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Sunday, July 20, 2008
  Israel: a virtual study tour
I had an interesting email the other day, a parent wants to take their son on a virtual study tour to Israel. I was asked to suggest ten places to "visit", selected because of their "historical importance, but also of picturesque value". I had to admit that I am biased, I teach only Old Testament and so when in Israel I never visited the
places that mattered to Jesus!

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:
  1. though we must end up with a list of ten we can discuss more places before we narrow the list
  2. the list is fosused on enriching understanding of the Bible
  3. places should be either of great historical or geographical significance
  4. 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
  5. the surrounding geography will form part of the virtual visit, so below I suggest Megiddo in part because of its location.
Notice that the list is intended to be of use for understanding of the Bible story - so e.g. Tel Azekah and the Elah Valley might get in, regardless of one's estimation of the historicity or otherwise of the characters David and Goliath, since a visit to a Shephellah valley would assist understanding the stories of Judges-Kings.
Photo from Wikipedia
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.
Note that this makes it less likely that Hazor (trade routes, gates and Bronze Age cult) or Beersheba (gates, administrative centre, water supply) will make the final cut - places like this that serve multiple functions are especially useful!

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Saturday, June 28, 2008
  Dogs and Cats, followup...
In response to the question I posed in


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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Friday, June 27, 2008
  Teaching like Cats & Dogs
Thanks to Problem Attic I discovered a fun site with yet another "personality theory". I am a sucker for personality theories, anything that makes some sense of the confusing jumble of human relationships has to be good - as long as you don't take it too seriously ;-)

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.
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!
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?

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:
Teaching
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."
Crowd: "Yes, we 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.

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 know that frustration! The answer is to be sneakier in avoiding the Cat role:
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.)

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!"
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...

Do any of you have ideas for making encouraging a class to act more "catlike" during parts of a session?

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Thursday, June 26, 2008
  Help, I need someone to suggest a film
I am teaching Genesis again this year, after several years break. I want to start by explaining why Genesis matters, and would really like a short film clip that illustrates how knowing the beginning of a story helps us to understand the rest. So I'm thinking a film where some vital item of information is shown right at the start, and if you "came in late" and missed it you would also miss much of what is going on in the film...

Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks!

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Tuesday, June 03, 2008
  Oh, use your Moodle!
Geoff (at Theologians Without Borders) has been asking to hear about creativity in theological education, in an off blog email "conversation" he has asked about how we use our use of the Moodle CMS in Carey's distance program. I also agreed to do some guest posts with the theme "What if..." dreaming of things that could be done to enrich distance teaching of theology. Here's what I am thinking as a "What if..." post about Moodle. Please tell me what I've missed, or missed explaining - before I send it in to Geoff!

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
Moodle is:
  • 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.
In short Moodle is great, and even better value, and it will allow a Seminary to really support Internet connected distance students, and through discussion forums and emails integrate them into a "class".

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...
  1. 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!
  2. 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)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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Saturday, May 31, 2008
  Performance as assessment: synthesis and Biblical exegesis
Geoff at Theologians without Borders asked for examples of Creativity in Theological Education for my contribution I've presented an assignment I regularly use which asks students to "perform" the text, they are then marked on a "justification" they write which explains the performance's origin in the biblical text, i.e. what about the text caused them to perform it this way and how their performance communicates important features of the text to their audience. You can read the write up here. Or just enjoy the two sample performances (because of a technical hitch I don't have time to fix before going away for a long weekend (thank you Mrs Queen for having a birthday ;) one is displayed here the other requires you to click a link:

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
  Omnisio or nomnisio?
I took a look at Omnisio today. It is a tool that allows one to associate video clips with slide presentations, and then allows users to comment directly on the video. It sounded cool and useful.

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.
Microsoft's chief, estimated worth $46bn, is the US' richest man
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.
Do you remember back in 2004 when Bill Gates multi-billionaire philanthropist and founder of the world's biggest software company proclaimed that the spam problem would soon fixed? Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time, Microsoft boss Bill Gates has promised. Nice one Bill!

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Thursday, April 24, 2008
  Bible Mapper Help
Mark has set up a wiki to provide help for the free Bible mapping tool Bible Mapper. The idea is that (since BM comes free but with no support or help files) the community of users could help each other. I noticed exploring his wiki that David Barrett the creator of Bible Mapper has already chipped in with an answer - this seems a good way for David to be able to provide assistance for users, but without being committed to offering organised regular help, for which surely he'd have to charge!

