Labels: hypertext, teaching, web
¶ 2:48 PM
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However, I have submitted the article: "The image of the invisible God: (an)iconic knowing, God and gender" and I have made good progress on notes on the poetics of biblical narrative (I am not sure if such textbook-type material really counts though :( and I have an abstract for SBL International (here in Auckland in July), which considering that at the start of the month I had not even a little idea to work on, indeed just a few days ago I was still idea-less, is not bad going. Here it is, though if you want to offer suggestions of criticism (especially constructive criticism) please be quick as the deadline is VERY close ;)
Diagnosing the mortality of metaphors in dead languages: בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל as an example
The term בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל is asserted to be a "dead metaphor", merely a demonym. The term "dead metaphor" is itself a dead metaphor, whose meaning is complex. However, the linguistic study of dead metaphors offers insights into the philosophy of mind and the psychology of language,[1] which have potential benefits for biblical scholarship.
Distinguishing "live" from "dead" metaphor is relatively easy in living languages, one can potentially interrogate native speakers, but correspondingly problematic in "dead languages". As Cohen notes, our language sample in the Hebrew Bible may be untypical, so frequency is perhaps not a good measure of the mortality of a metaphor.[2]
This paper will explore possible approaches understanding the functioning of such language by assessing the metaphorical mortality of the term בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. Is this term simply not a metaphor, rather as a "dead letter" was never alive? Is it, like a dead parrot, beyond resuscitation? Or, can we discern instances where, through interaction with the cotext, the metaphorical import of the term may be being revived by the text, much as I might revive even though "dead" tired?
Biblical uses of בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל will be analysed using Guttenplan's four point ordering of the mortality of metaphorical content.[3] Passages where this (possibly) dead metaphor is used in ways which if it were "live" would create a mixed metaphor, and examples where the metaphor is extended, will offer a means of assessing the liveliness of potentially dead metaphors in a "dead language".
This examination of the biblical term is not comprehensive, or quantitative, rather it seeks, through the use of selected examples, to show how Guttenplan's approach can help towards a more nuanced understanding of the usage of potentially dead metaphors in the Biblical Hebrew repertoire.
[1] Derek Melser, The Act Of Thinking (MIT Press, 2004), 171; Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor (Oxford University Press, 2005), 183.
[2] Mordechai Z. Cohen, Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor: From Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides (BRILL, 2003), 25 n.81.
[3] Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor, 192-3.
Yes, it is true, I confess. The idea for the paper and the work to check that it is viable all happened in the last few days, as a look at the previous post might suggest, almost... I had been thinking along these lines off and on for a while, but it had never become a "research project" till now.
Labels: hebrew, metaphor, research
¶ 4:30 PM
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that:
the phrase bene-yisra’el (’children of Israel’), ... is so conventional elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible that it is essentially a dead metaphorasks an interesting question: how would one prove this assertion?
Much of literary, and therefore biblical scholarship, is unprovable. However, often one can provide a way to disprove it, or to suggest that it might be true. In this case (it seems to me) that looking for usages of the term where the supposed connection with parenting is made explicit offers such disproof or confirmation. If in no, or only very few, case(s) does the author make a connection to parenting in the context, then it is likely to be a dead metaphor, if in many cases there is such a reference it is likely not to be a dead metaphor.
For if authors had a live sense of implied parenting when using the term then surely at least sometimes they would express these parental thoughts in the cotext?
So, I think that the phrase "as numerous as the sands of the sea shore" had essentially died, or at least was seriously indisposed in the biblical period. However, Job resurrects it:
Job 6:2-3 O that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances! 3 For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea; therefore my words have been rash.My gut feeling yet to be tested is that there are very few contexts in which use of the term "children of Israel" does elicit such a parental thought... more later if I have time...
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My gut feeling is that it is not just "the phrase bene-yisra’el (’children of Israel’)" which is a dead metaphor, but almost any phrase in Hebrew using ben "son", singular or plural, in a construct relation. Indeed this is true not just in Hebrew but in many Semitic languages, suggesting that the metaphor died many millennia ago. For ben very often has no "parental thought" but simply refers to a member of a class or an individual with a certain attribute.
For biblical scholars wanting to try Zotero, but too busy to read Scott's article in full (or just wanting the updated version), here is a modified and updated (by me) extract with instructions:
Using Zotero for SBL Manual of StyleVoilà!
