iLearning

(screenshot from Apple.com)

I’m very excited about the iBooks 2 roll out with textbooks. I’ve been hoping for something like this since the Kindle came out. I see infinite implications for education, particularly. Wealthier districts are already providing each student with a laptop or netbook; it’s get on the ball so each student in the country can have one, or watch students in lower income districts get left behind. I don’t think it needs to be the sleek Apple product we think of as the iPad. I imagine something partway between a Kindle and an iPad: an electronic book reader, with wifi capability, and the ability to make notes and view multimedia. Microphone and speaker are necessary. It will need a text/email function, too. Oh, and a graphing calculator, so we don’t have to buy those anymore. Optional keyboard. GPS locator and auto-lock for if it’s lost or stolen. First-generation Kindles cost $80 (and the Kindle Fire, close to what I’m describing, is brand new and $200). I bet in five years, you can buy an educational iPad-type product for $100 per student plus licenses and data plans (the school buys a bulk license for the textbook in public school; the student buys their own in higher education). If you’re outfitting each student with a new stack of textbooks in each class at $60 a pop, you’re saving money.

Here’s what I imagine will be possible:

Textbooks, like all non-fiction books, would have in-text popup citations (with a link to the cited work for sale, should you want to add it to your library). New information, corrections, and editions can simply be downloaded as an update.

Don’t recognize a word? A popup glossary defines the word for you. Tapping an icon saves the word and its definition to a list for you to study as a list or in a flashcard application.

Think of something as you’re reading? Tap the side of the screen to pull up your notes on the chapter and add your thoughts. Save all your notes on the chapter as a study guide, or email them to yourself/your friend/ your teacher. Tap to print. Tap to send a note (or all in the chapter) to your teacher via email as a question (or as a homework assignment). Tap to send a note as a post to the class discussion board. Tap another part of the screen to read the class discussion board.

Enter your notes via keyboard or using a stylus to write in your own handwriting. Or, use the voice recorder to make and transcribe notes. And use text-to-speech to read the text of the book or your notes to you (imagine the implications for special education students, and for commuting students in secondary ed and beyond).

During class, make notes in a notebook feature, rather than carting those around too. Save, email, and print your notes as pdfs. Use your stylus to doodle in the margins. I can’t take notes otherwise.

At certain places, an icon might invite you to view a video clip or hear an audio file. This might be anything from a scene in a movie adaptation (say, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” How does the courtroom scene differ in the book and film interpretations? Why?), to a video demonstration of a chemistry experiment illustrating its formula, to a tutorial of how to solve a math problem, to a map or model, to a recording your teacher made.

What was that? Yes, the educator could add custom notes, recordings, or video clips, viewable to only the students in her class, or on his team. Teachers could also use the book’s review questions as homework assignments (and the students could fill in their answers directly where they appear and then email or print the worksheet), or write their own questions in place of the provided ones. Educators all using the same textbooks might be invited to share their questions in a forum, and pick an choose their favorite questions to build custom assignments. Educators on teams can link chapters, review questions, and study guides between one another to facilitate interdisciplinary units.

In class, the teacher might be able to “take control” of the digital readers in the room, so that they all “open” to page 24 at once, or everyone views the same multimedia clip on the smartboard at the front of the room. Using questions or notes emailed to her, the educator can lead the discussion, or prompt students to raise the questions they thought of (and made note of) while reading.

And if every student already had an iPad type device, non-school groups could make use of them too. Imagine a youth group book study or bible study. Imagine an adult one, for that matter. Just imagining the Bible as a full multi-media book gives me little chills. That’s a whole other post. The maps! The iconography! The links to other passages or other sacred writings! The clips from bible-themed movies! The option to text a question to your pastor

A word about fiction:

As excited as I get about the potential applications for education, I drag my feet a little around fiction books. This is just a personal preference, I think, although overall I’ve been slow to embrace technology in entertainment compared to the speed with which I’ve embraced it for productivity. Only very recently (with the purchase of my iPhone 3GS), have I gotten fully on board with mp3s (and they’re not really mp3s anymore!). I *like* my shiny CDs. And don’t tell me you’re going to take my DVDs in their pretty packaging away and give me a mega-terabyte hard drive with digital copies of all my movies searchable by title, actor, genre, and keyword! Oh the horrors.

