Anumma: Hebrew Bible and Digital Learning
I’m off at faculty retreat for a couple of days, and will be keeping my posts short. So, comments, please: What would you try to emphasize when teaching the Psalms? If there were just a few points that your students or audience will walk away with, what do you want those to be?
I’m working up a post on students and professors being friends on Facebook, but in truth, it’s wandering, and I’m just too darned tired to shape it up this morning for publishing.
So help me out in the meantime: what are your convictions about Facebook “friending” between students and professors? I’m talking about adult students here: higher education. As a bit of a preview: I suggest that one’s answer to this questions depends on what you think Facebook is for, and that the answer to that question is user-specific.
Comments on students and profs being Facebook “friends”?
Have you heard the one yet about the groundskeeper and the mammoth tooth? (h/t to P.Z. Myers.) A terrific example of the small, unpredictable wonders made possible when learners are encouraged to view the world with an eye that is curious, well-informed, and trained in critical habits.
Responding to the possible counter-moral that good education mightn’t lead to prestigious employment, one commenter at Pharyngula objects that high school science isn’t simply for producing a generation of professional scientists. It is, rather, primarily:
…intended to try and make students better equi[p]ped to solve problems by thinking through them systematically (and to give them some useful/interesting facts in the process). In this case it seems to have worked.
How much would you love to see it done, as a video response to All the Great Operas in Ten Minutes?
I really love Kim Thompson’s video: it’s casual, it moves rapidly, it sparks a desire to see the full-length operas, and it challenges the misconception that opera is dull. I love the chiming bell after each segment when the selling points for a given opera are shown: prostitution! brawls! stabbing of animals!
If it were me, I would choose well-known Hebrew Bible narratives, but take the opportunity to show that they are not what you think. For example, that in the “walls of Jericho” story, the Canaanites do not have a misplaced faith in their mighty wall: they all know that they’re dead meat, having utter faith in the ability of the God of Israel to bulldoze their city. Or how patient, silent Job spends hundreds of words describing God as an amoral monster. Or how Eve never tricks Adam into eating anything.
Can you imagine getting Job down to one minute or less? And imagine the paper cutouts!
Another approach would be to narrow the scope in some way: All the Great Women of the Hebrew Bible in Ten Minutes, perhaps. Or, the Deuteronomistic History in Ten Minutes.
I can easily imagine a homework or extra credit assignment here. What would you do—or ask your students to do—with All the Great Old Testament Stories in Ten Minutes?
Watching the whole video (it’s only 77 seconds), and reading the comments, will help to clarify what’s happening:
What makes it funny? What parts of the dialogue can you figure out?
It’s a call for papers!
The Mid-Atlantic Region of the Society of Biblical Literature will have their annual meeting March 11-12, 2010, in New Brunswick NJ.
Any member of SBL may propose a paper, regardless of their region.
That’s not even all the good news: the annual meeting will include a plenary address by Benjamin Sommer, professor in Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Dr. Kenton Sparks (Biblical Studies, Eastern University) will give the presidential address.
My last two posts showed how students’ course-related blogging can be gathered and shared by Yahoo Pipes, and how their course-related social bookmarking can be gathered and shared by Diigo. Today, I conclude by showing how these and other online student works can be “fed” to a central location using NetVibes.
NetVibes is an aggregating page, as is Google Reader or Bloglines. NetVibes allows the user to create public pages (visible to anyone) as well as private pages (visible only to the user). Within a page, the user may create multiple tabs to organize her feeds. Michael Wesch, who teaches anthropology at KSU, has an active NetVibes public page.() Here is the “Welcome” tab of my own public page in progress.
For a given course, I create one or more tabs: here is the tab for my course IPS-417. Remember the Yahoo Pipe that I talked about a few days back, the one that gathers course-related blogs entries from all of the students’ different blogs? With NetVibes, I have created a widget that shows the results of that Yahoo Pipe: you can see it in the upper left of my IPS-417 course tab (it’s named, “Blogging”). And remember that the students will all belong to a Diigo group that shares its course-related bookmarks with one another? I also have a NetVibes widget showing those Diigo bookmarks: it’s in the lower left of that IPS-417 course tab.
Since this is all done simply by gathering RSS feeds, it is easy to add other useful feeds to a NetVibes course tab. So, that IPS-417 tab that we’re looking at also has feeds from Twitter and from the course WetPaint Wiki. On Twitter, I will encourage students to use the hashtag #ips417 for their course-related tweets; using RSS, my NetVibes widget gathers those tweets (and only those tweets) into a single feed. Similarly, any changes made to our course wiki are “fed” to a widget in our NetVibes tab. This not only helps the students keep abreast of changes, it also helps me easily track which students are contributing and how much.
