Some weeks ago, we talked about a specific case of using several applications across one’s mobile and tablet to do bible studies. The response from that article has been quiet, but there has been something quite consistently stated: the amount of inking, drawing, and pictures was a bit overwhelming. So, how about we scale things down a bit to just using your tablet (iPad, Nook, Kindle Fire, etc) for studies.

[click for larger view]

The Setup

• Safari Mobile Web Browser
• Penultimate
• Evernote
• Dropbox

We are keeping things simple here with the use of the built-web browser, Penultimate to collect and organize our content, and then Evernote and Dropbox for the purposes of archiving and sharing (you only need one of these, but am including both as Penultimate works seamlessly with both).

The Study: John 8:1-11
Many of us might be familiar with this section of the Bible. Here, a woman is brought before Jesus by scribes and Pharasees and she is charged with adultery. This was one of those studies where we were given the text before the meeting, and then had to come to the study with items to contribute. I decided to collect my thoughts within Penultimate, and then again use the app during the study to capture additional thoughts.

Before the study, I read the text and started in Penultimate with some questions that came to mind about aspects of the section of text: location, timing, what the Temple looked like, etc. After getting a few of these, I began just by using a simple search to look them up, and then started collecting facts and images from image searches, Wikipedia, and other places.

Then in Penultimate, I just went at it. What I liked here is that my notes very quickly started looking like something in a composition book, but with better links to images and data. What’s missing from Penultimate is some kind of screen that keeps track of the items that you grab from websites (like of like an automated biblography).

During the study, I went back to the document that I started, and just added additional pages to correspond to the questions being asked. No styli, no keyboard. Just grabbing snippets of images and writing as I see fit.

The end product looked like this PDF. I exported the Penultimate file into Dropbox, and it created this PDF. I also did an export into Evernote which gives me the opportunity to view this notebook on my mobile or anywhere else that Penultimate doesn’t exist (aka, anything not named iPad).

All in all, this has become a pretty neat workflow and exercise. Its only one of a few ways that you can use your tablet for Bible studies. Of note, the ability to mashup content within your notes is something you should take advantage of, or encourage those you teach to take advantage of. If you can do somethingl ike provide them with an outline to start with, and then let them cut/create as they go, you’ve got the starts of building understanding (Proverbs 4:7) with the text – note just memorization and rote learning.

Could this work for you? Or, do you have your own workflow for how you use a tablet with Bible studies? Chime in the comments and share.

A few weeks ago, I was in Philly welcoming my new niece into the world. While there, I also got a chance to connect with a good brother in the faith, Jaime Centeno, pastor of the Philly plant for In the Light Ministries. When he and I connect, it is always a good chance to hear and see what new has been happening with that part of the Body, and how they are making roads into life and community transformations by using the Gospel and plenty of computer/multimedia tech approaches.

Here is a small video (2:30) taken during that last visit after helping the, setup a few small pieces to their in-progress video room:

What I like best about this is how random the video was (mobile is good for that), and then the ability to see a young woman leading the charge in making this happen. Nina is rare in this respect, and what she is learning while Jamie and In the Light move forward, is making possible some neat explorations and discussions around the effect of the Gospel within urban environments.

I’ve had Vox.io in my iPad’s browser for almost a week. It really feels like this can be an answer to mobile ministry efforts which start at voice/oral behaviors. But, am not quite sure how.

Anyone got ideas? Or, already using this in a capacity where they can shed some light on this concept of moving beyond phone numbers?

This might be a bit off the normal stream of topic, but given the posts framing around the Lutheran branch of Christianity, and then glue and sticks (can you see the connection) already posted this week, might as well throw something of a ratchet into things:

…Which all makes me wonder: Are we are destined to hit a point where our global intellectual capacity is so taken up with maintaining the technological status quo, that we will loose the capacity for further technological innovation?  Or even worse; are we heading for a technology innovation impasse ends up degenerating into an uncertain and unenlightened future?

I have to say, I’m not an optimist here – that is, unless we learn how to build effective technology ratchets.

A mechanical ratchet, as everyone knows, is a device that allows movement in one direction only. By comparison, a technology ratchet can be considered as something that allows technology development to move forward, but prevents or inhibits it from moving backward.  The idea is to find ways to hold onto ground gained through technology innovation, without having to constantly expend huge amounts of effort in doing so…

Read the rest of Why We Need Technology Ratchets at 2020 Science.