(1) Set Zotero's "Preferences/Export/Default Export format" to "Chicago Manual of Style (Full Note with bibliography)". This is how to get full citation information in the footnotes. (See my screencast below.)
(2) Create a new Collection in Zotero's left pane. Call it something like "Used in [DocumentName]" - or if you are me organise by topic.
(3) When you want to cite an item in your database, just use the Word or Open Office tools.
(4) At some point place your cursor where you want the bibliography and click the "Zotero Insert Bibliography" button on the toolbar.
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Whither the OpenOffice Bibliographic project in all this discussion? Has Zotero pretty much sunk that project or does it live on?
Labels: software
¶ 10:51 AM
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Here are two quick and dirty screencasts to demonstrate:
Labels: bibliography, references, teaching, technology, zotero
¶ 4:26 PM
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i use endnote (it comes with the school i attend). do you have any thoughts on the comparison between the two?
By 
Tim Ricchuiti, at
January 22, 2008 5:32 PM
Endnote is brilliant too, ten years ago it was superb, in between it began to slow my computer a lot. The later versions (people tell me) do not have as dire an effect :) However, Zotero is free, lightweight fast and does what I want... If I was writing a thesis again and my institution provided Endnote I'd go with that to get the support.
Where I am we can't afford to provide Endnote, and Zotero is superb. If Endnote has features I need that Zotero does not I do not yet know what they are ;)
By Tim, at
January 22, 2008 5:38 PM
I've tried the Mac OS X integration (with MS Word v.X) and it works quite nicely. The only thing I'd like is some more control over variant styles within a citation (but maybe that's hidden in a preference box somewhere) and a bigger selection of output styles.
Also, do you know anything about "Scholar's Aid". Seems to bill itself as a cheap (or free for the Lite version) alternative to some of the flasher systems. Only for Windows though, and I'm not sure about integration with Word/Open Office.
By Stephen G, at
January 22, 2008 10:50 PM
Clearly very, very cool!! I don't have time to play with Zotero at the moment, so can't compare. Two things I wondered about it:
1. how many different referencing styles does it have available and can you produce your own if it doesn't have one you want (because you are writing for some obscure religious journal)?
2. what happens when you add further references to the same book? Does it manage ibid and short forms of the citation in your footnotes or od you have to do that manually?
If it does both these things, it is probably a very good substitute for Endnote. If not, it is still very impressive for free software.
By Judy Redman, at
January 22, 2008 11:27 PM
American Political Science Association
American Psychological Association
American Sociological Association (Author-Date)
Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date format)
Chicago Manual of Style (Full Note with Bibliography)
Chicago Manual of Style (Note with Bibliography)
Chicago Manual of Style (Note without Bibliography)
Harvard Reference format 1 (Author-Date)
IEEE
Modern Humanities Research Association (Note with Bibliography)
Modern Humanities Research Association (Note without Bibliography)
Modern Language Association
National Library of Medicine
Nature Journal
Though you can't (unless a computer geek) roll your own there is a big user-base and some institutional support, so they seem to add more all the time.
Zoterro handles ibid. and short forms as this example formatted in Chicago (Full note with Bibliography) shows:
1. Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature (New York: BasicBooks, 1992).
2. Robert. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2003), 12.
4. Alter, The World of Biblical Literature, 41.
5. Ibid., 12.
6. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.
By Tim, at
January 23, 2008 6:59 AM
Stephen,
Sorry I have not tried Scholar's Aid, I used to love Endnote, then it "went MS" got feature bloat, and tried to do everything. While poaching my eggs for breakfast (at lunchtime) it slowed what I was actually trying to do to a crawl. So I dumped it and went manual for several years. Now I'm getting hooked on Zotero. I do hope it does not catch MS ;)
By Tim, at
January 23, 2008 7:03 AM
Tim, I'm one of the few people I know who hasn't had any serious dramas with EndNote (though I've only used the older versions 5, 6 & 7 on the Mac). I do know there have been more tales of grief with the later versions though.
The few trivial problems I've had have been the odd error in a citation style, the lack of a style (e.g. McIntosh (for Australian theological publicaitons) or an SBL variant), or a missing type of reference (e.g. book review in old EndNote). Most of which I've worked around.