It’s all funneling: taking the things our students are doing all over the web, and directing them where they can be shared and assessed in one place. As Wesch has said, we are training “the machine” to bring the information to us. For me, this means that I am free to dissolve (or at least make permeable) the “firmaments” that enclose our CMS (Blackboard) and our classroom itself, allowing student collaboration to find a place in the overlapping spheres of public discourse that they are already using (or at least could be using).
Are your students (or you yourself, as a student) already collaborating online? Do you have other strategies for encouraging and managing online collaboration? What do you think of the possibilities, for bad or for good?
Notes:
I encourage educators and students alike to view Wesch’s hour-long address, “A Portal to Media Literacy.”
Last post, I showed how Yahoo Pipes will (among other things) collect posts from different bloggers when the titles or tags of their posts share a given keyword. So, students can have their own blogs, on which they write whatever they want—but when they write course-related posts, these all can be aggregated together and sorted in real time by a Yahoo Pipe.
This post, I look at how Diigo does the same thing with the students’ bookmarking of web sites and articles.
Most of us are familiar with the idea of “bookmarking” a web site or article. Normally, users have used their browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) to bookmark web pages; you can probably see the menu item “Bookmarks” at the top of your window right now. The problem is, you may use multiple computers, or change browsers, such that your bookmarks become unavailable you. And in any case, you cannot easily share them with others. Also, though browser bookmarks can be sorted and “tagged” with categories, it’s not really easily done.
Some readers may be using Delicious, an early social bookmarking site and still a great choice. With Delicious, your bookmarks are on a web site, available to you (and anybody else) wherever you are. You have a chance to tag bookmarks with categories when you make them. Your bookmarks are public: other users might, for instance, do a search for a given tag, like “Bible”; if you have bookmarks using that tag, they will appear in that user’s search. You can even have “network” of friends whose bookmarks you watch.
Diigo, another social bookmarking site, takes the “social” in “social bookmarking” at least one step further. It does all the things that Delicious does, but Diigo also allows you to join with other users into groups. So, for example, I have created groups for each of my introductory courses on Hebrew Bible.
Let’s imagine that you are a student in the course. I have invited you to join our Diigo group, and you respond by opening a Diigo account and joining the group. Now, you begin bookmarking and tagging web pages that are of interest to you. Many of these will not be related to our course: sports columns, videos of kittens falling asleep, favorite political blogs. But often, you will come upon course-related web pages that you want to share with the class. Creating (and tagging) a bookmark for that web page to your Diigo account, you will also save it to our group. Then, every other student will see the bookmark when they look at our group’s bookmarks.
Tagging is a part of how we members of a Diigo group make our bookmarks useful to one another. By tagging our bookmarks with categories (like “humor”; “politics”; “archaeology” “LGBT”; or whatever), we establish a cloud of tags that describe the kinds of topics and concerns that animate our shared bookmarks. One of us might, or example, search for all of our group’s bookmarks tagged with the category “LGBT” to find all bookmarked pages that concern the Hebrew Bible and lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transexuals.
We saw before that Yahoo Pipes allows students to have their own blogs, with posts on own varied interests; when they do post course-related content, a well-made Yahoo Pipe will gather and sort those posts into a single place. Diigo, then, does the same thing with bookmarks. Students have their own Diigo accounts, where they can bookmark whatever they like to their hearts’ content. But when they create a bookmark that is related to our course, they simply save it to our group, and everyone in the course benefits.
To see an example of Diigo groups in education, see the bookmarks of Michael Wesch’s KSU course in Cultural Ethnography.
Are you already using social bookmarking in your teaching and learning? What other applications do you see? Do you think social bookmarking might find a place in other venues of adult education?
It is an inverse proportion: as online collaboration becomes more authentic, it becomes less manageable. If I restrict my students’ collaboration to the “shell” of the Course Management System (for us, Blackboard), then we can all keep track of our activity, but that activity feels constricted, artifical, and forced. But if I were to encourage students to collaborate on our subject matter using tools outside the CMS—third party blog sites, Twitter, Delicious, Diigo, Wetpaint wikis—then everything is going on all over the place, and how in the world can we keep track of each other for collaboration and assessment?
Today, I look at Yahoo Pipes. In a later post, I’ll tack on public aggregation sites like NetVibes.
Yahoo Pipes’ slogan is, “Rewire the Web,” and that is exactly what it allows you to do. I’ll show an example that I think my readers can appreciate, then show its application to my fall courses. (I discovered Yahoo Pipes while persuing Michael Wesch’s website for his Digital Ethnography course).
Many bibliobloggers have been posting sporadically on the upcoming annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I want to be sure that I don’t miss any posts on SBL. So, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that:
My wife has a broken wrist, I’m limping around with plantar fasciitis, and my syllabi and rubrics stubbornly refuse to write themselves. So, let’s keep things simple this morning, and have us an open thread: What are you excited about?
