Akma

(I knew I kept this thing alive for a reason!)

Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational, inter alia) gives an assessment of his involvement with online education via MOOCs, from a PBS NewsHour segment. His experience tends to confirm my perspective about the role and future of MOOCs, so I was chuffed to hear from his quarter. Something he didn’t mention — that I brought up in a conversation with Kevin Werbach*? the other day — is that the very idea of a ‘course’ (defined in the terms necessitated by quantised, bureaucratic models) is itself alien to the online learning environment, which is more conducive to learner-led, associative, indefinite-duration endeavours.

I’ll bet that Ariely’s course is great, just as I would bet that Kevin’s online course is great. The cost of mounting such a course (especially one well-enough executed to compare with these) is, of course, non-trivial, and there are arguments and experiments to be made about the relative worth of a pound spent on a MOOC and a pound spent on making the most of an in-person educational venture — but online education isn’t going to vanish even if it’s prohibitively costly for many providers, so it may as well be done brilliantly by outstanding practitioners with deep-pocket support.

Last night, though, Tripp tagged me to comment on a HuffPo post by a former student of mine, Wayne Meisel. In response, I noted that Wayne has some good points, and some fairly serious mistakes.

I agree with Wayne that an intentional-community model makes a lot of sense for most seminaries; I used to suggest at Seabury that we should re-imagine the plant on a monastic model, with some residential brethren and some who come for formation, and whom we send out into the world. (I proposed renting a storefront in a particular neighbourhood which would serve as a satellite/lab for learning and serving in the hood.

I think Wayne is dead wrong about a topic on which I’ve been insisting all along: that seminaries should teach something other than theology (and its allied disciplines). I’ll begin listening to that one when someone suggests that a med school teach theology, or that a law school teach pharmacology. The implicit assumption is that theological understanding doesn’t matter that much, or that it comes automatically. “Their courses left something to be desired in terms of leadership training and skill development”? I don’t remember any courses at PTS that advertised themselves as leadership training. PTS is a theological seminary, one of the best in the world at teaching students deeply to understand the Bible and the theological tradition and the best practices in their ministerial vocation. ‘Leadership training’ is not irrelevant to that, but it’s no more central than it is in very many other fields, and is surely less important that, hmmmm, knowing what you’re doing as a Christian minister.

And by the way — where do we see the vast benefits of leadership training courses on Wall Street and in US government? It appears that the US has a shortage of leadership from pillar to post; it’s not really fair to assail seminaries for the problem (and simply identifying one’s favourite leadership guru doesn’t solve anything; Peter Drucker can only teach in one place at a time).

Luther Seminary didn’t falter because it should have been teaching leadership training; it faltered because it overspent on buildings and managed money based on the expectation that a boom would continue (as has been the case with other financially-troubled seminaries). But Wayne doesn’t say, ‘Avoid imprudent expenditures,’ which would seem to me a much more apposite lesson.

Joint programmes make a lot of sense; a different model for formation and community life gets at a genuine problem; but the heart of the problem that no one talks about is committing to excellence in theological education. Anything else simply papers over a more significant problem: ‘We have these jazzy community houses and leadership training, but if you go to our theological seminary you won’t actually learn much about Jesus and God and worship’.

MOOCs do terrific work of a particular kind; conventional university instruction does terrific work of a particular kind; seminaries can do terrific work of a particular kind (especially if they remember to concentrate on their historic strengths). Foundation executives can do good work of a particular kind, too. I endorse The strengths or failures of specific cases in one or the other don’t imply that others should be more like X or less like Y — if you want to suss out the future of online education, of seminaries, of universities, or whatever, it’s utterly vital that you pay attention to strengths and weaknesses, of capacities and purposes, and work from there. Even my preferred suggestion of an excellence-focused, monastic-model theological seminary has very significant limitations on the scope of its applicability.

‘One size’, as the Waitresses reminded us in the theme to Square Pegs, ‘does not fit all.’

