The Bible in Church and Academy
Posted in Teaching, Technology on Sep 15th, 2009
Mark Goodacre continues his innovation and trend-setting with a public “office hours” conversation via Duke’s Ustream channel. I’m looking forward to this one. Be sure to tune in at noon on Friday, September 18th.
Does anyone know of other uses of live streaming for higher education? What if a professor streamed her whole course via Ustream, [...]
In my Freshman Seminar this semester, I tried something a bit unusual. Instead of assigning the printed version of the first class text (Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book), I assigned the audiobook version. I had three reasons for doing this.
First, I have designed the course to be a romp through different genres and media forms. [...]
Jim West has posted information about the SBL’s project in development, The Bible in American Public Schools, which aims to help public school teachers address the Bible in their classes. Here is a page of general information and here is the “e-pub” Teaching the Bible. I am rooting big-time for this project. This is the [...]
Julia O’Brien has started a promising new section on her site called “Reading the Bible as an adult,” devoted to the idea that the Bible is, at heart, engaging and nuanced literature that speaks to people within and outside religious communities. It is tragic, to use her word, that Christians have so thoroughly yoked the [...]
Posted in Teaching on Aug 24th, 2009
The inestimable Merlin Mann on “Making the clackity noise“:
Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes [...]
Posted in Teaching on Aug 16th, 2009
I am excited to be in a faculty workshop tomorrow on active learning strategies. One of the assignments was to read this paper canvassing the state of the field on learning styles and strategies. For those of you working up your syllabi, the paper is a helpful inspiration to think critically about how you teach [...]
This is from his characteristically engaging and provocative essay, “Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Before another year of hirings and promotions and awards passes, decision makers should sit down and examine the larger consequences of requiring a monograph for tenure, approving projects on well-worn subjects, and pretending that books and [...]
Posted in Academia, Teaching, Technology on Jul 22nd, 2009
In case you didn’t see it, be sure to read Chris Heard’s post about the effort to remove certain kinds of technology from the classroom in favor of other kinds. Dekstop teaching stations encourage professors to use Powerpoint along with other visual media to augment their lecturing, or at least that’s the intention. Anecdotal evidence, [...]
Alan Lenzi has posted a great article comparing the study of “religion” to the process of recording, analyzing, and interpreting music (in all it’s infinite varieties). It’s a long and complex analogy that I need to think about some more, but what makes it work for me is the central insight that in the case [...]
This summer I will be teaching a course for laity at the Foothills Presbytery of Upstate South Carolina titled “Theology of the Old Testament Prophets.” We will meet 7 times, with 3 hours per session, on various Saturdays and Tuesday evenings in July and August. Anyone within driving distance of Greenville is more than welcome [...]
Chasers…