Il giorno ven, 28/01/2011 alle 00.14 +0100, Marjorie Burghart ha scritto:
Dear Digital Medievalists,
I guess I can safely assume that several people here have an experience teaching the TEI, specifically to an audience of medievalists or historians. After teaching some workshops, I feel more and more that it is highly efficient to teach the TEI not alone, isolated, as a means to encode documents in a smart way, but putting the TEI XML at the center of the other technologies that make its interest immediately evident to the students.
I totally agree with that. My current practice (after teaching a bit of theory on markup, and the TEI fundamentals):
- teach some XSLT and have students experiment with it at once: this is really useful to put to test some of the key concepts I explained before (form-content separation, importance of selecting carefully *what* to markup, what Torsten wrote about visualizing the intended result in adnvance, etc.); - have them use IMT to learn about with <facsimile> and friends; - have them prepare a little encoding project to be discussed during the final exam: they choose the text, explain to me their markup strategy, then do everything on their own, including creating a custom schema (using Roma) and XSLT style sheets to produce an HTML version ... this is incredibly useful to expose lingering misconceptions and to really learn what is like to work on a 'real' markup project.
So far I'm quite satisfied with this sequence, will look into the versioning machine too :) unfortunately I doubt I'd have the time to explain XML DBs (that would be needed as well, of course).
Ciao
Roberto