Me, I’m very excited about the rubrics I’m putting together for my fall assignments. I think students are going to respond well to the clarity of expectations you get with a good page of rubrics. More detail on that in a later post.
What’s got you jazzed this morning? In your research, in your teaching, in your recreational life? Have you had a breakthrough at work lately? Lowered your golf handicap? Taught your daughter to snap her fingers? Finish grading a summer course?
Tell us briefly in the comments: What are you so excited about?
This post leads up to a link: this link. But it’s a short lead-up, so go ahead and read me first!
Once, my young son went off to my sister’s for a couple of days and a night. They played some baseball, some tag, some handful of your usual backyard games. When I picked him up, my sister’s children said to me, “Hey, we figured out what the ‘J’ stands for in his name” (J is his middle initial.) I gamely asked, “What does it stand for?”
“Je-changin’ the rules!” they cried, cracking up together.
Every child goes through it, and it’s tempting for everyone. When the game doesn’t seem to be going our way, we want to change the rules in our favor. Eventually, we learn that when we give in and try to change the rules, we aren’t playing tag, or baseball, or much of anything anymore: nothing is getting done except us rehearsing our tired, unchanging, irrelevant apologetics. We are rightly told by others to play ball or go home: everyone else trying to get something done, and done well.
This lesson is good practice, because not every activity with rules is a game. People who are “je-changin’” the rules in the workplace aren’t called “bad sports.” They are called “corner-cutters,” “scammers,” or “perjurers,” the “recently fired.” Depending on the consequences, they may be called “manslaughterers,” or “perpetrators of negligent homicide”: that well-meaning fool with the bewildered look on his face getting dragged off at the end of Law and Order, his wake of surviving victims sobbing helplessly on the edge of the screen.
James McGrath has a good post on the impulse—common among Christian newcomers to religious studies but also considered by some to be found in higher places—to be “je-changin’ the rules” in the workplaces of scientific and historical inquiry. “Christian baseball”? By all means, have a look.
[A little later: Art has a related discussion going on: does “theology” fail to be ethical in a way that “religious studies” succeeds?]
Among the collaborative projects I’m assigning my introductory students this fall is blogging. (They’ll also participate in a course wiki, and do in-class collaborative work). Blogging will be mandatory, and graded. Besides a rubric for the assignment, I also wish to give them suggestions about academic blogging: what makes blogging appropriate for biblical studies and for an introductory course in Hebrew Bible?
This is my first draft. What suggestions can you offer for improvement?
Suggestions for Beginning Blogging in Biblical Studies. There is overlap between these suggestions, and the divisions are somewhat artificial. But, for the student who is still trying to learn to keep her writing within the bounds of “biblical studies,” they offer some guidelines to help stay on track.
Debunking dishonest Bible-woo is tiresome (but not hard: this post took me less than 75 minutes from conception to Publish), but has to be done. Let's be clear: the maker of this video starts with the conclusion he wishes to reach (that the President is the “antichrist” [whatever that is, which is a topic for another day]). He then commits whatever sleight-of-hand and misdirection is necessary to work backward from that conclusion to an impressive-sounding biblical basis. We'll link the video, then take it step by step.
[Update, 2011/01/18: the original poster has removed the video. You can still find a version of it here, with some attempts at bolstering the video’s claims.]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXMAnlMmEPw]
“I will report the facts.” Nearly of these “facts” are false:
“Jesus spoke these words originally in Aramaic…” This is not known. It may be that Jesus preached both in Aramaic and in the Greek of the New Testament. If he did preach in Aramaic, there is no reason to be optimistic about our ability to retrovert the Greek of the gospels into that alleged Aramaic original. Imagine giving an English translation of Don Qixote to twelve English-speaking scholars who had never heard Spanish spoken by a native, and having them all retrovert the English translation to the original Spanish. Know how many completely different “originals” you’d get? That’s right: twelve.
“…which is the oldest form of Hebrew.” No, it isn’t. Aramaic doesn’t precede Hebrew. They are sibling languages, with significant differences in vocabulary, morphology, and grammar. So, speaking in Hebrew is not “much the same way” as the way Jesus would have spoken Aramaic.
“…from the heights, or from the heavens.” Nice try: the speaker has substituted “heights” (in order to get to bamah, the word he wants to use) for “heavens” (shamayim, a word he wants to get away from because shamayim sounds nothing like “Barack Obama”). The argument from this point is not based on Jesus’ words (in any language), but on a paraphrase that the speaker finds convenient.
(We could stop here: Now that we see that the groundwork comprises crippling falsehoods, it is clear that anything built on it is pointless. We’ll continue anyway, just for the exercise.)