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* If you don’t know Kevin, he’s a legal studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the impresario behind Supernova, the author of For the Win (not the Cory Doctorow novel by the same name), and a wildly popular and successful online teacher). That is: probably understands a thing or two about what he says.

The end of teaching for the year is coming up on us, so my working days will be less oriented toward ‘what hitherto-unprepared lectures do I have to give this week?’ and more toward ‘what backlogged obligation can I clear away?’ This will make a considerable difference for the better, I promise.

I preached again this Sunday, this time at St Aidan’s in Clarkston, and I utterly omitted mention of it being Mothering Sunday (and almost avoided mention of Refreshment Sunday). This is not out of defiant despite of mothers, or my mother, or Margaret, or anything; I just followed the logic of the sermon as I was writing it out, and ‘mothers’ really didn’t enter the flow of the thing. No worries, though — we had plenty of matricentrism in the liturgy.

The text of the sermon below, and then I’m off to cobble together the slides for tomorrow’s lecture on theological interpretation.

 

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I did pretty well at blogging through January, but February rolled through with an avalanche of lectures for which I didn’t have presentations prepared, along with two book manuscripts, a couple of lectures, and so on and so forth. February was a blogging washout.
 
But March is still young, and I preached this morning at St Mary’s, and I’ll be preaching next week at St Aidan’s, so maybe I can jump start this blog. We’ll see — but for now, here’s this morning’s sermon. (Video below, text in the ‘continue’ link.)
 

 

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During the month-long Google-blackout, while Christopher was disinfecting my blog and reassembling it, I fell for a couple of music videos — one very safe for work, and the other unsafe for most workplaces, except perhaps in Glasgow.

First, They Might Be Giants’s ‘The Mesopotamians’ (for Madhavi) —

 

Margaret and I often begin our mornings singing “Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh” to one another.
Then I stumbled on Louie’s hip-hop anthem to the city we love here. The title itself probably tells you all you need to know in order to decide whether you want to watch and listen to‘(Glasgow) I F**kin’ Love You Mate’:

 

I posted them to my FB feed when they crossed my path, but now the links are here on my blog, where they belong. This helps set things in order.

For those keeping score at home, Margaret and I filed our applications for visa extension at the end of August, so we’re coming up on the end of our fifth month in Scotland without knowing our immigration status, with no expectation that we will hear for several months more. It’s an inconvenience for us — the Border Agency has our passports, so we can’t leave the country — and awkward for our family, whom we can’t foresee being able to visit.

Sorry, I meant to say ‘the wonderful Border Agency, our favourite government agency in the whole world’.

But we have friends who applied for their residency seven months ago and who haven’t heard; after his having been here as a regular worker for years, his job has come to its end, and he’s looking for a position, but is being turned away because (after all) he can’t prove that he’ll be granted leave to remain when the results come back from the Border Agency. And who would want to hire somebody, only to find out six weeks later that they’ll be deported? But in a grim catch-22, people who are here on a visa don’t have the right to unemployment benefits, so because he’s still waiting for visa approval he both (a) can’t get a job, and (b) can’t get benefits. Margaret and I aren’t in that position, but we can certainly sympathise.

Wednesday evening I presented a [slightly] modified, extended presentation of my presentation to the Ars Electronica conference from several years ago; it’s halfway between a meditation on technological change (and the ways that ‘change’ itself doesn’t always change from one change to another) and a call to arms. The tl;dr summary simply calls for technologists and theologians to cooperate toward exploring the possibilities of open-access, open-media publication in the religious sphere. Technologists get to experiment with low-cost ventures in a convenient sandbox of users and consumers with particular interests and a demonstrably strong ‘market’ for publications sympathetic to ‘religious’ interests; the theologically-active participants get to amplify the availability and quality of their communications channels, perhaps learning a lesson or two from what Aaron’s activism might have demonstrated to them. And at the end, my notes trail off from formal presentation to hortatory freestyling.

