What's a Little Unfriending among Friends?

Like many other Facebook users, I have a lot of Friends that I don't interact with much; or, I find that my Friends list has come to be at crossed purposes with what I'm trying to get out of Facebook. After all, most of us developed our network of Facebook Friends when the service was new. Not only did we not yet have an idea of where our Facebook use was going, but Facebook itself has changed a lot in the meantime.

These are the considerations going into my upcoming Great Facebook Friends List Slash and Burn:

Does this person have another way to reach me? For example, if I know them as a colleague or former student at Garrett-Evangelical, then they either have my contact information, or can always reach me through the school. Not only that, but a Google search of my name will yield my web site, which has a Contact Me tab (or my YouTube channel, where they can comment; or my Academia.edu page, which includes a phone number; or…). So--might as well face it--everyone can reach me. There is no one who really needs to be my Facebook Friend in order to contact me.

Have this person and I interacted in the last year or so? Have we commented on one another's Updates? Have we Messaged each other? Do we interact offline or in other environments like Twitter? If I do interact with this person, on Facebook or elsewhere, then I'd like to preserve the Facebook Friendship.

What about former students? This is a hard one. I really do not want to send an implicit (and erroneous) message to former students that I am ready to forget about them, or worse, that I only reciprocated their Facebook Friendship perfunctorily or grudgingly. But, look, they're not my students any more, they are free citizens. In some cases, we have continued to interact with one another (see above). In other cases, we haven't. Former students can reach me by other means, just as anyone else can. I especially welcome them to do so, including those whom I Unfriend after years without interaction.

What about current students that I don't know well? Sometimes current students whom I don't know choose to issue me a Friend request, then do not interact substantively (or at all) with me. But, hey, hope springs eternal: maybe tomorrow. Maybe I could Like or Comment on something of theirs and something might come of it. What the hey. Keep 'em.

As I have said previously, nobody can say authoritatively what "Friending" on Facebook is. Don't let me, or anyone else, tell you what your experience of Facebook, or of Facebook Friending, has to be! Only through their continuing decisions do users decide for themselves what "Friending" can be, or what it will become.

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[What's a Little Unfriending among Friends? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2013/02/15. Except as noted, it is © 2013 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Twitter Chats for "Introduction to the Old Testament"

Something new this year for the online Intro class: weekly Twitter chat.

How It's Done

On Twitter, you normally see the posts of people you follow, in an undifferentiating stream with the latest posts at the top. However, you can also view a Search window, and see all posts that include your search term…including posts from people you do not follow. So if a set of participating users agree to include a shared search term in their posts, then they can use that Search window as a chat forum. By convention, such a search term is proceeded by the hash sign (#), and is called a "hashtag": for example, our hashtag is the hash sign followed by our course number, #11500x. We meet Tuesday evenings 7:00-8:00 pm, CT.

Our Course

This course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," a fully online course with about 20 learners, taught by me at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. The course is completely asynchronous: there is no time at which all learners must participate together in real time. Also, our learning management system (Moodle) does not include a "virtual classroom" module. (It could, but we have not purchased one.) So, a Twitter hashtag chat allows us a space in which to have synchronous engagement with one another.

How It's Going

I am using the one-hour weekly Twitter chats to engage "big ideas" or "essential questions" that are foundational to the tasks they are accomplishing in the course; for example, "What is 'academic biblical studies'?"; "Academic biblical studies as public work"; "Biblical literature as narrative art"; and so on. Participation is voluntary, and has ranged from 10-14 learners (of my 20) to a scant 2.

Since Twitter is a public forum, our followers from outside of our class have discovered our chat and joined us. This includes my colleagues who teach biblical studies elsewhere (some known personally to me, but not all), former students, and other interested outsiders.

Each week, I have assembled a list of prompts, to keep things going or to get things back on track if necessary. I have not had to use them often, but I feel more comfortable having them ready to hand. Some "template" tweets are a good idea to keep handy though: reminding learners to use the course hashtag, announcing the chat and its topic, inviting lurkers to join in, etc.

Nearly all of my learners are brand new to Twitter. In every class I teach, whether online or face-to-face, I like to incorporate an activity that will introduce most of the learners to a new digital accomplishment of some sort. The idea is not that they should all like Twitter, but that they should have regular, guided experiences of braving new digital tasks.

