I'm starting coursework at the University of Maryland in their Masters of Distance Education program, and (assuming i stick it out) some of the results will probably get blogged (specifically this RSS feed if you want to narrow your scope). This is background for some recent interests in how the church might rethink their approach to discipleship by incorporating what we've learned about how people learn, and by building on internet technologies. Here's more information on the program.

Here's the bio i posted for my first class, Foundations of Distance Education.

I'm a manager and computer scientist in the field of human language technology, working to develop and deploy new technologies for finding information in speech and text. I've worked in this field for about 20 years, and (with the graduation of the last two of our five kids from high school this year) it's time to explore some new areas. In particular, i'm interested in how distance education can be used to help churches do a better job of helping adults learn to live out their Christian faith. I live near Columbia with my wonderful wife Donna.

The website reference points to my weblog [Blogos, of course!], where i sometimes muse about various topics related to faith, language, and digital technology. I also operate SemanticBible, "an emerging exploration of new applications of markup and computational linguistic technology to the study of Scripture." The explanation of what this means is a little long to repeat here: check the websites if you want to learn more.

About the picture: this is me, my brother, and my Dad at his 80th birthday party earlier this year. I'm the one with the funny glasses.