The SBL has received an NEH planning grant to develop a website, “The World of the Bible: exploring people, places, and passages.” The site is intended for general audiences and will share scholarly views and encourage critical engagement with the Bible, including its ancient contexts and interpretive legacy.

We encourage you to share this survey with people who are not bible scholars—your students, perhaps, or friends and family. The goal is to gain a diverse representation of our intended audience and to assess their current level of familiarity with and interest in the Bible.

If you have a little bit of time, please help out and participate in the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NH3V5ZZ

And, the Top 50 Biblioblog list is out for the month of November. The monthly Top 50 Biblioblog list is now a six-month listing, the current list is here.

• Ideas for vocabulary assessment (Randall Buth’s handout from SBL 2007)
• BH Vocabulary Word Pairs Chart-Blank (based on word pairings from John Hobbins)
• Sample Translation Exams (One, Two, Three) which ask grammar, syntax, and discourse questions requiring students to interact with the Hebrew text and a provided English translation.

These materials are, of course, just samples and will continue to be refined. Leave a comment with a suggestion or description of what you do in your own classroom!

Taylor Halverson, Brigham Young University
Effective Uses of Discussion Forums for Biblical Studies Courses at a Distance (20 min)

• Discussion Board Rubric (PDF)
• Distance Education and the Bible Presentation Outline (Word doc)
• Effective Uses of Discussion Forums for Biblical Studies (PowerPoint)

22-201 Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
11/22/2009 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM Room: Studio 9 – MR
Theme: Distance Learning: How to teach traditional topics in a non-traditional format

I’ve posted links to some of the resources mentioned in my portion of session below. An updated list (including material from the other presenters) will be kept on the SBL 2009 Pedagogy page of my blog. Check back again to find more material as we (the five presenters) update the links.

• CDW-G survey 2008: The 21st-Century Campus: Are We There Yet? Challenges and Opportunities for Campus Technology
• CDW-G survey 2009: The 2009 21st-Century Campus Report: Defining the Vision
• Campus Technology article 11/3/2009: Students Unimpressed with Faculty Use of Ed Tech
• Campus Technology article 10/28/2009: Most College Students to Take Classes Online by 2014
• Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota:10 Things I’ve Learned About Teaching Online

Online Tools:

• Moodle: Open Source community-based tools for learning
• Elluminate: web, audio, video, and social networking solutions for teaching, learning, and collaborating
• LearnCentral: social learning network for education, sponsored by Elluminate

A few of the tools mentioned by Brooke Lester:

• Wetpaint: A site solely for creating wikis
• Diigo: Social bookmarking, highlighting, and commenting of web pages.
• Netvibes: Bringing feeds to a central location from blogs, from wikis, from Diigo, from Twitter, from Yahoo Pipes, and so on.
• Yahoo Pipes: Grouping, filtering, ordering RSS feeds from anywhere.

Check his resource page for more links and tutorials to use these resources.

Great little place found in Uptown New Orleans: Oak St. Café.

Here’s a look at the 2008 festival:

UPDATE (for a full summary of the session go to the blog This Lamp):

Each presenter was challenged to use their respective software packages to solve the following tasks:

1. Give the parsing of a word and its meaning from a standard source.
2. Show all the occurrences of a word in the NT and LXX and show the Hebrew word which corresponds withe the Greek in the LXX (if there is a correspondence).
3. Find all the occurrences of οἰ δὲ in Matthew’s gospel followed by a finite verb within the clause.
4. I want to study a part of speech, e. g., demonstrative pronouns or interjections. How do I get all of the lemmas for that part of speech, get all the occurrences of those lemmas, and the results organized in such a way that I could write an article/monograph on that part of speech from the data?
5. I want to study the inflections of the Hebrew middle weak verb, and I want to see what the range of possible variations are for each of the conjugations (perfect, imperative, etc.) person, number, gender, stem. This means I need to find all the middle weak verbs, find all their occurrences, and organize them in such a way that the variation of their inflections are immediately apparent. The goal of the data organization would be to allow me to write an article about the variations of the Hebrew middle weak verb.

