Student Bible Blogging

My students have been blogging for a few weeks now. Feel free to pay them a collegial visit and see what they’re doing. One of my classes can be found here, in the boxes called “Blogging A,”, “Blogging B,” and so on through D. Another of my classes can be found here, in the box called “Course Blogging.” Each student has her own blog, but posts tagged with our course numbers are collected via RSS feed to our shared NetVibes page.

Their assignment is to engage the materials and methods of the course, which is pretty standard “Intro to Hebrew Bible” stuff except that we did the Writings first, and are now on Latter Prophets. Coming up yet are Former Prophets and only then the Torah.

Just managing to start a blog and get posting was a new challenge for most of my students of all ages. They are all to be congratulated for stepping up and experimenting with public writing. Enjoy visiting them, be respectful and supportive, and have fun.

Biblical Studies Carnival XLVI is Up

Clear some time this weekend for some reading, kiddoes: the latest Biblical Studies Carnival has been posted by Daniel and Tonya.

For those readers who are unacquainted with the concept: a monthly “carnival” includes links to a great many blog posts in biblical studies, all written during the last month.

Posts are nominated for the carnival by readers. Carnivals are hosted by volunteers. Carnivals are cool. Like it says in the Bible, “Come and see.”

You can find links to previous Biblical Studies Carnivals over at the Carnival’s home page.

Blasphemy Day (One Day Late Edition)

I missed Blasphemy Day yesterday. Again. I’ll have to send Blasphemy one of those embarrassing “sorry I missed your special day” cards. But looking back on the day, a couple of things come to mind:

I did get to teach on polytheism and henotheism in select texts of the Hebrew Bible, so there was that. Nothing like a little biblical polytheism to wake up the back row.

I enjoyed a nice conversation with some other teachers on the peculiar pastoral aspect of theological education, whereby we seek to persuade students to find the courage to give up the God/Jesus/Moses/faith that they walk in with, in order that they can find her/him/it through our shared learning endeavors.

{fainting couch}Polytheistic Bibles! Taking God out of the schools!{/fainting couch}

So I guess it turned out to be a happy Blasphemy Day after all. Another Blasphemy Day miracle!

Being a Student: Writing for the Course

“He could have written this before ever taking my class!”

Among my rubrics for student writing is the requirement that they rigorously engage the course materials (readings, lectures, discussion) and also engage the methods taught in the course (narrative criticism, form/genre criticism, attention to historical contexts, and so on).

For introductory students, who are still trying to get a handle on just what we are reading/doing/talking about, this can at first feel a bit abstract. Recently, an exasperated colleague at another school made a comment that, in my view, offers an excellent “thumb rule” on this business of writing for the course:

“He could have written this piece before ever taking my class!”

If I had to isolate the single most common complaint that I’ve heard professors utter about student writing, it wouldn’t be about grammar and spelling, or about making deadlines, or even plagiarism. It would be this complaint, that a piece of student writing (often for a final project in the course) could have been written by the student without ever having taken the course in the first place.

So, ask yourself—early in the process of planning, and again early in the writing, and again when approaching completion—could I have written this before I ever took this course? Or am I making concrete use of the readings I’ve read, the lectures offered, the modes of inquiry that have been encouraged, the discussions facilitated in class?

Random Colin: the Bible Isn’t a bible

Random Colin has a post up called, “The Bible isn’t a bible…” It’s in part about what the Bible is not (an instruction manual) and also what the Bible is. By all means have a look.

Something I find myself saying to my students, repeatedly and in different ways, is that we have to begin biblical studies by discovering what the Bible is (as opposed to whatever we might already think the Bible is). This discovery does not happen all at once, but rather happens over time, and only by one means: reading, reading, reading. The discoveries are piecemeal, but add up: the prophets prove not to spend all their time predicting the future; the Psalms are not so bland and nicey-nice as our lectionaries suggest; Job is neither silent nor uncomplaining; the Law doesn’t include much law; the Canaanites of Jericho don’t trust in their faboo wall. The more one actually reads the Bible, the more one says, “What gives?” And as surely as the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, “What gives?” is the beginning of knowledge.

I’d gotten the heads-up on Colin from Bryan at Hevel and John at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I’ve been reading him for a while now, and have now also and belatedly added him to my blogroll. While you are over there reading about what the Bible is and is not, browse some other posts for a bit.

