Exhibit is claimed to be a "simple widgets tool" enabling mere mortals to make useful, interactive web-based visualisations of data sets easily. It is open source :) with samples like these:- plot birthrate against deathrate for various chosen groups of countries (select by language, population, location...)
- sort personal datas and photos in various ways
- let people find Recent United States Senate Bills according to various criteria
- map data
Labels: biblical.studies.online, communication, digital, teaching, technology
¶ 7:24 AM
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I've taught students about the importance of terracing to cultivation, and so the possible population density of the hill country of Palestine. I think I saw a reverse illustrative example today. Above us on the hill (here at the Akha Hill House in northern Thailand) there are cultivated bushes. In the photo you can see what I saw, the bushes higher on the slope are consistently smaller and those lower down larger. I assume it is greater availability of water and nutrients lower on the slope as they (and also topsoil) are washed down in the rainy season.If anybody with greater knowledge of horticulture or geology can comment to confirm or deny this I'd be pleased. Otherwise I'll probably use this photo next time I'm talking about terracing...
Labels: biblical.studies, teaching
¶ 12:01 AM
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Of course, the church has been trying to think through the importance of non-spatial identities for centuries, which helps explain my confidence that a theologian’s perspective can contribute to the discussion. All along, people’s identities have been constituted by the memories, links, knowledge, and patterns that they share (or not) with the rest of the world; in our digital environment, those aspects of identity come to the fore. Let’s not shackle them to simulated spatiality, but instead let’s seek out a way to work with identity in ways indigenous to a non-spatial identity ecology.
Forgetting simulated spatiality, which is only an issue in distance education for the goofs who are using second life to mimic classrooms, ARE there ways in which non-spatial identity or presence have a distinctly different ecology? or Are we merely talking about different media of communication? Does the absence of smell (to take the most evident example of a difference in mediation between physical and distance modes) REALLY make a qualitative difference?Then (not temporarily since I am mentioning the items out of order, or rfather in my own chosen order), when having talked about the AKMAs his physical presence might with varying degrees of falsity bring to mind in someone experiencing his presence:
a tweedy academic in a town overrun with tweedy academics or a visibly-identifiable priest (at a cultural moment when any given (male) priest bears the suspicion that he has done horrible things to children)He concluded talking about:
[a] new, freshly ambiguated zone between full physical presence (and I've learned enough from my postmodern studies to doubt the obviousness of "presence") on one hand and merely-verbal communicative absence (on the other) that we wrestle with the messages that come to us from we-know-not-exactly-where. As we learn how to live appropriately, I might say "authentically" to bring us back around to the topic we were talking about when I first met many of you, under these unfamiliar conditions, we will find neither that "religion" is passé, nor that we are truly immaterial beings trapped in decaying flesh, but that there's more to cyberplace than just immaterial or physical existence, more even than we have dreamed of.I am again left wondering if the different mediation of "cyberspace" is not more significant than the "cyberspace" idea suggests, and therefore the difference in "presence" less significant...
Labels: communication, culture, digital, teaching
¶ 11:13 PM
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Tim - your verse(s) for the day would have to be Isa 30:19-21!
O people of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it."
By 
, at
December 1, 2009 8:12 PM
I have also repeatedly (though sadly only in private communication not often in the more public forum of "Student Evaluations" of courses and teaching :( noted with pleasure the positive comments students make about my quick response to emails, and discussion forum posts. Several of these comments have been phrased in ways that make it clear that a greater sense of "presence" is generated and supported by this promptitude. Interestingly the student's own presence in the class seems reinforced in this way as well as the presence of a teacher in the class.
Then this semester I used Adobe Connect to provide a "meeting room" in which I could conduct "distant tutorials". The software allows two way (or indeed multi-way) audio communication, live text messaging either to the group or privately to a selected individual, sharing of screens and programs as well as computerised whiteboard. The idea was to mimic the face to face tutorials in which we led on-site students through the practice of biblical interpretation. The weekly Connect tutorials were supplemented and supported by other (asynchronous) online interaction: forums, exercises, online tests etc... This is an element of the course that needs more work and to be better done next year. But apart from that, with respect to distant tutorials what did I learn about generating and nurturing "presence" at a distance?
Microphones: it makes a huge difference when most students have mics that work. Comparing a class where most have the ability to talk aloud with one were only a few have this capacity the difference is huge. (At least for me as teacher, I'd need to do some research to discover if the students' perceptions match mine.) Text messaging, in this multi-medium environment, is great as a back channel, but acts as an inhibitor of "presence" when used instead of voice as the main communication medium.
Multitasking: the multiple channels (voice, screen, whiteboard and text) combined with all the technical issues that need to be resolved, on top of the pedagogical responsiveness needed mean that having one "presenter" is not ideal. Often I was less present, or less effectively present (again targeted research would be needed to be sure which), than was optimally possible.
Task oriented: because it was the first time (apart from a couple of "practice" sessions) I had used the medium, and because I was aware that colleagues would be judging the utility of "virtual meeting" tools like connect to a significant degree based on how students performed in this class, I was too focused on the task. When the speaker is thinking more about the "content" than the communication presence suffers, and the interactive medium becomes more like a video lecture :( Fear of failure has much the same effect on many presenters at academic conferences, as I discovered afresh in a few gabbled sessions at SBL over the last few days - though in the room those presenters were hardly present for me, and I wish I had not been present for them ;)
Failure to encourage “social” contact: (probably one to file under Duh!) related to the above task orientation, I failed to realise that I should make more effort (in a relatively - at least compared with a face to face tutorial) impoverished media environment to generate mutual presence. We should have "wasted" more time on chitchat. By the end of the semester we did at least use the minutes while everyone collected in that way (at the start I am ashamed to note I was too busy with the technology to make small talk).
Despite these teething problems several students have already (without being asked) commented on the richer experience this richer medium permitted, and among these comments some already have chosen particularly to mention terms that relate to "presence" to describe the benefits they experienced compared with a "standard" distance course.
PS: I have not looked at the issues or research around "communities of inquiry" in this series because my goal is not to change the pedagogy we use radically - even if I am convinced such a change is desirable - but to explore the concept of "presence" and how it is experienced in teaching and learning at a distance.
List of works cited in this series so far:
Garrison, D. Randy. 1997. Computer conferencing and distance education: cognitive and social presence issues. In , ed. International Council for Distance Education . Pennsylvania State University.
Richardson, Jennifer C., and Karen Swan. 2003. Examining Social Presence in Online Courses in Relation to Students' Percieved Learning and Satisfaction. Sloan Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7, no. 1: 74.
