I again taught at XML Summer School in Oxford last month. This time around, I was part of the Applied XML Technologies track, teaching XSLT. Adam Retter spoke about XQuery, XPath, and XML databases, Geert Bormans introduced XProc, and Sheila Thomson explained how to test everything using XSpec.
I think we made a pretty good team, and we agreed to do it again next year.
I taught at Oxford.
It’s very, very cool just be able to say that. I did, though, last month (September). XML Summer School and Adam Retter wanted proposals for their 25th anniversary, so I suggested something about migration strategies, about converting something to something else. It was really all about my experiences with converting content in format X to some XML vocabulary and what you might want to think about when undertaking such an endeavour.
They accepted, and I was (and remain) thrilled.
I love teaching. It’s about sharing and caring, literally. It’s about sharing knowledge, about expressing ideas and getting a response, about questions and comments and discussions, and about planting ideas and concepts in listeners and participants. You feel alive and alert and thinking.
If you are lucky and privileged enough to do it in a setting such as St Edmund Hall in Oxford, it’s supercharging it, an experience to be treasured and missed. It’s as if the college and the town were both designed around curiosity and learning and celebrating knowledge. Maybe, probably, they are.