I like to read books. Paper books. I like the way they smell. I like the way they feel. I like that I can go to the library and get them for free for a little bit and then give them back (although, what if the *library* bought a digital copy of the book and then I checked it out and it was pushed wirelessly to my e-reader for two weeks and then I had to pay to renew it if I wasn’t done…). Even given the massive amount of moving I do and the huge pain it is to pack and unpack books, I wouldn’t trade them. If you offered to replace all of my books with ebooks and a kindle, I would take you up on it *for my professional library* (minus a few gems), but not for my personal library. I have a connection to books in print that I don’t have with their e-counterparts.

All that said, as I was flipping for the millionth time from the text of A Dance With Dragons (George R.R. Martin) to the back to figure out who a character was in the house lineup, and then to a map to see where they were from, I thought how easy it would be to have character names linked to their lineage, house names linked to their banner or motto, place names pop up with their location on the map, and words in foreign language offer their translation (or a recording with their pronunciation). Could I have the option of locking the book so I can’t skim ahead (or unlocking it so I can if I want to– or searching a name and only reading the parts about Tyrion…)? Oh, even my fiction has footnotes!

And then when it comes to producing and publishing books we are in a new world. This is where the publishers will revolt– just as the music industry did back when we all remembered what Napster was. Because what if an author could write a book, and imbed whatever media s/he wished, and then have that material reviewed and formatted by an editor and e-publisher, and then directly distributed to e-bookstores? No mass paper production. No shipping. Production costs so low we could sell books for fractions of the cost and yet authors could keep five times the income they do. I, as consumer, could pay you, as author, for the artwork you have made, the goods you have produced. Not the paper, not the cover, not the shipping– just the story or the research or the philosophy. I could pay you whatever that seems to be worth, and you could keep it (minus editing and formatting/production). I value your work, and you value my reading experience. Kind of like Louis CK’s pay-to-view comedy special, only (typically) without so much swearing.

As I said on facebook, I want in on the brainstorming about this. Oh, the possibilities!

That Old Time Hymnal; it’s good enough for…

The United Methodist world is abuzz with the news: production on the new United Methodist Hymnal, slated for the 2012 quadrennium, has been halted.

While my congregation rejoices that this means the copies of The Faith We Sing we just bought are not going to be obsolete right away, and I rejoice that people aren’t going to dump a gozillion Hymnals in recycling bins just yet, it’s a great opportunity for us to rethink what a hymnal can and should be in our context.

As usual, my friend Jeremy got me thinking about what such a hymnal might look like. But it was a Facebooker named Steve who wrote down what I was thinking and so much more. His vision for the new Hymnal is something I would like to see embraced by United Methodists at a grassroots level as well as by the publishing house and the General Church.

Join the conversation! What would you like to see in a new Hymnal?

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[editorial note: wow! my fingers haven't had their coffee yet; i caught a ton of typos, but I'm sure I missed some.]

Sticks and stones may break my bones…

… but words– oh the awesome power of words– words can cause me to hate and fear and kill.

Reflecting today about the shooting at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN. A virtual friend of mine, Terry, points out that we often tolerate hateful and violent words by people in the media in our country, claiming that because it’s ‘satire’ or ‘commentary’ that it is harmless.

Words are not harmless.

And we all know this, especially those of us who, one way or another, devote our lives to the awesome power of words. I bet my job, my vocation, my ministry, my spiritual journey, in many ways my very life on the transformative power of the word (and The Word), for good or for evil. If words are toothless, then what is preaching? what is reading? what was the Sermon on the Mount?

