Hope's Centre-Table

Fully Online Book:
Computing in Humanities Education: A European Perspective
http://helmer.hit.uib.no/AcoHum/book/
Edited by: Koenraad de Smedt, Hazel Gardiner, Espen Ore, Tito Orlandi, Harold Short, Jacques Souillot, William Vaughan
Chapters include:
1. Introduction
2. European studies on formal methods in the humanities
3. European studies on textual scholarship and humanities computing
4. European studies on computational linguistics
5. European studies on computing for non-European languages
6. European studies on computing in history of art, architecture and design
7. Conclusion
Includes background, conclusions and recommendations in each chapter.

Outsourcing CMS in Iowa
4/18/2007
By Linda L Briggs
The Iowa Community College Online Consortium (ICCOC), made up of seven community colleges, is using an outsourced learning management system to offer its online courses to students across Iowa. The learning management system, eCollege, is specifically designed for managing online learning programs, and helps makes course development and management far easier for colleges within the consortium.
eCollege’s learning management system differs from products like Blackboard or WebCT in that it is offered as an outsourced service. That means colleges don’t buy and install the product on their own computers; rather, they license use of eCollege from the company, which maintains the application remotely on its own servers. That allows schools to avoid heavy upfront capital costs, as well as the cost of adding technical support staff, since eCollege handles all support issues. The company says eCollege is run from computers in various locations, to ensure fast and continual service, and includes multiple levels of redundancy, backups, and an up to date database infrastructure.
Complete article at:
Outsourcing CMS in Iowa

Extreme Markup Languages®: a friendly, technically challenging, intensive, thought-provoking, argumentative, welcoming, obstreperous conference on markup, managing information, and information structures
THE MARKUP THEORY & PRACTICE CONFERENCE
August 7-10, 2007 Montréal, Canada
http://www.extrememarkup.com/
Extreme is the leading international conference on markup theory and practice. If you have interesting markup applications, difficult markup problems, or intriguing solutions to problems related to the design and use of markup, markup languages, or markup tools; if you want to know what the leading theorists of markup are thinking; if you are the house markup expert and want to spend time with your kind, then you should plan on attending Extreme Markup Languages® 2007.
About the Conference
Extreme is an open marketplace of theories about markup and all the things that they support or that support them: the difficult cases in publishing, linguistics, transformation, searching, indexing, and storage and retrieval. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to trade in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. At Extreme we push the edges of markup theory & practice.
* WHEN: August 7-10, 2007
* WHERE: Montréal, Canada
* HOST: IDEAlliance

Ockham Alerting Service
http://alert.ockham.org/
Ockham Alerting Service is a current awareness service based on National Science Foundation Digital Library content. It demonstrates a standards-based method for collecting content, providing access to it, and disseminating it on a regular basis in the form of an alerting service. The method includes:
1. identifying OAI repositories with content of interest
2. using OAI to harvest content and store it in a central pile
3. indexing the content of the central pile
4. providing an SRU interface to the index
5. allowing users to save the SRU URL’s as “profiles” (RSS feeds)
6. allowing users to have the profiles executed on a regular basis
7. making the results of searches available as HTML, email, RSS, etc.
8. returning to Step #1

The TEI Members’ Meeting
1-3 November 2007
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
*TEI@20*: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities
The Organizing Committee of this anniversary TEI Members’ Meeting invites individual paper proposals, panel sessions, and poster/tool demonstrations on the theme, broadly conceived, ‘The TEI@20: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities’. Topics might include but are not restricted to
* Building and using tools for TEI-based text encoding
* Teaching TEI: Challenges and Opportunities
* TEI as a theory of text
* TEI: the next 20 years
* New career opportunities for those using the TEI
* Lacunae and omissions: new directions for the TEI
Paper presenters will be allocated 30 minutes to speak, 25 minutes for
delivery, and five minutes for questions.
Alternatively, group sessions can be organized for 1.5 hours each and
may be of varied formats, including:
* A working papers session (pre-circulated papers)
* A round-table discussion
* Software demonstrations
Of the formats described above, a working paper session might be more
appropriate for a smaller group, all of whom have all read the
pre-circulated papers in advance. This type of format may span more than
one session and will be held concurrently with the general session.
Submission Procedure
/Individual paper proposals/: submit a title, brief abstract (no more
than 500 words), the name of the presenter, institutional affiliation,
and email address.
/Panel sessions/: submit a session title, brief overview of the session
(no more than 300 words), abstracts of each of the papers (no more than
500 words each) OR a 500 word abstract for a panel discussion, the names
of each of the participants, their institutional affiliations, and email
addresses.
/Poster Session/Tool Demonstration/: submit a title, brief abstract (no
more than 500 words), the name of the presenter, institutional
affiliation, and email address. The local organizer will provide a flip
chart and a table for each presenter, along with wireless internet
access. All poster session participants will have an opportunity to
participate in a poster slam immediacy preceding the poster
session/reception.
All submissions should be sent to Conference Chair, Sebastian Rahtz

by 6 April 2007.
Conference papers will be considered for a *TEI@20* Proceedings. Further
details on the submission process will be forthcoming.

