Category Archives: SBL

SBL Survey to plan: The World of the Bible website

I am joining my fellow SBL members is passing on this information from the Society of Biblical Literature which was emailed to us.

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

A New Month brings a new Carnival (XLVIII) and a New Top 50 List

Clayboy (Doug Chaplin) does a terrific job this month with the Biblical Studies Carnival XLVIII. I’m happy to see such a representation from the Hebrew Bible this month. He also successfully sifted out all of Jim West‘s photo journals of the SBL meeting and listed the best reports of sessions at that meeting in New Orleans.

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.

“Examining our Exams” links added

Below are links to material from my SBL session entitled, “Examining our Exams: What to include, exclude, and revisit for Biblical Language Exams.” These links have been added to my SBL 2009 Pedagogy page (link in toolbar above). A summary of my presentation, as well as links from other presenters will be added soon.

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!

More links for SBL Distance Learning session

I’ve updated my SBL 2009 Pedagogy page with the following links from Taylor Halverson:

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

Michael Fox discusses his commentary on Proverbs

Michael Fox discussed the second volume of his commentary on Proverbs with a group of bibliobloggers gathered at a dinner hosted by John Hobbins at the Deutsches Haus in New Orleans. Great food, fellowship, fun and discussion. The evening benefited Jericho Road, a charity rebuilding community after Katrina. I’ll post more about this fine evening later.

Taking the Distance Out of Distance Education

Today I was one of the presenters in the following session:

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.

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.

Bible Software Shootout

I could not be at the SBL Bible Software Shootout session between Logos, SESB, BibleWorks, Accordance and Olive Tree but I did follow some of the SBLtweets. So I’m putting a roundup of the tweets from that session here. If you were there and have anything to add, please leave a comment, thanks!

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