This has to be one of the more honest videos that I’ve seen recently. For those who might not have looked at it yet, its the video of a 1 year old child as they are playing with an iPad and then a magazine. The interesting – and probably distressing to some – aspect of this video is how the child seems to have better control over their hands when using the iPad than with the magazine.

Of course, we are talking about a 1 year old, and so comments about motor control and understanding have to be understood. However, there’s something to be said about how familiar the iPad is for the child than the magazine in respect to the kind of feedback that the kid expects and what they receive. The video (and this accompanying article at CNet) implies the claim that digital natives are going to forget the physical control and contextulization of print magazines if activities with devices like the iPad continue.

There’s a good chance that this could be the case with many of our cultures within a generation. There’s a truth towards the face of learning, financial transactions, entertainment, and more leaning much more on the Interent and connected devices than in generations past. But, we don’t want to go so far as to saying that everyone will have this experience. The digital gap very much mirrors the economic class gap in terms of accessible and usable services across these connected devices. And yet, we also see moments like in this video, where some methods of interacting are more “natural” and lend to changing the relevance of learning, relearning, and unlearning some of our assumed behaviors.

So then the question becomes, “what are you teaching towards with your mobile ministry efforts?” John Dyer notes in From the Garden to the City how many of the aspects of our faith behaviors that we think are needed or required really only became so because of (a) available technologies and (b) changes in expectations towards literate populations (location 327, Kindle edition). Even the mentality of reading the Word everyday is new – people had been oral learners, and so in order to keep the Scriptures afresh for continual education, they had to meditate on what was preached every day (Joshua 1:8).

We’ve aimed so far with mobile ministry practices as facilitating behaviors and expectations based on what we understand from former media channels (speech, performance, radio, TV, Internet). What do you teach towards when those former media channels don’t have any contextual bearing on your disciples? How do you adjust to a reality where faith practices that your disciples will do start from the latest things you’ve learned, not from the same place you’ve started?

My God daughter and I spent a number of days together this past Christmas. Due to me having an iPad, she also got a chance to play with it. She played so much in fact that the lessons she was getting on colors was accelerated. The lessons she was getting in motor skills was turned into a different direction (learning drawing, pinch-zooming, and multi-touch when you can’t hold a pencil too well is a heck of a swing). For her, the iPad is much like the Etch-A-Sketch was for me. And while I did learn how to manipulate the knobs to create cityscapes and other imagined moments, I also started from a place that was unlike that of my parents who didn’t have one while growing up. My God daughter starts from where I am now with the iPad and has the opportunity to do things that I couldn’t even imagine.

But that won’t come to pass if I insist that her way of interacting with her world – even her faith – comes through the same behaviors, contexts, and viewpoints that mine is founded in. Yes, the Scripture doesn’t change, but practices and behaviors do. As leaders of disciples, can your methods change to enable mature faith lives of those who will be starting from this moment were you are amazed? Or, are you set at teaching people at the level of things now, leaving their tomorrow in the hands of older methods and concepts that might fail to engage anything but disappointment?

Some years ago, the year when I attended both the BibleTech and VSN Leadership Conferences, I did something that was weird to some, amazing to some, and confusing to others: I plugged my mobile into the projector, and using a Bluetooth keyboard or joystick, was able to control the presentation (see the VSN video). This has been quite normal for me in terms of presenting, and I honestly have gotten all kinds of bent out of shape when the projector or my connection to it isn’t able to be done (for example, this year at GCIA).

Nevertheless, it just makes sense with many of the mobile devices that we have in our hands these days – and yes, I’m speaking towards most of you with smartphones. You really can get away with doing simfielding rural, urban, or educational mission fields. Its honestly not that complex to do, and is more or less a matter of making sure that your method of presenting the content and having enough power for the projector is taken care of.

Now, there’s a preliminary case study over at Mobile Active talking about this activity in rural India for educational initiatives. And I’m pretty sure that I’ve poked at the Kiosk Evangelism Project enough to consider this as a primary method of displaying and enabling interactive content in some contexts. But, I’ll leave that for you to explore and figure out.

