“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.)

Professors and Students, “Friending” Together: Mass Hysteria!

When I asked earlier for comments about students and profs “friending” on Facebook, I rather expected (on the basis of the usual media handling of the matter) something like this:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr. Raymond Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddmore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!

But the comments to my inquiry, even among those with reservations about student/prof friending, were persistently reasonable. I shouldn’t be too surprised: when teachers in higher education* discuss social media, the matter is one that comes up regularly, and so most of us have had time to think on it and hear from others.

As  see it, there are excellent reasons for students and profs to Facebook-friend…and also excellent reasons not to. It depends on how one answers some questions that don’t seem to come up regularly in the sound-bite-sized media scare pieces.

What is Facebook for? You’ll often hear some pretty definitive pronouncements about what Facebook (or other tools like Twitter) is for. Facebook is for sharing pictures of your cat. Facebook is for dorking around with a quiz while dozing through class. Facebook is for reconnecting with old friends. Facebook is for self-promotion. I’m going to make a suggestion here: It’s too early to say what Facebook is for. Within the bounds of its terms of service, Facebook is for whatever a user says it’s for. That said, it’s a really good idea for each user to clarify in her own mind what Facebooks is for, for her. (All of this goes double for Twitter, and I’ll say more in a later post.)

For some professors, Facebook is a place to relax with peers and with old friends (power-equal relationships). Let their hair down. Maybe engage in a little harmless griping. It’s a combination faculty lounge, gym, pub, and backyard cookout. Such a prof would likely be wise not to “friend” students (at least, not without a pretty sophisticated and confident tailoring of her privacy settings).

For other professors, Facebook is an extension of their professional persona. To the extent they have non-professional contacts, those friends can be counted on to be “rated PG” when writing or commenting on their walls or tagging them in photos. These profs may welcome student “friend” requests as an opportunity to open an additional line of communication with students.

Of course, everything is a trade-off: a prof whose FB friends include students doesn’t get to use FB as an extension of the faculty lounge, doesn’t get to rip off cuss words, and should probably be circumspect about her political pronouncements (as she should in the classroom, since she has the power to intimidate students whose convictions differ from hers). So, OMG! On Facebook, as everywhere else, it turns out you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

What is a “friend” on Facebook? I would be the first to agree that “I am not friends with my students, and they are not friends with me.” When I say that, though, I use the word “friend” in its everyday sense: someone with whom I have a power-equal relationship of mutual support and confidence. In that sense, friendship between faculty and students is not possible. But what is a Facebook “friend”? This simply brings us back to the question of what Facebook is for. For some, Facebook is a place where “friend” means the same thing as in the rest of my life. But for the most part, users are still determining what a “friend” is on Facebook.

For profs who have student friends on Facebook, “friend” is going to have a pretty circumscribed meaning in that context. Also, with the use of Friends Lists, the prof (and student) can micro-edit their privacy settings quite a bit. For example, a prof might not allow students to tag photographs of her; a student might not allow profs to see photos of her at all. Facebook “friends” don’t have to share everything, not even everything that they have/do on Facebook.

Some users rightly point out the issue of power-imbalance: with them, I will agree that, in general, a prof probably should not offer friendship to students. When students offer friendship requests to their professors, we should respect the fact that they also are making themselves vulnerable: they may, through no fault of their own, suffer a bit of embarrassment down the line (another friend may post something inappropriate on their wall, for example). A student who “friends” a teacher is trusting that teacher not to capitalize on such an incident. For this reason, I’m inclined to “hold off” on accepting friendships from brand-new students: they may leave school, they may drop my classes, they may decide I’m a jerk. By contrast, if I find myself in an awkward, too-soon-FB-friendship with a new dad at my kid’s school (for example), at least there isn’t that awful power-imbalance making the situation worse.

I look forward to looking at the issue in a year or so, and seeing what the trends are then: what issues will continue to vex? Which ones will seem quaint or be eliminated by new options?

* My experience is with adult students. The question of how high school or middle school teachers might ethically use social media with their minor students is another kettle of fish.

