only show someone a small bit, they are
likely to get confused at some point when they are trying to go
deeper.
As an interesting and certainly unintentional thing, we
discovered at one point that the words git uses to describe
commands are often daunting to students. Commit and blame in
particular. At one point we found many students weren't making
enough commits, or sometimes none and were reluctant to turn in
their homework. Through meeting in some 1:1's, we discovered
that some of the students felt that if their work wasn't
perfect, they didn't want to "commit" to it and that the word
held too much power seemingly- they thought maybe there was
something deeper to it.
This probably sounds silly, but when teaching people who are new
to programming there are all sorts of preconceived notions that
can really hold people back, and this was one of them.
Comment by sanderjd 3 hours ago: [10261966]
That doesn't sound silly at all. In fact what sounds silly
is taking techniques designed for large professional
software projects and applying them to things that aren't
anything of the sort.
It reminds me of the problem with teaching Java as a first
language – you _must_ start with `public class Foo` in a
file called `Foo.java`, containing a method declared as
`public static void main(String[] args)`, which means you
_must_ either explain tons of concepts (what "class" means,
what "public" means, what "static" means, etc.) long before
you can motivate any of them, which makes everything seem
complicated and hard, or hand-wave them away as incantations
that you'll learn about in due time, which makes programming
seem magical and mysterious.
None of which is to say that Java isn't a great language for
doing professional work, just that it isn't great to start
with. Git seems quite similar to me.
On the other hand, I get that it is valuable to teach
techniques that will actually be useful to students in their
professional life, even if they are clumsy in a non-
professional setting. There's a real tension here.
Apropos of nothing else I wrote: I've always enjoyed seeing
people alias `blame` as `praise` or something similarly
positive (although `annotate` is the built-in neutral
option, which is also pretty good).
Comment by johndbritton 9 hours ago: [10259004] This is a timely post, Alexey.
Today, we released Classroom for GitHub: [https://classroom.github.com]
Classroom for GitHub automates repository creation and access control, making it easy for teachers to distribute starter code and collect assignments on GitHub.
You can read more about it on our blog: [https://github.com/blog/2055-teachers- manage-your-courses-with-classroom-for-github]
Comment by alexeyza 9 hours ago: [10259212]
This sounds great and I'm sure it would resolve some of the barriers to
entry for educators.
Comment by johnwfinigan 10 hours ago: [10258864] I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier.
I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for both me and the students, so everybody gets a little more done.
Comment by alexeyza 9 hours ago: [10259272]
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't
obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course
website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually,
I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown
files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for
students to commit PR with corrections and suggestions to the course website
and material). I really love our setup now, but it took some figuring out
the best way to do it. BTW, if anyone is interested here the course website
(just as our example):
[http://startup-programming.com]
Comment by johnwfinigan 8 hours ago: [10259584]
I am definitely feeling that: I've already had to do some reorganizing
as I discover that some of my initial decisions weren't perfect, as to
organizing the class repo.
By the way, your article has encouraged me to get the students using
issues for eg. homework questions they'd normally email, thanks for
that.
Comment by alexeyza 8 hours ago: [10259614]
That's great!! I'm happy it helped.
Can I ask what initial decisions you had, or what did you reorganize
with time?
Comment by johnwfinigan 6 hours ago: [10260335]
Sure. Basically, we go through the first half or so of Stevens'
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment fairly
sequentially. My first take was to group the example code by
topic, but I've realized that it might make more sense to group
it by book chapter. So that's my current reorganization plan.
The thought is, with lots of topics, it will help orient people
better if they have an explicit cue for what chapter to review
if they are confused.
That's pretty specific to the more or less sequential approach
with the book, though. It's a good book, so it can support that
kind of thing.
I think it will also help with presenting the supplemental
material that is linked with each chapter/section. Again, that
might be specific since in the Stevens book, there is always a
manpage or Single UNIX Specification reference to give for
almost any section.
Comment by bitHero 8 hours ago: [10259545]
GitHub Pages might be a good solution for you course website, it does
HTML templates and allows you to use markdown.
Comment by alexeyza 8 hours ago: [10259604]
Yes, you're probably right. I didn't want it to include any HTML (to
make it easy for anyone to contribute to course website), but
perhaps there is a way to use a simple Markdown for GitHub pages.
Comment by sanderjd 6 hours ago: [10260350]
I think jekyll[0] works really well in conjunction with github
pages for exactly your use case.
[0]: [https://jekyllrb.com/]
Comment by alexeyza 6 hours ago: [10260747]
Well, I use Octopress (similar to this) for my own blog.
But, for the course, where I wanted all the students and
other staff members to be involved, I wanted something much
more simple. More specifically - nothing that would require
building. Perhaps that could be just me and my preference.
This might be a good solution if people want something a bit
more fancy as a course website. Thanks for sharing.
Comment by teshima82 8 hours ago: [10259689] Perfect timing for this post. Github is realeasing Classroom for GitHub. Excelent post by the way!. Thanks for sharing your experience!.