For now, I’m going to take the next step forward in how I do presentations from my mobile (right now using an HTML-driven slide-show system, with short-URLs and QR Codes to incite interactive moments for additional exploration during presentations). You might not be going that far, but if the device is in your hand, you’ve got a responsibility to figure this one out if that’s how your field missions function.

If you haven’t read Guy Kawasaki’s posting of his 12 lessons learned from Steve Jobs, it’s recommended. Then, once you have read that, consider the filter eDOT/Courtney has put these through:

…Real CEOs demo – I have worked for so many people who didn’t have an idea of what it is I do and what it is I work with.  They’ve been able to manage me and get me to do things but didn’t have a clue about the solutions I made to solve some problem within the organization.  Leaders in a non-profit need to understand the different areas of the ministry.  While they don’t have to be able to do everything, they should at least understand what is the function of each area and be able to explain each area to an outsider.

Real CEOs ship – We can daydream and spend time preparing things and give out ideas, but if we as a ministry don’t actually produce anything – then what are we about?  I think too many times our ministry are just about “raising awareness” but effective ministries do something and when they do, awareness is raised…

Read the rest of these reflections and the discussion to them at The Rose Garden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae4_e0bRsHQ

For a number of years, we’ve been talking about how Bible applications need to do a better job of addressing the non-pastorial perspective for their applications. We’ve talked about both content and the over all user experience, but rarely have we been able to do more than just instigate more chrome, rounded corners, or a faster search. Almost non of the Bible applications currently available take into consideration the fact that there are more people who own and use mobile devices than those that can read (by stat: the Orality Network speaks that about 60% of the world is or chooses to be illerate; there are nearly 55% of the world’s population that has a mobile phone* (hardware, not account) – overlap, not symmetry).

When looking at Siine Writer and its approach to creating a keyboard that’s based around iconography, I smiled because there seemed to be some develoeprs/UI designers who get it – on a mobile device, context-tuned entry is more powerful the less the user has to do to invent the context they are inputting.

So here’s your challenge. You have a library of resources, and don’t have the time to go about creating read-first interfaces that respect every language you are trying to reach. Can you create instead an icon (and color pallete) driven approach that is better able to lead towards that expected experince that person should have towards your application? Do you know the context of those whom you are building this solution for to do this? Or, does your mobile ministry approach need to start more with analysis of the people group, leaving you less time to make mistakes or do extra work?

If you are looking to build or deploy updates to your Bible/Bible-related applications for more than just the 120 or so trade languages, I’d encourage you to take a look at Siine Writer, accessibility best practices (for example, IBM’s listing), and even conversations that designers and others have about icongraphy and culture. Speaking from experience, its very hard to create interfaces that convey meaning when you are used to letters, words, and phrases to do so. However, the Bible, and specifically its application into how it is applied today, endears us to have to consider context just as much as we’d consider content.

For those of you already thinking and working down this path, here’s a recent tweet with some links to icons, icon galleries, and icon design practices that should add to your efforts:

Khoi Vinh (@khoi) – Helpful replies to my earlier tweet about icons: iconfinder.com, iconspedia.com and a post at Owltastic. Thanks everyone.

~ Siine Writer found via Ubergizmo & Techcrunch

*Update: got a question via email about the 55% number. That data is in the ITU datasets. However, it was also published by Tomi Ahonen in Feb 2011.

Caught this a little bit ago from The Living Labs Global Mobility Report:

…The website is the front end of an impressive back end algorithm. Geo-tagged photos of particular city scapes are presented to visitors of the site in pairs. Users are asked to click which place looks safer, more unique, or more upper-class. The algorithm uses the resulting binary data to classify places into these three categories.