Shatzer, Milton J., and Thomas R. Lindlof. 1998. Media Ethnography in Virtual Space: Strategies, Limits, and Possibilities. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 42, no. 2: 170-89.
Short, John, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie. 1976. The social psychology of telecommunications. London u.a: Wiley.
Short, John. 1972. Medium of communication and consensus. Lond.: Long Range Intelligence Division of Post Office Telecommunications Headquarters.
Short, John., Joint Unit for Planning Research. Communications Studies Group., and Great Britain. Post Office. Long Range Intelligence Division. 1973. The effects of medium of communication on persuasion, bargaining and perceptions of the other. Long range research paper, 50. London: British Post Office.
Stacey, Elizabeth. 2002. Social Presence Online: Networking Learners at a Distance. In , ed. Deryn Watson and Jane Andersen, 39-48. Springer, August 31.
Wheeler, Steve. 2005. Creating Social Presence in Digital Learning Environments: A Presence of Mind? In Learning Technologies 2005 Conference: Combined Presence. Queensland.
Labels: communication, culture, digital, teaching
¶ 3:01 AM
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Watching with great appreciation, Tim. I've pushed back on the "presence" argument in theoretical ways, but it’s good to look over your shoulder as you work through the experience yourself.
By 
AKMA, at
November 28, 2009 10:27 PM
They defined social presence as a communicator’s sense of awareness of the presence of an interaction partner. This seminal work came out of research sponsored by the British Post Office in the 1970s (John. Short 1972; John. Short, Joint Unit for Planning Research. Communications Studies Group., and Great Britain. Post Office. Long Range Intelligence Division. 1973) If this sponsorship puzzles you think of the then growing ubiquity and use of telephones - yes, landlines mobiles were not yet invented, except on Get Smart ;) As well as providing the dominant definition they also noted that the social effects of a medium are principally caused by the degree of social presence it affords.
This concept of "social presence" is significant for the processes by which we come to know and relate to others (John Short, Williams, and Christie 1976). So better person perception and more meaningful interactions are a result of increases SP. If SP is low group members feel disconnected, but when it is high they are more engaged and involved. Stacey emphasises the role of the teacher in distance education as facilitator of such presence. (Stacey 2002)
[Another influential strand in this involved a redefining of Social presence as “the degree to which participants are able to project themselves affectively within the medium.”, thereby presenting themselves as 'real people.' (Garrison 1997) But I have not yet worked through whether I find this shift a helpful one.]
The cues we use to build our sense of the social presence of another, or to consciously or unconsciously project our own vary dramatically in different communications media.
- text-based media like email and discussion forums - use “tone”, emoticons, self disclosing narratives
- audio adds inflection, ambient sound, paraverbal utterances ("Uh huh" in various inflections, or the sound of a students toddler playing as she attends class - the single mother not the toddler ;)
- video – adds visual cues
Yet before we rush to assume higher in the hierarchy (or lower in my listing ;) means better we should pause to consider more anecdotal and research evidence, that suggests different students respond very differently to different media. Some students love email, others require a phone call to really feel they have been in contact with the teacher (social presence).
Wheeler studied how different styles of being a student interact differently with different media. (Wheeler 2005) Using Entwistle's Approaches to Study Inventory he distinguished students into three groups. Like but perhaps distinguishable from Entwistle's three learning styles: autonomy, surface and tenacity. (p.6)
For my presentation I'll ignore the surface learners. They are the ones I try to convert to one of the other types ;)
In a natural co-present learning space (face to face) his autonomous students,
(due to their independence?), neither need nor experience a great deal of
social presence. Tenacious students, conversely, tend to experience high levels
of social presence. But when telephone is the medium of communication the effect is reversed, autonomous students perceive higher levels of connectedness. Using e-mail too students scoring higher on autonomy perceive less social presence (perhaps because “not in control”?), whilst more tenacious students experience higher perceptions of connectedness. He notes the special affordances of e-mail as a less immediate, but more permanent medium. These may fit also with the known liking for e-mail of the introverted, and an often expressed frustration with e-mail among more extroverted colleagues ;)
Mark N added in a comment on the previous post that there is also a literature around "transactional distance" that I must explore too. Second "duh" moment, I should have picked his brains first, still I will now have two wheels, and they do say that we only really learn what we discover for ourselves ;)
Labels: communication, digital, teaching
¶ 12:14 PM
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Hi Tim,
The 'Community of Inquiry' model would be another useful reference here... http://communitiesofinquiry.com/. See also E-Primer 4: http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/projects/eprimer-series. I'm doing an online (Connect Pro) presentation on this tomorrow night for our online tutor trainees... I'll let you know when the archive is available. 'Social presence' is one aspect of the framework.
Mark.
By Nichthus, at
November 24, 2009 4:53 PM
Thanks :) for this paper I do not want to extend to the communities of inquiry thing. I want to focus on presence. But I can see the connections...
By Tim, at
November 25, 2009 3:04 AM
Discussions on "distance education" (the term is often a misnomer since I have had students living or working closer to the on-site classroom than my home is ;) often get bogged down in primitive notions of "presence". The idea of distance skeptics seems to be that we are only "really" present to each other when in the same room. This is evident nonsense. If Barbara and I are in the same room but she is playing Facebook Scrabble I will be lucky to get a sensible reply to any question I ask. If I am reading a book she will get one of those male grunts that merely means "I think I heard that you said something - but I have no idea what." We are virtually non-present to each other, though in the same room. By contrast if we are talking on the phione about some concern over one of the children, even though in different cities we are highly mutually present. So, I got thinking about degrees and sorts of "presence" in online education. I remember vividly a long "conversation" between two students in the first class in which I used a blog assignment. Student A began from the position that anyone who was poor was poor because they were lazy, shiftless or anti-social. Student B was living in Thailand. B wrote about his family, a young son who saw a boy his own age "selling" flowers as a sort of respectable begging, and his boy's sympathetic response on learning more about the situation. Gradually over a couple of weeks A's attitudes changed and mellowed. He'll never be a bleeding-heart liberal, but the two students impacted each others' lives and were evidently and richly mutually present.
That got me exploring the research literature on the subject... (which will come in part III: Research findings).
Karyn Traphagen has posted about her presentation Taking the Distance Out of Distance Education to the SBL session: 22-201 Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies: Distance Learning: How to teach traditional topics in a non-traditional format. Here is a link to my notes.
Labels: communication, digital, sbl, teaching
¶ 3:46 AM
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Tim, don't leave me hanging, where's the rest??!!!
:-)
By Miriam J, at
November 24, 2009 7:49 AM
I am typing it between sessions, as a mature (read old) scholar after lunch I cannot type in sessions, it would break my concentration ;)
By Tim, at
November 24, 2009 7:57 AM
Hi Tim,
Have you heard of the concept 'transactional distance', coined by Michael Moore (US)? There is a very rich (and highly relevant) distance education literature to the posts you've been making...
