Rob Letchford, bless his soul, exemplifies the kind of individual dtermination that will evenetually break through the conceptual logjam at the intersection of technology and education. He has already developed a site replete with the writings of and information about Cyprian of Carthage; now he’s soliciting participants for a grass-roots effort to hand-code a machine-readable transcription of Marcus Jastrow‘s [Aramaic] Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. This is the sort of enterprise that a cadre of graduate students would do well to take up (not because grad students are a less caste of academic labor, but because this effort would combine their academic contribution with learning that furthers their own interests). Again I say, if some institution were to take up the cause (and associate their name with it), they’d be furthering their mission, their name, and the broader cause of teaching and learning.
And if such an endeavor became a model for collaborative work in the field of education and technology….
Thanks for the positive write-up!
Rod