#JobvGod: Job versus God, the Twitter Game

It's Job versus God, in an epic battle of justice and power. Who's right? Who wins? What the heck is with those friends, anyway?

This is a multi-player Twitter game, inspired by Twitter vs. Zombies. It can be adjusted to last for days (as in these instructions) or for only a few hours. It ends when time is up, or (tragically) if everybody playing finds themselves on #TeamFriends. Job vs. God was developed for the Open Old Testament Learning Event 2015 (OOTLE15).

Rules:

All game tweets must include the hashtag #JobvGod.

Players announce their entry into the game by tweeting "I'm in!" (or similar) with the hashtag #JobvGod.

During game play, any player can attack any other player with a #JobAttack, paraphrasing Job's legal case against God and citing their biblical source accurately by chapter and verse. (For example, "42:6". Be sure to cite Job's speeches, not just any part of the book of Job.) Use at-mentions to select your victim.

The victim must issue a counterattack within six (6) hours. To counterattack, Reply to your attacker with a #GodAttack, paraphrasing God's argument against Job and citing your biblical source accurately. (Be sure to cite God's speeches, not just any part of the book of Job.)

If you find yourself attacked with more than one #JobAttack at once, you may counterattack them simultaneously by at-mentioning both attackers in your #GodAttack.

If a player is #JobAttack-ed, and fails to counter with a #GodAttack within six (6) hours, then she is penalized by joining #TeamFriends. She cannot issue any attacks or counterattacks while she is on #TeamFriends. To get out of #TeamFriends, she must tweet three (3) tweets paraphrasing the arguments of Job's three friends, including the hashtag #TeamFriends. (Be sure to cite the friends' speeches, not just any part of the book of Job.) She is then out of the penalty box, and free to #JobAttack other players again.

Nightfall: From 10pm-6am Central Time, the clock stops. So, if a player is attacked at 8pm, she has until 10am to counterattack.

These rules imagine the game going on for a few days, working around people's work schedules. If you want to play a shorter game, make sure all players are available and have the book of Job handy. Shorten the required counterattack time from six hours to five minutes.

Samples:

Job Attack: @anummabrooke tweets "Bring case to judge against God, & God is the judge! Fix is in! 9:15 @charheeg #JobAttack #JobvGod"

God Attack: @charheeg Replies "@anummabrooke Where were u when I gave birth to hail from my womb? 38:29 #GodAttack #JobvGod"

Team Friends: @charheeg, finding that over six hours have passed since @anummabrooke's Job Attack, tweets three tweets similar to this: "Can u provide any evidence of the righteous perishing? I haven't seen it. 4:7 #TeamFriends #JobvGod"

Improvements?

Suggest improvements in the comments. For example, in Twitter vs. Zombies, you can defend another player with a "swipe." Should something that be a feature in this game? How would it work?

How to Write about Ferguson

Allow me first to correct the punctuation in my title, above:

"How to Write about Ferguson?"

Now you can hear it the way it sounds in my head.

For a week and a half, I've been preoccupied by the Michael Brown tragedy, by the ensuing protests, and by the depressingly and infuriatingly (but not surprisingly) misconceived police response that still grips the city and daily threatens further loss of life. At the same time, I bang out nearly-due revisions to one writing project and draft two more, both also under deadline. At the same time, I prepare my fall upper-level course for waiting learners.

Today, Nyasha Junior, biblical scholar and public speaker, rightly has asked:

Asking again: Other than the @ONScripture piece, have any of my non-Black #SBL colleagues written on #Ferguson? If so, pls link. #aarsbl

— Nyasha Junior (@NyashaJunior) August 20, 2014

The ONScripture piece is a resource for "preaching reflections" on Michael Brown and Ferguson. "#SBL" refers to the Society of Biblical Literature, the flagship professional society for academic biblical studies.

I am primarily an academic, though I do preach occasionally, as an unordained layperson. I teach the literature of ancient Israel, understood as having two interpretive "anchor points": the likely meaning of biblical texts in their ancient Near Eastern social/historical context, and the range of possible meanings such texts may support for us johnny-come-lately readers in our own social/historical contexts. Additionally, my job description asks me to explore digital learning, finding and modeling better practices of online pedagogy.

My habitual mode, then, is less to tell people HOW to interpret biblical texts in light of the murder of an unarmed Black teen by a white law enforcement officer, and more to PREPARE learners to generate such interpretations as they might find liberating, for themselves and for others.