Mark.
By Nichthus, at
November 24, 2009 9:29 AM
I will be posting about some of the literature, see next post, but focusing on "social presence" rather than "transactional distance". With this tip I may extend the series in that direction in future ;)
By Tim, at
November 24, 2009 11:32 AM
DJA Clines is an iconoclast, I vividly remember the time I met him, SBL International in Jerusalem in '86. He was sharing a room with Robert Carroll, one of my few friends from Glasgow, and a guru I admired, but never tried to follow. I had the room next door. (The rich occupied the flash SBL hotels in town, the creative, the European and waifs like me occupied student accommodation at the Hebrew University.)
It was at that SBL International (or at the IOSOTS that accompanied it) that David met Heather, but I remember it more for one phrase. I think it was Clines' but it could have been Carroll's. I've Googled it, but could find no attribution (if you try that NOW, Google leads to me, but I know I did not invent the phrase - I just wish I had). That phrase, picked up from whichever intellectual nomad from the neighbouring room actually coined it, has guided, or at least served as Leitmotiv for two decades of (my) biblical study.
But back, from senescent ramblings about times past, to David's presidential address, David is an iconoclast, and his address topples many cherished icons of the academic world: the dichotomy of teaching and research, and the primacy of the latter, the modes of teaching, the hierachy of teacher and student... David is an entertaining speaker, and most of us chuckled and a few even dared to laugh... David is a prophet, and his address may even (like Muillenberg's in 1968, an SBL even I am too old to have attended) provide a stimulus for years to come... But is was not NEW. And there's the tragedy, Biblical Scholars are still not listening to other disciplines, we "borrow", occasionally, an unfamiliar notion torn from its context (preferably non-Anglophone) in Psychology (especially the esoteric and academically dubious fringes of Psychology) or Literary Studies for these can provide the dillettant biblical scholar with a neat paper for many sections in the SBL program guide, but we systematically turn our backs on the professionals. Professionals in teaching above all ;)
And that may be the truly iconoclastic element in DJA Clines' SBL presidential addesss in 2009. If he stimulates a few younger scholars to toy with the ideas of teaching theorists and researchers as he once stimulated me to toy with ideas of the unnecessary "hypothesis of the idiot redactor" then thank God for SBL Presidents!
Labels: biblical.studies, sbl, scholarship, teaching
¶ 5:47 PM
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OK, so I'm the idiot. What's the phrase?!?
By David Ker, at
November 24, 2009 9:16 AM
I doubt you are an idiot, David, and I suspect I am the more jet lagged of the two of us (in the USA for a few days), probably you scanned the post quickly but I did tell you - in the last paragraph, I just did not tell you too clearly ;)
By Tim, at
November 24, 2009 11:30 AM
Labels: audio, hebrew.bible, old testament, podcast, teaching
¶ 4:20 PM
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Here's one I prepared earlier:
The two tools I used to make it are (excluding Firefox):
- Capture Fox the screencasting add on for Firefox
- Miksoft's Mobile Media Converter "free fast and easy" it converts most audio formats and many video formats into many others, for this job it will render the big fat AVI file Capture Fox produces as small lean MP4 or WMV video
PS: As anonymous comments below there is a Beta version available here which compresses the AVI file better. Using Miksoft's converter will still give much smaller file sizes, but for people who don't like technology the new version would make it a one step process instead of two. And probably many of you have less students on dialup still or poor "broadband" than we have in NZ ;) So a great tool is getting better.
Labels: culture, digital, teaching, video
¶ 2:48 PM
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New version includes compression. It's experimental but you can download it.
By , at
May 30, 2009 7:11 PM
"Being produced" because the material is a wiki, being refined continually by members of the MLA's Committee on Information Technology, though the guidelines are already very useful.
Note to Jim: Wiki technology, far from being the necessary haunt of flagrant dilletants, can be a really easy way for a group like this to publish ongoing work - Judge the product not the technology (a useful motto for this conversation ;) :End note to Jim
The site: The Evaluation of Digital Work contains a very useful annotated listing of Types of Digital Work, and a Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work that would be really useful to members of committees called upon to evaluate digital scholarship, as well as illustrative material and an (unfinished) section assisting applicants with Documenting a New Media Case.
NB. This post follows on from the following earlier discussion:
Stephen's Academic Blogging: Publication or Service?
Mark's Academic Blogging: Publication, Service or Teaching
My rant Should blogging count for academics?
(see also Jim's Blogging: To What End? and Mark's Why blog? and - though you may need to scroll to see the connection - Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens - Apr 25 09
Labels: biblical.studies.online, blogging, digital, review, scholarship, teaching
¶ 7:50 AM
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Evaluations of academics' performance are traditionally, and probably globally, thought of under three headings:
- teaching: fairly obvious, includes preparing, marking, talking to students...
- research: usually requires publication in a peer-reviewed form of actual research, so writing a Bible Dictionary article usually counts as service or teaching not research
- service: a rag bag for anything else the academic and their evaluators think of as "work", committees, consulting, speaking to non-professional groups etc.
Jim in a typically forthright reply poses the question differently in Blogging: To What End? and Mark offered a typically reflective answer in Why blog? I'll answer Jim's question briefly, and then return to the original one. I blog because I enjoy the intellectual stimulation of reading other people's posts, and I hope that (by blogging myself) I can add a different voice and perspective to the mix. In short I blog for the same reason that I do not (despite being a raving introvert) sit silent in a corner during conversations in the Carey staffroom, or the church coffee room after the service, because I feel part of the community.
So, back to the question should blogging count as work for academics?
Professional scholars have long enjoyed a privileged elite status in society, not least in the freedom to choose how to spend time. As long as certain requirements of teaching and committees are fulfilled, we get to select which interests to research. To a large extent too we get to choose when to work, late into the evening for some, early mornings for others... and if the plumber can only call on Tuesday afternoon there is a good chance that the family academic can arrange to be home at that time :)
And yet, these freedoms, and especially the freedom to research, have been restricted over the years.
When I began at Carey in 1993 we taught typically 4-5 courses a year, 2 larger courses (maybe 25-35 students) in one semester and 3 smaller ones with 7-20 students in the other. This left plenty of time for research and service, and these activities were not rigorously assessed. If my research produced no publications some years, but I wrote a series for the denominational paper, that was fine.
