Is it a bad thing to periodically purge online spaces? In a session this morning, Gideon pointed out that everything from BYU on Blackboard is about to be erased as we transition to a new institutional learning management system. I thought there might be an upside to that.

Perhaps we need a sandbox to play with ideas where we feel freer to experiment because of the LACK of permanence.

I’ve heard politicians say they regret they can no longer have the sorts of exploring, deep conversations that are common among college freshman in the dorms at 1:00am. Those young people are free to experiment with ideas because of the privacy of the setting.

-what does it mean when images, video, music can be accessed from anywhere on the web when previously you would have to go to a museum, attend a class, or visit a specialist to have access to traditional art forms?  Does this mean art is really accessible to the masses?

-Integrated classrooms can enhance learning, but what about the distraction that is free broadband in the classroom? How do students pay attention when anything else on the web might be more interesting than your class?

I am currently teaching Spanish education at Lakeridge jr. high in Orem.  As a foreign language department, we have developed common assessments in digital format and they are administered using CPS clickers on a weekly basis.  We are currently in the process of analyzing data as a department and I would like to further research technological approaches and data collection with respect to our anaylsis of classroom formative and summative assessments.

I am new to this kind of conference, and so much of the jargon used goes over my head. I’m interested in integrating my blog, facebook, and educational media (offered at BYU) to give students a unified experience that conveniently extents beyond the walls of the classroom. I’m also interested in learning about techniques to draw people to my blog on outdoor education/writing.

I’d like to talk about what the open data really holds for Humanities study. Open Linked Data and the Semantic Web is really hot right now, and they seem to be buzzwords included in a lot of proposals, funding requests, etc. But how can the technologies really be leveraged for Humanities research and study? What can having an ecosystem of open data do to change the traditional landscape? What might such an ecosystem look like (i.e. what kind of data do we really have in the Humanities…is it just bibliography and metadata, or is there more)? What can traditional scholars learn from contributing to open data repositories or from utilizing such resources?

To help spark the conversation, it may be helpful to read over the RDF Cookbook for Digital Humanities, a collaborative document started several months ago.

Generating content is one thing, but managing distribution, look-and-feel, and feedback systems, not to mention a host of other considerations – is another. Designing with modularity in mind can increase the reuse of systems, as well as their content. There are some great implications, not just for the humanities, but for all knowledge systems that seek to disseminate to a global audience. We need to explore these implications and identify the future possibilities and channels that may not exist now (but soon will). Modularity, as Baldwin and Clark have stated in their book “Design Rules”, will be at the core of these innovations…