Truth be told, I sometimes feel MMM serves as a ratchet for some of you. Personally, there have been things done (living mobile, using a mobile web server, etc.) that have certainly felt a lot like this tech has indeed been a ratchet. For example, when’s the last time you heard us write on the topic of being “mobile only?” Saw Mobility Nigeria blogging about their experiences doing so and it kind kind of strikes me as a bit interesting that since going mobile-only (some background on that), we’ve not really turned back. In fact, anytime I’m asked to use a laptop these days (virtual conferencing and Visio/PowerPoint preferences), I get very aggitated and want to take an axe to the person(s) requesting such (antiquated to me) tools and behaviors. Similar feelings simmer when someone asks “hey, can you print from that iPad?” And I’m having to quickly process (see James 3) on finding their context of why they see printing as necessary. Its honestly that difficult to go back to a context of computing that I’ve gone away from.

Have any of you felt the same way? Perhaps in regards to when you first started replying to your office or family using mobile email and the resulting “crackbettery addict” conversation? Or, maybe it was you doing something so daring as bringinng a PDA/mobile to church and using that for Bible reading, then looking around at those with print Bibles and wondering why they insist on squinting at that 2in stack of paper? Or, whatever it was. There is some sense of technologies and behaviors adjusting or resetting our state of “normal” and now we move forward, or try to, in the midst of a greater community that’s slow to get the message.

Perhaps it wasn’t so off the stream of our topics afterall?

Over the past week(s), I’ve been working on answering some simple questions to address building pitch slides for the weekly 1M/1M public discussion. There’s a signifiant need for sales/marketing help for MMM, and getting through these slides has been rewarding and frustrating. We are really missing a lot of pieces of data we should have, and other parts are defined enough that it doesn’t fit normal modes of “building and marketing a product.”

The “product” MMM sells is the knowledge and underanding of making sense out of the points which connect mobile and faith activities. That’s not something easily bottled, that is, unless its sold as glue and not as the bottle. Now, to sell glue, you have to identify what things need to be present in order for that stickiness to take place. You’ve got to be able to say on your label what surfaces it works best on, where not to put it, and probably some hazard information in case someone misuses the glue.

For us, that means we aren’t so much as building apps and services, as much as we are identifying those points where devices, services, and experiences come together for a specific environmental condition at the intersection of faith and mobile technology. Unless folks already see that these two areas collide, they won’t be able to discern how best to glue them together. That’s how we get the term mobile minsitry, we are looking at this intersection of two areas that have some common points (communications, sociologiy, etc.) and what happens when they collide and both those common and uncommon areas get challenged.

The other day, I responded on a post for a developer at LinkedIn. The post didn’t identify a specific need for the developer, but did mention much about the organization (the usual HR boilerplate stuff) and then some toolsets/skills needs for the position. I made several assumptions about what they are looking for ending with a statement that perhaps they are looking for something less oriented to building and something more like glue. Now, I was corrected, and in that correction was detailed the specific need for that position, but it still came across as looking for glue, not someone to make sticks.

When it comes to mobile ministry, part of that identifying what it is you are offering (our case) or what you are looking for (the folks we tend to attract) is making this distinction between building and sticks. Sometimes, you might solely be on the side of building, and therefore a specs sheet of programming languages accompanyed with certain products might be the key. Other times, and usually what we see more often than not, is that people are looking for the glue. How does mobile stick best with wherever they are? Whether that’s reformatting videos, adjusting to the appearance of mobile on the ministry scene, or introducing less friction to a reiteration of a product, its more about the glue (what happens in between the points), than the sticks (the points)..

I’d wager that many of you have been using sticks like glue and wondering why you haven’t seen the successes you’ve wanted. May I make the suggestion that you find the jars of glue (who connects the dots within mobile and ministry), and then refocus your energies? You might find that with less building that you enable more sticking to your ultimate goals.

Snippet from the posting at EchoHub:

This Christmas Eve, Salem Lutheran Church here in Texas (with an Echo Hub reader or two on staff) tried something pretty interesting. Joel Wetzstein, SLC’s Director of Worship & Integrated Communications, told me the team set out to do two things:

• Leverage the church’s new organizational structure, which combined Worship, Communication, IT, and Production Technologies into one department.
• Put Salem Lutheran School’s 54 iPads to good use during Christmas.

That’s where the idea for an iPad-driven video wall came in. While doing some research, the team discovered Sofftech A.S., a company in Istanbul that had coordinated large iPad video walls in the past. Joel and the team worked with Sofftech’s Çağdaş Timurlenk on the software development, and also went to work coordinating the music, video, and choreography elements of what they had in mind.

How far are you and your church/org willing to extend the creative energies within your communities? How does this provoke you to step out further?

A good bit of the conversations here lately have been driving in an out of this idea that context should drive the way we interact and live out the text within the Bible. That literacy isn’t so much about reading as much as it is an ability to create and explore in between the points you are trying to relate to so that you can derive and teach facts and relevance. Now, there’s not much different about this kind of thinking/activity that’s not covered in courses talking about organizational management, knowledge management, time management, and even basic note-taking. 