Now we teach 5 courses a year, and few of them have less than 30 students while the largest have 70-80. About a third of these are distance students, so a whole extra layer of preparation and interactivity online has been added. My guess is that overall these changes double the time taken each year by teaching, take out committee meetings and the like... research and service become spare time activities. Yet research is now subject to a government sponsored evaluation process, it is not enough to produce an article for a local (= Australasian) journal, at least some of my publications must be in top international journals...
Should blogging "count"? I do hope not, because if it does, I'll need to produce "n" posts a year, and remove from Sansblogue any posts I fear will not meet the approval of some committee. If blogging starts to "count" then the biblical blogsphere will become a mass of turgid, safely academic, posts full of language designed to impress rather than to communicate, relieved only by the amateurs - used in it's deep sense of someone who undertakes an activity for love rather than payment - and the outsiders.
Labels: biblical.studies.online, blogging, scholarship, teaching
¶ 11:44 AM
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I think that blogging should "count" only in the sense and to the extent that things like radio interviews, books with trade publishers, and other such activities do. It should be appreciated as drawing attention to our work and the institutions we're affiliated, but not expected in the same way peer reviewed publications or teaching a certain number of classes are.
Thanks for keeping this conversation going - it is an important one!
By James F. McGrath, at
May 28, 2009 1:44 PM
James, the post above was a rant, deliberately overstating a case to make a different point, as my next post above hopefully shows ;) Actually I think blogging, subject to the sort of evaluation the MLA team suggest, should count both as you suggest in the service area, but often also rather like papers to academic conferences. That is as a sort of quasi- or preliminary publication that services the research community.
But I could not write that above or I'd have spoilt the fun ;)
By Tim, at
May 29, 2009 7:38 AM
It reminds me why Illich is so important, still. We (meaning teachers) get so caught up in the technology of teaching (meaning not equipment, but learning outcomes, clear syllabuses, marking criteria and the rest of the techniques which we are told will make or teaching better - or at least better fitted to the educational system of which we are a part).
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I find it a little troubling. Aren't there places in the world where the teaching example is important for the inspiration of a few individual who will in this way realize a potential they might otherwise have missed? I am thinking too of the schools for girls in Afghanistan which the insurgency does not want - or your school in 'far away places' that you taught in. The interaction with one teacher - it is personal - will encourage as much as 'amo amas amat' and other tabular forms of rote learning might discourage.
BTW - I have had some real success with one 11-year-old over the past 10 months. He is inspired by the 5 minutes a week on a single Hebrew word or letter and has started with his Mum some weekly 1 hour lessons in reading Hebrew - his speed is marvelous and his daily practice makes him his mother's teacher already - after just two lessons! I will close my eyes and pray the little scholar can find his feet and keep enjoying learning.
By Bob MacDonald, at
March 12, 2009 10:41 AM
Hi Tim,
I had some thoughts on this video at http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/illich-makes-a-come-back-at-last/, where I first saw it. Illich's work is very useful however in some ways we might compare him with Marx's work on capitalism - a very good critique, but not much in the way of a viable and sustainable alternative. Learning from Illich is not the same thing as doing things his way, something I am very grateful for.
By Nichthus, at
March 12, 2009 11:06 AM
The comment Mark (Nichthus) mentions is here It is (as you'd expect, sensible and worth reading!
Bob: personally I read Illych as a critic. I don't take everything as a program to follow. I would not have spent more than 25 years teaching if I thought teaching was worthless. But I do believe that too often teaching and learning get caught up in educational systems which prioritise mass production of "knowledge" at the expense of either developing real skills or the wisdom to use them (knowledge and skills) well.
Mark: I wish we listened more and more effectively to Illych's critique. I love your Marx parallel. In both cases I would not want to become an "ist" (Marxist, or Illychist) but I find both have a lot to say about what is wrong with the world ;)
By Tim, at
March 14, 2009 7:20 PM
It is!
Prezi lets me create something like a mindmap, and then share it with others, or use it to illustrate my talk. Click on the image below to explore my Prezi on biblical narrative it's my first try, it has no pictures, but already I can see this is a new and often better way to present ideas than the old slideshow was. An audience can zoom in and out (just click on something to zoom in there, click on the magnifying glass icon to zoom in, or the full screen icon to see the whole "page") or step forward or back through the presentation with the arrows.
PS:
Stephen asks (in the comments below) for a standalone file to run the presentation on a PC (without the need for an Internet connection) here it is. It is nearly a 10MB download as it includes the files for Prezi as well as the data for the presentation. Apparently it works on Windows and Mac (but not yet on Linux) so pretty portable!
Labels: teaching, technology
¶ 4:16 PM
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Can you general standalone movies that you could put on a PC in kiosk mode? That would be cool
By Stephen G, at
February 16, 2009 9:25 PM
And it works (they say) on both PC and Macs... how cool is that?
By Tim, at
February 17, 2009 7:36 AM
Being in Flash it is all done with vectors, so you can swoop in very very close to the detail that's invisible on this screenshot, can include pictures and stuff as well as shapes and words... great for explaining ideas and their relationship in ways that let your students pan out to see the "big picture" and fit things in context.
But it is in private beta and I don't have a login :( If anyone knows how to get inside the magic castle please let me know - they say they will only let the filthy rich and venture capitalists inside, but surely they want potential users (especially those in the top 50 bibliobloggers) to try, demonstrate and generally rave about how wonderful their tool is? Don't they? Haven't they heard of Web 2.0???
Labels: software, teaching, web 2.0
¶ 3:38 PM
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I've got beta access. I simply wrote them and told them I was an educator interested in using it. Definitely not just for those with capital to invest, as I have none. ;-)
It took about two-three months, and then they sent me a login.
By Jimmy Doyle, at
February 5, 2009 4:43 PM
powerpoint has actually already been dead for years, killed by Keynote. part of Apple's iLife suite. I'm slowly converting all my fellow faculty members over. Much easier to use, and the presentations are stunning.
Another good free online one is SlideRocket if you have a PseudoComputer (PC)
http://www.sliderocket.com/
By Danny Zacharias, at
February 6, 2009 8:17 AM
But Danny, evangelical hype aside, don't "Keynote" addresses look, feel and work much like PPT, a sequence of boreing slides? I'm asleep alr...
By Tim, at
February 6, 2009 9:02 AM
Well, the slides are only as boring as the user makes them IMO. And I guess it depends what you need to share. Prezi is certainly cool, but I'm not sure what I'd use it for. Keynote keeps my students focused, and reminds them of what my main points are. I also integrate video, pics, as well as sympodium use in my classes- so keynote is just one tool. Prezi is another one in the tool box for sure
You know I'll never cease to be an evangelical :-)
I'm delighted with Camtasia, it is easy to use, and gives me loads of control. Brilliant for making screencasts and online presentations. BUT, I'm a geek, I like playing with computers and tweeking settings... most of my colleagues don't :( That's where Screentoaster (HT Jane Hart again) seems ideal, it runs from your browser, no FTP uploads, just use the "embed" code to add the 'cast to a blog or course... Has anyone tried it?