Dot porter announces that there will be two TEI-related sessions at Kalamazoo this year taught by James C. Cummings of Oxford
The Medieval Academy of America Committee on Electronic Resources is
pleased to announce two TEI workshops to be held at the International
Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, in May 2007. Both workshops will be
on Thursday, May 10 (sessions 32 and 138; see
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/sessions.html for complete
conference schedule).
1) XML and the Text Encoding Initiative Workshop I: Introduction to TEI Encoding
This workshop offers an introduction to best practices for digital scholarship, taught by a medievalist, James C. Cummings, specifically for medievalists. Instruction includes introductory-level XML and structural encoding, as well as new TEI P5 standards and guidelines, markup concerns for medieval transcription, and a brief consideration of XML Editors.
2) XML and the Text Encoding Initiative Workshop II: Advanced TEI Encoding and
Customization
This workshop offers advanced instruction in advanced topics in TEI encoding and the customization of the TEI for an individual project’s needs, taught by a medievalist,
James C. Cummings, specifically for medievalists. Instruction includes metadata
for medieval manuscript description, advanced-level concepts of TEI P5 modularization, schema generation and customization for individual projects, and a brief survey of related technologies.

Voyaging into a new decade!
TCC WORLDWIDE ONLINE CONFERENCE
April 17-19, 2007
Pre-conference dates: April 3-4, 2007Conf: TCC Online: U-Learning
http://tcc.kcc.hawaii.edu/2007/tcc/welcome.html
INTRODUCTION. E-Learning is passe. U-learning is the new wave
globally in higher education. Ubiquitous learning encompasses e-
learning and emphasizes learning anytime, anywhere and anyway in both
formal and informal lifelong learning environments. As u-learning and
Web 2.0 technology evolve, social interaction, intercultural
communications, and global collaboration increases in importance.
Social networking and learning communities are integral components of
u-learning.
Through online social networks, young adults today gain a sense of
community that is important in their daily and social life. How can
we learn from this? How can we learn from our students?
What is the status of social networking (Facebook, Mixi, etc.) and
online learning communities today? Have they succeeded or have they
withered away? How can we complement our students’ prior experiences
with interacting socially online? How can we assess learning in this
new environment? Will mobile phones become synonymous with u-learning
as proponents advocate? How do we train faculty and staff and engage
them to support productive learning communities? Will learning
communities help bridge the Internet divide? How do we “feed and
weed” effective learning communities or social networking systems in
the U-learning era? Will virtual worlds such as Second Life become a
new learning environment?
THEME. TCC will offer papers and presentations on the evolution,
trends, successes, or failures of learning communities and social
networking systems in higher education. The coordinators, however,
are interested in a broad range of topics that highlight the use of
educational technology, including but not limited to the following:
* Online, hybrid, blended or other modes of technology enhanced learning
* Distance learning including mobile learning
* E-learning and ubiquitous learning
* Student success factors in online learning
* E-portfolios and other online assessment tools
* Technology implementation and services in learner centered
environments
* Emerging technologies for teaching and learning (blogs, wikis,
podcasts, etc)
* Creating and delivering multimedia including learning objects
* Building and sustaining learning communities
* Student orientation and preparation
* Open content and open source
* Accessibility for persons with disabilities
* Global learning and international education
* Professional development for faculty and staff
* Gender equity, the Digital Divide, and open access
* Online student services (tutoring, advising, payments, etc)
* Technology use to enhance communication and collaboration
* Institutional planning and change catalyzed by technology advances
* Educational technology use in Asia & the Pacific, Europe, South
America, and Africa.

The report produced by M. Stoner re: the UVM web redesign can be found at:
http://www.uvm.edu/webguide/redesign/?Page=updates.php
The opening page has some interesting recommendation. (UVM name/password required on first visit)
Updates on the progress will be posted to the webteam blog:
http://webteam.blog.uvm.edu/