Paying attention to critics

I'm sold on the usefulness of the Web for education, so it's important that I hear a different perspective once in a while. So . . . I checked out Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains and Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen from our provincial library system. I was really disappointed with the former; Carr just kept saying that the way the Internet is shaping the way we learn is bad because it's not like learning according to a modernist view of what it means to know. I've just begun the latter, but I'm already enjoying it more, despite its being published in 1995.

"Flipping" instruction

Funny--I was calling this a "flip" before I knew that others are. In a small way it's what we're doing with a course I'm now facilitating, and it's what I'm proposing as the heart of our Distance Ed program at Horizon.

The idea? That we take the risk of dividing what we've worked so hard over the past few years to integrate--content and interaction--and use the web to "deliver" content, reserving class times for discussion, "unpacking" and applying what students have (ideally) already taken the time to work through. Of course, this system means that they can always go back and review after class, seeing the content with new eyes, and if they catch on to blogging, the conversation can continue, too.

How's it working so far? Well . . .

A Calebite!

I was reading along in 1 Samuel, finding it all quite familiar, and suddenly came upon 25:3--

His name was Nabal and his wife’s name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman, but her husband was surly and mean in his dealings—he was a Calebite.

Wow! For all the sermons I've heard and preached about Caleb and his godly, faith-filled character and about Nabal and his surly godlessness, I have never seen this--Nabal was a descendant of Caleb! How did he come to lose sight of his ancestor's faithful example?

How time has flown

I knew it had been a long time since the last posting, but good grief--back in May? Since then I've finished the PhD and graduated and started a new job and moved . . . phew!

I'm trying to inspire students to use blogging in a course I'm teaching and, as part of that effort, am blogging with them--using edublogs but not as a class blog, just for my own contribution.

Besides that, though, it's probably way past time to start putting my money (effort, actually) where my mouth is and begin thinking out loud via this blog.

I've been reading lots on theology themes of participation and analogia entis and most recently Gary Deddo's Karl Barth's Theology of Relations: Trinitarian, Christological, and Human: Toward an Ethic of the Family. Most likely my random thoughts will be loosely organized around such ideas, so I suppose I've now lost any readership I might have had . . .