Rosetta Stone Arabic

I finally broke down and purchased the Arabic language module from Rosetta Stone. Anybody out there already have experience with Rosetta Stone language software?

I had long considered taking Arabic in a structured way from an accredited institution, whether brick-and-mortar or at a distance, but two factors have so far conspired against me:

• My own teaching schedule is very tight, and almost always conflicts with whatever is available.


• Institutions of learning may as well throw up electrified fences with ground-glass ramparts, if they refuse to keep contact information up to date. Nobody can tell whether our web sites were published last week, last year, or ten years ago, and when you send emails to the contact people on our web sites, those emails drop into our Big Black Hole. (I don’t mean my own school when I say “our” and “we”: I’m talking about a culture-spanning problem.) No schools want my tuition money badly enough to keep their contact information up to date or answer an email, so Rosetta Stone gets it. And I get a six-month money-back return policy, in the bargain.

Let me know if you’ve had any experience with Rosetta Stone. It will be a few days before I dig in, but monkeying around with the thing at the store was more fun than I’ve had with language since I puzzled out my first liver omen.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t work for Rosetta Stone, and they haven’t given me anything in exchange for writing about their software. They did throw in an extra headset-and-mike, which was pretty cool.)

A Post for My Favorite Class

[Later: Don’t mind me: just showing WordPress to my students. Nothing to see here.]

This is my first entry for my class. I hope I'm doing it right.

The class is about the literature of ancient Israel.

Moltmann! Live on Web! Today!

It’s all true. Jürgen Moltmann is delivering our convocation address this morning, and this afternoon he will have a round-table discussion with our theology faculty members Anne Joh, Nancy Bedford, and Stephen Ray.

Both events are to be webcast at the URL http://www.garrett.edu/convocation. Viewers will require Apple’s QuickTime Player (Mac/Windows).

Convocation is at 11:00 a.m. Central Time: tune in as early as 10:00 a.m.

Round-table discussion is at 1:30 p.m. Central Time: tune in as early as 1:00 p.m.

Why Do You Think We Offer Them Insurance?

You don’t need me to tell you that being a student is a chancy business. As Ph.D. comics notes, there are the perils of summer.

Then, there are the special hazards of fall. Like, your Hebrew teacher singing.

Hammotzi

Stay safe out there, everyone.

Bible Dudes? Bible Dudes.

More proof, if any were needed, that I need new minions: how have I not been made aware of these guys?

Hat tip to Bryan at Hevel.

Comments, Please: Teaching the Psalms

I’m off at faculty retreat for a couple of days, and will be keeping my posts short. So, comments, please: What would you try to emphasize when teaching the Psalms? If there were just a few points that your students or audience will walk away with, what do you want those to be?

Comments, Please: Professors and Students as Facebook Friends

I’m working up a post on students and professors being friends on Facebook, but in truth, it’s wandering, and I’m just too darned tired to shape it up this morning for publishing.

So help me out in the meantime: what are your convictions about Facebook “friending” between students and professors? I’m talking about adult students here: higher education. As a bit of a preview: I suggest that one’s answer to this questions depends on what you think Facebook is for, and that the answer to that question is user-specific.

Comments on students and profs being Facebook “friends”?

Why We Teach: Mammoth Teeth and “Over-Education”

Have you heard the one yet about the groundskeeper and the mammoth tooth? (h/t to P.Z. Myers.) A terrific example of the small, unpredictable wonders made possible when learners are encouraged to view the world with an eye that is curious, well-informed, and trained in critical habits.

Responding to the possible counter-moral that good education mightn’t lead to prestigious employment, one commenter at Pharyngula objects that high school science isn’t simply for producing a generation of professional scientists. It is, rather, primarily:

…intended to try and make students better equi[p]ped to solve problems by thinking through them systematically (and to give them some useful/interesting facts in the process). In this case it seems to have worked.

In other words, this “over-educated” groundskeeper isn’t only spotting mammoth teeth, he is presumably turning his alert attention and high-school-trained critical faculties to the whole range of his personal, political, professional, recreation, perhaps spiritual, life. At least, on a good day.

