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GitHub goes to school

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Re: GitHub goes to school

#21

Post by bluedino »

martindale wrote: post #11

Fantastic seeing this initiative by GitHub. Though I'd prefer an open source solution that they could host themselves, this is a good step in the right direction. I also don't believe Git is the right tool for this problem. Educators need something tailored much more specifically, and one that reduces the complexity of branching and merging along the way. There's a space here.

Nothing new with trying to get people hooked early so they'll use your products (and hopefully pay for them) once they get out into the real world. Microsoft academic licenses are dirt cheap, for example.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#22

Post by [deleted] »

spindritf wrote: post #13
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? At the very least, one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? It doesn't allow users/students to analyse, or learn about, its inner-workings. I don't know how important that is but with git being so easy to deploy, why not use something students can maintain?

[deleted]

Re: GitHub goes to school

#23

Post by srean »

Zikes wrote: post #16
spindritf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? It doesn't allow users/students to analyse, or learn about, its inner-workings. I don't know how important that is but with git being so easy to deploy, why not use something students can maintain?

Isn't that going a bit overboard in an educational setting, though? Seems to me like it'd be like showing up for a drivers ed class and spending the first semester learning about the history of internal combustion engines. Sometimes it's best to start with something that transparently "just works", make the students aware of other options like gitlab, and let them explore those if they wish.

Depends on what the end goal of the education system is: to make you a driver/chauffeur or to make you someone who is going to design the car of the future.

How to stage and sequence the exposure to the details is indeed important. I am not advocating exposure to the details right away, but the option has to be available at a reasonable price (be it in money, or in time).

There is also the "teach a person to fish" thing, rather than handing him/her a fish. Although many are in the business of handing out fishes, stale ones too.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#24

Post by krapp »

davexunit wrote: post #14
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? At the very least, one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all.

>What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it. >one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

>Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it.

This is true. However, it is still possible to be taught to code on a Windows machine in Visual Studio, or in Java for Android, etc. Your point of view has merit but it also has a limited context. The tools do matter and some of those tools are closed-source.

>There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

And yet, sooner or later everyone has to eat.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#25

Post by akerl_ »

davexunit wrote: post #14
krapp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? At the very least, one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all.

>What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software? Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it. >one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

Yes, we know what "proprietary software" means. We're looking for clarification on how using a proprietary tool that allows students to better share source code and collaborate with each other and the society at large counts as "anti-educational".

Re: GitHub goes to school

#26

Post by unethical_ban »

Zikes wrote: post #12
davexunit wrote: post #3

I was happy to see that my university decided to self-host a Gitlab server for CS students instead of using proprietary options like GitHub or Bitbucket. The students that set up the server learned from the experience, the instructors got around the problems they were having with Bitbucket's account limitations, and the new undergrads have a great platform on which to learn Git. I would encourage other educational in…

GitHub is just as anti-educational as proprietary textbooks, proprietary class management software like Blackboard, proprietary hardware like Macs or Dells, and proprietary software like Windows and OSX. You're welcome to your principles, but they're not always practical.

Well, proprietary textbooks about ancient math is kind of silly.

And Blackboard is anti-educational. Have you ever tried to use it?

Re: GitHub goes to school

#27

Post by theboss »

Github, I use you for all my \LaTeX papers, programming assignments, masters projects, whatever else. It is really helpful.

But I don't like that I can only have 5 private repos. Making my work public could be an honor-code violation and a violation of the professors trust, that I won't make solutions available to their projects. On top of that, I'm usually working on more than 5 projects at any given time.

Now that I'm finishing graduate school, this pressure is especially high. If I work on something in github, the other grad students will undoubtedly see it, since we are all gitbuddies. Does github have any talk of raising the private repo ceiling on education accounts from 5 to >5, or should I just remove my work while it's done?

Re: GitHub goes to school

#28

Post by robszumski »

theboss wrote: post #27

Github, I use you for all my \LaTeX papers, programming assignments, masters projects, whatever else. It is really helpful. But I don't like that I can only have 5 private repos. Making my work public could be an honor-code violation and a violation of the professors trust, that I won't make solutions available to their projects. On top of that, I'm usually working on more than 5 projects at any given time. Now that…

You can have a private repo called writing with a folder for each project. Not elegant but it works...

Re: GitHub goes to school

#29

Post by theboss »

robszumski wrote: post #28
theboss wrote: post #27

Github, I use you for all my \LaTeX papers, programming assignments, masters projects, whatever else. It is really helpful. But I don't like that I can only have 5 private repos. Making my work public could be an honor-code violation and a violation of the professors trust, that I won't make solutions available to their projects. On top of that, I'm usually working on more than 5 projects at any given time. Now that…

You can have a private repo called writing with a folder for each project. Not elegant but it works...

Yeah that does work. It is only frustrating when I have a lot of big projects at the same time. Sometime they can be public, but othertimes they cant.

I imagine it is worse for undergrads, where almost all their coursework will be private.

Re: GitHub goes to school

#30

Post by justincormack »

tantalor wrote: post #19
susi22 wrote: post #8

Side note: When you have 15 links in one sentence where every word is a link to somewhere and the word actually has no meaning, then I think it's time for a bullet list. It might just make people actually click a link. But all those links in one sentence are of little help IMO.

This is an annoying meme I've seen before, but I don't know what it's called.

Overlinking in Wikipedia parlance.
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