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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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":
- as a "vocabulary"
- as a ZIP file for you to download and play with locally
.
Labels: hebrew, open.biblical.studies, teaching
¶ 8:58 AM
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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.
Labels: teaching, technology
¶ 7:53 AM
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Hello Tim,
This is Umesh from authorPOINT team, thank you for your comments on aP Lite and WiZiQ. You got that all correct but for one thing. You can actually upload aP Lite output to your own servers (manually ofcourse) and they would play fine as any other html page OR embed SWF tag depending upon which mode you are interested in and how much you can code at your end :).
FAQ at http://www.authorgen.com/authorpoint-lite-free/faqs.aspx#6 has the details of possible distribution modes of the output. We did not include these within the software to keep the installer size as low as possible and to keep the UI easy enough for maximum possible range of users.
You can write to me directly at umesh@authorgen.com if you feel like discussing this more, such discussions help us immensely to plan the product further.
By , at
November 26, 2007 11:39 PM
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
- 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
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.
Labels: colombo, refugee, sabbatical, teaching
¶ 8:24 PM
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Congratulations Tim! Do keep the blog going, no eSabbatical please!
By Nichthus, at
November 21, 2007 8:33 AM
I'm not planning one, though like many who have been blogging a while I have wondered recently "what's the point, or could I use this time better... Geoff is encouraging me to keep a blog/journal while we are away, though time and Internet will be quite short...
By Tim, at
November 21, 2007 12:54 PM
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
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...
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?
Labels: audio, education, teaching
¶ 5:05 PM
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By , at
November 28, 2007 9:44 PM
Hi Tim
When he spoke about Kinesthetic learners being hard to cope with in the classroom ...
Not sure I said it quite like this. If I did what I meant was that kinesthetic learners are harded to cater for in a classroom and require the teacher to be more imaginative. Now we of course can (and did) question wether a teacher should 'cater' for the students. Good summary of the session, hope it was useful. Regards Peter
By , at
December 18, 2007 9:32 AM
Since I'm NOT a read/write learner, we are relying on my forgettory or your notes, so I am very hqappy to accept that you said something much more nuanced! If you can tell me what I'll even correct the report above.
I found the session very useful, in providing both encouragement to explore a wider range of teaching activities, and a framework (even of crude or un-substantiated by evidence ;) for thinking about the issue.
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