(2022-09-28) Udell Github For English Teachers

Jon Udell: GitHub for English teachers. In “GitHub for the rest of us” I argued that GitHub’s superpowers could serve everyone, not just coders. Ever since then (2015) I’ve felt that I overstated the case

the tools that I thought could make GitHub friendlier to non-coders mostly haven’t arrived.

I have long imagined a tool that would enable a teacher to help students learn how to write and edit. (writing)

in “How to write a press release,” I tried bending Google Docs to this purpose. To narrate the process of editing a press release, I dropped a sample release into a GDoc and captured a series of edits as named versions

it’s much harder to present those steps as I do in the post. That required me to make, name, and organize a set of images, then link them to chunks of narration

More recently I tried a GitHub-based alternative to that GDoc technique. Again the goal was not only to produce an edited version, but also to narrate the edits in a didactic way. I put the original doc in a repository, made step-by-step edits in a branch, and created a pull request

This screencast shows the final result of the technique I’ll describe.

GitHub enables what I’ve shown here by wrapping the byzantine complexity of the underlying tool, Git, in a much friendlier interface. But what’s friendly to a coder will likely still overwhelm an English teacher.