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?