Once again this year I was privileged to participate in Great Lakes THATcamp, held at MSU. Following are a few loosely organized thoughts about the experience.

• If possible, things were even more friendly and collegial than last year. Great mix of scholars, teachers, librarians, archivists, and museum folks, as well as people whose duties straddled those lines.
• There seems (to me) to be a reduction in the learning curve on a lot of really cool stuff. For example tools like Broadcastr and WhatWasThere will ease entry to using location-based tools in teaching–especially in getting students to participate in the creation of content. I’m certainly going to try and come up with ways to use these in class this fall.
• The two bootcamps I attended, on WordPress and Omeka were great. In particular, I really valued learning about some of the guts of WP as well as being introduced to omeka.net accounts. Again, these are things that will have a direct impact on how I teach.
• Speaking of teaching, Saturday morning was spent with others who were interested in digital pedagogy, particularly the concept of Massively Open Online Courses.

I’ll probably have more thoughts in time, but all in all, this was a great weekend with great people. I look forward to future such events!