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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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
  When NOT to read the Bible
Kevin Wilson has been reflecting on the difficulties of cramming too much into introductory courses. In particular the conundrum that if you ask students to read the Bible (in an Intro to the Bible course) there is no time to read a textbook too.
Photo by fitaloon
Duane Smith demonstrated that this was equally an impossibility in ancient times, after having claimed that "we read most of the Hebrew Bible (in English)" he then admits: "1 and 2 Chronicles and Esther were not assigned and we only read about half of the minor prophets and just selections from Leviticus, Numbers,
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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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
  Dialogue in biblical narrative
I have been working on completing my notes on biblical narrative, in preparation for teaching the course in Sri Lanka (BTW for news of my trip, with I hope photos and videos from both CTS and the refugee camp please subscribe I do NOT expect to be posting here much while we are away). I have just completed the page on "Dialogue" only about 1500 words (not counting the linked pages or notes) and it probably doesn't count for International Biblical Studies Writing Month anyway - but it is another writing task (partially) achieved. Only narrative speed, prose and poetry, omission &, ambiguity to go.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
  Zotero is brilliant, and integrates nicely
In the comments discussion on my post below about Zotero - the free open bibliography and citations manager - I may have helped mislead people. I had not then been using the wordprocessor integration feature. I now have, it is great. And works just as well in MS Word as it does in Open Office on my PC (I assume that the Mac and Linux versions are as superb).

Here are two quick and dirty screencasts to demonstrate:



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Monday, January 07, 2008
  Technology makes you dumb!
Or maybe not! Way back in 2007 Nichthus posted in The new illiteracy a few extracts from the announcement of a report: The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardises our future. The extracts made me want to scream and cry.
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!
Opening titles from the TV series
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!

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Sunday, January 06, 2008
  Maps for teaching
A couple of days ago Chris Heard posted about how he is upgrading the maps he uses for teaching (I found his previous set really useful a couple of years ago) using the atlas module in the Accordance Bible program for Macs. Because Chris wanted maps with semi-transparent "call outs" with reminders on them he took the Accordance maps into Photoshop to enhance them. Then David Lang on the Accordance blog noted this and proposed that presenting them directly to the class in Accordance would allow extra features like animating the routes map. Chris replied that he wanted the maps available to students for private study, and that not all students have this software, so the maps had to be exported anyway.

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.)

video

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Thursday, December 13, 2007
  Computers in class :: or a false view of teaching?
Photo by Hari Bilalic
Another teacher fires a round in the war against laptops in class "Computers in the Classroom…Not All They’re Cracked Up to Be?" Is this a "Dog Bites Man" headline, or what? R. Scott Clark talks sense about the fact that students who make handwritten notes are likely to do better than those who try to typewrite a transcription of the lecture. Students and other profs chime in to complain about the clacking noise... yada, yada, yada...

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.
Photo by peiqianlong
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

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Friday, December 07, 2007
  Experts and Web 2.0 :: teaching and learning
Photo by Cdr Aitch
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.
Photo by Jitsu
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 ;-)

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Thursday, November 29, 2007
  How do "theologians" think?
Nichthus in Teaching theology: What's the microcosm? Quotes Parker Palmer
(1997:123):
We honor both the discipline and our students by teaching them how to think like
historians or biologists or literary critics rather than merely how to lip-sync the conclusions others have reached.
Which 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.

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.

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Sunday, November 25, 2007
  Learning Hebrew Vocabulary
John, the prolific, Hobbins has posted, as a demonstration of concept The Human Anatomy in Ancient Hebrew: An Introduction. Basically he is proposing a better way to present and learn vocab. Through displaying a semantically related collection of words and their relationships. What he is proposing goes far beyond what we can achieve through דָּבָר : Biblical Hebrew Vocabularies project. Though we have tried, by using semantic field as one of the ordering categories, to make something approaching John's dream more possible.

At present, with only about 550 words, we are far short of the thousands John's dream requires, though that's the beauty of a distributed collaborative project, if John, and you, join in the full list would soon be done! As a sample of the sort of thing a student would see I have outputted the currently available "kinship terms":
If you want to play with the system email me: tim (at) carey.ac.nz
.

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Saturday, November 24, 2007
  Virtual classrooms
I have been playing with Authorpoint Lite (a tool to turn a PowerpointTM :( presentation with recorded audio into FlashTM :( ) It works really well, the only drawback to the free version is that the Flash only seems to work on my local machine or from their server, so it is only suitable for material one wants to make freely available (Carey copyrights its courses :(

If someone were to give me US$299 (or whatever the Education price is - not displayed on the website) I'd love to use the full version!

So, when they emailed me about a new "Virtual Classroom" tool (WiZiQ) for Moodle (the Open Source Learning Management System) I became really interested. If I was teaching next semester at Carey I'd try it out (but I am on sabbatical :) ...

