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Posts Tagged ‘tech’

Highlighting Some Mobile Learning Case Studies

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

At the time of composing this, I was only a few hours from hearing that Judy Breck (Golden Swamp, Handschooling, and various contributions to Smart Mobs had passed away in October. She was a huge encouragement to myself and the activities here at MMM and always did an impressive job of presenting mobile and web technologies as the best tools yet to close the (race, class, access) gaps that exist in educational activities here in the USA (for example, her video interview with We Magazine).

To that end, I’ve gone through her works and started pulling out some of the many resources she’d linked to. Of note, work by ACU and St. Mary’s City Schools which aren’t too dissimilar to work I (Antoine) did in 2002-04 with PDAs and high school students (man, I wish I could find that documentation). Highlighted below are links to some of their case studies on mobile learning worth adding to your resource library.

Abilene Christian University (ACU) Mobile Learning Reports

2008-09 Report (PDF)
2009-10 Report (PDF)
2010-11 Report (PDF)

St. Mary’s City Schools Mobile Learning Technology

Verizon Case Study (PDF)
GoKnow Case Study (PDF)
Inkster/Michigan Public Schools Case Study (PDF)

I know of other projects happening in this space such as foundational work happening at Taylor University, and the pionnering work by Cru’s mLearning Project. What else should we be highlighting here? Or better, what have been your challenges and successes towards mobile learning/mlearning initatives?

Tags: Abilene Christian University, ACU, ebooks, Golden Swamp, Handschooling, Judy Breck, mobile in education, mobile learning, PDAs, St. Mary's City Schools, tech
Posted in Communication, Social Engagement | No Comments »

Working by Mobile in Angola by Unwired View

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

android device with Movicel SIM There’s some sense of disbelief across mobilists, developers, theologists, and just about anyone else when I describe to them how I live/work solely from mobile devices (seriously, I only need a conventional PC when doing a SharePoint virtual training class). Its normal for me to live like this. To hear those who ddeal and work with mobile not work/live like this does tend to get to me a bit. Nevertheless, there are moments when others get a chance to poke at life via mobile that’s different than their normal contexts.

Such was the case at Unwired View. In a recent article, there was such an exploration of mobile and life brought about because of work/productivity needs. Here’s a snippet:

All together I can say that all the (mobile) technology made the trip to Angola very easy for me and my family. It helped me to get my work done there, it entertained me in the evening and it kept me connected to my local colleagues, my friends and my family. Don’t know how generations before us did the same without these little helpers but I don’t want to miss this kind of mobile technology in my life anymore.

Read the rest of Unwired Thought’s Back from Angola – Back on Duty.

Notable to that article, and personal experience, being productivty with such an arrangement means dealing with certain compromises and advantages. You have to know not just your device, but the advantages and limitations of all potential viewing windows for whatever it is that you are producing. For example, living such a way has meant for the complete removal of MS Office from my computing devices. Documents that won’t be seen by others sit in Evernote or are self-generated HTML documents; collaborative documents migrate to Google Docs or task/project management solutions (SharePoint, Basecamp, etc.).

Another note from that piece, do you see how he had to adapt his personal mobile tech to the contexts of the culture. Needing a torch, FM radio, and using a device that iis easy to be repaired were common to where he was. The Internet was so new, and expensive, that outside of a company-supplied SIM it wasn’t going to happen as often unless through a Wi-Fi hotspot or cafe. Knowing mobile means that you have to understand these aspects of your environment before you get there, while being open and versatile enough to change when teh situations warrant.

Many of you might have stories of such challenges and opportunities. You should be open about those items, and help others online and around you prepare adequately for such variances in technical environments.

Tags: Africa, Android, Angola, Google, mobility, power efficiency, Skype, tech, Unwired View, Video
Posted in Devices and Software | No Comments »

Further Thoughts on the Bible as (Digitally) Applied

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

When I speak with people about MMM, some people ask about Bible and religious-based applications. What’s always neat is when after offering their opinion about what it is they are/aren’t using, I ask them what would be their ideal application. Interestingly enough, the answer to this always sounds like some aspect of faith digitally applied rather than faith-knkowledge retreived from somewhere (the paradigm of Bible apps).

What are some of those apps? Here are a few:

An application (service) that would help people connect church announcements with their device’s calednar
An app that would facilitate the sharing of prayers with a small group
An app that would invite financial and psychological support to missionaries whom are abroad
An applicaiton that would help you investigate events and locations in the Scriptures interactively
(And my personal favorite) A notepad that when I write a Scripture verse to my notes that it automatically links to BibleGateway or the (preferred) app on my device

Look again at these. There’s not a throwing away of the Scripture, but an asking of digital tools to enhance behaviors that are already happening, and in some cases would happen better if mobile/web was in the midst of the behavior.