My habitual mode is less to rally faculty colleagues to a particular understanding of the racist and preposterously over-militarized police response in Ferguson, and more to rally them to the possibilities for facilitating online communities of inquiry where they and their learners can be genuinely present to one another in a time of crisis, even if the learners are prevented (usually for economic reasons) from enjoying on-campus residency.

In an upper-level seminar on "Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Old Testament in the New Testament," I may ask learners to write creative, biblically-allusive blog posts on Ferguson, white power, and casual brutality. Persuading faculty colleagues to learn to live-stream lectures & panels, I may appeal to their desire to reach at-risk communities…perhaps including Ferguson. I'm working up notes! But shit takes time. And the revisions, and the drafting, and the fall classes.

For now, I'm a white academic whose relative privilege would allow him to monitor Ferguson passively while sweating out those scholarly revisions and drafts. For whom Ferguson is important but for whom (let's face it) Ferguson need not be treated as urgently as some other things in his life. How can I write about Ferguson now?

Like this, apparently. And by letting people know, here and on my Facebook feed, that I am Tweeting about #Ferguson and (more importantly) Retweeting about #Ferguson, and that they should be too. By letting people know that they can become better informed. That other academics are trying to figure out what we owe our learners now and later in response to Ferguson.

If you are a non-Black biblical scholar, then (aside from preaching), how do you write about Ferguson?

Connected Courses

Talk about just-in-time learning. One day, I begin to fumble through creation of a "connected course" for 2015. Next day (more or less), my Twitter feed coughs up an invitation to Connected Courses,

a collaborative community of faculty in higher education developing networked, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.

This is gonna be great.

Twitter Chats for "Introduction to the Old Testament"

Something new this year for the online Intro class: weekly Twitter chat.

How It's Done

On Twitter, you normally see the posts of people you follow, in an undifferentiating stream with the latest posts at the top. However, you can also view a Search window, and see all posts that include your search term…including posts from people you do not follow. So if a set of participating users agree to include a shared search term in their posts, then they can use that Search window as a chat forum. By convention, such a search term is proceeded by the hash sign (#), and is called a "hashtag": for example, our hashtag is the hash sign followed by our course number, #11500x. We meet Tuesday evenings 7:00-8:00 pm, CT.

Our Course

This course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," a fully online course with about 20 learners, taught by me at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. The course is completely asynchronous: there is no time at which all learners must participate together in real time. Also, our learning management system (Moodle) does not include a "virtual classroom" module. (It could, but we have not purchased one.) So, a Twitter hashtag chat allows us a space in which to have synchronous engagement with one another.

How It's Going

I am using the one-hour weekly Twitter chats to engage "big ideas" or "essential questions" that are foundational to the tasks they are accomplishing in the course; for example, "What is 'academic biblical studies'?"; "Academic biblical studies as public work"; "Biblical literature as narrative art"; and so on. Participation is voluntary, and has ranged from 10-14 learners (of my 20) to a scant 2.

Since Twitter is a public forum, our followers from outside of our class have discovered our chat and joined us. This includes my colleagues who teach biblical studies elsewhere (some known personally to me, but not all), former students, and other interested outsiders.

Each week, I have assembled a list of prompts, to keep things going or to get things back on track if necessary. I have not had to use them often, but I feel more comfortable having them ready to hand. Some "template" tweets are a good idea to keep handy though: reminding learners to use the course hashtag, announcing the chat and its topic, inviting lurkers to join in, etc.

Nearly all of my learners are brand new to Twitter. In every class I teach, whether online or face-to-face, I like to incorporate an activity that will introduce most of the learners to a new digital accomplishment of some sort. The idea is not that they should all like Twitter, but that they should have regular, guided experiences of braving new digital tasks.

Have you ever used Twitter chats as a teacher or as a learner? Are there other digital "new frontiers" that are part of your course work this year?

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[Twitter Chats for Introduction to Old Testament was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/27. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You

A novel and exciting business model seems to keep coming up a lot lately, one that educators using social media might keep an eye on. It's so "out there" that it might as well be fantasy or science fiction. In fact, here, I'll draw on an episode of the TV show Angel (spin-off from the better-known Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for an example; the scene is a classic ransom swap:

Italian Demon: "You give me the money, I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare at him blankly.)
Italian Demon: "You give me the money…I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare blankly.)
Italian Demon: "Money, head. Money, head."

