Jamie Wood We (Antonella, I and the student ambassadors) just completed training over 100 first year students on our East meets West module in the use of Xerte. They will be using the tool in group projects for source analysis assignments.
It was an effort to run the workshops and there were various technical challenges (PC failure, non availability of Chrome on machines we’d installed it on three days before! etc.) but most of the student picked up the techniques for using the tool quite quickly (within half an hour they were able to make a ‘Postcard‘ Xerte object).
The next challenge is to support the students in their group work and to get them to think about how to make their Xerte objects historically useful as well as visually interesting and technically robust. I’ve prepared an example of the sort of object that we want them to make in their groups (of 4-5) – it’s on the early medieval writer Einhard and his biography of the Carolingian Emperor Charlemagne and you can see it here.
More news soon…