Have you ever used Twitter chats as a teacher or as a learner? Are there other digital "new frontiers" that are part of your course work this year?

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[Twitter Chats for Introduction to Old Testament was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/27. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You

A novel and exciting business model seems to keep coming up a lot lately, one that educators using social media might keep an eye on. It's so "out there" that it might as well be fantasy or science fiction. In fact, here, I'll draw on an episode of the TV show Angel (spin-off from the better-known Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for an example; the scene is a classic ransom swap:

Italian Demon: "You give me the money, I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare at him blankly.)
Italian Demon: "You give me the money…I give you the head."
(Angel and Spike stare blankly.)
Italian Demon: "Money, head. Money, head."

What we expect, of course, is that the Italian Demon will make the head freely available to the protagonists, while accepting advertising revenue on the side. Naturally, the Italian Demon would then be free to negotiate with his advertisers concerning how the head might be festooned with banner ads; or whether Angel and Spike might be invited to choose their advertising experience before accepting the head (and their personal preferences sold as data to marketers). Since Angel and Spike are themselves paying nothing for the head, they are comfortably excluded from all decision-making concerning the transaction, and if they don't like the terms, they'll have plenty of friends to admonish them not to complain about free stuff.

But here, instead, Angel and Spike are paying directly for the head. By spending their own money, they become partners in the transaction, rather than passive recipients of whatever the Italian Demon and his actual partners (his advertisers) choose to deliver. (In fact, Angel and Spike will use this agency to decide to fight the Italian Demon instead of pay him, and the Italian Demon will give them a bomb on a short fuse instead of the head. But anyway.)

It's a powerful idea. Earlier this year, I moved this site from Wordpress.com to Squarespace. I did this for a handful of reasons, but one of them is that, since I pay for the service, I get 24/7 living-person customer support. ("You give me the money, I give you the head.")

I wrote last week about some troubling developments at Twitter. As most of us know, Twitter's partners are not its users, but its advertisers: as Jason Lefkowitz has said (quoting Dave Winer), users aren't even riding in the backseat, they're locked in the trunk. Most users won't care much as "promoted Tweets" by BP and KFC take over their feeds, and as Twitter rubs out 3rd-party Twitter applications in order to provide users with a "consistent (i.e., Twitter-controlled) user experience." But it won't just be nerdy app developers that lose out: educators, for example, will likely lose the ability to use Twitter in ways that they choose (like with Storify), if their pedagogical choices don't match up with Twitter's (potentially ever-changing) "rules of the road."

A group of app developers have gone off and created a Twitter alternative, "app dot net." Users pay (currently $50/year) to keep the service working and growing, and so the proprieter's business is with the users, rather than with advertisers. Whereas Twitter is chopping off the development of 3rd-party applications, AppDotNet is largely inhabited by such developers. And here's my point: if as an educator, I want to see a certain kind of user-experience for my learners, then in principle, I can create the app I want or contract with a developer to create it for me.

"You give me the money, I give you the head." It's a powerful idea.

I do love getting free and cheap stuff on the web. I willingly sit through commercials on Hulu. I grudgingly hand over my personal consumer habits to Google. It's one way to do things. But it's not the only way. And for educators who have a stake in taking ownership of the "user experience" and, and in multiplying the possibilities for the learner's ability to experience and manipulate of web content, riding locked in the trunk is not always going to be the best way.

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[Free Your Twitter-Using Learners from the Car Boot? It Will Cost You was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/08/20. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend (Picking My Feet Edition)

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?

I'm on my way this morning to THATCamp Pedagogy (ProfHacker post), an unconference on teaching and learning as an aspect of digital humanities (THATCamp home). The unconference is in Poughkeepsie NY, and is sponsored by Vassar College.

Besides the "unconference" sessions, there are planned "boot camps" on:

• integrating digital projects into undergraduate courses;


• teaching with Omeka;


• the undergraduate's voice in digital humanities;


• "So Long, Lecture."

I will plan to live-Tweet as opportunity allows. On Twitter, you can follow me for the weekend at @anummabrooke to see my Tweets alone, or follow the hashtag #THATCampedagogy (note the single "p") to follow all Tweets on the unconference.