That may not seem impressive, but check out the results. Among all cities surveyed (Boston, New York, Vienna, Salzberg, and Linz), Boston and New York have the most unsafe-looking places, while the Austrian cities have the top 10 safe-looking places. Just quickly looking at the photos categorized this way provides amazing insight into particular characteristics that draw people to, or send them running from, a public place. A sense of enclosure, vegetation, street-level retail, and other human beings are common characteristics among the safe-looking places…

Read the rest of the post at Living Labs Global and the full report of Place Pulse at MIT Media Lab.

For as much as we would like to believe in the perception of our churches and faith communities as being beneficial to our surrounding communities, the truth is that we don’t really know about what people think until we ask them, legislation provokes our response, or disaster happens and we aren’t asked for assistance. In a recent conversation, a musician told me how he didn’t care for many people of faith because he found them to be hypocrites, liars, and in denial of the day-to-day issues in which some go through – in a sense, he called the church “disconnected from the real world.” That was a scathing assessment of things, especially in a city like Charlotte which is (a) in the Bible Belt” and (b) has over 1000 registered churches by some accounts.

Could your church or community therefore stand up to a system such as what’s described in the MIT project? No, not are you preaching the Gospel, but what is the intensity of living the Gospel (James 1:20-21) that your surrounding communities can see, or even measure. And if your reputation was more public ally known, how would you change? Could your church/community culture change? Or, will such information cause such the kind of breaking down of things that the only way to rebuild would be to have an effort very similar to Jesus resurrecting?

This is another side of mobile ministry that has to be considered. Its not just the channel or the technology that you need to address, but the perception of the faith that people already have. If a project came like this to put your efforts on a heat-map, would your faith be hot or not?

Always nice to see others putting together various experiments and implementations of edge-case technologies. This one, from the folks at Church Mag is taking the idea of QR Codes, and mapping some interactive and sharing elements to it. Here’s a snippet of the experiment:

A thought popped into my head:

Bible. Verse. QR. Codes.

This might actually be a good idea. There are Bible verses on posters and t-shirts and bracelets; why not QR codes? I reach for my Bible, and select a few verses. I make a few codes, planning to show them to some friends, and think no more about it.

But God has bigger plans for this project. The seed had been planted.

Read the rest of this at Church Mag, and share your experiences with this QR tract experiment.

Explaining, Repenting, Relating as recorded via Qik last night.

I’ve spent the better part of the last year (not to mention all of my college and a few post-college years) in rural America. Computing is certainly a different experience than in urban and suburban settings. In most cases, the difference comes because of the difference in cultural approaches to reputation, leadership, connectivity, and ethnicity in those rural settings. For lack of better terms, its not the same world and depending on how off the wall you are, being too innovative can put you in a position where you self-learn yourself into a cloistered existence. If you aren’t innovative enough, you blend into the fabric of your community, and the elements that effect it which are usually out of your control to which you only have terceary knowledge/understanding of.

So, there’s then this opportunity in such contexts to create something new – to define a new paradigm. This is usually done by connecting to those who pass through or aspects of knowledge/information which aren’t a part of the normal fabric of your surroundings. Your imagination becomes entreated with the “possible” and those energies/purposes inside of you persuade how far you go towards those efforts. Indeed, you can literally learn youself into a new reality. Some people do this. They take advantage of those streams and create a new opportunity or several.

Now, what if the connectivity that mobile and web computing offers allows for those self-learning moments, while also keeping some connectivity to a larger (global) community of thought and discussion? A post at Mental Floss sparked just such a question:

…Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk starts with these words: “There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go….” From this jumping-off point, Indian education scientist Mitra shows us a variety of experiments in which he placed computers with internet access in contexts where kids could experiment with them on their own — without teachers. “At the end of [the early experiments], we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers sand the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. At that point I became a little more ambitious, and decided to see — what else could children do with a computer…”

I would encourage you to check out Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk and then place your educational mobile ministry methods into this context:

What could your efforts do to instigate opportunities for self-directed learning and maturity in spiritual matters?