No, words are not weak. Words create meaning, and community, and vision, and worldview, and context. Words inform behavior, and can shape that behavior to be life-giving and compassionate, or fear-filled and violent. Words can inspire, like King’s I have a dream and, sadly, like Hitler’s rallying speeches. Words, spoken, preached, downloaded, written, published, read, can create the reality in which one operates, and can shape that reality as a peaceable kin-dom, or a civilization threatened by liberals, upon whom one must take revenge, with a baseball bat (as recommended by Ann Coulter) or a shotgun.

In the midst of the power of words– words of welcome and love spoken by a congregation, and words of condemnation and distrust, written by media personalities and interpreted by a twisted and broken mind– an act of violence erupted in a community, killing two and wounding seven.

Those wishing to express words of blessing and hope and healing for the Tennessee Valley UUA can do so at a webpage set up for that purpose.

Nope. I really can’t tell.

Please note: there is no way on God’s green earth that linking to this site is in any way an endorsement.

One of my friends told me about this site, and I spent a lot of time clicking through it.

It’s called “You’ve Been Left Behind,” youvebeenleftbehind.com, and here’s the thing: I can’t tell if it’s legitimate or not.

So here’s what they say they’ll do: they’ll give you some encrypted storage space and some non-encrypted space and up to 62 email addresses you can store. You upload documents or chose from their sample ones (which I haven’t been able to see), and they’ll hold onto them for you. For just $40 for the first year (and the re-subscription price will ‘go down as more people subscribe’), this website will store your documents, and then, send them to the specified emails after you have been raptured.

That’s right. So you can tell your friends how to get saved before it’s really really too late. So you can tell your enemies haha i told you so. So you can email the Pope and see if the Catholics really did get Left Behind like Tim LaHaye always claims they will.

How will they do this? If their team of five couples of Christians doesn’t log in for three consecutive days, it’ll apparently trip some sort of fail-safe and send emails three days later (assuming no one resets the system, or the antichrist doesn’t destroy the internet).

On the one hand, it sounds wacky enough to be something people would do. On the other, the language doesn’t smack quite enough of LaHaye jargon. And yes, I’m being pretty cynical about that particular brand of ‘theology’, mainly because I think it’s, well, not. I’m all for theological diversity (heck, I chair the team), but Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are not theologians. Nor are the folks who run this website, and refer to Christ as the “third person of the Trinity.”

You can log in and pay through PayPal.

But I didn’t. My friends and I tried entering information from a dummy account, but the site was smart enough to know the account was outdated. That lends a shred of credence to it. Well, at least to the fact that they actually are taking people’s money.

But I really want to know. Are these people for real? Because it also sounds like a really devious way to swindle fearful folks out of $40/year. Bad (or non-existent) theology aside, I’m not sure that anyone deserves that.

On the other hand, Rapture-oriented theory (which, I must stress, has no basis in either the Bible or Christian theological history) is one that preys on people’s deepest fears: fears about death and pain and being the slightest bit wrong about the nature of the Divine. This just adds one more layer of fear– fear about your loved ones. And so it attempts to take advantage of people’s fears to make a buck. LaHaye’s been doing that (somehow!) for years.

Irresistible Revolutionary

Okay, ‘fess up. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t have at least the teeniest crush on Shane Claiborne? Male, female, queer, straight or bi, is there anyone who doesn’t want to either be Shane or be near Shane? Because I’ll admit, I’ve got it bad for this grungy Jesus freak! Lookit the glasses! Gotta love the glasses. Not to mention that little smirk.

Ahem.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m reading Jesus for President. I read Irresistible Revolution over a year ago, then again with a book study group at my church, who promptly launched a mission project to change our small town. It’s a powerful book.

I was initially a bit bored with Jesus for President. It has a lot of history to it, stuff that I learned in seminary and I might have skipped over it, but the pages just look so spiffy and the way Shane puts words together is so much fun. That’s his thing. Often it’s not that he’s saying something new or radical or revolutionary or that I haven’t heard before, but he’s putting words and ideas together in a way I haven’t heard before. This book, which he co-authored with Chris Haw, is far more historical and theological than Revolution, but even the history I know so well gets a fresh look in their excellent writing.