[Addendum: the hashtags actually used at the unconference have been #THATCamp and #pdgy]

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie? (Not Safe For Work!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5wCpR8Cg4&feature=youtu.be#t=00m30s [Update: cut from French Connection since blocked on copyright grounds]

[THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/10/14. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011

Along with everything else in life that you’ve been missing, the Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (“Day of DH”) 2011 came and went a couple of weeks back. What are the “Digital Humanities,” you ask? You could settle for me telling you that it’s humanities accomplished digitally, or you could ask the Wikipedia about it; or best of all, you could simply hear the explanations offered by those who have self-identified over the last three years as working in “digital humanities.” Here are just a few:

Digital Humanities is the application of humanities methodologies and theories to modern technology research. -Andy Keenan, University of Alberta, Canada

Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others. -Brett Bobley, NEH, United States

I think digital humanities, like social media, is an idea that will increasingly become invisible as new methods and platforms move from being widely used to being ubiquitous. For now, digital humanities defines the overlap between humanities research and digital tools. But the humanities are the study of cultural life, and our cultural life will soon be inextricably bound up with digital media. -Ed Finn, Stanford University, USA

On the Day of Digital Humanities, hundreds of folks who see their work in this way agreed to write a blog post about what they were doing that day, March 18, 2011. (This was the day that I became aware of the term, "digital humanities,” because the Day nosed its way onto my Twitter feed, whereupon I followed the tag #dayofdh for the rest of that day and the next.)

You will be excited to know that I’ve saved the best news: Because the fine folks at Day of DH have made the RSS feeds for the blog posts available as an OPML file (or, to translate, “Because blah blah the internet is cool”), I have been able to place the blog posts on my public NetVibes page! And you have a whole year to peruse them before Day of DH 2012!

[Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011 was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/05. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

VOST2011: The Visions of Students Today

What do students in Higher Education see today? What do they “see” in the sense of, “What are their visions?” And, what do they literally see from the place in which they are expected to learn?

This is the question posed by Michael Wesch, professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Wesch is well known for his work so far in gathering and analyzing the experiences and voices of higher-ed students in an internet age.

Watch some of the YouTube videos tagged VOST2011. For an educator in Higher Ed, the videos are rather hypnotic, occasionally disturbing, and often illuminating. Take the following as an example:



More upbeat, but not less analytical or thought-provoking, is this piece from a student at University of the Philippines:



In the professorial circles in which I run, I am probably among those more likely to identify with the students of VOST2011: besides being a “distance pedagogies guy” (in progress), I am after all a Gen-Xer, and until a subject matter grabbed me in my Masters work, felt continually disenchanted with and alienated from the structures of education, while still identifying strongly with other students as a peer group. At the same time, however, I am formed by an exceptionally traditional and modernist Ph.D. program, and believe as strongly in “disseminating data” as in facilitating constructivist activities for peer-to-peer learning.

Professors: What do you think of Wesch’s call for submissions, and what do you think of some of the videos? How do they speak, or not speak, to you as educators?

Students: What are your visions today? What do you see from the place where you are expected to learn?

[VOST2011: The Visions of Students Today was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/03/25. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Closed Captioning for User-Generated Video (via ProfHacker)

[Changed title, but not URL, to reflect distinction between subtitles and closed-captioning.]

Yesterday, ProfHacker posted a blog entry about how to produce closed-captioning for your videos using the site Universal Subtitles. As ProfHacker points out, when you have created the subtitles, they exist only at the Universal Subtitles web site; but, you can download the subtitles as a file and upload that file to your video on YouTube. ProfHacker shows the process, step by step.

Embedded below is my first effort at closed captioning. The main glitch is that my videos often already have subtitles of varying kinds, because they are often language-learning videos. And, you cannot (I think) change where the closed-captioning sits: it is always at the bottom of the screen. Now, if your already-existing subtitles are YouTube “annotations,” you can always go into YouTube and move them around. But, if your subtitles were created with the video itself (as in iMovie or whatever), then you would have to actually go back and re-edit the video and upload the revised version (which would have a new URL on YouTube).

