"Being" Online // Living the Digital Life // Lessons in Social Media // Higher Education, Christian Sector, Individuals
The digital brings different possibilities for engaging with the Bible, via smartphones and social media. For some this digital world is hell, for others it is paradise, but it is the reality for most in our world, and therefore Christians need to engage with it. We’ll identify a number of positive examples as the basis for discussion.
Confirmed Contributors: Dr Bex Lewis, Dr Tim Hutchings
Talk submission to Greenbelt for 2012.
Finding Your Own Digital Paradise: 
Tribes, Digital Sabbaths & Crowd-Sourced Worship
Panel Session: Is there such a thing as ‘digital paradise’? How does the digital allow us to do things differently? Who do we connect with and not get lost in a Christian bubble? How do we ensure that we gain from partaking, rather than getting exhausted?
Confirmed contributors: Dr Bex Lewis, Rev Joanne Cox, Bryony Taylor & crowd-sourced content
The other year I went to a great event on social media in museums (I thought I’d written a blog post on it, but I appear not to have!) as part of Social Media Week in London – a really interesting evening, so I was excited to see that it’s back this year (though I haven’t managed to sign up to a physical event!)… I have followed e.g. a lot of #LikeMinds tweets online (@WeAreLikeMinds).
Social Media Week is coming back to London from 13th – 17th February 2012 with over 150+ events, most of which are free thanks to our sponsors and partners. This year’s theme is Empowering Change through Collaboration reflecting on the global impact of social media and its role as a catalyst in driving cultural, political, economic and social change.
If you’re not able to attend events live (I left it too late to book any of the ones that were particularly relevant/I would have been able to get to), then Livestreaming offers access to a number of the talks.
Media, Religion, Culture Conference 2012
http://mrc.anadolu.edu.tr/
Format: Presentation, leading to discussion.
I was alerted to this conference at the weekend, and had about 24 hours to pull together a conference proposal. We’ll see if this ticks any of the right boxes…
We live in a ‘digital age’, in a world that is increasingly defined and shaped by the digital. When we talk about ‘unplugging’, we are giving the impression that the effects of digital culture on our life are optional. This paper asserts that the digital is a ‘space’ or ‘culture’, and that there is no such thing as ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds: only online and offline space/cultures. It uses the Christian context as an example of how cultural change is being encouraged through engagement in the digital spaces.
For many in the Christian church, the rise of the digital age, in particular social media, has been seen as something to be feared, if not ignored as an irrelevance. David Wilkinson (CODEC) emphasises that God is a communicating God, a God who is extravagant in communication, not a silent God who has to be tempted into communicating with people. Importantly, however, God looks to communicate in the right context, something that Christians often get wrong, and preach into the wrong context.
Sharon Watkins, head of a Christian order, said “God never told the world to go to church; but God did tell the church to go to the world.” Accommodation theory calls for us to accommodate to the world in which we live, to be part of the conversations, rather than trying to protect ourselves in the bubble of our own faith.Technology is not the problem, not the answer, but it is the reality for most in our world, and therefore those of faith need to engage with it.
The Centre for Christian Communication in a Digital Age (CODEC) undertook a Biblical Literacy Survey in 2009, which demonstrated that although 75% of people have access to a Bible, only 18% read their Bible daily. The Big Bible Project emerged through a desire to get people reading the Bible, making use of the widest range of social media tools, already used by millions every day. What questions do people have, and how do we make our faith, and our religious texts, more accessible through online tools?
Religions need to stop blaming the media for poor representations of their faith, and get involved. We all have something to contribute to the digital space: a digitally enabled laity is powerful. In a world where hierarchies are collapsing, we can draw on a range of voices, rather than adding this to the ‘to-do list’ for the leadership team. Elizabeth Dresher identified three characteristics, creative improvisation, participation & distributed authority that have made broadcast media unsuitable for many mainstream Christian churches, that are assets in a social media world, offering space for questioning.
The Big Bible Project has engaged over sixty ‘digital disciples’, those who seek to live out their Christian faith in the digital spaces, in conversation. We would like to open some of the topics of debate that they have raised with conference delegates, including questions of authenticity, appropriate behaviours, mobile device etiquette, the power of images and words, and whether these are similar concerns across other faiths. What does it mean for faith voices in the digital space?
Dr Bex Lewis, Blended Learning Project Manager, The Big Bible Project, CODEC, University of Durham. Bex.Lewis@durham.ac.uk
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1377963
A combination of ‘the information age’, technology and transparency leads to this kind of story:
The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates’ careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 – undergraduate and postgraduate – sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.
A single click of a mouse produces striking information, including a league table of salaries by college, graphics showing the impact that subject choice might have on employment prospects, and even data that indicate how quickly graduates of particular courses might start to pay off their student loans.
Read full story.
There’s been a lot of debate recently about where we should publish, and how. Is it more valuable to go through the long peer-review process, or to publish openly, and allow the conversation to continue:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/753931
Open-access online journal will speed release of data and encourage feedback. Paul Jump writes
A radical open-access journal is to be launched that will rely entirely on post-publication peer review.
F1000 Research is the latest initiative by the Faculty of 1000, whose large existing network of senior scientists select and evaluate top published papers in biomedicine.
The new life sciences journal will also publish non-standard research outputs such as incomplete data sets, negative results, preliminary analyses and “thought experiments”, which are typically rejected by standard journals.
Submissions deemed to have passed a basic in-house “sanity check” will be posted immediately, and the journal, which will be funded by article fees, will then invite specific experts to post a review. Other readers will also be able to comment on the paper or the reviews, and authors will be encouraged to amend their papers in the light of that feedback.
Read full story.
Such a good presentation, it made it to the front page of Slideshare!
For the last 24 hours I’ve been in a hotel in the Lake District, working with the Organisational Development in Higher Education Group. We (The University of Winchester/ODHE) have been awarded £10,000 to contribute to a large ‘Developing Digital Literacies‘ programme, for which baselining was required to be complete by 31st January – and I was then able to present our findings to the group at their national meeting, as we think about where we go from here:
Digital Literacies Baselining ODHE
Good feedback from the group who were very engaged!
I LOVE Psychologies magazine, and there’s an increasing number of articles about technology and it’s affects on our lifestyle (yes, I have plans to write something… when is a question!). Read here an extract:
Technology has always changed us. Television brought us 24-hour news and celebrity culture, and paved the way for the instant-access digital age. The clock ended our reliance on nature’s rhythms and regimented our living for ever. Even the printed page transformed our culture of oral narrative. Carr notes that the philospher Socrates feared the development of writing would make people forgetful. There were losses, and gains, but we adapted. So, do we really need to worry?
Read the full article.
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