On thing I loved about EndNote was the ability to connect to the various OPACs around the world with little or no hassle. No need to deal with different OPAC interfaces. Great for chasing down references when publication details vary by country. Zotero can do similar things, but it feels a little more clunky and I personally don't like working in web browsers (which includes webmail and similar - and why I use Ecto to blog with).
By Stephen G, at
January 23, 2008 10:48 AM
It sounds as though there are some things that Zotero can't do that Endnote can. It has literally hundreds of styles available for even reasonably obscure publications (although not Le Museon) and you can usually modify an existing style that is similar if you can't find "your" style. Having said that, there are still some things that need hand-editing in Endnote when you are writing for some of the older theological journals that haven't changed their styles since the mid 1930s!! And the Endnote SBL style isn't quite right.
A word of caution about WorldCat citations - they come from library catalogues and are not always 100% correct because they are put in by human beings. :-) You should always check that the citation you have downloaded is exactly the same as the book you are using. And as Stephen says, beware of the fact that there are British and US editions of some books published in the same year which are sufficiently different to cause problems if you reference the wrong edition.
If it looks blurred, blame Flash compression, if it looks jerky I had no tripod (or whatever) and was using full optical (10x) AND digital (3x more giving 30x) zoom!
BTW over the next few weeks posting to this blog will stop, and probably hardly resume till mid-April, so please do subscribe to Teaching OT in faraway places we know we will find the experience interesting, fun and that we will learn a lot - we hope we (Barbara and Sarah will probably share writing the posts and taking the video/photos) can share that with you.
Labels: video
¶ 7:47 AM
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- Introduction
- At the Golden Gate
- American Politics
- American Salmon
- The Yellowstone
- Chicago
- The American Army
- America's Defenceless Coasts
This book is controversial, it records Kipling's cutting observations of American life in the 1990s, and it reports with apparent relish the most racist of opinions as if they were facts.
Yet Kipling's essays about American life in the 1890s are written with an interesting British/Indian distance from his subject. Though the tone is often sarcastic, his affection for the country and its people is a steady undercurrent. These essays provide an interesting glimpse of the
As well as the rude things he says about the
Indeed Kipling's writing, often, and above all here, raises questions of interpretation. One American reader (G. A. England from
He comments scathingly on Kipling's passage (in ch.1) describing the benefits of the San Fransisco cable-car system: "With the same scorn he wastes nearly a page in fantastic description of a cable-car as an amazing phenomenon. It is as though Alaric at
Indeed, can the critic be as naive as I have assumed above? Mr England of Harvard began his piece demolishing Kipling claiming: To the American temperament, the gentleman who throws stones while himself living in a glass house cannot fail to be amusing; the more so if, as in Mr Kipling's case, he appears to be in a state of maiden innocence regarding the structure of his own domicile. Was England perhaps playing Kipling at his own game and pretending to take seriously, what really he was smiling fondly at?
In the end, this is not Kipling's best work, yet these articles, first published in an Indian Newspaper, still carry vivid impressions both of the
Quotations from The New York Times of October 11th 1902.
Labels: audio, kipling, librivox
¶ 3:29 PM
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Type in a search term (left) and you go to a page (right) from which you can select the book you need and from the page that appears (below)
and for a moment watch in wonder the Zotero "Saving Bibliography Item" message before right clicking the new entry, and presto you are ready to enter the item in your document!Maybe I should do an instructional video for students...
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But Zotero still doesn't work with a word processor to generate footnotes and bibliography — that's the gravy of reference managers!
And you only have to be rich to afford Endnote. But on Macs, Bookends and Sente are very reasonably priced.
By Danny Zacharias, at
January 18, 2008 1:37 PM
I have never used it, but RefWorks seems to be comparable to Endnote and is significantly cheaper. You pay to subscribe and the cost is $100/year, which is significantly less than Endnote (over AUD500). It's major disadvantage is that it is an on-line database so if you aren't connected you can't use it, whereas Endnote stores your references on your computer, so you can use it any time. I realise that this is still a lot more than free, but potentially more within the budget of semi-financially challenged people.
Note - that would be RedMAN not RedMOND. :-)
By Judy Redman, at
January 18, 2008 3:11 PM
Aagh, so sorry, Judy, that's what comes of working from my notiriously collander-like memory. I have corrected it. One of the things I like about Zotero is that though it is a Firefox addin it does not require the web to do its basic work. The database is on your local machine.
