Stories from the GitHub Classroom: Changing Practice, one Pull Request at a Time

Stories from the GitHub Classroom: Changing Practice, one Pull Request at a Time

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Before we get started, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is John Britton and I’m the Education Liaison at GitHub.

I have a background in educational technology with a specific focus on training software developers.

In essence, my job is to help you get the most out of GitHub in your teaching

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to observe the ways educators have used GitHub in the classroom, and I’ve noticed a trend: many educators do not use pull requests in their courses.

That’s a shame, because they’re a really powerful way spark collaboration and improve the learning experience.

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Enough about me, let’s talk about GitHub:

GitHub is a platform for collaborating on software. It’s a place for you to keep your code, share it with others, and communicate about changes as you make them.

In this talk, we’ll learn about how a key feature of GitHub, the pull request, can be used as a teaching tool.

* Show of hands, how many of you use GitHub on a regular basis?
* And of that group, how many of you are currently using GitHub with your students?
* And finally, how many of you feel that you are using pull requests to their full potential?

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But first things first: What is a pull request?

(Ask audience)

“A pull request is a proposal to introduce changes, a distinct set of commits, into a project. It’s a conversation about code. When a...

Transcript

1. ! CHANGING PRACTICE, ONE PR AT A TIME
2. ! johndbritton
3. !
4. WHAT IS A PULL REQUEST?
5. FEATURE
6. “Hey, I think you missed a spot.”
7. CONTRIBUTE
8. COMMUNICATE
9. PHILOSOPHY
10. “We’re always learning.”
11. IMPROVEMENT
12. AN INVITATION
13. SOCIAL CODING = SOCIAL LEARNING
14. WHAT DO PULL REQUESTS HAVE TO DO WITH PEDAGOGY?
15. 3 SHIFTS IN CLASSROOM PRACTICE
16. APPLIED APPROACH
17. SOCIAL SKILLS
18. KNOWLEDGE CO-CONSTRUCTION
19. CLASSROOM AS COMMUNITY
20. FROM TO
21. HOW DO PULL REQUESTS FOSTER COMMUNITY?
22. DO THE PEOPLE WHO LIKE IT TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER? COMMUNITY:
23. COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY MODEL
24. TEACHING PRESENCE
25. “Pull requests (PR) are the heart of the GitHub work- flow, and we took advantage of PRs, including task lists so that students could report on their work in progress and get over initial humps. Any merged PR got extra credit(!). Because the course had been improved in some way—this seemed like an interesting standard for giving out extra credit.” - Jim Baker, University of Colorado
26. ATTACH WIP PULL REQUESTS
27. CI / PASSING INTEGRATION
28. COGNITIVE PRESENCE
29. STUDENTS FIND MENTORS “UPSTREAM”
30. “To get the students involved in their projects, we encouraged them to make actual contributions. Several teams were successful in this, and offered pull requests that were actually merged…. The open source projects generally welcomed these contributions, as illustrated by the HornetQ reaction” - Arie van Deursen, Delft University of Technology
31. PATCHES == EXTRA CREDIT
32. “Your job is to identify an existing ticket in an upstream project and send a patch. For every patch you submit that gets accepted, you get extra credit. I totally have students “hacking” their grade in my course, and submitting 17 patches by the end of it. That makes me pretty confident that at the end of the class they will do this stuff in real life, because they are doing it on their own.” - Remy DeCausemaker, RIT
33. SOCIAL PRESENCE
34. DIGITAL IDENTITY
35. Developers also sought out more information on others in response to code contributions. They sought out information about other developers’ interaction style and interest to inform how they communicated with them. They also formed ability and expertise impressions based on profile information. These impressions influenced the way they handled project contributions moreso when the value of submitted contributions was uncertain, the contributor was unknown and future interactions were not expected. - J. Marlow et al. (2013)
36. PEER REVIEW
40. PULL REQUESTS —> COMMUNITY
41. HOW DO PULL REQUESTS MAKE MY LIFE EASIER?
42. WAY LESS CHEATING
43. D.R.Y.
44. BALANCE THE LOAD
45. CHECK INS DURING CLASS
46. LEARNERS BUILD THEIR NETWORK
47. …because the TAs worked so closely with each of the teams over eight weeks, they had a really good sense of how well each team performed, how well they did using the software engineering techniques, and who actually contributed and who didn’t contribute.” - Dean James Larus, EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
48. PULL REQUESTS + PROJECTS = LESS WORK, MORE REWARD
49. GITHUB EDUCATION IS HERE TO HELP
52. CASE STUDIES
53. ! references + further reading 1. Basu, S. “Team Collaboration With GitHub” http://code.tutsplus.com/articles/team-collaboration-with-github-- net-29876 2. Binns, R. “Open Research in Practice: responding to peer review with GitHub” http://www.reubenbinns.com/blog/ open-research-in-practice-responding-to-peer-review-with-github/ 3. Escalante, J. “GitHub Pull Request Tutorial” http://www.thinkful.com/learn/github-pull-request-tutorial/Work- in-Progress 4. Garrison, D. R. (2011). E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice. Taylor & Francis. 5. Marlow, J., Dabbish, L., & Herbsleb, J. (2013, February). Impression formation in online peer production: activity traces and personal profiles in github. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work(pp. 117-128). ACM. http://herbsleb.org/web-pubs/pdfs/marlow-impression-2013.pdf 6. McMinn, K. “How to Write the Perfect Pull Request” https://github.com/blog/1943-how-to-write-the-perfect- pull-request 7. Orsini, L. “How To Win Friends And Make Pull Requests On GitHub” http://readwrite.com/2014/07/02/github- pull-request-etiquette 8. Rigby, P. C., German, D. M., Cowen, L., & Storey, M. A. (2014). Peer Review on Open-Source Software Projects: Parameters, Statistical Models, and Theory. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 23(4), 35. http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~pcr/paper/Rigby2014TOSEM.pdf 9. Zagalsky, A., Feliciano, J., Storey, M. A., Zhao, Y., & Wang, W. (2015). The Emergence of GitHub as a Collaborative Platform for Education. http://alexeyza.com/pdf/cscw15.pdf
54. ! johndbritton education.github.com