[Later: I see Colin has moved to WordPress. Here is the link to The Bible isn’t a bible…, and to his Home Page.]

“An Exciting Time to be Saying Forsooth”

Readers have all kinds of reasons for preferring one Bible translation over another, but “hilarity” isn’t a standard often brought to bear. T-Rex and Utahraptor make an excellent case for the Wycliffe, and it’s not just about being able to say, “forsooth.”

“Audience” and Student Writing

To whom should a student imagine herself writing, when doing her course work? At least, she’ll want to know how much knowledge of the subject matter she can presuppose on her reader’s part. Further, a writer naturally imagines a hearer: an interlocutor to her line of reasoning, a narratee to her narration.

In my experience, the usual reflex is to imagine the professor as the audience. This makes a kind of sense: the work is actually to be read by the professor, of course. And, the professor created the assignment in the first place, so doing the thing feels like an “answer” to that.

However, many students will already know some drawbacks of imagining the professor as their reader. For one thing, the professor’s knowledge of the field of study will usually so far exceed the student’s that the student has no idea what prior knowledge or presuppositions to assume for that reader…not to mention the creeping fear that the prof will know some bit of data that totally demolishes whatever line of reasoning the student has gone out onto the limb with in her writing. Further, the student may have negative, fearful, or ambivalent feelings about the professor. The conditions for good writing are delicate, and as easily frightened away as shy woodland creatures: the imposing shadow of the prof-as-reader can all too easily paralyze the writer before she can really get started.

At the same time, I don’t think that the utterly uninformed layperson—what I think of as the “tabula rasa” audience—is a much better alternative. If the imagined audience has no prior knowledge of the subject matter, then the student writer feels compelled to explain every little thing to the nth degree…and the work becomes unmanageable. Also, this “tabula rasa” audience is rather amorphous. I prefer a nice, clear audience in my head.

For my part, I suggest that in their writing, my students imagine a strong colleague as their audience. That is, some one (or two, or three) classmates who have kept up on the reading, heard the lectures, participated in the discussions, and have sought to make connections between the different elements of the subject matter. This solves the question of prior knowledge: the writer does not have to explain every little thing, but insofar as her research has led her to information not covered in class, she should bring that data into relation with her classmate’s body of knowledge. The “strong colleague” is (or can be) a positive figure to hold in one’s mind, and emulating that mental audience is an attainable goal: the “strong colleague” is like the writing student herself at her imagined best. In the writing that she is doing at that point in time, the “strong colleague” represents the best of what she is trying to be.

What do you think of the “strong colleague” as an imagined audience for student writing? What sorts of audiences have you imagined for yourself when you write, and with what results?

The End of Bible and Ancient Near East

I’ve closed blogs myself, and know that it’s a natural part of the blecosystem, but I’ll be sorry to remove Alan Lenzi’s “Bible and Ancient Near East” from my RSS feeds. Alan’s has long been among my favorites.

Thanks for great posts, Alan. I’ll instruct my minions to let me know when you pop up again, whether in your old haunts or in another venue.

[Psst: Addendum]

The Earth Quakes Before Them

Local Big Ol’ University is back in session now—they start later than us at Adjacent Seminary—and the students, they are thick on the ground.

Like autumn leaves, you kick up showers of them when you walk.

Like gnats, you catch them on your uvula when you open your mouth.

Like worries, they fill your field of vision when you close your eyes.

As the prophet Joel anticipated…

Before them peoples are in anguish,
all faces grow pale.

Like warriors they charge,
like soldiers they scale the wall.

Each keeps to its own course,
they do not swerve from their paths.

They do not jostle one another,
each keeps to its own track;

They burst through the weapons
and are not halted.

They leap upon the city,
they run upon the walls;

They climb up into the houses,
they enter through the windows like a thief.

…they are climbing in the windows.

Blagging: Hebrew Students

Very busy, but not too busy to blag on my introductory Hebrew class a bit.