The opportunity to create streams for people to learn and mature in areas about faith is certainly present when we talk about mobile ministry. However, if we are using mobile and expecting it to be a constant tether (we or someone we assign is always the source for learning), does this make mobile into a profitable measure for spiritual formations/maturity, or present opportunities to allow for us to go hands-off in some contexts to allow for people to direct themselves to avenues of learning we might have never before considered?

What are ways in which your use of mobile tech has grown the knowledge of others around you?

In a recent conversation, an older woman spoke of how she really enjoys items like her new iPad, but the ease at which it brings information to her attention has caused a kind of running-over of her cup of attention. And while she’d been in a career where she had to manage several types of data and attention streams (a few decades as an administrative assistant), the amount of attention that’s required (or built into) the various media channels and devices around her are overwhelming. So much so that its not any more a question of learning how to use a technology, but how does one build-into themselves or their communities the skills to manage the noise.

A similar sentiment is taken in a recent post at the New Media Project at Union Seminary’s blog. Dr. Byassee’s piece, Lament of Attention, describes some of what this very present issue looks like:

…And yet I want to maintain something of a lament for this shift. (I say this as I work on the New Media Project, preparing this for a blog on a laptop, while surfing websites that may help as links, and preparing for a sermon tomorrow that will be accompanied with visual images downloaded from the web and splashed on screen. Alexander the Great would be impressed…) One clear victim of this shift is a certain habit of paying attention: an ability to read forward rather than in all directions, to attend to a line of reasoning or story or argument, to engage that line of thinking, disagree, make connections with other works, etc. This shift in attention has been detailed in many places (see The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age & The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains). Others disagree. But my interest is more properly religious. We read biblical texts and prayer books with a habit of attention that focuses on God. This is a hard-earned practice. In every age people become distracted—monks in ancient monasteries were no different. But they fought against the sin of inattention, and with a little grace, they could win this combat. Now we are not even trying…

So then, what is to be made of this acquisition and approach to a technological lifestyle that begs of us its attention, but our spirit and health demand otherwise? Or, to quote the signature that I’ve had for years at the Brighthand forums, “if your smartphone is so smart, then why are you spending so much time learning it? Shouldn’t it learn you and adapt to your leanings?” Yes, part of that is about learning the technology, and programming it to respond to us accordingly – yet, another part of that is taking account of our own lives and making that time to meditate, contemplate, regard, and retool.

As I write this, I’m reminded of something that I wrote in response to a question about the Sabbath over at Holy Culture Radio’s forums:

…It is in that rest from their “work to make a living” that they were to begin to re-realize the provision that God had always granted to them – even mores because they were His people set aside for His grand design to reconcile all men back to Him. Hard to be a point of reconcilation of an all-providing God when you are breaking your neck just to have enough to put food on the table. The observation of the Sabbath therefore had a dual role. Not only were they getting a rest from “making a living” but also a rest from the deblitating effects of the curse (remember, “cursed be the land… you will have to work it to eat…”)…

…Psychologists will also tell you that to drive yourself (“work”) for more than six days at a time will mentally wipe you out. Observing God’s initial example of resting from His work to enjoy what He created (what He “worked” if you will) allows your spirit, mind, and body to recover and restore itself…

When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the times that we should take to consider that God’s provision for us in all matters has to be considered. Our provision in this context can be considered an over-abundance of information. Somehow, in the midst of some working the land, we’ve got to take time to consider our steps (Joshua 1:8, Proverbs 3:5-6), and that means the activity we instigate of taking ourselves from those streams and putting ourselves elsewhere – usually in shut-off place. When we do this, we allow for our minds, hearts, and bodies to receive a kind of provision that just isn’t able to be met in the opulence of attention.

Maybe, this attempt to address the increase and impression of attention in our lives has to sit in a similar vein as humbleness – humbling ourselves under the observed and soverign hand of God, looking forward to not us finding that thing to be noticed, but that he would open us up to those opportunities that present themselves as He wwills (1 Peter 5:6).

PS: looking at the picture chosen for this piece, its almost too ironic the caption to it.