What we are doing here is taking some of those principles and applying them to the unique opportunities and constraints within mobile and tablet environments. Its not enough to just have a list of items as we would with paper. We have to be able to see and manipulate the connections in and around those points – taking advantage of the tool, and embracing more of what’s valuable about our faith.

I’ve been talking about sketchnotes and showing some examples of how to go about re-visualzing notes in some of the larger sketches – having a larger overall picture that shows you more about a topic area as you zoom and pan. One of the apps that continually sparks how this can be done and done effectively is Tactilis. Tactilis is one of those apps where you can always say “if only it had…” but realize when you get into it that it has just enough to get things done and keep most of the tools out of the way of a certain kind of productivity. 

Most recently with Tactilis, I’ve been having an email conversation with its author on potential features and directions of the project. What I’ve enjoyed about this interaction is how he’s listening to people who have used his app, and not necessarily getting away from his central vision for it, but considering how others use it as means to refine what he sees and doesn’t see in his own use. In one of these email conversations, I walked through a Tactilis document I created, and what I think about in terms of features to add which would refine my workflow, and make more beneficial the application in light of its intended purposes. I’m sharing a piece of that email here now, because I think it would be helpful for some of you in seeing how we get from just talking about lists of apps to types of behaviors and the results they enable:

First: the 1st like has a reference to an item in the Bible. I’d love to be able to draw a marquee around that reference, and then have a command which points it to the Bible referencing, URL shortener Bib.ly, to a URL for an online Bible service, or to the search field within a Bible application on my iPad. For the 1st, there’s an API to do something like this. For the latter, it would require those apps being open to outside apps being able to link to it – not sure Apple’s policies on inter-app linking.

On the right there is a graphic. I’d link that to (a) the calendar (that little tag with the time on it would be where I would be doing that linking) and (b) to an online gallery of other artwork that I’ve created. One of the difficulties that I have now is that when I do these drawings on my notes, I have to save the picture to photos, then import into Adobe Ideas, then zoom to only see the picture so that I can export the picture only. Being able to draw a marquee and export the picture to photos/Dropbox/Evernote/email right from Tactilis would save a ton of steps there.

On the left of that graphic is the notes that I made during the 10am session. While its flat on the document, ideally, I’d love to be able to marquee and tag that section by time (10amnotes for that overall event). Then, you can see that there’s some text and directional arrows there: those would be linked to to referencing scriptures, and then also be able to be saved as a collected image which itself is tagged and able to be exported wherever.

Ok, so you are seeing now how I think (some) about layered content. Just one more.

The graphic in the bottom right of the document is actually off-subject of the rest of the note. This often happens when I’m in Tactilis drawing (I think of something but don’t want to leave the doc and start a new one, it breaks the thought/flow). This would be a graphic (maybe called an “aside” – taking from the HTML5 schema) which too can link elsewhere, but acts more like a pinned note. In terms of the scratchpads, this would be something smaller, like of like a limited corkboard of items (3-5 items) which are outside of the main scratchboards. They are smaller (like this) and don’t have the ability to be zoomed or do most of the other full-drawing tasks – but its able to be a snippet for later use. Perhaps it even has a slit-pin graphic like what’s here when its inserted into a document.

I’m pretty big on the linked items within documents. With such a feature, pages aren’t as needed. Being able to zoom in and draw more could take something like the graphics on this page and make them the notes themselves. 

Like I said at the end of that email exchange, a lot of what I’d like to do when I’m taking notes is about linking to other sources and making associations between different content types. When I’m able to do this, the actual creation process of making notes becomes it own adventure into the content. For example, drawings always spark contextual memories of what I was hearing, but linking that to the calendar, a larger art gallery, or even embedding its own set of text into it turns a simply sidebar sketch into something usable across several domains.

I know that we can easily find and talk about Bible applications that make the text available. But, perhaps we should also be looking at better linking to the way that we process, collect, store, and retrieve information we deem personally and collectively valuable. Over the years, do people get from the place of simply wanting to read the text, to wanting to do something more with it (if the initial app experience is pleasing)? If we started making apps from the notes perspective, and then linked into the Bible and other sources, what kinds of expectations could be reset towards retention and living spiritually, that look more like the ways in which people process life and want to learn? Or, what other possibilities for visuializing and hearing the Bible open up when itds not the translation that matters as much as it is the hearing?

Was sent this video a little bit ago from Chris White Ministries. We’ve talked some with them previously about their efforts towards distributing electronic Bibles to pastors in Kenya and India as the cost of doing so with paper Bibles stretched budgets and capacities thin. In this video, Chris talks about mobile ministry as he will be applying it on an upcoming ministry trip, including some good tips about paying attention to the types of devices those pastors will use, the type of training that would be able to be provided, a mobile content strategy using Phone Publish, and some distribution strategies ussing Bluetooth and WiFi.

