I certainly haven’t retreated from the web—nothing like that. But after a month of using Gmail, I’m going back to using the Apple Mail client with Pepperdine’s Exchange server. Although I very much appreciated Gmail’s priority inbox feature, I simply found that managing multiple Gmail accounts was too difficult. With Apple’s Mail client, I can easily switch between various accounts, and even see all incoming e-mail in a single window. If I were trying to access my e-mail from various computers over which I didn’t have complete control, Gmail would seem like a much more attractive option. However, I usually read e-mail on my laptop, my iPhone, or my iPad. If I can access Gmail using one of these devices, I can also access the Pepperdine Exchange server just as easily. Plus, I find it much easier to switch between applications than to switch between tabs in a tabbed browser.

For these reasons, for better (I think) or for worse (some might say), I’ve said goodbye to Gmail … almost. Forwarding my Exchange e-mail to Google was incredibly easy; Pepperdine has a one-click solution for that. Going the other way is much more difficult. Using IMAP with Gmail is an absolute pain in the rear, because Gmail’s labeling scheme results in runaway duplication of e-mails when you access Gmail via IMAP … so now I’m neck-deep in cloned e-mails that just won’t seem to go away.

At the e-publishing and blogging sessions that I attended during the 2010 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Atlanta, presenters and respondents from the audiences repeatedly raised questions related to tenure and promotion committees’ esteem, or lack of same, for online journals. As far as I know, no one has done any kind of serious research project on this issue, at least as it relates to biblical studies. However, as a member of Seaver College’s Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee, I can certainly offer some anecdotal evidence related to this topic. As a blogger, I can also offer my personal opinion without having to pass it through any editorial control—and there’s there rub.

In my experience, it matters little or none whether you deliver your scholarship in physical or digital formats. Tenure and promotion committees, however, almost always draw their members from across the entire college or university. We have eight “divisions” in Seaver College, and our Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee consists of one tenured representative from each division plus one untenured representative elected by the faculty at large. Therefore, I—a biblical scholar—must evaluate research done by my colleagues in all other disciplines. The farther we get from the humanities, the farther we get from my ability to independently assess my colleagues’ research, never mind the time involved. Faculty sitting on tenure and promotion committees must therefore rely on the judgments of reviewers in the same field, and that’s why peer review is so important.

In my own applications for tenure and promotion, for example—as well as for research funding and such—I have no reason to think that the relevant committees have considered the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures inferior in any wise to Semeia (to use only two examples) just because Semeia was printed on paper and JHS is (note the different verb tenses!) distributed electronically (though you can get a paper copy). Quite the opposite, in fact: JHS rates higher than Semeia in the eyes of my Seaver College peers, because JHS is peer-reviewed while Semeia volumes were editor-reviewed. Both, however, carry much more weight with our tenure and promotion committee than my most brilliant Higgaion posts, precisely because the JHS and Semeia articles were reviewed by professionals in my field before they were published.

In short, the distinction between print and digital media matters far, far less than the path to publication, for most forms of research. Only if that path goes through an academic editor’s hands, and more desirably through several peer reviewers’ hands as well, will tenure and promotion committees consider the work to be “scholarship.”

When I came up for tenure, I asked Chris Brady to write a letter for my file addressing the value of iTanakh to the scholarly and student communities. However, I did not offer iTanakh to my tenure and promotion committee as “scholarship”; rather, I categorized it as “professional service.” Ditto with Higgaion; I (have) include(d) it in my applications for tenure, promotion, appointments, grants, and such as “professional/public service,” not as “scholarship.” The lack of peer review, in part, drives this categorization.

I very much support Chris Brady’s suggestion for a kind of peer review panel, under the auspices of the SBL, which could undertake such evaluations upon request. However, I think that tenure and promotion committees will still prefer material that has been reviewed before publication to material reviewed post hoc.

One final note: my comments here related to fairly traditional forms of scholarship, such as essays and papers. As Bob Cargill has pointed out repeatedly, including in the blogger session at SBL 2010, we still need to develop new forms of peer review for research that comes packaged in other media.