What we expect, of course, is that the Italian Demon will make the head freely available to the protagonists, while accepting advertising revenue on the side. Naturally, the Italian Demon would then be free to negotiate with his advertisers concerning how the head might be festooned with banner ads; or whether Angel and Spike might be invited to choose their advertising experience before accepting the head (and their personal preferences sold as data to marketers). Since Angel and Spike are themselves paying nothing for the head, they are comfortably excluded from all decision-making concerning the transaction, and if they don't like the terms, they'll have plenty of friends to admonish them not to complain about free stuff.

But here, instead, Angel and Spike are paying directly for the head. By spending their own money, they become partners in the transaction, rather than passive recipients of whatever the Italian Demon and his actual partners (his advertisers) choose to deliver. (In fact, Angel and Spike will use this agency to decide to fight the Italian Demon instead of pay him, and the Italian Demon will give them a bomb on a short fuse instead of the head. But anyway.)

It's a powerful idea. Earlier this year, I moved this site from Wordpress.com to Squarespace. I did this for a handful of reasons, but one of them is that, since I pay for the service, I get 24/7 living-person customer support. ("You give me the money, I give you the head.")

I wrote last week about some troubling developments at Twitter. As most of us know, Twitter's partners are not its users, but its advertisers: as Jason Lefkowitz has said (quoting Dave Winer), users aren't even riding in the backseat, they're locked in the trunk. Most users won't care much as "promoted Tweets" by BP and KFC take over their feeds, and as Twitter rubs out 3rd-party Twitter applications in order to provide users with a "consistent (i.e., Twitter-controlled) user experience." But it won't just be nerdy app developers that lose out: educators, for example, will likely lose the ability to use Twitter in ways that they choose (like with Storify), if their pedagogical choices don't match up with Twitter's (potentially ever-changing) "rules of the road."

A group of app developers have gone off and created a Twitter alternative, "app dot net." Users pay (currently $50/year) to keep the service working and growing, and so the proprieter's business is with the users, rather than with advertisers. Whereas Twitter is chopping off the development of 3rd-party applications, AppDotNet is largely inhabited by such developers. And here's my point: if as an educator, I want to see a certain kind of user-experience for my learners, then in principle, I can create the app I want or contract with a developer to create it for me.

"You give me the money, I give you the head." It's a powerful idea.

I do love getting free and cheap stuff on the web. I willingly sit through commercials on Hulu. I grudgingly hand over my personal consumer habits to Google. It's one way to do things. But it's not the only way. And for educators who have a stake in taking ownership of the "user experience" and, and in multiplying the possibilities for the learner's ability to experience and manipulate of web content, riding locked in the trunk is not always going to be the best way.

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[Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/20. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else

Twitter has published the coming changes to how it allows applications (programs) to use its service, and these changes spell debilitating problems for educators who use Twitter.

Teachers on Twitter overwhelmingly favor some form of "active learning" or constructivist pedagogy: whether in face-to-face or online courses, the idea is that students learn by doing, making, building (often collaboratively). As part of a typical learning cycle, the learner is exposed to knowledge or information or has an experience facilitated by the course designer, and then goes on to make something in response. By working (often with others) to create something (a paper, a debate, a presentation, a tool), the learner makes original connections between data points and thereby constructs new meanings for herself. The result is a perception-changing experience of the subject matter. Make sense? Making a thing > making meaning.

Twitter's changes will make it impossible for many educators on Twitter to facilitate the kinds of activities that accomplish this. For one depressing example, take Storify. Educators use the dickens out of Storify, for good reason. After a student has had some instructor-facilitated, varied experience mediated through (say) Twitter, blog posts, news articles, Facebook, and so on, she can use Storify to make meaning of that experience, and to create a digital narrative of that experience for others. But look at Twitter's "rule 5a" for Time lines:

Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.

As far as I can see, this is a bullet in the head for the use of Storify with Twitter.

The "big picture" of Twitter's changes to its API can be seen in the quadrant at the bottom of the announcement…or even better, in Dan Wineman's improvement to the graphic. As I tweeted before, the graphic amounts to this:

• business engagement, business analytics, consumer analytics = GOOD.
• consumer engagement = BAD.

In Rene Ritchie's words, "Twitter wants to marginalize apps used by me, and maximize apps that would use me and my data."

Welcome to the Facebook-ization of Twitter, the perhaps inevitable result in services that are free to consumers and depend on leveraging their attention to advertisements. In a later post: "Welcome to App-dot-net."