The items talked about in this video are happening in several areas, but are most often being put into practice in developing nations. Within the Kiosk Evangelism Project we explored using items talked about here in both developed and emerging nations. We’ll have some more case studies from them to publish soon.

If you have questions on anything in this video, definitely put those in the comments here or directly to Chris White Ministries. Mobile Ministry is happening. This is the intersection and what one of the many responses to it can look like. How do you want to step into this?

During the month of January, we posted six articles which corresponded to five resolutions suitable for those working in and around mobile ministry. Being that this is one of those days that happens once every four years (on the Gregorian calendar), how about we just take it as a day to reflect on those resolutions and any progress made towards them.

Here are the items we posted:

1. An App is Not A Strategy
2. Specifically Define Mobile in Education
3. Get Connected to Tech, Mobile, and Mobile Ministry Events
4. All Books Project and Mobile UX Standards and Raising the Bar on Mobile UX Standards
5. Become a Digital Faith Advocate

How are you doing with these? Are you finding some more difficult to work through than others? Any that you’ve thought, “oh yea, I’d like to do something like that,” but haven’t made any progress towards?

Thinking about it some, yesterday’s post might have come across as if we were putting ebooks, literacy, and that neat community experiment only inside the frame of smartphones. Sure seems like it doesn’t it? Well, no. Everyone can do that, and your mobile efforts should take into account the capabilities of as many mobile devices as possible when you do those kinds of things.

And I know the refrain, many folks talking things up in mobile ministry have a working experience of what’s in their pockets – and that is often a smartphone. A random survey of just a few folks from the Mobile Ministry Forum pointed to just that. And it doesn’t mean that we are limited to knowing what’s in our pockets. Not everyone has had my experience of being a mobile device reviewer, or owning more than two mobile devices for most of their mobile life. So, There’s some forgiveness that has to be had when we do craft mobile solutions and it sounds like it only meets the needs of the most affluent amongst us.

You don’t see non-smartphones around you (I’ve heard that too)? So, whom are you around? Did you know that globally that about 30% of the mobile phones sold in the last year were smartphones – and that’s out of a total of 1.2 billion mobiles sold (Tomi Ahonen stats, Cellular News stats, Taipei Times). Or, if you are in the USA, you might say “yea, but it doesn’t look like that when I see on TV, in the cafe, etc. that so many have them.” You are right in some respect, of the mobiles sold in the USA, (I think we are just about at) 50% are smartphones (across the national carriers), and rarely are these sold with those persons that use pre-paid accounts (Nielsen). So, if you aren’t seeing them, there’s a question of context, half of the people you interact with will probably not have a smartphone. If you aren’t seeing that, you’ve got to check your associations.

And I know that those who work with/for content creators and media companies that smartphones are a much easier target. The browsers are better, there’s an app for that (grrr), and folks are willing to often flaunt that new device with a nifty case or sound. That’s no excuse though to just target them. We covered Phone Publish last month which is able to get content suitable for the smaller screened, lower-speced, non-smartphone folks, without keeping the content away from them (designing the user experience is harder, I’ll admit that much too). 

You want to push apps to everyone, check out GetJar. Get Jar is how many of us who have been doing mobile longer than the last half-decade are familiar with the concept of “app store.” You go to the site on your device, and it recognizes the device you are using and just shows the content that’s compatible with it. Simple right? If you follow the specs for the majority of devices which can download Java/Java-similar applications, then you’ve got a means to get in on those devices. There are other app stores (Nokia Store, Bada Store, etc.), but just wanted to hit on that one since it really does endeavor to hit the most devices.

Some stats are showing that – at least in some regions – that people are using mobile over PCs to get online. So, that really cool developer who wants to do something based on that pretty 22in monitor, tell them to take a few steps back. Concepts like responsive design, mobile website transcoding, etc. need to be looked at just as much as you observe that client requirement of “make it look good on my screen first.”

And if those folks aren’t able to get online, is your mobile strategy doing SMS (over 90% of mobiles are capable of doing text, nearly as many do multimedia (MMS) messages)? What about memory card swapping? Look back at that idea about a book fair, notice how we have a central librarian laptop that is able to serve those devices which might not have the ability to get content via WiFi, Bluetooth, or swapping memory cards. Your church might have gone mobile, but folks can’t go with you if they can’t get what you’ve moved forward with (Pew Internet, via Textually).

So, don’t forget folks who aren’t using what’s in your pocket. Its easy to do (trust me, personal experience like crazy here). You do your witness of the effects of the Gospel when you love on all of your brothers, not just those with the buttons and trinkets that look like you (1 Cor 1-3).