I don’t make my seminary classes intentionally unpleasant, but I do make them as rigorous as possible, because a part of my dream for the church is that, with each graduating class, we turn out a platoon of “over-educated” leaders who are, effectively, little time bombs of alert attention and critical faculties, waiting to be tripped off by whatever mammoth teeth come their way on a good day.

How about you? Do you find yourself using your education for more than filling your job description? How so? If you teach, do you educate or “over educate”? Do you know any other mammoth-teeth stories?

All the Great Old Testament Stories in Ten Minutes?

How much would you love to see it done, as a video response to All the Great Operas in Ten Minutes?



I really love Kim Thompson’s video: it’s casual, it moves rapidly, it sparks a desire to see the full-length operas, and it challenges the misconception that opera is dull. I love the chiming bell after each segment when the selling points for a given opera are shown: prostitution! brawls! stabbing of animals!

If it were me, I would choose well-known Hebrew Bible narratives, but take the opportunity to show that they are not what you think. For example, that in the “walls of Jericho” story, the Canaanites do not have a misplaced faith in their mighty wall: they all know that they’re dead meat, having utter faith in the ability of the God of Israel to bulldoze their city. Or how patient, silent Job spends hundreds of words describing God as an amoral monster. Or how Eve never tricks Adam into eating anything.

Can you imagine getting Job down to one minute or less? And imagine the paper cutouts!

Another approach would be to narrow the scope in some way: All the Great Women of the Hebrew Bible in Ten Minutes, perhaps. Or, the Deuteronomistic History in Ten Minutes.

I can easily imagine a homework or extra credit assignment here. What would you do—or ask your students to do—with All the Great Old Testament Stories in Ten Minutes?

Denial’s End

Okay, I’ll come out and say it: the academic year is on us. Charles’ excitement about things (“…I have the privilege of teaching some amazing classes”) seems to me an opportunity for all of us to finally let go of our denial and talk optimistically about the elephant in the room. (“Not everybody gets to have one, you know. Think of all the fertilizer for the garden!”)

This term, as a sabbatical replacement, I get to serve as director of one of our academic programs: with advisees, and everything! What interests me most about it so far is, that it draws me into closer contact not only with the students but also with the other faculty. The life of us “contingent faculty” types sits on a spectrum from isolation to collaboration, and tends to be weighted toward the former. The ability to spend more time on campus means, for me, the opportunity to become better acquainted with peers whom I already vaguely know to be some interesting people.

Courses:

• Introduction to the Old Testament: many changes this term, mostly toward online collaboration; also, I am offering my lectures only as podcasts to be viewed at home, not during sessions.


• Elementary Hebrew I: continuing with an initial ten hours of purely oral/aural exercises (no aleph-bet). I have ideas for something that seems fun to me, but I’m not talking about it yet in case I don’t quite manage it.


• Colloquium for Masters of Theological Studies: where new MTS students get oriented to the degree program and veterans write and present their thesis proposals. This is a new one for me.


• Literature of Ancient Israel: this is actually at another school, Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Pastoral Studies. It is geared towards laypeople, and meets only once a week at night. Last year’s students were a delight.

The truth will set you free: shake off your denial and come clean. If you are teaching, then what are you teaching? If you are a student, what are you taking? In either case, what are you (or what could you be) excited about in this coming academic term?

“Hebrew is a Hard Language” (YouTube)

Watching the whole video (it’s only 77 seconds), and reading the comments, will help to clarify what’s happening:



What makes it funny? What parts of the dialogue can you figure out?

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.”

Social Learning Tools: Bookmarking with Diigo

Last post, I showed how Yahoo Pipes will (among other things) collect posts from different bloggers when the titles or tags of their posts share a given keyword. So, students can have their own blogs, on which they write whatever they want—but when they write course-related posts, these all can be aggregated together and sorted in real time by a Yahoo Pipe.

This post, I look at how Diigo does the same thing with the students’ bookmarking of web sites and articles.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of “bookmarking” a web site or article. Normally, users have used their browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) to bookmark web pages; you can probably see the menu item “Bookmarks” at the top of your window right now. The problem is, you may use multiple computers, or change browsers, such that your bookmarks become unavailable you. And in any case, you cannot easily share them with others. Also, though browser bookmarks can be sorted and “tagged” with categories, it’s not really easily done.