The take-away on this for me is that, when I produce subtitles in my videos (that is, subtitles that are not closed-captioning), I will want to keep them at the top or sides of the screen, so that there is room reserved at the bottom for closed-captioning. As you can imagine, the screen “real estate” will really be filling in at that point.

This is my video on how to sing Happy Birthday in Hebrew. In the few places where my subtitles and my closed-captioning collide, I have not tried to fix it (yet). Obviously, you will need to click the "cc" (closed captioning) button at the bottom of the video screen.



What experience do you have with closed captioning, whether needing it or producing it? What issues should I know about as I continue to closed-caption my videos?

[Subtitles for User-Generated Video was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/03/11. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Hey, the Teaching Carnival is Back

The Teaching Carnival had been (once again) defunct for a while, but look: it has been back and thriving since September 2010. The current teaching carnival is 4.05, hosted by Sara Webb-Sunderhaus.

The Teaching Carnival is a carnival of blogs in higher education. Because many of us who blog in biblical studies are also teaching in institutions of higher ed, I would love to see (and try to embody) some more explicit overlap between “Hebrew Bible” and “Higher Education.” The blogging going on out there about teaching and learning with undergrads and with grad students is amazing. Carnivals come and go, but in my experience, the bloggers in higher ed form a stable blogging community characterized by mutual support and penetrating reflection on learning, teaching, and academia.

If you can, try to put down that article on narrative in the ancestral tales, or that Akkadian hymn to Ishtar (just for a while!), and enjoy a visit some of our fellow educators in the Teaching Carnival or in my “Other Academic Blogs” blog roll (right sidebar, below my regular blog roll).

[Hey, the Teaching Carnival is Back was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/01/21. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation

“‘To Those Far and Near’: the Case for Community at a Distance.”

The Background:

A Community of Scholarship, Emory’s Candler School of Theology.

Episode CXXVIII of the Endless Thread, Pharyngula.

Losers of Friday Night on Their Computers, Twitter search. [link fixed]

SBL Annual Conference 2010 (#sbl10), Twitter search. [link fixed]

Intro to OT Online Group Paper (concluding summary), Wetpaint.

Dissecting Community: Example from Sociology:

Community, Infed (Informal Education).

The Project:

Bible and Teaching Blogs via feeds, NetVibes.

Collaborative Wiki on the Hendel Affair, Wetpaint.

[Links for SBL10 Workshop Presentation was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/11/22. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

What's (Not) Going On around Here?

“What's not going on around here?” That's easy: writing.

“What is going on around here?” is another question, and amounts to, “Why isn’t writing going on?”

The easy—far too easy, and therefore false—answer is, I am just way, way too busy. And I am too busy, so that is not the part that is false. What is false, is the notion that there is such a thing as “Too busy to write,” if writing wants to be happening.

I have in mind a short series of short posts, in which I think aloud a bit about why I write here, and what sorts of things get into the way of writing in a space like this. It will not be about “blogging,” so much as it will be about “blogging here at Anumma.”

So, feel free to read or not read. Without anticipating the results of my inquiry, I can say that it is likely that there will be, at the other end, blog posts having some continuity with what has gone before: reading CoS in a year, how to be a student, the social web and teaching higher ed, a little light debunking of Bible woo, and of course, Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

What’s (not) going on around here? Every few days, on a schedule negotiated between a crushing teaching load and a persistently impatient desire to write, we’ll just see.


[What's (Not) Going On around Here? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/10/24. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

"Good Morning, Eager Young Minds."

This is the first day of the new term. My classes this time around are:

• “Introduction to the Old Testament”: yes, we are reading backwards again. We’ll also continue with viewing lectures as pre-recorded downloads outside of class. New this term is the Wikipedia assignment, in which students will make a series of course-related edits to relevant Wikipedia articles. Also new is a plan to prepare for in-class discussion with threaded, asynchronous, online discussion between sessions.


• “Elementary Hebrew 1”: as in recent years, we’ll be starting with about ten hours of oral/aural exercises, using no texts of any kind. I’ve got a small surprise planned for today, if I can manage to walk to a store between classes.