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[Twitter to Learners and Teachers: Run Along and Play...Somewhere Else was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/17. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Literary Allusion in the Bible (Book of Daniel): SBL/AAR 2012

One of my two proposals to SBL/AAR 2012 has been accepted, with the other still unreported. "SBL/AAR" is the annual meeting of two societies, the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.

I will be presenting in the Book of Daniel consultation on "Allusion to Isaiah in Daniel 7-12, in Light of 35 Years of Allusion Criticism." The pitch is to look at the methodological disarray that characterizes the study of literary allusion in the Bible, and demonstrate how a commitment to greater clarity yields better readings and opportunity for more productive exchanges between scholars.

I see that Chris Jones has reawakened the Twitter hashtag #SBLAAR for reporting acceptances. What will you be doing in Chicago this November at SBL/AAR? And is anyone else still waiting for word on any of your proposals?

THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend (Picking My Feet Edition)

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?

I'm on my way this morning to THATCamp Pedagogy (ProfHacker post), an unconference on teaching and learning as an aspect of digital humanities (THATCamp home). The unconference is in Poughkeepsie NY, and is sponsored by Vassar College.

Besides the "unconference" sessions, there are planned "boot camps" on:

• integrating digital projects into undergraduate courses;


• teaching with Omeka;


• the undergraduate's voice in digital humanities;


• "So Long, Lecture."

I will plan to live-Tweet as opportunity allows. On Twitter, you can follow me for the weekend at @anummabrooke to see my Tweets alone, or follow the hashtag #THATCampedagogy (note the single "p") to follow all Tweets on the unconference.

[Addendum: the hashtags actually used at the unconference have been #THATCamp and #pdgy]

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie? (Not Safe For Work!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5wCpR8Cg4&feature=youtu.be#t=00m30s [Update: cut from French Connection since blocked on copyright grounds]

[THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/10/14. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation

“‘To Those Far and Near’: the Case for Community at a Distance.”

The Background:

A Community of Scholarship, Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Episode CXXVIII of the Endless Thread, Pharyngula.

Losers of Friday Night on Their Computers, Twitter search. [link fixed]

SBL Annual Conference 2010 (#sbl10), Twitter search. [link fixed]

Intro to OT Online Group Paper (concluding summary), Wetpaint.

Dissecting Community: Example from Sociology:

Community, Infed (Informal Education).

The Project:

Bible and Teaching Blogs via feeds, NetVibes.

Collaborative Wiki on the Hendel Affair, Wetpaint.

[Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/11/22. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Open Access Intro to OT

This post concerns my ideas for a particular kind of open-access Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

I recently floated a Tweet (and Facebook status update) that asked around about any open-access Introduction to the Old Testament. I have an idea for such a project, and wanted to see if anything was already out there (knowing pretty well that there is not).

Akma proved (as I knew he would) to be an eager conversation partner, and his responsive post has generated some discussion. I follow up there with some remarks about what I have in mind.

What I plan to try for is an Introduction to the OT that:

• is freely available online;


• is historical- and literary-critical in focus (as is a Coogan or a Collins, say; in other words, not a "theological introduction" narrowly reflecting the concerns of faith communities or other readerly social contexts);


• is authored by a socially diverse body of contributors.

With the "open source" aspect, I mean to respond to a clear need. I would like my own students to have a freely-available, critical Introduction. (I'd actually like them to have several, as well as several open-access Hebrew and Greek grammars, and so on.)

With the authorship and content that I have in mind, I mean to address a situation in the field. During the time that historical criticism was held to be in decline, traditional historical-literary introductions continued to be ceded to the white male authors, while women and people of color wrote works intended to supplement such introductions. Now, though, the recognition of the biblical authors as among the "Others" to whom we try to listen earnestly has prompted some rehabilitation of the historical-critical approaches. It is well past time to have "traditional" historical-literary-critical Introductions to OT that reflect genuine diversity of authorship. (What holds together such an Intro would be a shared commitment to grounding one's historical-literary claims in publicly-shared evidence and lines of reasoning; what makes it diverse would be the unpredictable range of possible perceptions and assessments regarding that evidence.)

Akma had the excellent idea that such an Intro could be "modular": after the initial publication, if somebody wanted to offer a supplemental chapter, zie could do so as long as the controlling body agreed that the supplemental work fit the scope and formatting of the project.

