Before I Take My Classes Online (3 of 3): “So, I’ll Be Able to See All Their Faces, Right?”Posted on February 5, 2015 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorFor the face-to-face teacher and learner, entering the online teaching environment is a cross-cultural experience. It’s natural to try to hold on to the familiar, even when aware that this can interfere with a genuinely immersive, transformative experience of an unfamiliar environment. Find your points of discomfort, and ask questions (like those in this blog series) of instructors who already teach online….
Before I Take My Classes Online (2 of 3)Posted on January 14, 2015 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorFor the face-to-face teacher and learner, entering the online teaching environment is a cross-cultural experience. It’s natural to try to hold on to the familiar, even when aware that this can interfere with a genuinely immersive, transformative experience of an unfamiliar environment. Find your points of discomfort, and ask questions (like those in this blog series) of instructors who already teach online.“But Commmuuunniiittyyy!”“‘Community’ only happens face to face, because of embodiment, and the incarnation.”I don’t know what the secular, non-seminary parallels to this objection are, but I’m sure they exist. But this is how it finds expression in a seminary. I’m going to hit this one pretty hard…
Seminarium Blog 2015: A Call for BloggersPosted on December 10, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorSince July 2013, Seminarium Blog (powered by Fortress Press) has hosted essential conversations about teaching and learning in today’s religious-studies and seminary classrooms.Many of us of the large changes sweeping other academic disciplines into new learning models, content delivery technologies and deep systemic changes. How are these reflected and perceived among the institutions, professors and learners that have come to count on Fortress Press for progressive leadership in religious academic publishing?
Before I Take My Classes Online (1 of 3)Posted on December 9, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorIt may be that you’re already excited about the possibilities of online learning, or maybe find yourself compelled while yet skeptical. Perhaps you have been invited to teach online for the first time…or have been coerced by some means into doing so. Perhaps you have had some experience with online teaching, and it hasn’t worked out well. Whatever your trajectory to this point, you stand at the start of a trek into a foreign land. I frequently tell my learners that reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience. Here, I invite you to see online learning and teaching too as a cross-cultural experience—but into a foreign land in which you might elect to establish a permanent residence. Think of it as a second home.Venturing into this foreign country, you’ll naturally be drawn to grasp at any practices or ways of thinking that promise as little change as possible…
Forks in the Road/Nodes in the Web toward Digital LearningPosted on October 6, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorI usually don’t see the fork in the road at the time I take it. It’s only looking back that I can say, “Huh. Made a choice there.” Or, occasionally, “Huh. Made a meaningful choice there.”As 2008 slid into 2009, a recent addition to the rank of PhDs and already-long-time member of the adjunct-faculty class, I read a blog post–I suppose for me in that year it must have been a blog post, rather than a Tweet or a Facebook status update–by Dr. A.K.M. “Akma” Adam, recommending his readers’ attention to a *then* recent digital learning video by Michael Wesch. It was “A Portal to Media Literacy” (2008), following upon Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (2007). Both presentations concern learning and the digitization of text…