Oh, and I should clarify. This isn’t a book review; I’m only a third of the way through.

And yet, nearly every other page is dog-eared already (just like Revolution!), and I’ve already decided that this book, and Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, and a few others are going to form my new pulpit-side must-have section. Since I’ll be preaching in and around a state capital for the next five to seven years at least (I hope!), I’m loving these reminders of how radical and political Jesus’ words were and are.

Shane and Chris had a great take on the yoke, which I read this morning, just a few days too late and dollars too short for my sermon on Sunday, but it would have been so much better (you see, I really should spend more time reading for, um, fun!) than what I preached. Fortunately, they have a great passage on the sower and the seeds, again nothing I’ve not heard before, but new ways of putting ideas together that I can totally mine for this Sunday.

And I cannot wait to preach about Legion. Yowza!

Mm-mm! Bring on the radical, political, gritty hippie preachin’!

Let’s hear from the Shane-lovers. Speak up!

Ouch.

But nothing we didn’t already know. Nearly half of Americans have switched religious affiliation/denomination. Oh, and that’s not good news for the UMC.

With respect to my earlier thoughts about Easter, I read this in Borg and Crossan’s The Last Week, which, about three pages from the end now, I highly recommend:

“Both parts of the pattern [of Good Friday and Easter] are essential: death and resurrection, crucifixion and vindication. When one is emphasized over the other, distortion is the result… Without God’s reversal at Easter, Good Friday leads to cynical politics. This is the way the world is, the powers are ad always will be in control, and those who think it can be otherwise are utopian dreamers… [but] Easter without Good Friday risks sentimentality and vacuity.”

The question, of course, is how to balance death and resurrection, crucifixion and vindication in fifty five minutes once a year. Good luck with that.

Wherein I become a Fundie

So my thoughts on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.

First, I can’t believe this, but it’s true: I’ve finally found a series of books that I would recommend people not read for religious reasons. I don’t mean like Narnia and Left Behind, which are Christian stories with bad theology. I mean the other end of the spectrum. That’s right, these books are too non-christian for me.

It’s an odd place to be. I feel a little Jerry-Fallwell-ish, and if there’s anything I never wanted to feel it was Jerry-Fallwell-ish.

Not that I’m for banning or burning books just because I don’t like them or I am morally uncomfortable with them. But I read them, like I do with other religion and anti-religion themed books so that I could form an opinion on them, and the opinion I have formed is negative.

The rest of this post contains mild spoilers for the series.

First, because it also matters, I don’t like the writing. It’s not particularly good or engaging, doesn’t move the plot along very well. The character development is weak; Lyra is, predictably, portrayed as a rather foolish girl, and the author seems as surprised as his character when she develops a little cleverness to go along with her spine later in the series. I didn’t really care what happened to the characters either. I was more moved by Lyra’s relationship with Pan and the struggles that it endured than I was by her relationship and struggles with Will. It had major point of view problems, with one character using the vocabulary of the other before being introduced to the concept (and their worlds and therefore vocabularies were drastically different at times). While the story arc was at least interesting, if slightly offensive, the execution of the action was often poorly done. These books took way too long to read.

Second, on the subject of general moral ambiguity and parenthood: I would be the last one to say that there is a hard and fast right and wrong and that kids have to be made to toe a line. But kids do respond to a sense of fairness and stability in the world and in their lives. They expect, for example, to have some idea whether or not their parents are trying to kill them. I was utterly confused through the entire series about whose “side” Asriel and Mrs. Coulter were on, whether or not they had parental instincts at all, and whether or not Lyra could trust them not to kill her. I get that this was part of the plot, but it was disturbing rather than intriguing.

