This overview explains how we help instructors create collaborative websites for displaying student work. These websites demonstrate what collaborative digital history can be: a group of students contribute small articles that collectively add up to something useful, creating something that one person alone couldn’t do in a reasonable timeframe. The course website will be a collaborative sustainable digital projects.
Instead of an audience of only the course instructor, students will have the chance to share their coursework for a wider audience. This helps increase the authenticity of assessment and encourages our students to think about how to improve public engagement with the humanities.
Many popular website creation apps, such as Wordpress or Wix, place limits on design and function. When creating a website in a hurry, those apps get the basic job done. However, these apps involve so many layers of code that even someone with web design experience cannot understand how they work. In addition, these apps diminish student agency over the look-and-feel of the page they contribute to the website. Our process results in a website with similar design features as a Wordpress website, but will also help students gain experience with website design and introductory coding. The steps that we have designed reinforce a collaborative ethos and provide a clear picture of how basic code produces design elements on a page.
If you are interested in any of the above, let’s talk about building a website together for your student projects. We’ve got the technical infrastructure set up and the documentation of instructions for you and your students. We’re happy to visit classes to help.
GitHub is a popular website for collaborative software development, especially with museum, historical preservation, and cultural heritage work. Getting started on GitHub for website creation and design involves a somewhat unfamiliar shift in thinking about the website creation process. The process for GitHub Pages differs from the model of one person retaining total control over an online space, while allowing contributors to edit one page at a time. Instead, each person contributing to the content of the website makes a copy of all pages on the website. Each contributor will then add their own content and re-send the entire website, which now includes their changes, back to the original. Those with permission to accept or reject the requested merge can note any conflicts or problems before accepting it. Each contributor tests out how their changes look on the site before submitting their changes for approval. We use this feature of GitHub to allow everyone to make edits without fear of breaking anything.
GitHub uses the term ‘repository’ for the location, like a top-level folder, that stores all the information for a particular project. For our purposes, that project is several files that will combine to form a website. Folders inside the repository organize different parts of the website. Some folders will contain information such as font and color for the whole website. Other folders will contain the content for particular pages, such as student essays. We will help you understand the function of the various folders you see in the repository of the template that you choose for your course website.
Once you have set up a GitHub account, we will help you make a copy of the repository on Amaranth’s account for the website template that you want to use for your course. This is called forking the repository. After you do that, you will have a complete copy of all the files that create the entire template website. This is now yours to edit; you play around with it while leaving the original alone. For example, you can begin typing over the placeholder text for the title of the website. We’ll give you a tour of the various places in the repository that hold files that you will edit to make the website specific to your course. Once you have finished making changes for the day, you will request a merge with the repository in Amaranth. This process is called submitting a ‘pull request.’ When we accept your pull request, the changes you made will be merged and the website hosted from Amaranth’s repository will reflect the changes you made.
Just as you did, your students will also create a GitHub account and fork the repository from Amaranth’s GitHub account. Since they will make their repositories public, you will be able to see any changes they make. Each student will create their own folder and fill that folder with their images and a text file with the content of their page of the website. They will not make edits to any other part of the website. We recommend that students only submit a single pull request when they have finished making all changes.
To understand the basic elements of a website and its pages, you and your students will become familiar with the basics of coding language. Fortunately, this really means only learning a few special characters in order to generate features such as headings, italics, image captions, and footnotes. This simplified coding language is called markdown.