This isn't exactly related to R or RStudio, but I thought it might make sense to have this discussion in the open, rather than just with whatever list of people I might think to cc on an email.
@jjallaire and I talked about this briefly at rstudio::conf this year. While those of us who teach short courses/workshops tend to use git and Github for version control and dissemination of our materials, there's a little bit of a disconnect when it comes to the slides we teach from (often, Keynote). This leads to a couple of problems:
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It's a lot of work to keep all the pieces synched. For example, for data science in the tidyverse there were three pieces I needed to keep matching-- the .Rmd files for exercises, the .Rmd files for solutions, and the Keynote/PDF files of slides. If you change code in one place, you need to remember to update in the other two places. This seems like a job for... programming! I can kind of imagine how to write a parameterized markdown document that knitted to two different versions, one with solutions and one without, but it sounds like a lot of extra work. Any then of course, the Keynote piece is basically unsolvable at the moment
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A somewhat simpler issue, but when someone wants to use the (usually CC-licensed) materials, they can grab the .Rmds and the PDF slides from Github, but if they want to edit the slides they need the original keynote files. Speaking for myself, I am often procrastinating on prep and realize just a few hours before I'm teaching something that I don't have the Keynote files. It would be great if we could develop a culture of sharing these on the web, as well. However, there are some technical challenges there, as well.
- the simplest thing would be to check the Keynotes into the same git repo as the other materials, but I think we all avoid doing that to minimize the size of the repo (especially if you're going to
usethis to download the entire repo onto someone's computer during a workshop)
- we could all have parallel repos for slides, like
AmeliaMN/data-science-in-tidyverse and AmeliaMN/data-science-in-tidyverse-slides, but that gets us back to a similar problem to (1), where that gives us several things that need to be updated. Plus, the way I structure directories on my computer, I often have the folder with keynotes inside the main folder, and I worry about weird nested .git files
- is this somehow the place for submodules?? I have never gotten into that particular aspect of git, but maybe it would be the right thing?
Anyway, if anyone has any brilliant ideas, I'd love to hear them. cc'ing @jennybryan, @mine, @cwickham, @hadley, @garrett, @yihui