¶ 1:01 PM
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The "Subjects" tab lists: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology and Religion so there's something for everyone!
Except...
The only entry under "Religion" is Christine Hayes fine series Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). And we already know about those lectures... where are all the other Biblical Scholars? What makes Biblical Studies so ungenerous, so unwilling to share?
If your institution has a less "dog in the manger" attitude to teaching about the Bible than my employers do please go to the page about partnering with Academic Earth, you may earn no cash, but you might raise your reputation and assist people with fewer resources...
Labels: biblical.studies.online, christmas, teaching, video
¶ 7:24 AM
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What a great resource. Thanks for pointing me to it.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on your own posted question: 'What makes Biblical Studies so ungenerous, so unwilling to share?'
By Jason Goroncy, at
February 3, 2009 1:29 PM
Well... if no one else is willing to show and tell, maybe I'll have to go first, but I would rather hear some other ideas before posting mine - but I promise I do intend to post my experiences in this area ;)
By Tim, at
February 3, 2009 4:32 PM
Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over ten languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide.Prof Wesch has a stimulating post on Participatory Media Literacy: Why it matters, he draws heavily on a fine essay Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies, by Howard Rheingold. With one of the longest running stimulating gurus of digital collaboration (Rheingold) and one of the hottest - recently voted Prof of the Year - US tertiary teachers around (Wesch) there are plenty of stimulating ideas to reflect on.
Howard Rheingold is a critic and writer; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing). He is the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs. website: rheingold.com vlog: vlog.rheingold.comReading the two underlines WHY teaching about digital literacy (beyond the standard "how to use the library catalogue, online databases and Zotero to research and write an essay in a Wordprocessor") is vital whether one is teaching Chemistry, Anthropology or Old Testament.
Just as it was not merely the technology of moveable type that changed the economics of literature in early modern Europe, but even more the ways that technology was adopted and used that revolutionised the culture and the thought that changed "everything". If Luther and others had not adopted the technology and used it to undermine the old power structures in politics, theology and the academy the technology alone might have enabled a very different world, where Rome and the aristocratic families of Europe licenced print and censored its contents...
In 2009 the failure of banks and auto manufacturers demonstrates that the notion of a "free market" that can adjust itself successfully is evidently false. Yet if the new(ish) communications technologies are to have a liberating effect (like that of print) we have a greater need of an open market than ever. To achieve this we need literate users using the technologies, so that those who would harness them for their own benefit alone can be hampered as Luther's rude and crude cartoons scandalised those in power in late medieval Europe.
As Rheingold tries to demonstrate only a participative pedagogy is up to this task. So, the deep questions are:
- Can teachers learn fast enough? or
- Will the volunteerism of "Web 2.0" be enough to open the doors?
Labels: culture, digital, teaching, technology, thinking
¶ 10:29 AM
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Hey, I've been thinking a lot about this topic through my work at Project New Media Literacies, and I'm thrilled to see so many people searching for actionable items in respect to participatory pedagogy. You can read a recent blogpost I wrote on this here: http://newmedialiteracies.org/blog/2009/01/and-what-rough-beast-its-hour.php
By Jenna, at
January 9, 2009 2:11 AM
NB: The link and the offers vanish like Cinderella's coach at midnight in the Amazon on St Valentine's Day (Feb 14th). So use it now!
Labels: book, study-skills, teaching
¶ 8:15 AM
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What do you make of it?
[The MP3 was produced by a husband and wife team, and together with a very good essay explaining and justifying the performance it was submitted for the last assignment in the Genesis class I taught recently. I shared some of the thinking behind this assessment on Theologians without borders.]
Labels: audio, audio.bible, genesis, teaching
¶ 4:12 PM
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Huge thanks to Stephen for the tip off (via email) to this brilliant resource:The Bible Style Guide may be "a reference text designed specifically for those working within the media industry." But the "crash course in the Bible" it offers is good for far more than just "busy journalists, broadcasters and bloggers." It combines a very brief, down to earth, and wise glossary of key terms that people use when talking about the Bible. With a crash course in the nature of biblical literature, translation and the Bible in today's world. There is probably no one who can not learn something from this free 70+ page book!
Students, do you:
- think Ebionite is a sort of ancient plastic?
- a Codex is used to decode secret messages?
- that a canon goes "bang"?
Kids, do you think the Bible is old fashioned but confused because you were brought up to think it a Holy Book? Just get The Bible Style Guide and browse through it like a magazine.
Mature Christians (that's code for "not longer young" and somewhat stuck in a rut) just get the (totally free) Bible Style Guide and discover something new and inspiring - before breakfast.
Teachers, fed up with people who do your Intro class yet still think the Catholic Epistles were written by Pope Benedict? Point all your classes to The Bible Style Guide and then warn them you'll get tough on people who have not at least mastered its under 80 pages!
Quite seriously this is the most compact, useful and easy to use Bible Handbook I have ever seen...
Labels: bible, biblical.studies.online, education, teaching
¶ 6:28 AM
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This approach is one we valued in developing דָּבָר Biblical Hebrew Vocabularies project. Along with the other contextual material: sound, picture, other forms, semantic field... we included a phrase from the Bible that uses the word to be learned. In our version the student can also hear n0t only the lemma, but also the example phrase.Allan has prepared lists for about 1200 words. We only have about half that "done" so far. But if you notice that "vocabularies" is plural in the name we chose you may also spot that with our system you can produce the vocabulary you need for whichever grammar book or course you are using. If you need a word we have not yet done you can become a "contributor" and get a login to add data to the collection to fill in the gap.
Here is what one word would look like to the student.
BTW if you want Greek flashcards Danny has a system to offer. Which allows me to mention that דָּבָר Biblical Hebrew Vocabularies project also allows you to output your vocabularies for printing to use as flashcards. (Actually flash two sheets of paper that slide but that will save trees too!)
Labels: hebrew, open.biblical.studies, teaching
¶ 7:29 AM
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Your davar project web page is very nice. I wish I could create something similar.
As for what I'm doing: If you click on the scripture reference you can hear me pronounce the whole scriptural phrase. Also, you didn't mention that I give a translation of the phrase without translating the Hebrew vocab word. The real motor is to see the word in a familiar context and intuitively know its meaning. For example, "In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth." It's very easy for someone with basic Bible knowledge to see that "elohim" means "god". Finding this kind of context isn't always possible. But the idea is to strive for a context that will help one gather the word's semantic value, whether due to familiarity or the phrase itself.