We see something like this happening with the popularity of reading plans with YouVersion. Why is a reading plan effective? It doesn’t try to give you the entire Bible at once. There’s a flow to the use (each day/week/month you open it, you see some progress). There’s an invitation to connect your progress to an online community (catering to encouragement and esteem). Note the mix – literally Joshua 1:8 and Deuteronomy 6:6-9 happening in practice. Reading plans, as YouVersion has enabled them, allows the believer to keep enough of the contents of the Bible in front of their routine that it is almost a compulsion to live what you are reading and meditating on.

What does this look like then beyond reading plans? Look at the applicaitions mentioned above (I know, lots of looking back), engage with a piece of Scripture and then persuade the person engaged to go “heads-up” (to steal a page from Microsoft’s Windows Phone marketing message).

Something interesting happened when I updated my iPad to iOS5 – I didn’t reload any Bible applications. Not a one. And not because I don’t like them (ok, I have my moments), but because I’ve found the use of this iPad to be such a blank canvas for creation and computing that I’ve modeled my use of it to consume and produce that which looks like the text that my immediate communities are already familiar with. That means I’m drawing, I’m creating tools to teach, I’m coding, etc. I’m developing a behavior of digital living where the Bible has to be applied in order for the tool to demonstrate appropriate use. That doesn’t mean that my use of ESPN Scorecenter will always look like any of the characteristics of the church, crucifixion/resurrection, or even judgement. But, it does mean that even in that app, I’m subjugating the entire digital experience under the same mandate that was given to the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28-30).

When we move to that paradigm – this idea of the Bible as applied to digital spaces – what then are the more notable effects to those things online and offline can we see? Well, when your small groups start talking about their prayer chains and the testimonies from them, let me know

Tags: applications, bible applications, definition of mobile ministry, development, education, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobility, social networking, teaching, tech
Posted in Devices and Software, Social Engagement | No Comments »

No Longer the Age of Bible Apps, Now the Age of Bible As Applied

Monday, November 21st, 2011

A friend and I were talking about a project he and his company were working on and while it was great that they were working on it, I had to be direct and ask him, “why are you building another Bible applicaiton?” According to he and his team, having a Bible application would put them on equal footing with other companies in this space who have applications and have (apparently) made the successful transition from a PC-based product model to a mobile/web-based one.

I shook my head at his flawed logic. “You don’t run to where the puck is, you run to where it would be,” I told him (quoting Wayne Gretzky). The problem with their approach, and many within this mobile ministry (#mobmin) space who are looking for their innovative solution to take the religious world/church/tech world by storm, is that they keep looking to copying current products in order to make a dent or shift in perception. That’s just not how this works.

For this group, I asked why didn’t they go the route that other Bible applicaiton companies haven’t gone, but that very few secular companies would dare go: the Boston Globe/Boston responsive web, subscription web approach (several articles talked about this)? He looked at me with disdain, as he heard some about that project, but didn’t know how far reaching that it went. You see, their team is savy enough to build something like that, but their company isn’t visionary enough to figure out why that works.

Hence the title of this article: the age of bible applications is over; it is now the age of bible as applied in digital spaces.

Am I saying that there is no need for any company to create, recreate, or innovate on top of the paradigm of reading, searching, bookmarking, and collections with Bible apps? No. But, I am saying that if you are a content publisher who bases your content on any of those Bible app paradigms, then you are better off pushing your energies towards developing a product somewhere else besides “let start with a Bible app.”

Antoine: you aren’t even a developer, how can you say such things?

Easy actually. Go have a conversation with someone. Tell me, did you start in the Bible or was the conversation dipping in and out of the Bible at various points with other contexts as the backbone to the conversation? I’ll address a recent conversation from a coffeeshop. The pastor/missionary and I started talking because I asked about his wide-margin NASB that he was carrying. The conversation went into church history quickly from that, then into cultural perspectives of various regions of the USA. Would a Bible app have helped there, or an application that was able to search on topics related to church history which also referenced Bible verses, noted authors, theological paradigms, and denominational statements of faith that added context to the situation. Of course, innovation here would be turning on said app while in the conversation and as it “listened” it would pull a Google/Britiannica/Wikipedia/Wolfgram Alpha and search then display all of the relevant content streams, statistics, and opinions available online or in accessible scholarly collections. If you will a Shazamm for Biblical conversations.