As for updating references and notes as you go, I agree Danny that that feature is great - though with Endnote 5+ it seems to come at the price of slowing even a fast machine to a crawl.
Danny, since I am not writing a thesis, and usually work chapter by chapter I think I'll stick to Zotero, and not downgrade to a Mac to get cheap(er) software to slow me down ;)
By Tim, at
January 18, 2008 5:42 PM
Thanks Tim - I used the Chicago styles to fill in and correct all my citations - it was really easy just to do it with MS Word and copy and paste. One day I will fix my bibliography (well maybe).
Would my presentation on the Psalms be worth submitting for this Biblical Writing month? (see http://bmd.gx.ca/psalms/psalms.pdf )
Congratulations on your reading!
By Bob MacDonald, at
January 18, 2008 7:08 PM
That's OK, Tim - many people do it.
My university provides Endnote for free to graduate students, which makes it my software of choice. I am currently using Endnote X and before that used 9 and neither of these slowed my computer that I noticed. My current computer is high-end Vista compatible and I'm using XP so I wouldn't expect it to have any trouble, but my old computer which was much less powerful didn't seem to mind it either. Mind you, I always order double the amount of RAM that comes standard with any computer package - more if I can afford it, and perhaps Endnote is RAM hungry.
By Judy Redman, at
January 18, 2008 9:36 PM
Judy:
Maybe Endnote has improved since version 6 ;) but anyway I'm no longer eligible for a University copy and Carey is too small to get a good price. Thankfully for chapter length projects Zotero works brilliantly.
Bob:
Definitely, make a post, name it and claim it ;)
By Tim, at
January 19, 2008 3:18 PM
The most important features for me are social bookmarking, a rich set of capabilities for extracting bibliographic data from web sites, and export so my data doesn't get trapped. To that end, i recently switched from Connotea to CiteULike: the former seems to have a larger user base (hence is stronger on social bookmarking), but CiteULike is better on extracting data, and i find that's crucial to actually using it. CiteULike can also generate bibliography references in a variety of styles (but like Zotero it doesn't work directly with a word processor).
By Sean, at
January 22, 2008 8:08 AM
There may be some misunderstanding above, for the record:
Zotero integrates well with MS Word or Open Office on PCs, Macs and Linux. Within office one can insert references, which are updated when the information in Zotero is changed, with a one click "refresh" command. The system also generates bibliographies. It covers most common referencing schemes. It is good at extracting data from catalogues etc. and usually the Endnote link works automatically to dump the data in Zotero, even when the page is not a simple one click on the address bar reference.
By Tim, at
January 22, 2008 3:28 PM
"Danny, since I am not writing a thesis, and usually work chapter by chapter I think I'll stick to Zotero, and not downgrade to a Mac to get cheap(er) software to slow me down ;)"
Oh Tim, you are still stuck in the shadow world of PC. Time to get a real computer :-)
By Danny Zacharias, at
January 23, 2008 8:38 AM
Well, a real computer would be nice, but so far I have not had time to install and learn Linux, but it is looking increasingly attractive. As Windows and MacOS both suffer feature bloat ;) maybe I'll make running Linux a hobby project till I learn enough to swap OOes
By Tim, at
January 23, 2008 9:14 AM
and wrote:Subject: A really excellent series of stories!Stalky has now had 5,673 downloads since 30 April 2007, so I'm delighted, and hope other listeners are too!
This was my first LibriVox download and what a wonderful introduction it was! Tim Bulkeley did an excellent job reading the entire book. His reading was as good as many professional audiobooks I've bought and the sound quality was also well done. I grew up loving Stalky & Co (they were the original "Marauders" before JK Rowling invented James Potter & Co for her series and Stalky still wins hands down, without any magic at all!). If you haven't read the stories then this download is a great introduction. And if you have read the stories this is an excellent way to enjoy them again.