Third, on the separation of God and Religion: In the first book, the primary bad guy was the church of Lyra’s world (which is a fantasy world and not our own). The church there, which is similar to the catholic church of the middle ages, perhaps, is corrupt and drunk on its own power to the point of being hurtful and downright evil. That’s fine. I’m down with reading about that. It’s a human organization in a fantasy world, and it is corrupt. That doesn’t mean that every church everywhere is evil, or that the church in our world is evil, or that the things for which the church used to (and ideally should) stand for are evil. I can separate those ideas, and I think intelligent readers can be expected to. In fact, I object when people can’t seem to distinguish between God and religion. It’s like not being able to distinguish between, say, the concept of freedom and the messed up and often very flawed and evil application of that ideal as seen in American foreign policy. In fact, it’s rather offensive to confuse the two. Dis religion (and corrupt religious bodies) all you want; it doesn’t mean you’re dissing god. Pullman doesn’t actually claim to be an atheist, but a ‘materialist,’ that is, some one who believes in the purely physical, not spiritual, aspects of life. God doesn’t exist for Pullman, and he thinks people who believe in God, spirit, and so on, are at least mildly deluded. He speaks about it in and interview here. Strangely, he seems unable to separate God from religion, because he blends the two, and he seems very concerned with God.

Fourth, on God/the Authority: which brings us to the trilogy’s main plot, the quest to kill “the Authority,” the semi-divine being who has been falsely claiming to be the creator and who ruled all the worlds (there are infinite worlds) with an iron fist before becoming old and powerless, whereupon rule turned over to his meaner right hand man, Metatron (who for some reason is also Enoch) who rules even more harshly through the corrupt church. At first, this quest is the sole (soul?) vision of Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, who, given that he has just killed a child (Lyra’s best friend) and offered to be in cahoots with his ex (Lyra’s mother) who has killed and tortured even more children, might be assumed to be the bad guy. But, as mentioned in the moral ambiguity paragraph, he is not. Yeah, he kind of doesn’t care about his daughter and wants to kill god, but apparently, this is the “good side.” Almost more disturbing, the Authority is killed kind of by accident, and Metatron on purpose but basically off screen and it’s very unclear that this is an act of love and sacrifice on Asriel and Mrs. Coulter’s part (which I think I was supposed to see it as) or just a thing to do because they’re existentially bored. I actually liked the bit about the afterlife/world of the dead and releasing the trapped souls so they could go back into the cycle of life as atoms or whatever. But we’re left with this: having killed god and his stand in (both of whom of course were personified and male– way to be shockingly different), our tragic heroes are poised to build “The Republic of Heaven,” which stands for what exactly? What are the ideals on which life is founded? Knowledge? That’s a small theme in the book so I’ll buy that. Justice? Notably lacking. Love? I’m not even sure that anyone in the books experiences anything beyond attraction and friendship. Aw, the ickle kiddies fell in teenage puppy love. How world-altering. No, if you’re going to insist that the Authority is a liar and there is something else in the world that is the source and breath of all that is (Dust), then you need to give us some reason to see it as a, you know, thing (I’m going all Sorkin in my inability to describe what’s wrong with the picture here). Either set up a story and a worldview in which there is a something that undergirds everything and articulate what that is and how we live it, or set up one in which there is no thing and we courageously make our way in the world. But you can’t, oh mr. materialist, insist that thinking god exists is foolish but thinking that dust exists is not and then not really give us any reason to care about it. It’s not atheism or anti-christianity (although it is anti-belief-system, basically, anti-every-belief-system), or materialism or what have you. It’s a world in which I’m not sure what to care about or what the characters care about or why I should care about them and what they care about.

So, yeah, very unimpressed with the story, the writing, and the worldview presented. I do not recommend in terms of enjoyability of reading, nor in terms of something that I think kids would like or even feel comfortable reading.

Link Rec

Someone recommended this link to a friend to help her pass the time, and it is the funniest thing I’ve seen ever. Of course, it helps if, like me, you suffered through all twelve Left Behind books just for the sake of laughing at them/ being horrified by them/ being prepared to explain to people why they are laughable and horrifying. The author of this blog does that, in great detail, and with considerable wit.