• “The Old Testament in the New Testament”: a new seminar, beginning in tee minus 150 minutes. The meat and potatoes of the course will be student presentations, with each student presenting a “method” article on some aspect of literary allusion as well as a “content” article on NT allusions to the OT. Something new: all presentations will be offered from a standing position and must have some A/V (multimedia) component. The idea is to raise the energy level up from “somnambulant rap session” to…I don’t know, something where blood continues to flow to brains.

And, yes, each of these meets today! The seminar meets once each week, the Intro course twice, and Hebrew thrice, so Tuesday is the big day of the week this term.

How about you (both profs and students): what’s on the menu for Fall 2010? What’s new, and what’s old?

["Good Morning, Eager Young Minds." was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/09/07. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything

This is an idea about which I could not be more enthused (hat tip to Pharyngula).^[1] Ten biologists collaborate together to answer any questions that a layperson might pose them. The front page provides some relevant caveats; for example, if the question is quite basic, they might gently point a reader to the standard textbooks, rather than be roped into doing someone’s homework for them.

I especially like that the site builds a searchable growing repository of questions already answered. This should be a helpful resource, not only for inquirers, but for the team members to consult when dealing with new questions.

The idea of a similar, “Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything," site has seized my imagination. In my experience, answering questions about the Bible and biblical studies for genuinely curious laypeople is a delight. Part of that delight comes from my sense that only a few people have a resource in their lives to field such questions; when I make new acquaintances, they often have a short list of questions about the Bible that they've waited to unload, or that they've bounced off of others without receiving satisfying responses.

Some desiderata that come to mind are:

• As with AaBA, there would need to be a fairly large team: at least eight, I think. The good news is, I suspect recruiting new team members wouldn’t be all that hard, such that the team could grow (or shrink) according to traffic. The idea is that nobody should have to spend more time on it than they want to, with a very low minimum expected commitment.


• Team members should have terminal degrees in biblical studies, or else be candidates in a terminal degree program.


• The team members would have to have a shared understanding that “biblical studies” is a non-confessional literary and historical enterprise, relying for its claims on the shared public evidence of the biblical texts and such extra-biblical evidence as variant manuscripts, ancient Near Eastern texts, material remains, and so on (rather than on private revelation and confessional dogma). Theologically, it’s about the theology in the texts rather than one’s theology of the Bible. This understanding would need to be communicated on the front page of the site.


• There would have to be a standard rubric for recognizing and dealing with poor-faith inquiries coming out of the culture wars. This would, at the same time, have to allow for good-faith inquiries coming from those whose frame of reference has been distorted by the culture wars. (In English: What about spamming inquiries from folks like Answers in Genesis? What about well-meaning inquiries from folks whose minds have already been addled by AiG?)

I’m not in any hurry on this—believe me!—and it is the very beginning of the school year, with all its busy-ness. Still, if anyone who meets the second criterion above would be interested, let me know, and we can begin to look into it. If enough scholars were interested that the work load were low, it could be a real service.

BACK TO POST By the way, P.Z. has been having a hell of a time. He won’t be grateful for your prayers, but if you’re in a position to give to Red Cross, donate blood, or otherwise render service to heart patients, he’d be pleased.

[Ask a Biblical Scholar Anything was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/08/26. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Six Days Remain…

…of guilt-free blogging.

Blue Gal reminds me that May is National “It’s Okay If I Don’t Blog Today” Month.

Have a good day.

[Six Days Remain… was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/05/25. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Higher Education Blogroll

If you haven’t noticed it before, this page sports two blogrolls. The second one, titled “Other Academic Blogs,” lists some of my favorite (non-biblical studies) bloggers in higher education. Most are women, and most are pseudonymous.

Check them out, if you haven’t already or if you haven’t lately. Let me know if you suggest any additions.

[Higher Education Blogroll was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/13. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Reading and Tweeting

Lisa Halverson (Open High School of Utah) is reading Lord of the Flies with her students, and they are Tweeting as they read using the hash tag #lotf. (Apparently another group recently began using the same tag for “Land of the Free,” but you’ll find a solid group of Lord-of-the-Flies material if you scroll down a bit.)

Many Twitter users have observed that, on balance, Twitter is shaking down to be more about information-distribution than about building communities. However, this is a continuum, not a binary: users do experience the creation and especially the maintenance of communities on Twitter. It seems to me that this might be especially true for reading groups.