Labels: audio, kipling, librivox
¶ 1:38 PM
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Kingdom Living has made a list of about 70 Christian Sermon Links. It starts with an Theologian, Alister McGrath, and includes Wolfhart Pannenburg (the list is not restricted merely to the living as Karl Barth gets in) and includes a numberof great and famous Biblical Scholars, like Ben Witherington III, Craig Blomberg, D. A. Carson, James Dunn, N.T. Wright and Walter Brueggemann. It also includes Evangelical heroes like Eugene Peterson, John Stott, Marva Dawn (so it is not quite a male only zone ;) Ravi Zacharias, Tony Campolo, a selection of worthies from the Wheaton College Chapel and Will Willimon.But also among the top seventy preachers of the current age lists Tim Bulkeley.
So, in the spirit of the occasion I'd like to thank my mummy and daddy, my hair dresser (there is only one - hair that is, though actually Barbara has been the only one in the other sense for years now)... actually I'll stop this acceptance speech before it gets out of hand. But seriously, folks: Thank you, Kingdom Living!
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 You’re St. Melito of Sardis! You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers! |
No, there are worse things than being unknown, being "known" for a start - would you want to be "known to the police"? Or as Saint Paul (to make this a genuine 10 caret biblioblog post ;0 said: "Being unknown people, everyone has heard of... (2 Cor 6:9)
¶ 10:07 AM
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Congratulations, Tim! Melito was great! His "On Pascha" is a classic of the early church. With some consternation, I turn out to be a Tertullian.
By mgvh, at
January 11, 2008 11:49 AM
You reminded me about this, but that's weird--I'm Melito as well!
By 
zephyr, at
January 11, 2008 7:22 PM
I expect there are a lot of us, the unknown saints outnumber the stars by quite a bit ;-) Still it's good to know I'm in good company!
By Tim, at
January 12, 2008 6:35 AM
Jim West is seeking your help to imitate the (possibly mythical) legend of king Canute. He wants to hold back the tide of technology. The technology of blogging works by allowing several things - all of them available separately elsewhere, but which in conjunction make the form what it is:- the writable web - like a content management system blog software makes it easy to write webpages, and insert them into a working site
- RSS feeds - allowing a loose "community" of others to read what you write, as you add something new, thus making the system more time dependent than the conventional web but also adding focus and greater sense of "community"
- links to other blogs - while not an obligatory part of the "system" almost all blogs have a "blogroll" of (some of) the blogs the author(s) read and think "like" their own
- "conversation" - while comments are not obligatory as a software feature, the genre of "blog" works through a high proportion of material showing interaction between different people about the topic, where the comment feature is not provided (and sometimes when it is) this takes place through linked posts.
Jim seeks to define an in-crowd, he does this honestly and exclusively by defining who is "out", while Duane rises to the bait and seeks to enlarge the borders through a Modest Suggestion. Now, if the biblical studies cloud round Abnormal Interests was the same as, or included the biblical studies cloud round Dr Jim West etc. etc... then we could neatly define the biblioblogsphere. But they are not, each writer includes some, but not others of the putative bibliobloggers. The attempt at definition, whether inclusive (Duane) or exclusive (Jim), fails. Or at best only offers an approximate answer, this blog is a bibiloblog with a 65% degree of probability! The technology itself resists the attempt.
The sub-title of this post may be explained by this old post.
Labels: blog, culture, technology
¶ 8:44 AM
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My article has been lightly corrected and is now nearly ready to submit, so if you want to pre-read or have comments on "The image of the invisible God: (an)iconic knowing, God and gender" now is the time!
Meanwhile I have begun collecting reading for the chapter on "Jesus and the Father" for the book about the use of motherly language and imagery to speak about God, whose title might be Not Just a Father.
Labels: writing
¶ 2:00 PM
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He starts by underlining that there is no crisis, and indeed that students themselves are not crying out for a change of approach. Most are (more or less) happy consumers of what we provide. Today I will let this claim pass, it is largely true. There is certainly no crisis. I am less convinced that students, who are aware of other possibilities, are totally happy with the current tertiary pedagogies. But, as a basis for argument today, let's let this claim stand as a starting point. I am even happier to agree that there is nothing in the desire for more flexible education that requires Web 2.0 solutions.
It is part of his conclusion (2/3 of the post ;) that I want to address. In particular a key couple of sentences:
As we have seen, the potential of Web 2.0 is facilitative rather than determinative – and the core of what advocates of Web 2.0 in education seek to embody is not new to education theorists. At best, the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 draws fresh attention to old theories and provides additional possibilities for their use.Indeed. The best of what Web 2.0 approaches seem to offer does sound very much like what Freiere, Illich and other pedagogical writers popular in the seventies were advocating. In which case questions follows inevitably: Why have these approaches not been widely adopted? What (if anything) has the web changed in the educational matrix that might make them more useful now?