I wonder how well the two-way audio would work over dialup, let alone video, so for now this is a dream of the future for many of our students.

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Monday, November 19, 2007
  Sabbatical plans!
Now that the marking is finished, and before I prepare the paper for the Aotearoa NZ Association for Biblical Studies meeting (3-4 Dec) I am enjoying relishing planning my sabbatical which officially begins in days now :)

As well as writing:
  • an article on coherence and cohesion in Amos 7:1-8:3
  • organise a colloquium on the Coherence of Biblical Texts (perhaps alongside the SBL International meeting in Auckland in July 2008 )
  • another article on linguistic cohesion and coherence in Amos draft written (but not submitted)
  • complete Not Just a Father
  • editing: significant progress on Hypertext Bible Dictionary
  • possibly begin work on book on Family in the Bible or on Theology of Ageing
I will be going to teach intensive courses in two rather different Asian contexts.

A masters' course on Biblical Narrative at Colombo Theological Seminary will be intensive, the students get 9 hours of lectures and some reading before I arrive, and then over two weekends and some evening sessions midweek I'll deliver the other 27 hours of the classes.

The other class is undergraduate, teaching in a refugee camp which has its own Bible School with teachers coming from other parts of Asia with the occasional Western visitor like me.

Barbara will be coming with me to both places, and in the camp will probably use her counselling training! Our daughter Sarah will also come to the camp and will likely help teach English - education can be so important to people who have had so many other things taken away! I've been setting this up through Geoff Pound and his Theologians Without Borders, and have really enjoyed our email conversations, not least the excursi on topics like the possibilities of MP3s of lectures for local language distance education.
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Friday, November 16, 2007
  Learning with style!
Several things have got me thinking about human difference. One was our recent staff training day (the middle of the marking season is also "naturally" the prime season for extra meetings ;-)

We focused on "Learning Styles" with input from Dr Peter Gossman from AUT University's Centre for Educational and Professional Development. He introduced the concept of learning styles through a question about which medium we'd prefer to use to learn about a rotary engine. He showed us:
  • a series of pictures of a cut away of the motor at work
  • an animated GIF
  • a page of text describing its workings
  • a model which one could turn and watch
Interestingly our preferences for these correlated pretty well with our scores on a test of learning styles. He also had us do a VARK questionnaire. There are dozens of different approaches to measuring learning styles, and they do not agree among themselves, nor do all the tests match their respective theory, so this is a fun playground for empirical educationalists ;-)

However, the VARK approach is conceptually simple. People tend to prefer to learn in four modes:
  • Visual: diagrammes, pictures, colour coding...
  • Aural: the people who download my 5 Minute Bible podcasts presumably, and those who like to talk about what they are learning
  • Read/Write: the bookish ones, who write good notes in words (my notes were kind of mindmaps with few words)
  • Kinesthetic: the ones who fiddle with their pens while others are talking, and who walk about or wave their hands a lot...
Now of course everyone is a mixture, and some are more mixed less biased than others! But, still in our group of a dozen or so all four styles were evident. When he spoke about Kinesthetic learners being hard to cope with in the classroom, Miriam was sitting next to me clicking her pen, while I was rolling mine in my fingers - from what he said, he is lucky we and a few others weren't wandering round the room! (Kinesthetic learners do not like sitting still being talked to, or even with ;-)

This stuff was fascinating to me, I spent a decade in tertiary education (BSc, BA, PhD and a year of missionary training) and almost all of it was either oriented to the read/write learners (books, articles, essays...), the aural learners (lectures, discussions, arguments over a coffee...) with just a little for visual people (the occasional photo or diagramme). None, nada, zero, zilch was formally oriented to my learning style! Though since I passed, either the visual stuff (my second preference) helped a lot, or I managed to roll my pens enough to learn something...

Now it gets really interesting...

My teaching, has largely copied my teachers. It is VAR but little K. Actually I think its the reverse, RAVing nuts (since according to our time estimates we expect students to Read and Write much more than they Talk/Listen, and Visual material is still regarded as a nice extra added on to enrich the words!

Wouldn't it be nice if our classes catered for ALL our students!

Next year's Intro to the Bible at Carey will do a better job than most, my secondary style "visual" has always been "allowed" so the material is pretty visual already, and Karen (who has experience and training teaching children!) has developed some great exercises where the students actually do (as in move, kinesthetic experience, real doing) things...

So, which learning preference(s) are yours? (Do the test at the VARK site to find out it really only takes a few moments.)

Does the teaching/learning that you do/endured match your preferred style?

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