I just got word a little while ago that Pepperdine’s Instructional Technology division has chosen me to be among the faculty and staff testing the first wave of iPads on campus. Aside from the obvious “Yippee!,” this news brings with it heightened responsibility to think about how to use the device in class. As Chris Brady and I have briefly discussed via Twitter, use cases for faculty differ from use cases for students. In my case, I’ll have access to both a MacBook Pro and an iPad. How shall I use each of these?

Currently, I carry my MacBook Pro (issued by Pepperdine) and my iPhone (personal purchase) to class, along with my physical Bible. I use Keynote for presentations, and like the iPhone’s Remote app for controlling Keynote slides, though it has some limitations—not least among them being the short battery life of the iPhone when you’re using WiFi constantly. Thus, I often end up using a Kensington Bluetooth Presenter Mouse instead of the iPhone app.

I’m very impressed with the Pages, Keynote, and Numbers guided tours that Apple provides, but I don’t think I want to use the iPad as a presentation-output device. To my way of thinking, you defeat the purpose of a mobile device if you tie yourself down with cables. Therefore, right now I think I will probably continue to carry my MacBook Pro to class, and I will probably run my Keynote presentations from that device.

So, what will I do with the iPad? Lots of things, I think:

• If the iPad has a Remote app for Keynote, or if the current iPhone Remote app works on the iPad, I will probably try using that to control my Keynote presentations—but only if it’s very reliable at picking up the connection again if I exit the app while the Keynote presentation is running on the MacBook Pro. The current version of Remote isn’t very good at that, in my estimation. If the iPad offers this functionality at a level that I find satisfactorily reliable, I will use it, and will enter any necessary notes as presenter notes in Keynote.
  
  
• If the bullet above doesn’t work out, I’ll still use the iPad for any notes I might need to consult during class—probably in the form of Pages documents, but perhaps in the form of PDF documents, depending on what types of PDF reader functionality exist for the iPad at and soon after launch.
• I will also be happy to access the biblical text on my iPad instead of using a paper copy, especially given the bookmarking, annotations, highlighting, and search options available in my preferred iPhone Bible reader, the aptly-named Bible Reader from Olive Tree (warning: auto-playing video on the home page).
• Having a second web-capable device in the classroom will enable me to interact with students in new ways, such as accepting questions via Twitter—currently hard to do given the way that Keynote and PowerPoint “take over” the machine in order to do what they do. I understand why Keynote and PowerPoint work this way, and I like what they accomplish—but without a second mobile device, that makes the laptop a one-trick pony for the duration of the slideshow. I often interrupt my Keynote sequences to switch over to a web browser (tip: use Spaces to do this without actually exiting your slideshow) to show something on the screen, but I monitoring a Twitter stream while simultaneously presenting with Keynote or PowerPoint has never worked for me. With the iPad I can envision doing just that (especially if someone will make a Twitter client with hashtag-aware push notifications).

I’m sure there several other uses that I haven’t yet considered or haven’t taken the time to detail here. I’d better stop now, because I have plenty left on today’s to-do list. But I did want to put this out there to get some conversation started. If you know of other places, educational websites for example, where this conversation is already ongoing, please hook me up!

I’ll head out tomorrow for BibleTech 2010 (or BibleTech:2010; the organizers/publicizers can’t seem to decide whether to use or omit the colon) in San Jose, California. On Friday, I’ll make a presentation on my efforts to “digitize” the introductory Hebrew Bible/Old Testament classroom.

Are any Higgaion readers attending BibleTech 2010?

The management of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport likes to call their facility “America’s friendliest airport.” One element of that friendliness: Sky Harbor offers a generous selection of electrical outlets as well as free wireless internet throughout the terminal. Props to Sky Harbor!

For some time, I’ve contented myself largely with consonantal Hebrew only here on Higgaion. I kept seeing goofy spacing when I would try to use nikud; the vowel points would show up between the letters instead of beneath, above, or within the letters as appropriate. However, I think I just may have learned a solution. Unfortunately, I cannot remember were I read this or from whom I learned it, though it wasn’t that long ago. I think it was on some discussion board or other. If you’re viewing Higgaion using a Macintosh, do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed עִבְרִית?