Some readers may be using Delicious, an early social bookmarking site and still a great choice. With Delicious, your bookmarks are on a web site, available to you (and anybody else) wherever you are. You have a chance to tag bookmarks with categories when you make them. Your bookmarks are public: other users might, for instance, do a search for a given tag, like “Bible”; if you have bookmarks using that tag, they will appear in that user’s search. You can even have  “network” of friends whose bookmarks you watch.

Diigo, another social bookmarking site, takes the “social” in “social bookmarking” at least one step further. It does all the things that Delicious does, but Diigo also allows you to join with other users into groups. So, for example, I have created groups for each of my introductory courses on Hebrew Bible.

Let’s imagine that you are a student in the course. I have invited you to join our Diigo group, and you respond by opening a Diigo account and joining the group. Now, you begin bookmarking and tagging web pages that are of interest to you. Many of these will not be related to our course: sports columns, videos of kittens falling asleep, favorite political blogs. But often, you will come upon course-related web pages that you want to share with the class. Creating (and tagging) a bookmark for that web page to your Diigo account, you will also save it to our group. Then, every other student will see the bookmark when they look at our group’s bookmarks.

Tagging is a part of how we members of a Diigo group make our bookmarks useful to one another. By tagging our bookmarks with categories (like “humor”; “politics”; “archaeology” “LGBT”; or whatever), we establish a cloud of tags that describe the kinds of topics and concerns that animate our shared bookmarks. One of us might, or example, search for all of our group’s bookmarks tagged with the category “LGBT” to find all bookmarked pages that concern the Hebrew Bible and lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transexuals.

We saw before that Yahoo Pipes allows students to have their own blogs, with posts on own varied interests; when they do post course-related content, a well-made Yahoo Pipe will gather and sort those posts into a single place. Diigo, then, does the same thing with bookmarks. Students have their own Diigo accounts, where they can bookmark whatever they like to their hearts’ content. But when they create a bookmark that is related to our course, they simply save it to our group, and everyone in the course benefits.

To see an example of Diigo groups in education, see the bookmarks of Michael Wesch’s KSU course in Cultural Ethnography.

Are you already using social bookmarking in your teaching and learning? What other applications do you see? Do you think social bookmarking might find a place in other venues of adult education?

Social Learning Tools: Yahoo Pipes

It is an inverse proportion: as online collaboration becomes more authentic, it becomes less manageable. If I restrict my students’ collaboration to the “shell” of the Course Management System (for us, Blackboard), then we can all keep track of our activity, but that activity feels constricted, artifical, and forced. But if I were to encourage students to collaborate on our subject matter using tools outside the CMS—third party blog sites, Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, Wetpaint wikis—then everything is going on all over the place, and how in the world can we keep track of each other for collaboration and assessment?

Today, I look at Yahoo Pipes. In a later post, I’ll tack on public aggregation sites like NetVibes.

Yahoo Pipes’ slogan is, “Rewire the Web,” and that is exactly what it allows you to do. I’ll show an example that I think my readers can appreciate, then show its application to my fall courses. (I discovered Yahoo Pipes while persuing Michael Wesch’s website for his Digital Ethnography course).

Many bibliobloggers have been posting sporadically on the upcoming annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I want to be sure that I don’t miss any posts on SBL. So, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that:

• collects RSS feeds from each of the blogs in my blogroll;


• filters the posts, permitting only those that use the text string “SBL” in the title or as a category/tag;


• sorts the results, listing them with the most recent on top;


• makes that list available. Here, you can see the results of my “SBL Blogging” pipe. (Tip: click the tab “list” instead of “image” for a clearer presentation; I don’t know why the less visually clear “image” mode is the default.)

What about application to my classroom?

