Why I am not using GitHub Classroom

As I mentioned the other day, I have turned my attention to preparing for Spring's courses. I am on deck to teach CS222 in the Spring. It's a fun and challenging course to teach, and I've been thinking about whether there are some ways to streamline the student experience. This morning, I spent some time investigating GitHub Classroom. It wasn't the first time, and that's why I'm writing this quick reminder to myself about why it's not the right fit for me.

There are two things that keep attracting me to GitHub Classroom. The first is that it reinforces the use of distributed version control. Anything that gets students into the habit of using version control and making small commits is good. The other is that it leverages the power of Markdown, where a writer can seamlessly integrate different kinds of text into one document: prose and code live happily together. This forms a synergy with the first point, since it gets students to start to think about version controlling all the things. 

What specifically got me looking again at GitHub Classroom though was its support for feedback via pull requests. This would allow me to comment on an individual line of student work as well as the work as a whole. The shortcoming is that the writer cannot do the same. 

I need a student to be able to do three kinds of writing:

• Traditional prose
• Source code
• Commentary on specific lines of the source code

The writing environment has to allow a student to say that a particular section of code manifests a particular property. This cannot be done in source code comments because those comments are part of the code itself. Rather, I'm talking about a kind of metadiscourse that is at a different level of abstraction than the code. It cannot easily be done in prose either. This requires either interrupting the code with commentary or using a referencing system, such as line numbers. The latter is not terrible, but it pales in comparison to the approach I have used for years: using Google Docs' comment feature to comment on different parts of the document. Using this approach, both the student writer and I can evaluate the text. In fact, I wish I had one more level of abstraction: I would like to comment on the students' comments, not in a thread, but at another level yet. 

These qualities describe a writing environment unlike any I have seen. It would be an interesting HCI exercise to explore how one might interact with such a thing. One might start by looking at Google Wave (RIP) or Code Bubbles. In the meantime, I will have to keep using word processors like Google Docs that allow for the metadata stream of comments.

Updated postscript:

I was thinking about switching from Google Docs to Office365, but after that experimentation, I don't think it is fit for purpose either. It seems like Word insists that we are preparing documents that will be printed on paper, whereas Google Docs has long allowed for continuous, non-paginated documents.