The Slacktivist, or, for those who want the topic-sorted list (most recent entries first, so start at the bottom of the page to read in order), the link to his massive Left Behind Fridays, offers a page-by-page critique of the rotten writing and even worse theology of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

If I laugh any harder, I just might rapture myself.

Surprised by Stewardship

I had what I thought was a relatively disappointing Stewardship Sunday this past week. We had decided to do the 18th because we thought people would be away on Veteran’s Day weekend. Last week there were 74 people in church; this Sunday, there were 51. Well, bugger. I’d worked hard on my sermon and thought it could be used to help convince people to give more generously, but that’s kind of hard to do if they don’t show up to listen.

Anyway, the sermon was good, and is uploaded to my archive site. “Tipping Point” speaks of the need to take a leap of faith, push just a little harder, and live into abundance rather than out of fear and want. It also, by the by, settles a miniature debate with the lovely and talented Lynn Flewelling, who all but bet me that I couldn’t use her “godless” books in a sermon one day. Nightrunner fans will recognize my retelling of the best leap-of-faith story I know. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out (hehe. which, given themes in “Temple of Doom” and Flewelling’s Stalking Darkness, is not a bad admonition).

Anyway, happy with the sermon but not so happy with the turnout, I was already planning to include CDs of the sermon and/or links to the sermon in the letters we send out to the people who weren’t there, asking them to give a listen before they fill out the cards. And I awaited the tally with trepidation. After all, as I say in my sermon, I needed everybody to increase their pledge by $5-10 per week (knowing that some won’t and some givers have passed/moved away, and there will be some new ones) in order for 2008 to not operate under the same $12,000 shortfall as 2007.

That’s right, we’re trying to make up a $12,000 shortfall.

So maybe you can understand why tears sprung to my eyes when I opened this email from my Financial Secretary just a few minutes ago:

To date we have received 12 fewer pledges than last year [due to people who normally give not being in attendance]. However, the estimated giving for 2008 already exceeds that of 2007 by $10,000 (This is the sum of the new pledges and the 2007 giving for the folks we have not received pledges from). There were 7 new pledges this year. A couple of these were former pledge givers who opted to fill out a pledge card this year…but still a lot of new folks which is great. What speaks highly of the congregation is the number of folks who increased their pledge this year…22 of 27. Says a lot.

A lot indeed.

Spiritual Darkness

I recently read this article on Time Online: Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith, by David Van Biema. It’s a long article, and a heartbreaking one, but well worth the read. To very briefly summarize, a collection of private correspondence (which she’d wanted destroyed and I half-wish they had listened, but am half-glad they didn’t) reveals that Momma T suffered from spiritual darkness (more like blackout) for the entire time she was in Calcutta, the last fifty years of her life. As in, she believed Jesus spoke to her and told her to go there, and then she never felt his presence again.

The author of the article and his sources have several theories as to what caused this darkness. One of the most compelling is that Mother Teresa, who wanted to give up everything to live like the poor and to suffer like Jesus did exactly that. For a rich man, the greatest sacrifice may well be to sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor. But for a woman of faith, living in material poverty wasn’t the same kind of sacrifice. Living in spiritual poverty and depravity certainly was. In feeling forsaken by God, she shared in the suffering of Christ in a way she had not imagined, the article says.

And yet, no one seems to offer a rather obvious explanation. Momma T’s spiritual darkness began the moment she was given permission to start her work in Calcutta. Face to face with poverty and sickness that no person should have to witness, let alone experience, in a world with a just and loving god, did she suddenly feel the soul-deep despair of compassion for those God has so seemingly abandoned? Did she ask herself every day until she was numb from it how any god lets this happen, how any god could exist and this still happen? And how, how in the name of all that is holy, did she live with that for fifty years? How did she find the strength to nurture the sick, and, far more difficult in fact, to nurture the spiritually sick when she was so broken herself?

The woman is a Saint. You hear me, Catholic Church? An ever-loving Saint.