It prbably makes sense why I can say that you can bend beyond Bible applications when I phrase the context like that right? But that’s called research and analysis, specifically, anlaysis of cultural behaviors of communication that rarely go into the development of these kinds of applications (this is how reports like Mobile Lens 2011 were framed). And that’s why we end up with a situation such as what I described with my friend at the start of this article. If you want your product(s) to be of earthly good, then you have to move beyond the age of simply offering just the text. Develop an app that engages the application of Biblical (religious) knowledge first, and then grounds the user in a growing (maturing) understanding of Scripture, church history, and culture as they grow in faith and knowledge.

Anyone want to bet on “Bible as Applied” being the space in which faith-based/religious apps show the most potential for growth in the coming years against simply offering the text in increasingly siloed services?

Tags: apps, Bible, bible applications, context, definition of mobile ministry, development, mobility, publishing, tech
Posted in Devices and Software, Future Trends | No Comments »

[Presentation] From the Toilet to the Pulpit (CPCC/The Geek Fest)

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

The Geek Fest 2011 Around this point, barring anything having happened to me while on the road in the past 24 hours, we’re almost starting with a presentation titled From the Toilet to the Pulpit at The Geek Fest (at Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC, USA).

You might be interested in following along with the presentation, and as our usual methods, you can view the slide deck here.

For those of you keeping up with our previous talks, there’s some repeat of some of the items in this deck. For the offline discussion, things are more tuned towards the topic title. Do feel free to offer comments and feedback via Twitter (put @mobileminmag in your comments so that we can easily/quickly see it).

Tags: CPCC, information technology, mobility, presentations, statistics, tech, The Geek Fest
Posted in Events | No Comments »

A Church Based on Movement not Preaching

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

We hear it in sermons often, “the church isn’t what happens in the pews on Sunday, but what you do in your communities throughout the week.” And yet we continue to place the event of sitting for singing and the preached word as central to the sustainability of faith. What if we could be the kind of roving fellowship to which a static location wasn’t key to spiritual sustainability, and the types of interactions as well as our travel in between them, became the mode of living? What if fellowship was determined to be most effective when it was a series of smaller, sometimes more random, meetings, and then the weekly gathering was a look at the stories that happened in those moments – a weekly YouTube channel of your social connections around your city and places of life/work/entertainment? Would it look something like the Mo Mobility System?

I hear it often from pastors that they’d want more members that think and act like this? But, without incentives for organic fellowship, or being able to model such mobility to people who aren’t single, entrepreneurs, or upwardly affluent to gather like this, how could you pull this off? Is reinventing our cities the answer where our churches aren’t able to move out of that behavioral caste?

Tags: church, convesations, evangelism, fellowship, missions, Mo Mobility System, mobility, social networks, tech, urban missions
Posted in Social Engagement | No Comments »

What I Wish My Pastor Knew About: Responsible Engineering and Technology – from Ministry Theorem

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

As an engineer, it strikes me as odd sometimes that many Christians I know will expend a great deal of energy and passion arguing about theories of science, while at the same time unquestionably accepting nearly every new technological development that comes along. Perhaps you know Christians to whom mentioning the age of the earth or evolution can trigger heated debates. On the other hand, for these same people, mentioning nuclear power or the need for sustainable energy technologies usually results in blank stares or shrugs.

This seems interesting to me because, while scientific explanations of history can be fascinating (as other essays in this collection have no doubt demonstrated), they rarely impact our daily activities in the way that technology does. After all, technology shapes our lives from the moment we crawl out of bed in the morning (perhaps from our visco-elastic “memory foam” mattress, made from a material revised and adapted for this purpose only within the last 10 years) and step into the shower (where we enjoy an almost immediate flow of water obtained from a massive water treatment plant via a complicated piping system and heated by a water heater powered by natural gas). Consider the impact that ubiquitous electronics technology has each day on how we spend our time (think televisions, computers, digital music players, cell phones, ATM’s).

So, as an engineer, I sometimes wish that my pastor would encourage people to better appreciate the substantial benefits technology (and therefore the exciting work of engineers) provides, while at the same time encouraging people to be more careful about the technologies they buy and use.

Read the rest of What I Wish My Pastor Knew About: Responsible Engineering and Technology (Gayle Ermer) from Ministry Theorem.

This has been sitting in a window/tab to read on my iPad for a few days and (at the time of writing), I’ve still not gotten to reading the entire piece. Still, the subject and initial paragraphs have been intriguing enough to just poke my mind enough in the direction (again) of wondering how technologists can do a better job of relating to non-techincal fields the Godly value of what we do. I mean, we shouldn’t need God to speak on our behalf all the time (ref Exodus 25 as God making out an industry for certain types of engeineers, craftsmen, and tailors), but it sure does feel like that’s the only way that these two groups would come together for the glory of God and benefit of the entire Body.

