The eLearning Backpack Project is an initiative to provide faculty with backpacks loaded with tools that will allow them to fully leverage the new services available in Canopy. It is an opportunity for faculty to reimagine how they create/deliver course content and engage with their students.

Discuss the cohort 1 and look ahead to the now forming cohort 2.

Additional information – https://www.uc.edu/canopy/tools/elearningbackpack.html

Twitter is a digital salon, a global party line, offering a window to real-time information and sentiment on a tremendous scale. There have been many compelling projects to analyze and monitor twitter activity as well as automate communication for entertainment, journalism, and scholarship.

Let’s meet to discuss possibilities for analyzing, reporting, or remixing content from Twitter.

Examples:

@congressedits is a twitter bot that was created to monitor and report changes to Wikipedia entries made from IP addresses assigned to the United States Congress. The script is open source and has been used by others to monitor changes made by other organizations, many civic and government. – inkdroid.org/journal/2014/07/10/why-congressedits/

The New Yorker has an interesting article from 2013 about Twitter bots and their use, from compelling to crude – www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots

I like all the big ideas, so here’s a little one to balance things out. Git and Github are traditionally used for software version control, but they’re also increasingly used outside of software. I’d be happy to lead a workshop on using git and Github to work collaboratively with text.

Here are some neat links to go along with this:

Project Gitenberg

Clay Shirky on gonvernment and git

OpenRefine is an open-source tool for cleaning and standardizing messy metadata. You can also link to external authorities and export your data in RDF and custom schema. Come with your own dataset and let’s clean!