A Twitter hash tag search is easily saved as an RSS feed and can be incorporated into a class’s web site and consulted whenever the reader likes. Feeling isolated in your reading? Want some inspiration from your co-readers? Check the feed. Contribute to it. Build up your reading community.

My principle shared reading project right now is reading Context of Scripture in a year, mainly with Joseph. But I am also reading The Story with members of my congregation. And of course, I am frequently reading biblical texts along with my students.

This application of Web 2.0 is almost ridiculously easy, and so is readily introduced to the non-web-savvy: sign up with Twitter, learn to use a hash tag. Have you ever Tweeted as part of a reading group? Can you imagine doing so?

[Reading and Tweeting was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/09. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Gayle’s List of (Women) Bible-Bloggers

Besides my other projects for the week, I am working through J.K. Gayle’s list of (women) Bible-bloggers, and I invite you to do the same.

I have been making a short list of Bible-bloggers to remove from my own RSS feeds on NetVibes: mostly those who 1) blog on the Bible or biblical studies only very rarely, or 2) those whose Bible-related blogging is mostly devotional rather than critical. (A previous incarnation of the “bibliobloggers” list sought to select for both of these criteria, though it had other problems related to bias; Jeremy’s current incarnation of the list is, as far as I know, open to anyone who wants to be included.)

Pruning my current feeds in this way will provide space for those on J.K.’s list who fit my criteria. Thanks for the heads-up, J.K.

[Gayle’s List of (Women) Bible-Bloggers was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/07. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Random Bullets of Research

It’s piled noticeably higher and deeper around here. Currently in the hopper are:

• Deciding on bibliography for a course on “The Old Testament in the New Testament (Allusion and Influence)”;


• Learning our institutional options and guidelines regarding creating course-packs, for above;


• Bringing my dissertation’s bibliography (late 2007) up to date, for revision;


• Inquiry into what “community” is, how we recognize it in a group of learners, and where it is found in the first sixteen years or so of internet-based online education (presentation for SBL 2010).


• Bread in the Bible and the ANE, baby.

Fortunately, I took the precaution of earning a research degree. Otherwise, I’d be worried.

[Random Bullets of Research was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/06. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Again with the Women…

…seriously.

When a community or an activity is overwhelmingly dominated by male voices, I simply assume that this is a sign of extreme ill health.

I might make arguments about why the community is in such a state, and about which external or internal factors are to blame, and how to bring the patient to a healthy state. But, nothing could convince me to spend time debating about whether the community is in ill health, any more than I would be drawn into a discussion about whether a 98%-white community were in ill health. Exclusion simply is a condition of ill health, an indicator of pathologies.

I bring this up because the Bible-blogging community has again asked itself, “Where all de wimmin at?” (see comments there, and if possible see this older post also).

To which I say, “Good”; frankly, I am not sure there are any more urgent questions to be asked.^[1] [A belated clarification: I mean by this to say, This is an urgent question; sorry that my phrasing was not as clear as possible.] Anybody who wants to can compare the level of participation of women in SBL or AAR to that in the Bible-blogging community and see the disparity.

That said, depending on how the conversation takes shape, it may or may not be a conversation I want to be involved in (not meant as a threat; I know that the world turns with or without my help; just processing things aloud in my head).

Insofar as the conversation is about whether there is a problem or not (especially in the mode of, “Won’t you complaining wimmin just kindly explain one more time why you think that there’s a problem here?”), I’ll just wander off to the punch bowl and see if any other like-minded folks are also there, rolling their eyes and trying to look like they just came in to get out of the rain.

Insofar as the conversation is about the role of wimmin in the (a, some-or-other) church, you’ll find me elsewhere, waiting for notice that the talk about biblical studies is scheduled to begin.

Insofar as the conversation is about why the women bloggers just can't enjoy a healthy (persistent, endless) debate about how uncomfortable they make traditional, complementarian-minded men feel, and why they can’t just be more sensitively tolerant of world views that prefer to see women’s voices marginalized, I’ll…well, no, thanks.