We’ve had four sessions together, doing exercises that are entirely oral/aural: no aleph-bet, no labels or signs, no text at all. Also, I’ve offered no translations for what they are saying: they pick it up through Total Physical Response and context. After four sessions, they are able handily to:

• Greet one another, ask each other’s names, ask after one another’s well being, and answer that they are very well, well, not bad, or not so well, and promise to see one another later;


• Tell me whether the book(s) or animals(s) are big or small, and which are which; whether they can or cannot see the book(s) or animal(s); whether the book(s) or animal(s) are under the table;


• Follow commands (singly or in groups) to stand, walk to the door, open or close the door, walk around a table, return to the chair(s), and sit; they can also narrate themselves or other students doing the same, both in a progressive present and in the past (I know those aren’t the categories they’ll learn in the grammar, but it’s more or less how they’ll be thinking of them at this point).


• Sing, from memory, the Hammotsi (blessing over bread), the Shema, and (just about all of) the blessing sung before the Torah reading in a Sabbath service.

I’m genuinely impressed with how comfortably they are working with the language. Remember that several elements of what they’re doing won’t even be covered in their grammar until Lesson 9, or 12, or even 18. This year, I have some new ideas about how to preserve some continuity as we learn the script and get into the more conventional, grammar-centered part of the course next week.

Teachers: which of your students do you want to blag about? Students: what are you accomplishing that you want to blag about in the comments?

“But What is Twitter (or Whatever) For?”

I don't seem to be following anyone who uses Twitter to alert me to their choice of breakfast cereal.

Well, one guy, one time. But he tried to make a persuasive case for its relevance, and he included an acknowledgment that he was embodying a cliché. All in 140 characters or less, mind you. Mostly, the people I follow are tearing off tweets on biblical studies, on Bible software, on trends in higher education or in the social web, on typography, on events in Uptown Evanston Illinois, on languages and linguistics, and on web shows in which Joss Whedon is involved.

I bring this up because whenever somebody raises the question of What Twitter Is For, we get the obligatory assertion that Twitter Is For Telling People What You’re Eating. (Or that Other Thing. You know.)

Here, slightly edited and reformatted, is a comment I made ’way long ago over at Bryan’s:

If Twitter has taught us anything (a premise I know some would question), it is:

1. First make something possible (“Hey look, Twitter.”).


2. Then we’ll see what sort of nonsense people do with that thing (“Hey look, I’m sitting on the john I’m eating breakfast cereal”).


3. Then we’ll see what creative people really do with it once they get going! (“Hey look, I've been detained without charge.” “Hey look, a secret earthquake in China.” “…a revolution in Iran.” “…a TED talk relating unexpectedly to my field of study.”)."

My point is that even Twitter’s creators didn’t know what Twitter is for. Rather, that has been (and continues to be) decided by each user, in her own decisions about use if she decides to dink around with the thing.

(If you do decide to see what anyone in education is doing with Twitter, there is some stuff to see once you look.)

Professors and Students, “Friending” Together: Mass Hysteria!

When I asked earlier for comments about students and profs “friending” on Facebook, I rather expected (on the basis of the usual media handling of the matter) something like this:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr. Raymond Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddmore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!

But the comments to my inquiry, even among those with reservations about student/prof friending, were persistently reasonable. I shouldn’t be too surprised: when teachers in higher education* discuss social media, the matter is one that comes up regularly, and so most of us have had time to think on it and hear from others.

As  see it, there are excellent reasons for students and profs to Facebook-friend…and also excellent reasons not to. It depends on how one answers some questions that don’t seem to come up regularly in the sound-bite-sized media scare pieces.

What is Facebook for? You’ll often hear some pretty definitive pronouncements about what Facebook (or other tools like Twitter) is for. Facebook is for sharing pictures of your cat. Facebook is for dorking around with a quiz while dozing through class. Facebook is for reconnecting with old friends. Facebook is for self-promotion. I’m going to make a suggestion here: It’s too early to say what Facebook is for. Within the bounds of its terms of service, Facebook is for whatever a user says it’s for. That said, it’s a really good idea for each user to clarify in her own mind what Facebooks is for, for her. (All of this goes double for Twitter, and I’ll say more in a later post.)

For some professors, Facebook is a place to relax with peers and with old friends (power-equal relationships). Let their hair down. Maybe engage in a little harmless griping. It’s a combination faculty lounge, gym, pub, and backyard cookout. Such a prof would likely be wise not to “friend” students (at least, not without a pretty sophisticated and confident tailoring of her privacy settings).

