It's book spine poem time...

Having recently declared my own leave of absence from this blog, I am now breaking the "temporary silence" I decreed in honour of my friend Erin, who got me onto this fun little thing to do when you feel like doing something, you know, fun.


Winter indoor activity #1: Book spine poetry
(Please forgive the name, Erin. I realise it isn't winter where you are. But it seems just the sort of thing that Melburnians should lap up when stuck inside in the cold.)


The rules are simple.

• Create a book spine poem (examples here).
• Take a picture.
• Post it on your blog.
• Link back to this post.
• Tag another blogger, or two, or ten.

I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure which other bloggers to tag, since I do a fair amount of my blogging in a vacuum, unaware of the blogosphere that I inhabit. So I tag all of you who read this post and have a blog. Make your own. It's fun, and was a wonderful way to start the day.

What fascinated me most about the exercise was the psychological side to it. I'm sure there could be studies done on it to identify what subconscious traits are brought to the fore in this kind of exercise. Somehow, constrained though much of it had to be (book titles had to be somehow related, and I personally rejected too many single-word titles), I ended up with a poem about the troubles of Christian perseverance, a subject almost always in my mind and often in my own writing. How odd. I'm sure there's a PhD study in this somewhere...

News: The Consolations of Writing

If you have not yet discovered my new blog, you may want to check out The Consolations of Writing, a site devoted to posting my writing and thoughts about writing. There has not been an enormous amount of activity there yet, but I'm expecting to use it much more in coming weeks, months and hopefully years. Have a look at it if you haven't done so already - and feel free to leave a comment so I know that you've been there!

I think, therefore I blog

My housemate Phil declared, on seeing "The Social Network" with me last year, that it was THE film to capture our generation, and Phil knows about movies (he writes them) so I guess I'll trust him on that one. I certainly thought of it when reading this article from ChristianityToday on the impact of blogging and Web 2.0 on theological debate. Mostly I thought of it because the article directly referenced the film. But I also thought of it because, duh, it's an obvious connection.

In particular, I thought of it when I read this section of the article:

Social media relentlessly asks us to publish our personal opinions on anything and everything that happens. There is no time for reflection in prayer, no place for discussion with other flesh and blood image bearers, and no incentive to remain silent.

You must declare your position, and you must declare it now.

Which is, of course, where the film tells us that Mark Zuckerberg began: blogging about his breakup of that evening, and insulting his ex-girlfriend in the most public forum the world has ever known, the Internet. This was, of course, a practice that the said ex-girlfriend Erica later decries sarcastically:

As if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared. The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink.

The problem with blogging is the very problem that Zuckerberg had that night: it's instantaneous, and encourages instantaneous, and thoughtless, comment. This, as the ChristianityToday article observes, is an approach to public discourse that is anathema to so much in the Bible, and thus should be anathema to church practice.

But wait a minute. The article makes an excellent point, and I don't want to defend it purely because I, as this very page demonstrates, am a blogger. No, I'm not interested in defending blogging, rather in refining what it should aim to do.

First of all, I would suggest that Paul's injunction to Timothy to "watch [his] life and doctrine closely" could be revised to, "watch your life and blogging closely". That's to say, do you think, or pray, before you blog? Do you aim for consistency in the life you live and the life you portray online? Do you embrace the anonymity of the internet to live a life, and to espouse a worldview, which those that know you best would laugh at you living and espousing?

I don't know how I would answer those questions. I am not writing this because I have any of this worked out. I cannot write this post at all without a fairly strong sense of the irony of every word I am typing. But blogging ain't going away, even if I decided, prayerfully, to suspend my blogging altogether. So I might as well use it to spread the word, that they who blog should be judged more harshly than they that keep their discreet mouths shut.

That said, if by prayerful reflection I did decide I should no longer blog, I would hopefully have the maturity and humility to do so. But for the time being, I say to everyone who both reads this and knows me: Don't just read what I blog. Look at how I live. If they don't match, tell me. I need to hear.

For the time being, I will try to pray more before I blog, and to think more, and to write only when I have something to say. That seems a good place to start.

2 sir W lov

Well, my fascination with the blogosphere has now taken me into brave new territory - the world of educational blogging.

Not that that's so new for me. I do, after all, have my own personal, rarely updated educational blog. But now I'm experimenting in a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. (Which is, I regret to say, why I'm not going to put a link to it from here, because, while I theoretically trust you all, I don't know who most of you are, and am not sure that I want you hanging around my students.) However, given how few people actually have the site's URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can't write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we've written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site's doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it's still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It's also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there's the kids who haven't even got a copy of "The Crucible" yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven't read. It's a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there's still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it's been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I'm the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can't succeed with everyone. Technology's not the all-purposes answer, but it's certainly helping.