The project was going to be turned into an electronic database that would be compatible with all available grammars via a sorting mechanism. But things didn't pan out.
Apparently the project wasn't commercially viable enough to justify the programming investment.
By Alan Lenzi, at
August 31, 2008 11:50 AM
Alan, the PDF I downloaded from your link does not seem to be clickable, but if you don't mind making your work available freely, we could look at either you using the engine that runs Davar to create your own resource, or using your data to make the existing resource better.
To use the engine would require asking the developers at the U of A but I would expect they would be willing.
To change our data would require discussion with the others who have developed it to this point...
By Tim, at
September 1, 2008 6:13 AM
Mind you they need to. At present the front page of Googlepedia features clogged toilets and how to backpack. Ah, the joys of a fully "authoritative" and commercial encyclopedia, so much better than Wikipedia - NOT! Yesterday to illustrate the genre of the Torah I needed a photo of conglomerate, I found this on Wikipedia. I wonder if the googleplex will ever match that?
For now - until the authorities get busier - don't bother looking for biblical material on Google, "Isaiah", and the like are blank, though there is an article on "David". Jim won't like it though ;) But for the rest of us it even has a photo!Labels: biblical.studies.online, internet, teaching
¶ 10:45 AM
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A task for you
So, I thought I'd make a start and ask you all to join in. I'll post my fragmentary list, with some reasons, either in comments here or on your blog (in which case please place a comment with a link to the post here, so that I can gather the posts into a full listing in a future post. Nominate places giving a short description of your reasons.
First some ground rules:
- though we must end up with a list of ten we can discuss more places before we narrow the list
- the list is fosused on enriching understanding of the Bible
- places should be either of great historical or geographical significance
- we will need a balance of places of significance for the Jewish/ChristianHebrew Bible, and also the Christian New Testament, as well as those that illustrate the geography of the land
- the surrounding geography will form part of the virtual visit, so below I suggest Megiddo in part because of its location.
My first suggestion- Megiddo: (a) geographically significant to explain the Plain of Jezreel (b) significance of trade routes (c) site of battles including (?) the one talked about in Revelation in the NT (d) Iron Age administrative centre (e) importance of water supply (f) gate complex and (g) Bronze Age cultic site.
Labels: 1sam, 2sam, bible, internet, teaching
¶ 8:56 AM
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Teaching like Cats & Dogs Carl Sweatman (sporadic at best) offered - via Facebook, which I have only just yesterday joined - this brilliantly simple answer to the question:
Throw them some mice!Like I said, brilliant and simple ;-) So, a supplementary question for you all: What sort of wisdom-related "mice" might get a class of students going as cats?
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Well, it might help if there were using this Bible translation :-)
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
By Stephen G, at
June 28, 2008 11:55 AM
This one claims that we are all either "Cats" or "Dogs". The description is fun, and I'm sure you can guess which you are!
Cat: Scratch my ear. Ex-cellent. May I use your leg as a scratching post? No? Hmm, how about I sit on you instead.You see, recognisably Dog and Cat, as we meet them in everyday life, but also recognisably roles we play in social contexts. Not necessarily actually as built-in personality, but at least roles we adopt in particular situations, and probably as preferences too?
Do not move. ... Well done. Now feed me.
Dog: Hello, let's do something. What should we do? ...
Yes, the stick fetching game would be acceptable.
... However I find that stick you are holding uninteresting. Try again. ... Ah, yes, yes! That stick I find quite exciting! Ok, I will fetch the stick. ... That was fun!
Paul Harrison links it to a more complex discussion of "dominance" about which I am less convinced, but he gets really interesting again when he talks about Dogs and Cats in education:
TeachingI know that frustration! The answer is to be sneakier in avoiding the Cat role:
When teaching a class, the teacher naturally takes the cat role. Therefore, the students are in the dog role, and adopt the dog cognitive style.Brian: "You are all individuals."Most of the time, this assignment of roles is correct. However when teaching a creative or assertive skill (for example, programming or feminism), it may be important for students to practice using the cat cognitive style: they will need to use this style when applying what you teach.
Crowd: "Yes, we are all individuals."
Simply asking questions of your students will not put them in the cat role, as it is still you that initiates action. Thus, asking questions is not a good strategy for waking students up and getting them engaged, something that causes much frustration to teachers.
I once had a lecturer called Damian Conway (yes, that Damian Conway) who avoided taking the cat role by making his students set the agenda. At the start of the lecture, he would ask for questions, which he would then write on the blackboard. This took a little coaxing, usually when you go to a lecture your brain has switched to idle before your bum hits the seat. He then ad-libbed the lecture from these questions. (It's no good to ask for questions at the end of the lecture, by then everyone is comfortably in dog mode.)I can't see me adopting the "act stupid" idea much - I guess I'm afraid they might not catch the irony ;-) but I've always been tempted by the idea of getting the students to design the class...
Another way to flip roles is to do something blatantly and obviously stupid, and hope someone points it out.Performer: "Where has it gone? Where-ever can it be?"
Audience: "Behind you! Behind you!"
Do any of you have ideas for
Labels: teaching
¶ 10:38 AM
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Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks!
Labels: narrative, teaching, video
¶ 10:10 AM
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What if... we really used Moodle to the full
Some years ago at Carey we began to "move our distance teaching to the next level". Part of the plan was to install, and make good use of, an open source (means free) online "Course Management System" called Moodle.
Moodle allows:
- a central store of documentation for a course, which can be updated as soon as something changes
- students to be reminded of assignments that are due soon and other important dates
- one central place to email a whole class
- a place to store and deliver marked assignments
- a place to provide course related material like pictures, videos, links, PDF files of readings that did not get into the course anthology...
- teachers to set simple "quizzes" (with questions in various formats like multiple choice, short answer etc.) that can either count towards the course marks or simply provide feedback to students or check that they have done required reading
- cheap - no software costs, and even a professionally hosted option is not expensive
- easy - it takes very little time and instruction for even our less techie colleagues to work the basics, and usually not too long for someone to show you how achieve the less obvious goals
- scalable - anything from one course with one teacher to the whole British Open University (which with over 150,000 students is a but bigger than the average theological seminary ;-)
- fairly easy to manage, and there are plenty of people around with experience who can help.
Some courses at Carey really quickly began to make real use of the system. Brian Smith (our retired principal who had not used a computer before retirement) clocked up the most student contributions to a discussion simply by asking really thought -provoking leading questions. I used the tests to reward students with up to 10% simply by doing the "required reading" and as a result turned what I think before was 80% of the class in real life do about 20% of the reading, to 80% of the class do at least 80% of the reading.