The pitch of the piece veers imperfectly from technological audiences to theological audiences (the core audience that’s literate in both spheres being uncomfortably small). As such, I alternate oversimplifications and under-explanations from side to side — if I were going on Newsnight or The Colbert Show to expound this topic, I’d try to even it out and do a better job clarifying the various dimensions of it. Feel free to correct me in comments, if you want.

But in response to popular one request, I’m posting the PDFs of my speaking text and the presentation slides below the fold. I haven’t compared my text to Bloch’s God’s Plagiarist to make absolutely certain I cited every case in which I relied on his specific wording — so you should know that most of what I know about Migne I learned from Bloch, and his is the True Source on all that section, no pretence of personal originality there. And some copyrighted images may have fallen into the slide show, though I tried to stick with Wikimedia or obvious fair use of other sources. So, disclaimers having been made, you can find the PDFs of my slides and talk below.

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Today’s the eleventh anniversary of my first post, committed to pixels via Blogger in 2001.

In honour of that span, and because I noticed the other day that something was missing from the Web, I have reconstructed the original web version of the talk I gave at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace conference in 2001. Teaching Theology and Religion (on whose editorial board I now sit — hey, where’s the cushion?) subsequently published a longer, dressier version of the presentation as an academic article, but it loses some of the vigour of the as-presented talk. Mine was one of the later papers, if not quite the last, and I got impatient with the ways my fellow presenters were imagining the internet and the Web, so I was editing the talk and even some of the graphics as I was waiting my turn. Considering the talk was given in 2001 — I wasn’t even blogging yet! — I’m quite proud of it. I stand by the general premise, if not all the specifics. And I wish that someplace would put some institutional weight behind actually, whole-heartedly embracing the vision I set out there. (The ideas were, at that point, already two years old; I made essentially the same pitch to the dean and the president at Princeton Seminary while I was working there, and then again to the dean of Seabury as soon as I moved there.)

You can see institutions implementing some of the aspects of a Disseminary-like vision, but I’m not aware that anyplace has fully, deliberately gotten aboard the cluetrain. I regret that — there are twelve, fourteen years of innovation and impact that we could have been making — but the opportunity hasn’t closed.

Our fair city has been promoting its affection for the winter seasonal holidays for weeks now, and only recently did I realise why the posters irritate me so much.

In this city with its glorious heritage of art and design, it’s positively mortifying to have to look at a poster with such execrable kerning. The kerning isn’t even remotely adequate; the word looks as though it were the phrase ‘Hogm A Nay’ (which could plausibly look legit to a visitor with no knowledge of Gaelic). Come now, Council, between these posters and the architectural designs for George Square — click through and support the grassy restoration — this has been a weak winter for a beautiful city.

By now, most everyone who would make a way to this blog knows that Aaron Swartz appears to have committed suicide Friday. Aaron grew up in suburban Chicago, so our circles overlapped both online and spatially; as far as I can recall, we were only in the same place at the same time once. In 2003, Josiah and I went to the opening of the Michigan Avenue Apple Store in Chicago, and while we were there I recognised Aaron. Apparently — though I didn’t remember this — Si went over and introduced himself, and I took a picture of Aaron browsing at a PowerBook. Apart from that, and knowing some of his friends, that’s all that connected us; Aaron didn’t know I existed.

When I woke up and began browsing yesterday morning, the news had just broken. The only media source that mentioned it was the MIT newspaper; as my tech friends woke up one by one, Twitter trembled with their shock and grief. Most knew that depression numbered among Aaron’s complexities; some remembered him blogging thoughts about suicide. No one saw it coming.