I will be writing up an outline delimiting the methods, outline, and scope of the project, and will also be having discussions with possible contributors. I am at a very early stage on this, so you will have to stay tuned a while to hear more about what takes shape.

Reading and Tweeting

Lisa Halverson (Open High School of Utah) is reading Lord of the Flies with her students, and they are Tweeting as they read using the hash tag #lotf. (Apparently another group recently began using the same tag for “Land of the Free,” but you’ll find a solid group of Lord-of-the-Flies material if you scroll down a bit.)

Many Twitter users have observed that, on balance, Twitter is shaking down to be more about information-distribution than about building communities. However, this is a continuum, not a binary: users do experience the creation and especially the maintenance of communities on Twitter. It seems to me that this might be especially true for reading groups.

A Twitter hash tag search is easily saved as an RSS feed and can be incorporated into a class’s web site and consulted whenever the reader likes. Feeling isolated in your reading? Want some inspiration from your co-readers? Check the feed. Contribute to it. Build up your reading community.

My principle shared reading project right now is reading Context of Scripture in a year, mainly with Joseph. But I am also reading The Story with members of my congregation. And of course, I am frequently reading biblical texts along with my students.

This application of Web 2.0 is almost ridiculously easy, and so is readily introduced to the non-web-savvy: sign up with Twitter, learn to use a hash tag. Have you ever Tweeted as part of a reading group? Can you imagine doing so?

[Reading and Tweeting was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/09. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

“But What is Twitter (or Whatever) For?”

I don't seem to be following anyone who uses Twitter to alert me to their choice of breakfast cereal.

Well, one guy, one time. But he tried to make a persuasive case for its relevance, and he included an acknowledgment that he was embodying a cliché. All in 140 characters or less, mind you. Mostly, the people I follow are tearing off tweets on biblical studies, on Bible software, on trends in higher education or in the social web, on typography, on events in Uptown Evanston Illinois, on languages and linguistics, and on web shows in which Joss Whedon is involved.

I bring this up because whenever somebody raises the question of What Twitter Is For, we get the obligatory assertion that Twitter Is For Telling People What You’re Eating. (Or that Other Thing. You know.)

Here, slightly edited and reformatted, is a comment I made ’way long ago over at Bryan’s:

If Twitter has taught us anything (a premise I know some would question), it is:

1. First make something possible (“Hey look, Twitter.”).


2. Then we’ll see what sort of nonsense people do with that thing (“Hey look, I’m sitting on the john I’m eating breakfast cereal”).


3. Then we’ll see what creative people really do with it once they get going! (“Hey look, I've been detained without charge.” “Hey look, a secret earthquake in China.” “…a revolution in Iran.” “…a TED talk relating unexpectedly to my field of study.”)."

My point is that even Twitter’s creators didn’t know what Twitter is for. Rather, that has been (and continues to be) decided by each user, in her own decisions about use if she decides to dink around with the thing.

(If you do decide to see what anyone in education is doing with Twitter, there is some stuff to see once you look.)

Social Learning Tools: Bringing it Together on NetVibes

My last two posts showed how students’ course-related blogging can be gathered and shared by Yahoo Pipes, and how their course-related social bookmarking can be gathered and shared by Diigo. Today, I conclude by showing how these and other online student works can be “fed” to a central location using NetVibes.

NetVibes is an aggregating page, as is Google Reader or Bloglines. NetVibes allows the user to create public pages (visible to anyone) as well as private pages (visible only to the user). Within a page, the user may create multiple tabs to organize her feeds. Michael Wesch, who teaches anthropology at KSU, has an active NetVibes public page.() Here is the “Welcome” tab of my own public page in progress.

For a given course, I create one or more tabs: here is the tab for my course IPS-417. Remember the Yahoo Pipe that I talked about a few days back, the one that gathers course-related blogs entries from all of the students’ different blogs? With NetVibes, I have created a widget that shows the results of that Yahoo Pipe: you can see it in the upper left of my IPS-417 course tab (it’s named, “Blogging”). And remember that the students will all belong to a Diigo group that shares its course-related bookmarks with one another? I also have a NetVibes widget showing those Diigo bookmarks: it’s in the lower left of that IPS-417 course tab.