“…from Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary.” As Bryan mentioned on Facebook, When someone grounds their argument in the use of Strong’s concordance/dictionary, they are saying, “I do not know any Hebrew. Do not trust anything I say on the topic.” Strong’s is a tool designed for people who do not know Hebrew.
Baraq is the Hebrew word for lightning: this is a fact. It has nothing to do with the name of our President, but baraq does mean “lightning.” Barack, our President’s name, is Swahili, and related to Hebrew Berekh, “to bless.” (Think of the better known form, Barukh, “blessed.”) In other words, why would a speaker of Hebrew (or Aramaic, or Greek) would use the word “lightning” to evoke the Swahili (or Arabic) name, Barak = “blessed/blessing”?
Isaiah 14: No mention of Satan here: Isaiah is plainly talking about the king of Babylon, whom he compares to the mythic “Daystar, son of Dawn.” He says so [ref. added: Isa 14:4]. But, the Jesus of the gospel Luke may be evoking Isaiah when he says that he “saw Satan falling as lightning from the heavens,” so I’ll give this a pass.
Isa 14:14: “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.” That’s right: the word “heights” (which, you’ll recall, Jesus does not use anyway) is not associated with the falling of the Daystar, but with his (planned but not certainly achieved) ascent. Also, the “heights” are plural: the phrase is bamotê-ʿab, “the heights of the cloud.” Hear it? Not bamah, but bamotê.
“Some scholars use the O [to transliterate the conjunction waw].” No, they don’t, because it is never, never pronounced “O.” The prefixed conjunction we- or wa- becomes u- in biblical Hebrew when it precedes a bilabial consonant (b, m, p) or any consonant followed by the shewa, or half vowel (Cĕ-; think of the first vowel in a casual pronunciation of “America” or “aloof”). It is never o-. Sorry, but never.
“…or, ‘lightning from the heights.’” Okay, in the second place, the conjunction never means “from.” Hebrew (or Aramaic) has a preposition for that. The phrase baraq u-bamah (not o-bamah) will mean, “lightning and a height” (whatever the heck that is; also remember that baraq has nothing to do with “Barack”). The phrase will never, never mean “lightning from the heights.” Sorry, but never. (And in the first place, remember, Jesus never even said, “lightning from the heights.” He said, “lightning from the heavens,” which is why all this stuff about “heights” is pointless.)
Conclusion: if a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by Isaiah, were to say the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18 (seriously: why would our rabbi do this?), he would not say, “Barakh Obama.” He would not even say, baraq u-bama. Or baraq u-bamoth (lightning and heights). If he means to use Jesus’ words, he would not even say, baraq min-habbamoth (lightning from the heights). I suppose he might (might) say, baraq min-hashamayim (lightning from the heavens). So now you know why our secret Muslim president’s Arabic Kenyan birth certificate remains hidden in a clandestine madrassah in the Lincoln Bedroom: because on it, you will indeed find the true name of the antichrist…
(oh, wait, neither Isaiah, Luke, or even Revelation [or Daniel, if you care] use the word “antichrist”: it is used in the letters of John as a generic term for “unbelievers”)
…Baraq Min-Hashamayim.
If you want to see some other debunking, go see Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math Bad Math, Michael Heiser at PaleoBabble, Bryan at Hevel, and James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix. Each of them adds some additional arguments that I don't make here.
A day or two back, New Kid was writing about working with others and working alone. (This is only a partial quote: I recommend you read her whole post if you’re interested.)
Something valuable I realized, I think, was that I do like working with people, more than I realized. I think I used to underestimate how social teaching really is; academia values research more highly, and research (in the humanities) is a relatively isolated endeavor, and so I always thought of academics (and myself) preferring to work independently.…[B]ut [my history internship] became much MORE interesting when there were other interns around and I started to be able to discuss it with them.
(Btw, you will have heard it elsewhere already, but Biblical Studies Carnival 44 has erected its tents and opened for admission over at Jim West’s place.)
Every now and then, in order to keep a post under a thousand words or so, I’ve thrown out a promise to flesh some idea out more fully in the future. Here, I’m going back to try to list some of those outstanding promises.
Everyone who has taught first-year students in higher education knows it: besides teaching the subject matter of the course (“Introduction to X”), we are also triage nurses in the task of academic formation: writing skills, critical thinking, academic integrity, time management, methods in collaboration and mutual support, and so on. In short, being a student. All of this depends in part on soliciting the students’ trust so that they’ll hear our sage advice. Some of my recent reading has me considering all this under the umbrella of “mentorship.”
Sparked by a post about faculty mentoring in Inside Higher Ed, there has been a conversation in the academic blogs about mentoring in grad school. In the final link below, Dr. Crazy writes about her strategies for forcing students to accept mentoring.