Test document for my PE4 and PE5 blog entries

pe4-github.md

For my Relevant & Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS), I’ve chosen to use GitHub.com to show instructors for online classes how they can work in projects with similar patterns to how they would in physical classrooms.

GitHub started with a simple concept: easy source code hosting using Git, a software package designed to help teams track changes to their code. Because of its free and Open Source nature, it has since been adopted and adapted to suit needs beyond its original intent. I’ve been using Git and GitHub in the classroom for almost 2 years now and both have been amazingly helpful. But I think that GitHub’s slick user-friendly web interface to Git could be applied to more classrooms than just those with heavy development focus.

I’m a problem-solver. I love to pick and poke at something until I understand it. So when Rena expressed frustration at being able to track activity in the Literature Review assignments, I immediately started picking at the problem to see where I could take it. I was also recently in a meeting with a group of instructors of online courses and a similar thread came up: they need a way to track collaboration and work on group projects, but not in a way where the technology gets in the way of the learning objectives.

I’m not saying GitHub is a perfect solution yet, but I think it may be a start. GitHub has a section devoted to how it can be used for (non-technical) project management, including tools like:

• Multi-level access (read, write, administer)
• Wikis
• Comments inline with content
• Issue tracking
• Milestones, labels, and tagging
• Content analysis

GitHub also has a scaled-down tool called Gist, which is meant for short-term collaboration. Given the dead-simple usability of a Gist, I can’t help but think that this would be an elegant solution for non-development classrooms.

I fixed some minor spelling errors and hyperlinked the GitHub and Gist titles.

It sounds intriguing. But for more simple documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it seems google docs would also serve the same purpose. We can view the revision history and see who made changes and when, multi-level access, comments inline with content. I don't know if wikis, tagging and content analysis can be done in google docs though.

Did your group try this? I would love to have the practical feedback. I am wondering about the privacy settings. I will have to dig deeper into this one.