“A person who at college doesn’t find himself seriously questioning all sorts of core assumptions about himself and the way he thinks is almost certainly receiving an inferior education. Learning new things means questioning the old things.” — John Shore, “Doubting Christ, Young Christian? Have At It!” (HT Wes Ellis) Read more

The Onion does it again, with this entertaining parody of some current legislative and societal debates: http://o.onionstatic.com/flash/video/embedded_player.swf?videoid=14401New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don’t Love Each Other Read more

“I think that we distort the text when we try to harmonize – and we may, in fact, harmonize away the truth. The so-called discrepancies aren’t problems to be solved, but clues as to the form and purpose of the text. The fact that the order of creation is different in these accounts tells us that the purpose and form of the text is not historically accurate chronologies, and this is just fine. Realizing this we can relax and look... Read more

A fellow biblioblogger asked me if I knew of any video compilations on YouTube or elsewhere that compile snippets with religious symbolism and imagery. If you know of any, please share them. Thanks! Read more

As I’ve been spending so much time thinking about technology and teaching this summer and particularly this week, I’ve had lots of ideas. Some will deserve to be forgotten. But it seems that sharing them may be the best way of figuring out which are which. So here’s an idea I had. I’ve been wanting for a while to record vodcasts and podcasts of my classes. Now that a number of classes at Butler have Panopto, it should be possible... Read more

I saw the movie Imagine That earlier this summer, and I found myself thinking that the movie is in many ways a parable of the value of a liberal arts education. Although with a fantastical bent, one of the underlying messages of the movie is that it is those who can be creative, who can bring ideas from other areas into their work in invigorating and unexpected ways, who can appreciate the value of play and imagination, who are most... Read more

.prezi-player { width: 440px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf Transforming Teaching Through Technology on Prezi If you have never tried it, Prezi.com offers a free presentation creation tool for educators that can be very useful and allows for a flexibility that many other presentation platforms do not. Read more

I just learned of Poll Everywhere, and am thinking about its use in the classroom. To that end, please respond to the poll below. Thanks! Make a live audience poll at Poll Everywhere In class, they’d presumably vote using their cell phone. Replace audience response hardware with Poll Everywhere Read more

Although there is an organization with this name “Nextbook,” presumably that won’t make it inappropriate to attempt to coin a phrase and lay claim to the term “nextbooks” for the sort of electronic, open access, open source, online, digital, interactive, multimedia “textbooks” that we have been talking about. Especially since Mark Goodacre suggested that what we have in mind is something less “texty,” replacing the “text” part with something else seems appropriate. And since we’re envisaging lots of different, partially... Read more

I’ve been thinking about the New York Times article on plagiarism and the digital era. Most students would understand the difference between making a mash-up of Star Wars and Star Trek – with everyone knowing that your contribution is the combination of the two at the level of editing – and presenting such a mash-up as a video assignment for a course in which you were supposed to not merely combine content created by others, but create your own content.... Read more