But there are gaps. Some teachers hardly use Moodle - though not difficult it is one more thing to learn in a life that is too busy. Few of us actually get organised to post pictures and links relevant to our courses... So, implementation and take up of the possibilities are a bit hit and miss...
What if...
- We had a "Moodle consultant" (alias a technically minded senior student) who could spend an hour or two each week helping us to use Moodle more or better - guess how much more most teachers would achieve!
- We had a policy that all teachers and students in every class promised to take a serious look at the discussion forums for that class at least twice each week (maybe one or two hours of work to timetable in each week, but think of the greater communication with distance students and how much more time effective than individual emails replying one-on-one to questions)
- One of the Moodle consultant's jobs was to check what pictures and other resources we used in teaching the class onsite, and helped us make them available to distance students.
- A scattering of our courses set as an assignment to present readings online and then interact with other students presentations - I have seen such an assignment put a student in South-East Asia in contact with one in the South Island of NZ and "watched" the experience open the student's eyes to a wider world producing real formative change.
Labels: distance, internet, teaching, technology
¶ 1:59 PM
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Tim
This article is coming along well and I hope others add their penny's worth.
When I taught some online courses at Whitley College, one of the assignment tasks was to contribute to online discussion on the lecture--about 250 words each week with encouragement to interact with each other.
We did have classes each week but also distance students were part of the course.
Some people really got into the online discussion with enthusiasm. Others hung back. It was important to give sufficient marks for this to be deemed to be worthwhile and important.
One guy said that as an introvert he liked the opportunity to reflect on his contribution before posting it to the class discussion, whereas in the real class he often hung back.
As a lecturer, the first time I ran this I discovered there were more students and more work in posting lectures and resources online. I did not give the time to stirring the online discussion and interacting and I think online discussion requires this support from the teacher.
The next time around and subsequent times I did not employ a 'Moodle Consultant' or the like but simply a tutor, part of whose job was to stir the online discussion and to chase up the online tasks. I found this to be a great help and he did act as a consultant, especially for students who were emailing assignments for the very first time.
By Geoff Pound, at
June 4, 2008 6:10 AM
Geoff, yes, the time delay (and probably the quasi-anonymity) of online asynchronous "discussion forums" is great for us introverts, but teachers still have to watch for the non-participants and encourage them.
Your "tutor" sounds like a more upmarket version of my (grandly named ;-) Moodle Consultant. Perhaps different teachers would benefit more from each:
the low tech great teacher (like Brian Smith) could use a Moodle Consultant - assisting with some of the technical stuff, like reformating pictures to suitable size and uploading them;
the more techie could use a tutor to assist with the actual teaching (e.g. I am not good at "stirring the pot" as a peace maker I tend to try to calm it too much ;-) a "stirrer" like you describe would be great.)
By Tim, at
June 4, 2008 6:23 AM
- Genesis 22 (Powerpoint)
- Genesis 1 (as a pyramid):
Labels: biblical.studies, gen 1, gen 22, teaching, video
¶ 6:59 AM
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I chose to watch Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero talk. Watching him speak, as well as hearing the talk with slides should be so much richer, I thought. And some intelligent comments from other previous watchers would be added value. In fact it is the worst of multimedia meets the worst of "Web 2.0". Since you have good sized video and good sized slides, with OK sound the presentation did not so much stream and trickle with frequent annoying hiccups. Make the video smaller, maybe compress the sound a little more and that combination would be great though (or deliver it from a DVD for real quality). The comments, of course are not intelligent, they are anonymous and crowd out the video with such gems as "Great!!!" repeated 16 times at various apparently arbitrary points. It might have been interesting to know that the chair (that almost appeared in the video) was Ikea, but it was irrelevant and so just another blot on the video. All in all a big disappointment.
Now before you think I am a multimedia Luddite, or a Web 2.0 sceptic, hear me out...
The multimedia aspect is brilliant, the combination of video and slides has the potential to offer so much more than slides and audio alone. Except in this implementation it does not work. Both slides and video are smallish (about 480px wide each) which is unavoidable for web delivery, but they are not small enough (at least on NZ's rather narrow "broadband"). Bigger slides with smaller video in one corner (think Camtasia with a webcam) would download faster and give a fullscreen experience.
Or, deliver it on DVD...
Web 2.0 is great, when users contribute usefully. The "wisdom of crowds" works (at least often) and applications like Google Earth and sites like Flickr use publicly contributed resources brilliantly to provide a growing and useful body of material. But do not give me the folly of "Anonymous" once humans are sure they will not be identified we tend to give reign to our baser instincts - in this case a plethora of useless, annoying and occasionally rude comments. Which proliferate like rabbits, at times almost hiding the presenter behind a barrage of meaningless verbiage.
Make users login, identify them and provide their email address so that particularly crass and stupid "comments" can get the feedback they deserve, and you'd have a brilliant opportunity to interact with the video. (Probably you'd need to put most comments outside the video and only put those which like the "Ikea chair" comment relate directly to some visual element on the video itself.) But you can't do that, because of spam, once again spam ruins a potentially useful tool.Labels: multimedia, spam, teaching, web2.0
¶ 10:03 AM
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Sorry the Omnisio experience wasn't up to your expectations. Admittedly we have optimized for consumers with reasonably fast internet connections - I would recommend opening the window in the background and letting it buffer before watching it. Also note you can click the icon in the top left corner of the slides or video to adjust the size (e.g. if you want to get the small video + large slides layout that you describe). The fullscreen button should also help.
We are working on the anonymous commenting issue.
Cheers,
Ryan
CEO and Co-Founder, Omnisio
By Ryan, at
May 21, 2008 8:47 PM
Thanks Ryan, I hope I did not sound too negative, and after the event I realise the "clever" title might increase that danger I think the idea is great. The speed issue will resolve itself given time ;) I think that the commenting issue is the real killer, at present it makes the system simply unusable :( So I'll be delighted when it is fixed. Maybe a "view only signed comments" feature?
By Tim, at
May 22, 2008 8:41 AM
There is an RSS feed, for compulsive Bible Mappers (like me) to keep up with all the questions and answers or new maps that people upload.
I have only one problem with the system, since I was already a PBWiki user I cannot seem to get added to the BibleMapper Wiki to actually write anything, even a plea for help! And I have one... Somehow, even though I have un- and re-installed the program I cannot select things like rivers, I just get an hour glass and the program hangs for a few moments before continuing as if I had never tried to use the select tool. I wanted to use it to (a) try out David's helpful answer and (b) once I had mastered it document it with screenshots to make it easier for beginniers... Now I'll just have to ask the question here, and email Mark to see if he has a magic key to let me in to the Bible Mapper Wiki ;-)
< wicked > I wonder if Jim will overcome his Wiki phobia enough to use this one? < /wicked thought >
BTW if you do not subscribe to David Instone-Brewer's superb Tyndale Tech Briefings - DO! This time he covers Bible maps and mapping with a really useful summary of much of (the best of) what is available.