But, insofar as the conversation acknowledges at the outset a problem in exclusion—no matter what the possible internal or external root causes of that exclusion—and seeks to discover and address root causes; insofar as that search for root causes is well-meaning and sincere, however naive and fumbling; insofar as the conversation partners are eager to be self-critical; in short, insofar as the conversation situates itself in 21st century academia, then I am cautiously excited for its possibilities and earnestly committed to participate.

(Postscript: I can imagine a related post dealing with the fact that Bible-blogging is less independent of sectarian confessional writing than is the peer-reviewed work associated with SBL or AAR.)

(Second postscript, later: J.K. is also welcoming conversation.)


BACK TO POST Though some other questions might be closely related, such as that of the relation of privately-held sectarian claims (about gender, for instance) to the publicly-shared evidence and lines of reasoning that characterize academic biblical studies.

[Again with the Women… was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/05. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

SBL 2010: "Community" in Online Learning

My presentation proposal for the 2010 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature has been accepted. The paper is, "To Those Far and Near": The Case for "Community" at a Distance. The session is about Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning, and is offered by the section, Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies.

I will share an abstract and my plans for the presentation later on. Briefly, what prompts me to choose this topic is my frustration that many educators who are unfamiliar with online learning will pronounce authoritatively that “real” or “authentic” community only happens face to face. It would be fine if this position were adopted as the conclusion of an argument befitting the holder of a research degree. However, the impossibility of “online community” is too frequently asserted as a non sequitur, without investigation into the fifteen-odd years of data at our disposal. Humanities educators may presume without inquiry that distance learning is limited to a static mode of knowledge-distribution. Among Christian theological educators, one commonly hears discussion-closing, preemptive appeals to “embodiment” and “incarnation.”

My presentation will offer a paper that takes the data—student evaluations, scores on collaborative assignments, teacher testimonials, independent surveys—into account. I may look also make note of online communities not relating to distance education. Ideally, the paper will focus on courses that traditionally depend on the creation of community toward the end of moving and changing student participants. Ideally, the paper will be offered asynchronously so that the presentation itself will involve a real-time community-building activity.

Are you skeptical of the possibility of online “community”? If so, what are the grounds of your skepticism, and what sort of evidence for online “community” might you (in principle) take seriously?

Do you already experience “community” among folks who have not met face to face? If so, where and how do you experience it?

[SBL 2010: "Community" in Online Learning was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/02. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Blogiversary (No Fooling)

Today “Anumma” is one year old: on April 1, 2009 I wrote the first piece of substance in this space. Fascinatingly (to me, anyway), that first bit of writing is still the 3rd most popular of my posts (2nd most popular if you don’t count carnivals).

The most popular post remains some mess about the President, the “antichrist,” and lightning, a piece written in a casual hour before my second cup of coffee. That thing still garners comments, even as of yesterday. I’d like to say that, if I had known how many people would read it, I would have spent more time on it; but the truth is, if had had that knowledge, I wouldn’t have been capable of writing it.

As a special Blogiversary present, you all made March 2010 the biggest month of my twelve. So, thanks!

Annuma’s biggest referrers are Charles, Doug, and Bryan, partly from linking Anumma in posts and partly because these are well-trafficked sites that honor me by putting Anumma on their blogrolls. Thanks, guys. For my part, I am pleased to have sent some meager traffic over to Akma, Bryan, and Jim.

The most popular search terms bringing readers to Anumma remain “lightning from the heights,” “obama antichrist video,” and other variations on “I or somebody close to me is a hopeless rube who should be sat on every first Tuesday in November.” As a Joss Whedon fan and in my opposition to Bible woo, I am happy to see that “phlebotinum” still draws readers.

My second favorite thing about maintaining this space is the writing itself, which also happens to be my least favorite thing. But my most favorite thing about maintaining this space is the conversations I have enjoyed, here and elsewhere, arising from my participation in these overlapping online communities. I am a changed person for them.

On average, in internet terms, the number of folks who wander through this space on a given day is laughably small. But, even that small average number of daily visitors is larger than the number of students who have enrolled in my largest introductory survey course. An exciting and challenging thought, that.

Thanks, and thanks again, and peace.

[Blogiversary (No Fooling) was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2010/04/01. Except as noted, it is © 2010 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]