In the hours since we woke up to this intensely sad news, people have twittered and blogged and Facebooked in every way one would predict: unanimous grief and shock, lots of memories, many monitory reminders to keep in touch with the people you love, some self-blaming, some instructional columns about ‘signs’ or ‘what to do’ or ‘what not to do’, some angry criticism of how other people try to deal with the finality of a friend’s death. I don’t have the slightest idea how much the vastly overwrought federal criminal charges that Aaron faced affected him, but they certainly make a plausible hypothetical trigger on the second anniversary of his dramatic arrest. Some have begun a drive to expel the prosecutor from her office; Larry Lessig sees a direct connection between her miserably poor prosecutorial judgment and Aaron’s suicide, and since Larry knew both Aaron and the details of the case better than almost anyone, his word carries a lot of weight with me.

I don’t favour demanding that the prosecutor be expelled from office. Bad as her sense of this case was, she too has a life and family and friends, and we can’t know the extent to which her zeal contributed to Aaron’s death. (I do think it would be a mistake to re-appoint her, still Robert to promote her — the public facts of the case show a dangerous lack of perspective, which could well lead to further misjudged prosecutions.) Better she not be given a cause to blame others, to turn away from soul-searching to bitter resentment; better that this be a sign of her competence than a moment for vengeance.

Suicide defies our capacity to reason about it (a bitter irony, given Aaron’s own brilliantly logical thought). We want to know so much more about it than we possibly can; the people we most need to learn from will never speak to us again. We can draw conclusions from the situations of people whose suicides left the, yet alive, but that’s still a different thing than knowing what we need to from people who made sure their suicides were effective. Suicide – and it malign companion depression — affect us in ways greater, stronger than we can make sense of. When ancients talked about people being possessed by powerful alien spirits, they correctly described the force of these powers on mere human capacities (if not correctly identifying the ontogeny of the force). If we eventually learn something about suicide and how we may protect ourselves and our friends and loved ones from it, we will probably learn something that will catch all our grief-stricken pronouncements off target. For now, we struggle against something we can’t know enough about, and each of us will respond to our relative impotence by pulling counsel out our own repertoire of (falling-short) best ideas. And — for now — we’ll continue to lose our hold of some of the people who matter most to us. That saddens me.

About a month ago, my blog started throwing Google alerts at everyone who visited — which meant that everyone who visited sent me earnest warnings that my site was the source of all manner of dire and vile infectious malware, and did I know? I did, and I have prevailed on philosophical theologian and web adept Christopher Roussel to conduct a far-reaching dissection, disinfection, revivification, and perhaps even an on-going vivisection of Random Thoughts and some of the other web content (we may transform Limature and the Disseminary and maybe even Theological Outlines from Movable Type — for which we’ll always be thankful to Ben and Mena — to WordPress, for which we’ll always be thankful to Matt. There are good people at the heart of the Web!).

Between then and now, I’ve bid goodbye to three colleagues (the Kent Three — Rich King, Yvonne Sherwood, and Ward Blanton), finished marking for last term and thrown myself into preparing two new courses (shared) for this coming semester, visited exotic Helensburgh with Margaret, finished a revised version of ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’ for a collection of essays to be published later this year, cooked up a gamification scheme for the Texts & Cultures of the Bible course on which I’m working with my sole remaining biblical staff colleague, preached once or twice, and hammered away at a couple of other projects.

The most important thing that happened in the interim, from my family’s perspective, has been my Mom’s moving to a new apartment on the mainland of Massachusetts. I’m calling this out here because — at this great distance from Nantucket — I was of absolutely no use in this process. My sister Holly and my cousins and my aunts (literally; I’m not just making a Pirates of Penzance reference, though I’m happy so to do) did all the background work, all the checking-out and negotiating, all the moving, and handled all the stress that attends such efforts. The commonplace word for such labour is ‘thankless’, but I refuse to allow her to go unthanked. Hol, you made it go, and I was just peering over from across the sea saying ‘Uh-huh’ or ‘Oh, I suppose so’ to Margaret, who operates the communication machines at this end. There aren’t thanks enough for that very extraordinary push — and though my acknowledgement be inadequate, it will at least be on the public record that I admire and appreciate all you’ve done.

And hey, Mom, we’ll come visit as soon as we can — as soon as the Border Agency gives us back our passports.