I'll start with the latter question. The web changes two key elements:
- The Internet (aided and abetted by other new communications technologies, like mobile phones) makes communication at a distance fast, easy and cheap. In the seventies and eighties to communicate at a distance required an expenditure of time and/or money which made significant rich communication at a distance not viable. Now the opposite is true. Wherever there is an (even approximately) broadband Internet connection such communication with video and audio as well as other possibilities is easy and cheap - the cost once you have a computer and a webcam and an Internet connection is negligible- in NZ roughly $10/10GB. One of the key advantages of classroom teaching is communication not only with the teacher but also with other students - indeed the way the Oxford system worked in the seventies I learned far more from my classmates than from my teachers! (Please note these teachers were at that time among the best in the world in the disciplines of theology, and I learned a lot from them!)
- This fast, convenient and cheap transfer of data, together with a tendency from the print age which has continued into the electronic age for the cost of information to tend towards zero ("information tends to be free" - see my 2004 post Gatekeepers, Open Courseware and the future of the University or better my 2005 article Back to the Future: Virtual Theologising as Recapitulation) mean that "information content" is no longer a valuable commodity which the teacher or their institution controls, it is almost worthless and becoming of even less worth as time passes! What the teacher has to offer that is of great value is the wisdom to make sense of and use the information well. But that sort of wisdom and skill is precisely the sort of ability that the more open pedagogies claim to develop best.
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Nice one Tim. I appreciated your comment, "One of the key advantages of classroom teaching is communication not only with the teacher but also with other students - indeed the way the Oxford system worked in the seventies I learned far more from my classmates than from my teachers!".
Incredible that this style of pedagogy existed before the Internet!
;o)
Mark.
By Nichthus, at
January 9, 2008 1:43 PM
It existed before print too, indeed probably before writing, it is not technology dependent, but it can be made facilitated by some technologies, the Internet and the cup of coffee spring to mind!
By Tim, at
January 9, 2008 6:28 PM
The problem is that often people look at only the front end of what technology has to offer instead of the back end, or the outcome. An elementary principal told me that his fifth- and sixth-grade teachers are having problems when assigning research projects. The students view it as a procedure where they cut and paste information off a Web site, add some sentences of their own and turn it in. The information passes too quickly from the screen to the homework papers and isn't processed through the mind. The speed and ease of the digital resources actually conspires against producing long-term understanding.Now, I know exactly what this is about, I've seen it. My daughter preparing work for school, and slowly I am becginning to see it in my Intro class students. What makes me want to scream and cry is that the fault is not the students, it's the teachers! I said I was beginning to see the problem crop up in younger students in the Intro classes. Why do I not find it in the same students in level 2? Because we have taught them better. Returned work saying it is unacceptable, and explaining why it is unacceptable, and students learn to behave differently. They learn the behaviour proper to an academic environment, they learn to interact with and process what they read. Why can't this school principal get his teachers to do the same - after all the younger kids are brighter and more adaptable than the young adults we teach ;-)
They can't either because they lack the courage and imagination, or (my guess, because I'm impressed by the dedication and imagination of most primary and secondary teachers I meet) because "the system" won't allow them to test for real skills, but rewards students who can "manage information" in a simplistic way. In NZ it is the stupidity of the NZQA "National Framework" with its tiny quantifiable manageable "skills" that causes the problem. Now I recognise, and indeed have preached (in the very different academic context of the University), the value of clear coherent small learning outcomes, but only within an overarching system of values and goals (an academic culture) that sustains and gives context to these smaller "learning outcomes".
You improve your writing only when you are pulled up and challenged. The blogs keep them [young people] networking only with their peers and that holds them at the same level.Duh! Of course, but what is the teacher's role in this, the technology of blogging allows the student (at whatever level they are) to interact with writers who are more advanced than themselves. I've watched that work in a blogging community of Biblical Scholars. Now so far as I know no secondary students have interacted with that community, but there is no reason, if the student has some humility and common sense they could not. I'd bet it would be the same with communities of organic Chemists, or Poodle Fanciers. It is not the technology that is the problem producing dumb students, it is the teaching that is lacking, allowing dumb students!