Let’s imagine that instead of a couple of dozen bibliobloggers, I have forty M.Div students blogging about everything under the sun. Instead of collecting posts about SBL, I want to collect only their posts that pertain to our course, “Introduction to Old Testament.” No problem: I simply tell the students that, when they write a post for our course, they should tag it with our course number (“gets11500”). I will have created a Yahoo Pipe that collects their RSS feeds and selects for posts tagged with that tag. Presto: all my students’ posts pertaining to our course are collected in one place for collaboration and assessment.

This is just a fraction of what Yahoo Pipes is capable of, but this one application makes a huge difference to what I can offer my students. By folding their course blogging into the rest of the blogging that they may already be doing, they are folding their thinking about the subject matter into the rest of the thinking they are already doing: such integration and synthesis is among my educational goals for the course.

Notice that you can “clone” a Pipe that interests you, creating a copy that you look at “under the hood,” seeing how it’s built and modifying it as you please.

How might you “rewire the web,” and why?

Comment Thread: What Are You So Excited About?

My wife has a broken wrist, I’m limping around with plantar fasciitis, and my syllabi and rubrics stubbornly refuse to write themselves. So, let’s keep things simple this morning, and have us an open thread: What are you excited about?

Me, I’m very excited about the rubrics I’m putting together for my fall assignments. I think students are going to respond well to the clarity of expectations you get with a good page of rubrics. More detail on that in a later post.

What’s got you jazzed this morning? In your research, in your teaching, in your recreational life? Have you had a breakthrough at work lately? Lowered your golf handicap? Taught your daughter to snap her fingers? Finish grading a summer course?

Tell us briefly in the comments: What are you so excited about?

Backwards through the Hebrew Bible

It started as a joke.

Every year, while I take my introductory students through the Torah and the Former Prophets, I find myself saying to my TA, “If only they had already done the Writings. If they had read Job and Ecclesiastes and the Complaint Psalms, they would have such broader expectations about the Bible. They wouldn’t be so prone to expect only a series of flat morality tales with easy closure and platitudinous ‘messages’: ‘Be like Abraham’; ‘Don’t be like Canaanites.’ If only they’d already done the Writings!”

By last year, I wasn’t joking.

So this year, we are doing the Writings first, then Latter Prophets, then Former Prophets, then Torah. This means that we’ll be doing history backwards: they’ll get the post-exilic period (Writings), then the 8th century to the early post-exilic years (Latter Prophets), then the “settlement” through the monarchies with review of exile (Former Prophets), then the pre-“settlement” period with review of the monarchies and exile (Torah).

What advantages do I imagine?

• Beginning with the Writings, they will get to become accustomed to literary criticism without too much intrusion of adjusting to historical inquiry.


• Their first readings will demonstrate that the Bible revels in dissonance and ambiguity, what Brueggemann once called “testimony and counter-testimony.” The obvious ambiguities in the Writings will prepare them for the subtler ambiguities of the more historical-seeming books of the Former Prophets and Torah.


• Working through history backwards might be a nice opportunity: with each period, they’ll already know where things are going. And, each period will raise questions about how it got to be the way it was: learning the post-exilic period will raise questions about the late Judean monarchy and the Babylonian exile; reading the 8th century forward will raise questions about the early Judean monarchy and the northern kingdom of Israel; reading the “settlement” and monarchies will get them prepared for the long journey of the Torah toward Mt. Nebo.


• By the time we get to Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis (with which we usually slap them upside the head in the first week of the term), we will 1) have had time to establish trust between the instructor and the students, and among the students; and 2) already have learned about P and D (which is where Wellhausen himself started anyway, and concerning which there remains the most certainty even now).

Of course, revising the syllabus is quite simply killing me.

What do you think? Ever heard of anyone doing something similar? Any suggestions on how to make the most of such an experiment? Any concerns to raise before the starting gun goes off around Labor Day?

Changing the Rules: Being Religious at Work & Play

This post leads up to a link: this link. But it’s a short lead-up, so go ahead and read me first!

Once, my young son went off to my sister’s for a couple of days and a night. They played some baseball, some tag, some handful of your usual backyard games. When I picked him up, my sister’s children said to me, “Hey, we figured out what the ‘J’ stands for in his name” (J is his middle initial.) I gamely asked, “What does it stand for?”

