I’m interested particularly in the use of technology for teaching and learning language and culture, but also in educational technology in more general terms. I have been trying to put together a curriculum for a certificate program on Technology in the Humanities for graduate students at UCI. I would like the program to provide an overview of how technology can be used in research, teaching, and publication (including multimedia), and get them started on building a professional digital portfolio. Lately I’ve been trying to learn more about mapping software and using it in conjunction with digital storytelling.

I’m looking forward to listening a lot and participating in some interesting conversations!

I’m in the early stages of a massive research project about Katherine Dunham, an african american dancer and anthropologist, and the aim is eventually to create a rich-media resource about her work.  In an ideal world, I’ll be able to build some of the project into a course for advanced students.  Sophie is looking like a good platform for this someday-resource and I’d like to explore and get a stronger feel for the options it presents and the ways it can be creatively integrated both into scholarship and teaching.

I’d like to talk about a project called Synaptic Crowd that enables online participants to conduct remote interviews by nominating and voting on questions. The project can also be deployed in the reverse — so that the collectivity nominates and votes on the answers rather than the questions of an interview. I’m interested in thinking about this project in relation to the future of the real-time web and in thinking through the intersections between spectacle and democratic process.

I am interested in talking a number of topics.  One subject that would be valuable and timely for me would be to talk about open-access publishing, as I am involved in both a publishing platform at Occidental, <a href=”http://scholar.oxy.edu”>OxyScholar</a>, and in a nascent electronic journal designed to consider to powerful work being done in special collections around the country.  Aside from this conversation, I also hope to talk about multimedia student projects, both how to encourage and evaluate such work; I am also more specifically interested in projects that incorporate multimedia and mobility, especially when they connect classrooms and field research.

My focus is more on pedagogy and learning design than on computing as a “pure” research tool. So my key interests are as follows.

‘Extended’ notions of literacy (beyond prose writing): so multimedia literacy/production, ‘numeracy,’ programming even.

Online course design, pedagogy in the context of distance learning, graphic and conceptual models of course design.

Design as a model for critical thinking and course design.

Using mashups of GIS along with other forms of scholarly production to examine historical change in the Southwest.

We have a few spaces left, and it seems like THATCamp SoCal might be a decent venue to pick up some of the conversations from the DML conference, so please feel free to apply by sending a brief note (describing who you are and what you would like to discuss) to