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wicked man.... it's not phobia, it's disdain.
;-)
By Jim, at
April 24, 2008 12:25 PM
Hi, Tim. Mark here. Since you already had a PBwiki account, all you needed to do was contact me via the "Contact the Owner" link at the bottom of the front page. You are now officially a "Writer" for the site!
By mgvh, at
April 25, 2008 7:31 AM
Thanks, Mark, it was not obvious that that was what I needed to do. I am away with no Internet till Monday (Friday is a holiday here :) so I'll try again then...
By Tim, at
April 25, 2008 7:43 AM
BTW, once you post your question about the rivers on the wiki, I will try to provide additional info, perhaps even a video. In the meantime, try CTRL-F to Find and then right-click to edit the river.
By mgvh, at
April 25, 2008 8:04 AM
Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Job. Only a few of the Psalms and parts of Proverbs were assigned." so even back in the "good old days" when men were men and everyone a speedreader with no TV to watch or Internet to play with they only actually managed to read some good chunks of the Bible, and I bet less good students (even back then) managed to scrape by reading only bits of the books actually assigned ;)
Charles Halton also chipped in, admitting: "I don’t have good resolution yet." to the problem of "the ratio of primary and secondary readings".
I do!
Do not set the Bible as required reading. If your students do not read the Bible for themselves, or at least listen to the podcasts, then they really have little interest in the subject, so leave those students to flounder!
Actually seriously, there is no way to set reading the whole Bible as required reading, so set and use only small chunks, and make talking about them so interesting that students will want to read more... as always in teaching we need to remind ourselves that "sugar catches more flies than vinegar."
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"Ancient times"???
By Duane Smith, at
April 17, 2008 3:39 AM
Ah, well, I think you mentioned '64, now I am celebrating my 60th birthday and I was a mere stroppy schoolboy in '64...
By Tim, at
April 17, 2008 7:58 AM
Labels: hypertext, teaching, web
¶ 2:48 PM
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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.
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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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
BUT, the whole conversation is again so wrong. The "lecture" should not ne something you can, or would want to transcribe! Think about it, if it is transcribable why not just buy the book, a $20 paperback costs far less per student than a teacher and you can read it when you want - and you can choose a "better" teacher ;-) The lecture as a means to transfer information and ideas (as data) is inefficient and inconvenient, compared to print. Use the "lecture" time to do more, add value, get students engaging with the ideas and information and long term they will learn more.
If one dictates a "lecture", and students write a transcription (or even - though this is much better - makes selected notes) by hand or on a laptop then the teacher was replaced by technology over 500 years back! When Herr Gutenberg invented moveable type he made the printed book cheap - why take lecture notes, if the teacher just "lectures" save travel-time, boycott the class and buy the book....HT to Joe Fleener
Labels: teaching
¶ 6:24 AM
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In his post Web 2.0 and experts: a metaphor Nichthus continues to ruminate on the relevance or place of Web 2.0 approaches to teaching.This time he proposes a thoroughly Kiwi metaphor: refereeing decisions at a rugby match (I'm sure denizens of other sports-mad nations can translate ;-). Of course, in terms of the Rugby match he's right, no one but the blindest, most one-eyed fan would want the crowd consulted over a difficult point of interpretation of the rules of a sport that could decide a world cup.
BUT is refereeing a match, or indeed any other decision making process, the best model for teaching and learning? By this I mean: when I learn am I placed in the position of a referee who much decide what is "right"? In a totally, 100%, unguided system I might be, but if I have a guide or teacher (whether by my side or on the stage ;) the model no longer describes my experience or the process.In teaching and learning the question is not: which decision will be taken - was it a try or not? Rather the issue at stake is: will the learner acquire the desired information and skills, and through what process will they be best facilitated in this learning?
Here Web 2.0 provides a much better model than a referee. For, through the advice and critique of my peers, through trying things for myself, as well as through professional advice and critique, I am likely to learn more and better - not least because my peers motivate me. The joy of discovery motivates me, in ways the threat of bad marks does not. I respond better to stick and carrot than just stick! Maybe to use another Kiwi metaphor teaching is more like herding sheep than refereeing a rugby match, sheep are more likely to find their way to the desired pasture if they are part of a flock moving that way than if they respond alone to the shepherd's yells and waving arms! Of course the ideal is to have a few sheepdogs helping too ;-)
Labels: rugby, teaching, web2.0
¶ 11:04 AM
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Hiya Tim,
Thanks for your thoughtful post. Actually, my target in the post was NOT teaching and learning. It was the role of and need for the expert. We both agree that "is refereeing a match, or indeed any other decision making process, the best model for teaching and learning?" when we answer NO! But it DOES point out the difference between those with the best view and those watching from the sides.
I have a part B post that you may also be interested in... watch that space!
Best,
Mark.
By Nichthus, at
December 9, 2007 8:29 PM
(1997:123):
We honor both the discipline and our students by teaching them how to think likeWhich as Nichthus recognises raises, for teachers, the question: How do theologians think? I'm delighted that in seeking to answer this he returns to my favourite description of theology, Anselm's "Faith seeking understanding". In the light of this what theologians do is seek to understand (life, the universe and everything) as believers.
historians or biologists or literary critics rather than merely how to lip-sync the conclusions others have reached.
However, this is where it gets tricky, especially in the world of traditional academic theology. For as the discipline has grown and developed it has "evolved" several strikingly different specialities. In theology as academic discipline a "(systematic) theologian" seeks understanding differently from a "practical" theologian, and neither follow the same paths in their search for wisdom and understanding as a biblical "scholar"! Life is totally different in the real world. The neat corridors in the academy that one follows in the search for understanding are not like the winding paths and thickets of the forest of life in which we (whether "theologians" or "lay" - what a daft distinction, as if the untrained punter in the pew does not do theology!) are confronted by experience with requires our faith to "understand" it.
Please do not understand me wrong, I do not mean that the techniques and tools my discipline can offer to faith (all the methods and techniques that generation after generation of Bible readers in academy and church have struggled to develop, and now also adding some of the tools that secular readers of secular texts have added to the arsenal) are unnecessary. Students if they are to become competent readers of the Bible still need to recognise the genre of a passage, still need to listen to how others have read it... Discipline skills and knowledge are not unnecessary, they are vital. But, they are not the core of what a "theologian", qua theologian, does.
Labels: biblical.studies, teaching, theology
¶ 11:43 AM
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