Now you Know “A Life of Moses: A Biblical Portrait”

Last week I went to the Now You know studio to make a series of lectures on the Life of Moses a Biblical Portrait. I argued that the book of Genesis is a saga, a family story. The conflicts are local and familial. Exodus I argued on the other hand is a national story. The conflicts are between people groups. The assumption is often that a nation shares a common history, culture and language. I learned this in school. I try to tell myself that there was a time when this was in fact true. However, I wonder if it ever was. North America has always had multiple cultures, languages and sub-cultural histories. As I was preparing these lectures I thought it was too late to completely re-imagine what we mean by the term nation as it.
If we are to understand the book of Exodus and the life of Moses do we have to understand what is a nation or people?

What worked this Semester?

It started with a lunch over the summer. A colleague told me that he was using learning contracts in his classes. I remembered learning contracts from Carl Roger’s book Freedom to Learn. So I was persuaded to use learning contracts in my Christian Scripture class. My colleague warned me that completely unstructured learning contracts befuddled our students. So I wrote a basic contract for minimal competence. A student who wanted a superior grade needs to develop additional learning activities and rubrics. I was surprised the like Lake Wobegon everyone wanted to be above average.
Increasingly I believe there is a circle of learning from reflection on active learning to assessment and continued active learning. Somehow I would like to improve how I give them direction on learning contracts, assessment rubrics. I continue to explore ways to improve our understanding of this circle. I had the students in this class write a beginning essay that described their learning style. That was a good idea but I read them too late in the semester for maximum effect. Nonetheless, I think I will have students write an essay that describes their learning style and challenges in reading Christian Scriptures.
I also asked the students to write a self assessment at the end of the semester. These were sometimes self aggrandized defense of their stellar performance. However, more often than not the students reflected honestly on where they accomplished what they wanted to and where they fell short. Next semester I will give them more precise instructions on how they might structure such an essay. I want them to re-read their learning style essay and their learning contract as the background for their self-assessment.
I continue to have students in Scriptures 2 have the option of creating video podcasts. I would like to find some aids to help them construct a better video podcast. They used Flip cameras as well as more expensive equipment but I think if I could get them more exposed to the good work on digital story telling that would serve them and the class better.

Luckily there is still next semester to work on these things and students are resilient they learn even as we are learning about learning.

The Way to Second Life

For the past year I have been thinking about how to use Second Life to help students have an immersion experience of the pre-exilic Israel and Judah and post-exilic Yehud. The New Media Consortium is doing interesting educational things in Second Life. However, as a far as I can tell no one has used this to improve instruction in biblical studies.
Here is what I am thinking about re-framing Christian Scriptures 1 class next fall. I will have a panel of experts that student groups I am looking for at least one of each of the following: Near Eastern archeologist, gamer, new media expert, Second Life expert, cinematographer and educator. The student groups will work with these guides to build a face-to-face simulation that will be recorded. The panel will view the simulation and provide feedback which will give Second Life developers information for a Second Life build for a subsequent year.
After this step it seems that one could then secure the funding necessary to build a site in Second Life.