~ via John Dyer; paragraph breaks inserted into the blockquote for readability

Tags: Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Communication, engineering, Gayle Ermer, innovation, John Dyer, Ministry Theorem, relevance, tech
Posted in Commentary, Social Engagement | No Comments »

In All Thy Getting, Get Connected

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

I hear enough times, from certain generations/economic classes/ethnicities, that the idea of “community” that has some grounding in “electronic connectivity” is somehow less genuine and less effective than other methods. Of course, these comments tend to come from people groups where there’s been at least a few generations where the social stream has been disconnected from the family/village narrative, so I can understand why that perception lies so.

In this age of information and connected-ness, can one afford to not connect via the methods of the age/class/culture? Sure, we can make choices about some streams (I know I do when it comes to FB, Google+, etc.) – but we’d be missing the conversation of the age if we didn’t connect with it right? Here’s something to that point said in a recent Harvard Business Review piece:

…As the kind of connectedness that social media and technologies like Skype facilitate crosses and blurs the boundaries between social and professional networks, the depth of the relationships that result is often profound. For me, the insight is more important than the size of the input: a light-hearted quip is often more helpful and insightful than a long post or link to a book, or more often now, an eBook. It is about sharing ideas, developing them together, and putting them jointly to good use — this depth increases with the degree of connectedness you have, and in turn sustains it over time.

The most interesting part of social media is how it enables more meaningful connections with friends, colleagues, and advisers. Connectedness in this sense is also about the seamless way in which our communication continues, irrespective of whether we are meeting over a cup of tea or meeting over Skype, sending each other direct messages on Twitter or writing on each others’ Facebook walls, or sharing links and holding conversations in LinkedIn or Google Plus…

Read the rest of What It Means to Be Connected at the Harvard Business Review blog.

While you are considering how you will broadcast your/our faith to todays generations and generations to come, are you also subscribing to the understanding and wisdom present in the behaviors of connections taking place?

Tags: community, connection, conversation, media, medium, tech
Posted in Communication, Social Engagement | No Comments »

Listening for Those Other Voices and Perspectives in Mobile Ministry

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

She didn’t offend me. She didn’t even mean to say it as if I hadn’t paid attention. But, there we were in that small conference and enjoying a conversation that was slowly taking its way from technology and going towards writing, culture, and the voices that are prominent around us. A woman who was used to having a quieter voice and me who was used to ignoring the racial differences between myself and the majority of the other domestic participants. We talked and she said something to the effect of, “I’m really glad you are here. You are doing a lot for other minorities who don’t know that they have a voice in this space.”

I’ve kept the moments of that conversation with her (and later both her and her husband) with me. I noticed the ministry and mobile tech cultures that I am a part of. They are composed of affluent, usually caucasian Americans. There’s a prominence of Apple and Android devices in some circles, the addition of BlackBerries and managerial experiences in other circles. At one event I even cried on the phone to my best friend because I was literally alone there. There was no one who could share my passions, faith, and perspectives with – even though there were several people there who had bits and pieces of all of those.

It feels like I’m in a group of strangers when I talk with some friends who feel they are shackled with data plans for mobiles they don’t understand. Oh sure, they get what’s possible, and will not hesiate to call on myself or other “geeks” when problems arise, but to them their use of mobile isn’t about broadcasting a message or status, its about keeping with the relationships that matter. Their cultures dictate that being the only reason for the technology in their hands – scientists, journalists, and engineers aren’t normal.

So I roam around cities and towns, looking and listening to voices that aren’t normally in my social network activity stream. I’m asking the mother of four how she manages to handle all of those kids while playing Angry Birds. I’m asking the young man who is trying to push out of the ‘hood and into a junior-level middle management position how his technology choices help him get there. I’m cobbling together what I remember from my French class and mother (who taught me French when I was young that I’ve forgotten too much of) to talk to people in countries I’ve never visited but have perspectives of connectivity that aren’t something the infrastructure of the USA is used to dealing with.

I’m actively listening for the voice of how people other than the usual paintbrush of folks are using mobile and other technologies. Problem is, we aren’t used to hearing their voice. And so to realize that they are doing something special, innovative, or even needed is harder to discern. I should know better because I’m one of those minorities making those steps forward. I don’t know better because there are so few of those others voices and perspectives in mobile and ministry.

Tags: culture, minorities, mobility, social networking, stories, tech, women
Posted in Commentary, Social Engagement | No Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘tech’

Working by Mobile in Angola by Unwired View

No Longer the Age of Bible Apps, Now the Age of Bible As Applied

[Presentation] From the Toilet to the Pulpit (CPCC/The Geek Fest)

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