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

It’s all done with the magic of style sheets, and the solution assumes that you have access thereto. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on your own server, the style sheet is probably in the folder with your theme, and is probably named style.css or styles.css. Specific locations and names can vary. The solution remains the same. Once you have found your style sheet and opened it in an appropriate editor (use whatever editor you would use to edit raw HTML), add something like this to your style sheet:

.hebrew {
     font-family:"New Peninim MT",serif;
     font-size:1.5em;
     text-align:right;
}

You will probably want to fiddle around with the font-size. If your Hebrew looks too small compared to your English, try making the Hebrew font size about 150–175% of your English font size. For reference, I have my English font size set to .85em.

Now you can style any HTML object to display Hebrew more nicely. My quotation from Genesis 1:1 above just applies the “hebrew” style to a blockquote object, as follows:

<blockquote class="hebrew">בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃</blockquote>

You can apply the class to almost any HTML container: p, blockquote, td, and so forth. For inline Hebrew, apply the class to a span, as in the following example:

… do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed <span class="hebrew">עִבְרִית</span>?

If you don’t want to manipulate the size of your Hebrew text relative to the size of your English (or German, or French, or whatever else your main text is), you can simply add “New Peninim MT” and/or “Lucida Grande” to the font-family attribute of your body class. However, if you do this, ensure that something else sits in the first position. In my case, that would be Charis SIL (although I just looked at the site in Windows XP—something I never do—and Charis SIL seems ugly in Firefox for WinXP):

body {
     put your other body stuff here, plus …
     font-family: "Charis SIL","Georgia","New Peninim MT",serif;
}

My font definitions follow my own preference for a serif-style Hebrew font, using a specific font name for the Mac side and relying on browser interpretation on the Windows side. If you prefer a sans-serif font, just replace “New Peninim MT” with “Lucida Sans Unicode” (preserve the quotation marks) and add “sans-” (no quotation marks) in front of “serif” in the definition of the .hebrew class.

If Hebrew is working fine for you as it is, never mind! But these tweaks seem to display Hebrew well in Higgaion both on Mac (which I really care about) and Windows (whose users I don’t wish to alienate). Perhaps you’ll get some mileage from these style definitions as well.

At this time of the semester, I must evaluate quite a few student papers (208 of them, to be precise). I have grown weary and frustrated by getting hundreds of papers in .docx format with unnecessary, inappropriate, and just plain annoying extra white space in between paragraphs. And why have students suddenly started putting extra space between paragraphs? Because Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, set the defaults for the latest versions of Microsoft Word (on both PC and Macintosh) to put a 10-point white space after each paragraph. I have never in my life seen a style guide for college papers that called for 10 points of white space after each paragraph, but most students today either don’t bother to adjust the defaults, don’t realize that they should, or don’t know how. What on earth possessed Microsoft to stick in that 10-point white space in the first place?

Since returning from the 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’ve uploaded three new YouTube videos. One relates to my Religion 101 class:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

I will soon (today, if all goes well) supplement that one with additional videos on poetic structures in the psalms and form criticism of the Psalter. Two other videos, which I created in response to an e-mail from another teacher of Biblical Hebrew (whom I met through the Cohelet project), introduce students to typing in Hebrew on a Macintosh:

• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 1 — This video shows viewers how to activate and access Hebrew keyboards on the Mac, and how to use the Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer.
• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 2 — This video discusses font selections as well as some of the challenges with selecting and editing right-to-left text on the Mac.

I’ve also expanded the Cohelet and Semantic Biblical Hebrew offerings on iFlipr:

• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.1
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.2
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.3
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5 (Cumulative)
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Movement
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Prepositions
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Senses

Please let me know of any typos you find in the decks, and please send suggestions for additions (especially ways to expand the movement and senses decks without getting into obscure or difficult-to-illustrate terms).

Chris Brady, I mean, when he opines against twittering or blogging about the SBL meeting from the selfsame meeting. And Jim’s wrong too, when he says that we do it for people who aren’t here rather than for people who are. Well … partially wrong (over-the-top rhetoric can gain readers, though). I don’t really mean to criticize either Chris or Jim, though. I just wanted to offer this case in point in favor of blogging at the SBL for other SBL attendees: if not for Daniel and Tonya’s post, I wouldn’t have known about the new Accordance syntax database. I plan to go down for a demo tomorrow.