For other professors, Facebook is an extension of their professional persona. To the extent they have non-professional contacts, those friends can be counted on to be “rated PG” when writing or commenting on their walls or tagging them in photos. These profs may welcome student “friend” requests as an opportunity to open an additional line of communication with students.

Of course, everything is a trade-off: a prof whose FB friends include students doesn’t get to use FB as an extension of the faculty lounge, doesn’t get to rip off cuss words, and should probably be circumspect about her political pronouncements (as she should in the classroom, since she has the power to intimidate students whose convictions differ from hers). So, OMG! On Facebook, as everywhere else, it turns out you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

What is a “friend” on Facebook? I would be the first to agree that “I am not friends with my students, and they are not friends with me.” When I say that, though, I use the word “friend” in its everyday sense: someone with whom I have a power-equal relationship of mutual support and confidence. In that sense, friendship between faculty and students is not possible. But what is a Facebook “friend”? This simply brings us back to the question of what Facebook is for. For some, Facebook is a place where “friend” means the same thing as in the rest of my life. But for the most part, users are still determining what a “friend” is on Facebook.

For profs who have student friends on Facebook, “friend” is going to have a pretty circumscribed meaning in that context. Also, with the use of Friends Lists, the prof (and student) can micro-edit their privacy settings quite a bit. For example, a prof might not allow students to tag photographs of her; a student might not allow profs to see photos of her at all. Facebook “friends” don’t have to share everything, not even everything that they have/do on Facebook.

Some users rightly point out the issue of power-imbalance: with them, I will agree that, in general, a prof probably should not offer friendship to students. When students offer friendship requests to their professors, we should respect the fact that they also are making themselves vulnerable: they may, through no fault of their own, suffer a bit of embarrassment down the line (another friend may post something inappropriate on their wall, for example). A student who “friends” a teacher is trusting that teacher not to capitalize on such an incident. For this reason, I’m inclined to “hold off” on accepting friendships from brand-new students: they may leave school, they may drop my classes, they may decide I’m a jerk. By contrast, if I find myself in an awkward, too-soon-FB-friendship with a new dad at my kid’s school (for example), at least there isn’t that awful power-imbalance making the situation worse.

I look forward to looking at the issue in a year or so, and seeing what the trends are then: what issues will continue to vex? Which ones will seem quaint or be eliminated by new options?

* My experience is with adult students. The question of how high school or middle school teachers might ethically use social media with their minor students is another kettle of fish.

Rosetta Stone Arabic

I finally broke down and purchased the Arabic language module from Rosetta Stone. Anybody out there already have experience with Rosetta Stone language software?

I had long considered taking Arabic in a structured way from an accredited institution, whether brick-and-mortar or at a distance, but two factors have so far conspired against me:

• My own teaching schedule is very tight, and almost always conflicts with whatever is available.


• Institutions of learning may as well throw up electrified fences with ground-glass ramparts, if they refuse to keep contact information up to date. Nobody can tell whether our web sites were published last week, last year, or ten years ago, and when you send emails to the contact people on our web sites, those emails drop into our Big Black Hole. (I don’t mean my own school when I say “our” and “we”: I’m talking about a culture-spanning problem.) No schools want my tuition money badly enough to keep their contact information up to date or answer an email, so Rosetta Stone gets it. And I get a six-month money-back return policy, in the bargain.

Let me know if you’ve had any experience with Rosetta Stone. It will be a few days before I dig in, but monkeying around with the thing at the store was more fun than I’ve had with language since I puzzled out my first liver omen.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t work for Rosetta Stone, and they haven’t given me anything in exchange for writing about their software. They did throw in an extra headset-and-mike, which was pretty cool.)

A Post for My Favorite Class

[Later: Don’t mind me: just showing WordPress to my students. Nothing to see here.]

This is my first entry for my class. I hope I'm doing it right.

The class is about the literature of ancient Israel.

Moltmann! Live on Web! Today!

It’s all true. Jürgen Moltmann is delivering our convocation address this morning, and this afternoon he will have a round-table discussion with our theology faculty members Anne Joh, Nancy Bedford, and Stephen Ray.

Both events are to be webcast at the URL http://www.garrett.edu/convocation. Viewers will require Apple’s QuickTime Player (Mac/Windows).

