This has to be one of the more honest videos that I’ve seen recently. For those who might not have looked at it yet, its the video of a 1 year old child as they are playing with an iPad and then a magazine. The interesting – and probably distressing to some – aspect of this video is how the child seems to have better control over their hands when using the iPad than with the magazine.
Of course, we are talking about a 1 year old, and so comments about motor control and understanding have to be understood. However, there’s something to be said about how familiar the iPad is for the child than the magazine in respect to the kind of feedback that the kid expects and what they receive. The video (and this accompanying article at CNet) implies the claim that digital natives are going to forget the physical control and contextulization of print magazines if activities with devices like the iPad continue.
There’s a good chance that this could be the case with many of our cultures within a generation. There’s a truth towards the face of learning, financial transactions, entertainment, and more leaning much more on the Interent and connected devices than in generations past. But, we don’t want to go so far as to saying that everyone will have this experience. The digital gap very much mirrors the economic class gap in terms of accessible and usable services across these connected devices. And yet, we also see moments like in this video, where some methods of interacting are more “natural” and lend to changing the relevance of learning, relearning, and unlearning some of our assumed behaviors.
So then the question becomes, “what are you teaching towards with your mobile ministry efforts?” John Dyer notes in From the Garden to the City how many of the aspects of our faith behaviors that we think are needed or required really only became so because of (a) available technologies and (b) changes in expectations towards literate populations (location 327, Kindle edition). Even the mentality of reading the Word everyday is new – people had been oral learners, and so in order to keep the Scriptures afresh for continual education, they had to meditate on what was preached every day (Joshua 1:8).
We’ve aimed so far with mobile ministry practices as facilitating behaviors and expectations based on what we understand from former media channels (speech, performance, radio, TV, Internet). What do you teach towards when those former media channels don’t have any contextual bearing on your disciples? How do you adjust to a reality where faith practices that your disciples will do start from the latest things you’ve learned, not from the same place you’ve started?
My God daughter and I spent a number of days together this past Christmas. Due to me having an iPad, she also got a chance to play with it. She played so much in fact that the lessons she was getting on colors was accelerated. The lessons she was getting in motor skills was turned into a different direction (learning drawing, pinch-zooming, and multi-touch when you can’t hold a pencil too well is a heck of a swing). For her, the iPad is much like the Etch-A-Sketch was for me. And while I did learn how to manipulate the knobs to create cityscapes and other imagined moments, I also started from a place that was unlike that of my parents who didn’t have one while growing up. My God daughter starts from where I am now with the iPad and has the opportunity to do things that I couldn’t even imagine.
But that won’t come to pass if I insist that her way of interacting with her world – even her faith – comes through the same behaviors, contexts, and viewpoints that mine is founded in. Yes, the Scripture doesn’t change, but practices and behaviors do. As leaders of disciples, can your methods change to enable mature faith lives of those who will be starting from this moment were you are amazed? Or, are you set at teaching people at the level of things now, leaving their tomorrow in the hands of older methods and concepts that might fail to engage anything but disappointment?
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From the Perspectives of Teachers
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011Yet OliveTree and others showed very well that while they might not always be the preferred tool for creating sermons and studies, they were no less capable than “full” software packages commonly found on pastor’s desktops and laptops. This year’s SBL Bible Software Shootout reintroduces the mobile component – especially because of the popularity of the iPad – and gets an additional curveball in some responses towards using this software not from a company’s perspective, but from an instructor’s perspective.
From this year’s SBL Bible Software Shootout 2: Revenge of the Teachers, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools offers some commentary towards these presentations:
Again, there’s nothing radically new here, unless you look a bit deeper into what’s happening. The SBL Shootout is usually composed of companies skilled to develop towards the tnedencies of academics, not necessarly the most mobile-friendly audiences, and definitley one with a different paradigm towards teaching emthods. There was a heavier emphasis on the presenters here to be led towards applying the text of Scripture, but also demonstrating their methods towards dissecting and interpreting the meaning of the text based on what’s worked in instructor-led settings (languages, cultures, etc.). If you will, you are getting an opinion out of the actual use of the product, not simply the features that the developer wants to most demonstrate (biased towards their marketing/compitence). When you get the presentation of the capability of the software from the perspective of the teacher, you begin to see a bit more how this is used in such settings (wealth and warts) and can start to discern a bit more contexually the strengths of the software versus the stregths of the teacher.
What’s not clear from the commentary is how the reception was from students who engaged instructors that prepared these materials. Were the classes better managed? Or, where there additional challenges getting (some/most) students information in a manner that didn’t just work best for teaching the concepts, but also their devices? Clearly, the software is in a better place. And now hearing the academicly-tuned Biblical/religious community share their lessons-learned is great. The question is how can these persectives be rolled up into something of a working document for best practices for others who wish to have some insight or clarity towards instructing to this depth from a mobile device, connected software, and theological perspective.
I like some of the discussion here about the utilization of Apple’s iCloud. In some conversations with ministers recently, iCloud has come up as something they very much liked because it meant that they were better able to take what they needed from a laptop setting and have that on their mobile or tablet as they went. Again, this isn’t a radical change from what we’ve demonstrated and talked about here (its really syncing, though more than just calendar/contact data as many of you have done via Exchange, PalmSync, etc., without the fun of pushing a button to say so), but the acceptance of the behavior to prepare and be ready to teach a lesson is something to note. On our end, products such as Dropbox and Idea Flight have been quite useful towards instructor-led engagements. Though, simply putting your items on a server and then provoking interaction from that point has also been quite demonstrative.
Read the rest of the commentary about the SBL Shootout 2 from Biblical Studies and Technological Tools and then consider how you are leveraging these technologies to teach clearer or better. It might be that you create something similar to a traditional lecture-based course, or, that you might make something more along the lines of the Cybermission’s Mobile Ministry Training Course which goes towards a different direction of technical competence for instructors. In either respect, going mobile isn’t an excuse for not being able to handle teaching a lesson – the tools are there, are your teaching chops and students up for the rest?
Tags: Accordance, bible applications, bible software, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools, classroom management, Cybermissions, Dropbox, education, iCloud, Idea Flight, instruction, Internet, Logos, methodologies, Mobile in Discipleship/Education, Mobile Minsitry Training Course, Olivetree, SBL Bible Software Shootout, seminary, teaching
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