Curricular Materials

TAPAS Classroom will allow teachers of the TEI to store and manage their curricular materials in their project spaces, as well as collaboratively share and develop these materials with other TEI educators through the TAPAS Commons.

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We welcome all feedback, suggestions, questions, and conversations that may emerge around the question of, how can TAPAS better support your and your students use of curricular materials in TAPAS?

ben_admin's picture

What are the types of curricular materials you develop for your courses: syllabi, assignments, rubrics, templates, documentation and guidelines, etc? What are the formats you typically publish or store these materials in: text, pdf, tei? Are there types of curricular materials you would like to develop for your courses but are looking for help or samples to do so?
Charlotte Nunes's picture

My Spring 2016 English class at Southwestern University undertook a project to encode selected letters from the Lizzie Johnson Papers in SU Special Collections. I blogged about the project, screenshotting the process: https://archiveseducate.com/2016/05/02/teaching-with-tei-encoding-the-lizzie-johnson-papers/. I'm happy to share the curricular materials (sample transcriptions, encodings, etc.) upon request.

The thematically color-coded encodings fascinate me. I have also found these effective in teaching TEI, not just because of the interpretive latitude they offer but also because (in a workshop or short class session context) they give a really nice form of positive feedback to the students: showing the direct effects of markup on output and hence on reading/interpretation. We've been discussion how to support this feature in TAPAS Classroom and I'd be really interested in hearing more about how students end up using interpretive markup: do they tend to mark smaller/phrase-level things, or larger chunks of text? Do they tend to focus on one or two themes/concepts or do they develop larger interpretive vocabularies?
Charlotte Nunes's picture

I completely agree, Julia, with everything you've pointed out about the benefits of creating and displaying color-coded encodings. It really upped the ante for my students and provided just the positive feedback/climactic "big reveal" moment they needed to get hooked on the encoding process. Plus the color-coded displays are perfect for classroom presentations of encodings; the different interpretive decisions students make with similar or identical archival texts are prominently and visibly on display, which makes it easier for students to reference and articulate their processes when presenting their work to the class. In the assignment I blogged about, students marked up both individual words and phrases AND larger chunks of text, but they leaned toward color-coding larger chunks. However, this is because of how I set up the assignment, which was to mark up the text according to four thematic/conceptual categories. In future assignments, as I myself get more comfortable with TEI, I'd definitely like to supervise TEI projects where students set more of those terms.

Marina and I have used color-coding as well, asking students in each group to come up with their own set of tags. We don't put any minimums or upper limits on the number of tags they can use, but we do talk together about selecting tags so that they're able to cover all the topics they're interested in, while being selective enough that they can actually see patterns in the web versions & don't end up with just a mess of colors. So far, students have tended to highlight just a word or two at a time, possibly because the example I set up for them does so, or possibly because they inevitably find the difficulty in displaying a section of text as having more than one analytical category a limitation. You can see some of the example projects here (in the extremely low-rent Google site I set up for the first version of the class): https://sites.google.com/site/genderandtherennbody/home/sample-projects (These aren't all the projects, just the ones from students who responded when I asked whether they'd be willing to have their work serve as examples.) Both groups chose to have their categories display in the web version, so you can see some of the range of topics they came up with. The groups in the second class to do the assignment picked fewer topics, 5–6, and they ended up being more interested in using the XML, not just the display, to analyze their corpora. One group was interested in examining prevalence of male and female body parts over their corpus, for example. This might also be because I knew a lot more about XPath the second time we did the assignment, so I was probably talking about using markup for research as much as display.

For my courses, the things I develop are: syllabi, detailed descriptions of the assignments, lists of readings (which handle separately from the syllabus which serves more as a course schedule), and also hotsheets on specific technical topics such as getting started with Oxygen or using version control. I could also imagine creating documentation if the class involved working on a specific collaborative project. At the moment, I manage my course site in WordPress, so these materials are typically just WordPress pages, but I could also imagine creating PDF if I were sharing these as documents (e.g. in TAPAS).
ben_admin's picture

How do you currently store and share you curricular materials with your students? Would you have an interest in using the TAPAS project management and publication space as a place for your materials? If so, can you think of in what ways this would be a valuable tool?
Charlotte Nunes's picture

Google docs, baby! But I would definitely be interested in trying out TAPAS for storing and sharing TEI project materials in the future.

I currently use Blackboard to store my syllabi, assignments, resources and tip sheets for our class projects, but I would be interested in using the TAPAS space to share these materials. My students are absolute beginners and one thing that they have enjoyed about my current Pedagogical Partnership with Map of Early Modern London is that they feel like they are part of a larger scholarly community. It may sound like a small thing, but I think that sharing these materials on the TAPAS platform would underscore that sense of community and motivate students to take pride in their work.
ben_admin's picture

Do you currently share or develop your curricular materials with other colleagues of the TEI for pedagogical purposes? If so, how have you done this? Do you have an interest in using TAPAS as a community space through which to share or develop your curricular materials?

I have shared my materials with the WWP and, most recently, with a group of workshop participants at the Folger. I'm totally open to sharing! I'm especially curious about how people create rubrics for marking DH projects.