Since this is all done simply by gathering RSS feeds, it is easy to add other useful feeds to a NetVibes course tab. So, that IPS-417 tab that we’re looking at also has feeds from Twitter and from the course WetPaint Wiki. On Twitter, I will encourage students to use the hashtag #ips417 for their course-related tweets; using RSS, my NetVibes widget gathers those tweets (and only those tweets) into a single feed. Similarly, any changes made to our course wiki are “fed” to a widget in our NetVibes tab. This not only helps the students keep abreast of changes, it also helps me easily track which students are contributing and how much.

It’s all funneling: taking the things our students are doing all over the web, and directing them where they can be shared and assessed in one place. As Wesch has said, we are training “the machine” to bring the information to us. For me, this means that I am free to dissolve (or at least make permeable) the “firmaments” that enclose our CMS (Blackboard) and our classroom itself, allowing student collaboration to find a place in the overlapping spheres of public discourse that they are already using (or at least could be using).

Are your students (or you yourself, as a student) already collaborating online? Do you have other strategies for encouraging and managing online collaboration? What do you think of the possibilities, for bad or for good?

Notes:
I encourage educators and students alike to view Wesch’s hour-long address, “A Portal to Media Literacy.”

Bloggers at SBL, and Tweetup Tweeting

Daniel and Tonya had the terrific idea of compiling a list of bloggers presenting at the annual meeting of the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). The meeting is always the weekend before Thanksgiving (U.S.), and takes place this year in New Orleans. Thanks for this resource!

Speaking of SBL, there have been occasional rumblings of an SBL Tweet-up for Tweeple who, well, go to SBL. To my knowledge, it is still at the “let’s keep in touch on this” stage. I recently revived the hashtag #SBLTweetup, so keep an eye on that tag and we’ll see what develops. Me, I think the most logical venue is Jim West’s hotel room. :^) (Jim, I’m probably with you on Twitter in the pews, if only because thumb-typing while crossing yourself sounds ludicrous and even dangerous.)

[Later: I should add that, confusingly, the initialism “SBL” is already used on Twitter for “Spam Block List” and some other things that I don’t know what they are.]

It’s never too soon to get amped about a long weekend of…well, why reveal our society’s hidden mysteries? Come to New Orleans and see what there is to get amped about.

Linky Linky: Post-Carnival Edition

So you have consumed everything you can handle at the April Biblical Studies Carnival, and are hungry for more linkage (proven effective for End-of-term Grading Procrastination, or “EGP”)?

First, languages and higher education:

• Do you have a passing interest in Proto-Indo-European? See why some people want to revive this reconstructed language into living use. (The post includes some words on wholly constructed languages like Esperanto and on revived languages like Hebrew.)


• Many educators, including me, are interested in what happens when you read this article and substitute “higher education” for “newspaper publishing,” “universities” for “printing presses,” and so on. What will preserve educational institutions? The provocative answer: “Nothing will. But everything might.”

Then, the academic social web:

• There are some…places…where you can search Twitter profiles to find people in your field (like “Hebrew Bible” or “Bible AND instructor”) or in your geographic area (like “Evanston, IL”).


• The academic networking site Academia dot edu continues to come together. Have a look if you haven’t already. You can also follow Academia dot edu on Twitter.

And speaking of collegiality:

• The Biblioblog April Top 50 post is out, and the main post lists many additions whom you may not already know. Call it “Biblical Studies Carnival 41.5” and have fun.

Distance Learning Strategies in the Brick-and-Mortar Classroom (SBL 2009)

My paper proposal has been accepted for the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies section of the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The working title is, “The Contribution of Distance Learning Strategies to Brick-and-Mortar Learning.”

This fall, I am again thoroughly revising my courses “Introduction to Old Testament” and “Elementary Hebrew I.” In this revision, I plan to focus on building the classes as online collaborating communities that happen also to meet for four hours each week in a physical classroom. This presentation at SBL will report on the use in the brick-and-mortar classroom of strategies still typically associated with distance learning: podcast lectures, course wikis, blogging, the use of Web resources for research and as grist for critical thinking, online groups, and so on. I am also interested in the use of existing social community platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo, as alternatives to the more restrictive possibilities folded into Course Management Systems like BlackBoard.

As my plans come together, I will blog on the separate aspects of this plan, with a focus on how they might contribute to desired learning outcomes like critical thinking, taking ownership of learning, forming essential questions, collegiality, and the like.

In what ways do you think that the tools of distance learning offer unique possibilities for learning, beyond what has been possible in the physical classroom? How do you imagine putting such strategies to work in your brick-and-mortar or online classrooms?