Convocation is at 11:00 a.m. Central Time: tune in as early as 10:00 a.m.

Round-table discussion is at 1:30 p.m. Central Time: tune in as early as 1:00 p.m.

Why Do You Think We Offer Them Insurance?

You don’t need me to tell you that being a student is a chancy business. As Ph.D. comics notes, there are the perils of summer.

Then, there are the special hazards of fall. Like, your Hebrew teacher singing.

Hammotzi

Stay safe out there, everyone.

RBoC: T-Minus 21 Hours Edition

This time tomorrow, I will have finished with my first Hebrew session of the year, and be worshiping in chapel under the handicap of anticipating our first session of the large introductory Old Testament course.

On my mind today are the following:

• It’s my wife’s birthday. Why do academics marry people with early September birthdays? Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves, and besides, I wasn’t an academic when we married, or when she was born, for that matter.


• The Blackboard Help Desk never returns calls. [Later: that was pretty snarky. In fact, once they realized that our classes have started NOW, they have been very much on the case.]


• I want to post on the “women in biblioblogging” kerfluffle about as badly as I don’t want to post on it. (No link: either you’re up on it or you don’t need to know.) Preliminary observations: 1) Among the non-Bible academic blogs, women appear to me to constitute a pretty solid majority (for a self-selected and anecdotal glimpse, see my second blogroll). 2) With others, I point out that the soi-disant “bibliobloggers” are a skewed sample of Bible scholars: aside from being mostly male, they are mostly grad students, and (I am not dying to try to defend this or even define it too closely) largely somewhat conservative in background or readership. 3) Biblical studies as a culture tends to lag at least a few decades behind its ancillary disciplines (literary criticism, archaeology, history, culture studies, you name it, and yes-it’s-true-that-other-fields-can-be-slow-to-hear-what-we’re-doing-too). 4) Jobs are hard enough to find and keep, and more so for women than for men, and so far “bibliobogging” isn’t exactly up there in the requirements for tenure. I don’t wish at this time to try to tie these points together into a coherent set of claims, except perhaps to say, “It’s pretty early in the day yet, folks, yet not too early for attention to collegiality and justice.” More to follow, maybe.


• Pre-recording slide-enhanced podcast lectures takes, on average, four times longer than simply delivering the lecture in class. And that’s just for beta-version, not-ready-for-prime-time product.


• Fall ball? Why did we think that we had time for our son to be involved in fall baseball?


• I have a presentation to prepare for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (weekend before Thanksgiving, New Orleans LA).


• I cannot wait to get back into some more substantial posts. Be patient, please, neighbors.

Score!

Always befriend a librarian. In the first place, they tend to be really fun, smart people worth hanging around with. But in the second place, sometimes they make you aware of what they find tucked away in closets and storage spaces. Sometimes, they find things like this:



An Olympia Deluxe International Hebrew typewriter. It will want a new ribbon, and it’s possible that the margin-setting-thingies aren’t working properly, but it’s clean and seems to work very well.



You can see that the arrangement is according to the standard Hebrew keyboard. I’m used to the Hebrew-Qwerty keyboard myself (bet goes where our B is, and so on), which means I have to hunt & peck.

Since Hebrew does not have upper-case letters, I was surprised to see a shift/tab key assembley (lower left, as you expect). It turns out that “upper case” produces standard-sized characters, and “lower case” produces little wee characters. In this sample, you can see my botched first line, then an error-free line of standard size, and finally a line in little wee size:



Typographically, I can’t say that the font face looks exactly like any of the Hebrew font that I have on my computer (I have SBL Hebrew and whatever comes with the Mac OS). Pretty close in spirit is New Peninim MT. The following will appear in New Peninim MT, but only if you’ve got it installed. Otherwise, it will probably be in some version of Lucida.

מי יתן אפו ויכתבון

Good times! And yes, I feel like Arthur Weasley gushing over a collection of “plugs.”

Bible Dudes? Bible Dudes.

More proof, if any were needed, that I need new minions: how have I not been made aware of these guys?

Hat tip to Bryan at Hevel.

Biblical Studies Carnival 45…

…is up and running: links to many great Bible-related blog posts from the last month. Come and get it at the Golden Rule.

You can find lots—I mean lots—of Bible-related blogs on the latest Biblioblog Top 50 list.