“Je-changin’ the rules!” they cried, cracking up together.

Every child goes through it, and it’s tempting for everyone. When the game doesn’t seem to be going our way, we want to change the rules in our favor. Eventually, we learn that when we give in and try to change the rules, we aren’t playing tag, or baseball, or much of anything anymore: nothing is getting done except us rehearsing our tired, unchanging, irrelevant apologetics. We are rightly told by others to play ball or go home: everyone else trying to get something done, and done well.

This lesson is good practice, because not every activity with rules is a game. People who are “je-changin’” the rules in the workplace aren’t called “bad sports.” They are called “corner-cutters,” “scammers,” or “perjurers,” the “recently fired.” Depending on the consequences, they may be called “manslaughterers,” or “perpetrators of negligent homicide”: that well-meaning fool with the bewildered look on his face getting dragged off at the end of Law and Order, his wake of surviving victims sobbing helplessly on the edge of the screen.

James McGrath has a good post on the impulse—common among Christian newcomers to religious studies but also considered by some to be found in higher places—to be “je-changin’ the rules” in the workplaces of scientific and historical inquiry. “Christian baseball”? By all means, have a look.

[A little later: Art has a related discussion going on: does “theology” fail to be ethical in a way that “religious studies” succeeds?]

Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies: Suggestions

Among the collaborative projects I’m assigning my introductory students this fall is blogging. (They’ll also participate in a course wiki, and do in-class collaborative work). Blogging will be mandatory, and graded. Besides a rubric for the assignment, I also wish to give them suggestions about academic blogging: what makes blogging appropriate for biblical studies and for an introductory course in Hebrew Bible?

This is my first draft. What suggestions can you offer for improvement?

Suggestions for Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies. There is overlap between these suggestions, and the divisions are somewhat artificial. But, for the student who is still trying to learn to keep her writing within the bounds of “biblical studies,” they offer some guidelines to help stay on track.

• Summary: Summarize some resource: a chapter from the textbook; a lecture or part of a lecture; a hypothesis concerning some topic. A summary should have balance: its proportions should reflect those of its source. A summary should have a neutral point of view: it is not a review or a critique. Reading your summary, the author of the source would agree that you depict her work accurately and in terms she recognizes as her own.


• Integration: Try to integrate some new piece of knowledge with concepts you already feel you control. For example, maybe you’ve just learned about the literary genre “saga,” and you want to integrate it into what you already know about form criticism. Often, you will modify what you already think you know in order to integrate new data.


• Synthesis: There are two or more things that you’ve learned separately, and you are trying to bring them into a single coherent picture. What does X have to do with Y? Or X and Y with Z? What does the Judean “royal theology” have to do with post-exilic messianic expectations, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with apocalyptic? What do the “complaint psalms” have to do with the “dissenting wisdom” of Ecclesiastes, and what (if anything) do the two have to do with hypothetical Israelite scribal schools? This sort of work might be tentative, provisional, even speculative, but it should be clear about its line of reasoning and where its warrants are grounded in concrete evidence.


• Assessment: Here, you assess a piece of work in light of our own norms and methods of critical inquiry as they take shape in our course over the term. Suppose you’ve read an outsider’s blog entry or seen a YouTube video, and that work makes claims about the Bible or about the Bible’s historical context. Would that work pass muster in our class? Why or why not? Could its conclusions be sustained with moderate revisions to its arguments, or is it hopelessly wrong in its factual accuracy or lines of reasoning? (Your assessment should include an element of summary, according to our canons for summary described above.)


• Reflection: Here, you bring some aspect of your recent learning into conversation with your own habitual worldview or ways of talking about things. Treat it very much like “integration” above. Keep a profession tone. Avoid stream of consciousness, spiritual autobiography, and inappropriate self-disclosure. This mode should not dominate your blogging, but in proportion it can resolve tensions, enhance collaboration, and spark fresh ideas for you and others.

O readers: What sorts of additions might you make to these suggestions? What revisions, whether for clarity or otherwise? What sorts of blogging would you like your introductory students to be able to do?