Nichthus' own final comment points up clearly where the problem lies. Technology does NOT make you dumb, dumb teaching driven by dumb pedagogies do that, and the dumbest of all is "an answer-driven pedagogy", everyone who has listened to, read or watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy knows that it is not answers that matter but questions!
Labels: humour, internet, teaching
¶ 6:53 AM
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so now I must start to list what I'm doing:
- I have completed polishing my paper from the God and Gender Colloquium, it was due in December, so is only a few days overdue, and the other participants have not submitted theirs yet as far as I know, so I'll link to my draft and invite comments and criticism: The image of the invisible God: (an)iconic knowing, God
and gender - I doubt it counts for the "IBSW Month" but I am finishing two sets of course notes (well one is a revision but the other is new)
- I am planning and hope to finalise a proposal for SBL International
- I want to finalise a book proposal for Not Just a Father
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I haven't explored the map modules in the PC Bible software I use, I doubt it is as good as Accordance, though years ago Logos Bible Atlas software was a great addon. Now however, the maps and especially the wire frame "3D" ones look very dated. So I use another standalone program, Bible Mapper by David P. Barrett you can download and use the basic program freely, though there is a small (currently US$35) charge for adding some useful features. I think David's tool produces good-looking maps easily and quickly, though like Accordance it would need export to Photoshop (or GIMP or whatever) if you wanted to add semi-transparent layers.Mark at the really useful Biblical Studies and Technological Tools blog has posted on this a few times recently, he is presenting on the topic at BibleTech08 an event I'd have loved to be at, his posts are worth looking at:
Oh, and here's a short video that shows that I can't use graphics programs as well as Chris, and suggests that I must take all the advice and start outsourcing myself to India. (Rather than transporting myself to Sri Lanka.)
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I just went to Bible Mapper and discovered that it is no longer available for download or support. :-(
By Judy Redman, at
January 12, 2008 6:06 PM
That's very sudden, I checked the site when I made the post. Since it mentions nothing about the licence changing I could make a CD and post it to you by snail if you wanted to try it.
By Tim, at
January 12, 2008 6:24 PM
Dave Warnock drew my attention to the post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing HOWTO make a Senior Remote with only five big, friendly buttons such a simple neat and useful idea. But why, oh why does no one manufacture the things? Cory's post is itself drawing attention to the original (I think) by anonymous on IndestructiblesSenior RemoteWhich reminded me of another simple modification to an electronic gadget which could make it user friendly for older folk. An MP3 player with big buttons, and ideally a bigger screen font. I first explained in 2005 why I'd like to find a source for these. If they were cheap enough I'd buy 50 or 100. But no one seems to make them, and it has to be a small mod to make a cheap MP3 player user friendly for a whole new market. Add Librivox for talking books, add PodBible for talking Bible... or as Dave wants to add recordings of the service for shutins... the possibilities are huge. So, why does no one make them?
Mod your mom's TV remote to make it senior friendly.
My mom was born in 1931. She is from the generation of radio and WWII. Her eyesight is failing and she isn't good with anything electronic. TV remotes confuse her. This mod came to me after she called me one day, claiming her TV remote stopped working. It turns out, she inadvertently hit the button that activated the VCR functions. She didn't know or couldn't see the button to reactivate the TV functions. So I decided to "dumb" down the remote to only three functions: On/Off, Channel and Volume.
My post back then "Tim needs an MP3 player with large buttons" was in response to an amusing meme from Maggi Dawn, incidentally several of the real candidates still appear, Tim [still] needs help and a theme... plus ca change...
PS Back in 2005 I wrote: BTW if you choose to run with this meme, could you please quote the phrase "Tim needs an MP3 player with large buttons" as I'd love to see that come up top on Google when some other Tim decides to try the meme! Who knows a manufacturer might see one of those posts and actually make one! I'd like to still echo that, both to please make the link, and the hope that some manufacturer might see and take note - there is a market for these things.
Update: So, players with big simple buttons exist, designed for pre-schoolers. The Fisher Price one is a bit on the expensive side and I can't see an NZ stockist, some of the US stores have cheaper ones though, so I'll look when I am in Thailand unless someone can point me to a suitable source here.
Thanks to Stephen and Anonymous (though your DSE link did not work for me bringing up other products :(
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