Many thanks to the following folks for tweeting the session: @MaryShore, @BobPritchett, @bradleygr. Remember, these Tweets are in reverse order, so the earlier tweets start below and the last one is on top.

@MaryShore: @OliveTreeBible has lexical info? Can’t get it to work on my version but it looks sweet in presentation.

@MaryShore: One cool tip re. @OliveTreeBible. Easy copy and paste into email.

@MaryShore: @OliveTreeBible advanced searches on handheld are cool but I can’t imagine needing it this side of a shipwreck w/o laptop.

@MaryShore: @OliveTreeBible has lexical info? Can’t get it to work on my version but it looks sweet in presentation.

@BobPritchett: Olivetree is taking on the five problems using just an iPhone. Impressive!

@BobPritchett: I’m feeling very good about reducing the buttons and dialogs in @Logos 4. It’s hard to simplify UI while keeping power, but doable.

@BobPritchett: I’m feeling very good about reducing the buttons and dialogs in @Logos 4. It’s hard to simplify UI while keeping power, but doable.

@MaryShore: BW on too many buttons: “if we take them away, you won’t know power tools.” I think I’ll build students a simple workspace.

@BobPritchett: Accordance just named BibleWorks’ motto (focus on the text) as a requirement for good Bible software.

@BobPritchett: Accordance making the point that you need “research grade” texts to write a scholarly article. Calling out software w/ “featuritus.”

@BobPritchett: BibleWorks answered the analysis questions by using word lists in an interesting way. Now it’s Accordance.

@MaryShore: BibleWorks presenter using power methods and going too fast. I use BW daily & am experiencing presentation as overwhelming.

@MaryShore: BibleWorks up now. My question, from @ericbarreto, “Why so many buttons?”

@BobPritchett: BibleWorks presenting now; interested to see how they address the shootout problems.

@MaryShore: SESB expert using Hebrew examples. I can’t quite keep up.

@BobPritchett: Just presented @Logos 4 at #sbl09 Bible software “shootout.” Was worried about time and so went fast enough to finish early!

@MarySHore: Next presentation is Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible. Searchable critical apparati.

@bradleygr: BS now presenting SESB (based on LDLS3) straight after Bob’s Logos 4 demo.

@MaryShore: Logos: “We have never had anyone pay twice for a book since 1995.” So you won’t lose library in upgrade.

@MaryShore: 10,000 books in Logos library right now. Will sync across PC, Mac, iPhone. But who could afford all that?

@MaryShore: Five Bibles “reverse-interlinearized” so you don’t need to know Grrek or Hebrew to search on the terms. Logos

@bradleygr: Datasheet currently being demoed at #sbl09 No standing ovation, sadly.

@MaryShore: Logos: Highlight in LXX and corresponding BHS is “sympathetically highlighted.”

@bradleygr: BWS report answers both questions 1 (morph, parsing) and 2 (LXX usage)

@MaryShore: iPhone compatibility with Logos 4. Free app

@MaryShore: Computer-assisted reseach group gave Five problems gave to Software vendors and show us how you solve them. Logos 4 up first.

@bradleygr: http://pic.gd/620945 Bob about to present Logos at #sbl09

@MaryShore: Ready to tweet Bible software shootout at #SBL09. We’re in Rhythms 3 ballroom, 2nd floor, Sheraton.

@bradleygr: About to go to the software “shootout” at #sbl09

As many of you know, I’m an Accordance user and I love the program. I’m also using Olive Tree software on my iPhone (and will write more about that soon!). I’ve just loaded Parallels and Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, so I’ve also got Logos running the SESB package. Only thing missing from this Shootout lineup on my laptop is BibleWorks. I may try my own comparative test of a few “challenges” that line up with the kind of work I am currently doing.