So, last week, I threw out a question on Facebook and Twitter asking people why grading is stressful for them, and most of the responses fell into two groups. By far, the major stress factor for a lot of people is time. They want to return essays and other work back within a week or so but also want to leave substantial, meaningful comments. The two goals can often conflict.

— Nels P. Highberg, “Are You Locked in Grading Jail?,” the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker blog, October 14, 2010

Jim Spinti shared this tidbit a few days ago:

39% of kids (age 9-17) agree with the statement, “The information I find online is always correct.”

I have not done any formal polling, but my college students seem to have accepted a variant on this statement. Many of them seem to believe—erroneously—that the Internet is smarter than they are. When faced with a question about a particular biblical book or passage, a disturbingly high number of my students turn to Google or Wikipedia for answers instead of generating their own answers through direct interaction with the biblical text. A few years ago, when wireless Internet access wasn’t available in my classrooms, students would jump to the footnotes in their study Bibles. I wish I had a dollar for every poor answer I’ve read that was cribbed from Wikipedia. I can almost guarantee that most of those answers would have been better if the students who gave them had ignored Wikipedia and had done their own thinking based on the raw biblical text.

Robert Holmstedt and John Cook report that they have finished a draft of their forthcoming biblical Hebrew textbook, Biblical Hebrew: An Illustrated Introduction. I’ve had a chance to look at an earlier draft, and my first impressions were almost entirely positive. BHII, as Robert and John like to abbreviate it, isn’t just “yet another Hebrew grammar.” As Robert puts it,

this textbook bridges two (if not more) models of language learning in our quest to take advantage of the various results of applied Second Language Acquisition research while maintaining what we call a philological realism—no-longer-spoken languages simply cannot be learned in the same ways that spoken languages can.

Based on the earlier draft I reviewed, I think that John and Robert carry this out pretty well. I’m eager to see the finished version and to compare it to the Cohelet materials that I used last year. I expect to teach Hebrew again in 2011-2012, and I consider BHII a strong contender in the textbook race.

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!

While I was looking the other way, Jim West and John Loftus got into an argument about whether John properly qualifies as a “biblioblogger,” Hector Avalos came to John’s defense with, in part, a comparison of John’s and Jim’s educational background, and Jim decided that blogging was boring and deleted the latest incarnation (who knew biblioblogs could ride the wheel of samsara?) of his WordPress blog.

In the ensuing discussion, which has been voluminous (too voluminous for me to try to track, though better bloggers have attempted it), my name has been “dropped” a few times in reference to a post I wrote over three years ago during one of my not-terribly-infrequent public disagreements with Jim about home schooling.

When considering any writer’s/speaker’s/blogger’s argument on this or that matter of fact or interpretation (biblical, political, or what have you), educational pedigree doesn’t mean nearly as much to me as what that individual actually says. (Full disclosure: I don’t feel the same way when making faculty hiring decisions, where there are lots of other issues to consider, such as public relations, accreditation, rankings, and the promise of continued scholarly output that gains a hearing in the academy.) Thus, the source of Jim’s (or John’s) highest degree makes no difference to me in terms of weighing what Jim (or John) had (or will have) to say on any subject.

My argument three years ago (and I still agree with it today) is that Jim’s actual educational history (a Th.D. from a distance-learning institution based in Georgia, earned while Jim was pastoring churches in North Carolina and Tennessee) and actual pedagogical practice (teaching in online and distance-learning courses for institutions in Quartz Hill, California and Copenhagen, Denmark—according to his CV online at Quartz Hill School of Theology, last updated in 2005 as of this morning) do not cohere with a passionate hatred of home schooling. Jim’s own doctorate and the courses he teaches (or was teaching as of 2005) depend entirely for whatever legitimacy they have on the students’ self-direction and autodidactic pursuits, much like home schooling. Nobody doubts that some (perhaps many) home schooling experiences end up providing the students with pathetic excuses for instruction, just as some apparent distance education programs are really nothing but diploma mills. These facts do not indict home schooling as such or distance education as such, only certain implementations thereof. Either can be done well or poorly. My point in 2006 was that Jim’s actual practice of post-secondary education thoroughly embraces individual adults pursuing baccalaureate and higher degrees at home with guidance, sometimes quite minimal, from instructors. Jim himself is obviously a skilled autodidact. Yet on his blogs, Jim never failed to exploit any opportunity to criticize people who would apply the same educational logistics to elementary and secondary education.

In short, my comments about Jim’s educational background and teaching practices were not an attack on the quality of the credentials themselves (as I think Hector intends his own comments), but part of a critique of the inconsistency between Jim’s own educational practices and his intense rhetoric against home schooling.

I did not then, and do not now, want to get into a debate about the “worth” of a degree from Andersonville for ministerial or academic purposes. My argument with Jim about home schooling is long-standing and well known to those who have been around the biblioblogging community for a few years. Indeed, I started blogging partially for the very purpose of arguing with Jim about that very issue from a non-evangelical point of view (and because I thought the biblioblogging world, which was relatively small at that time, needed a voice somewhere in between Jim and Joe Cathey on historical issues).

For the record and in the interests of full disclosure, both of my sons (now in kindergarten and sixth grade) attend the California Virtual Academy of Los Angeles, an online public charter school, doing their lessons at home under the direct guidance of my wife and, one day a week, myself. A state-credentialed elementary grades teacher hired by the charter school supervises and assesses the instruction; CAVA curriculum adheres to all California state educational standards, and CAVA students are subject to the same standardized testing procedures (for whatever little they’re worth) as students who physically attend California public schools.

So if you see (saw) my name popping up in comments and such surrounding Hector’s criticisms of Jim’s declarations that John doesn’t count as a biblioblogger, please do me the courtesy of keeping the context in mind. If you disagree with my assessment and think that Jim’s Th.D.-granting institution and his teaching appointments c. 2006 (I don’t know whether anything has changed since then) are irrelevant to his criticisms of home schooling, that’s fine. I disagree with your judgment on the matter. But please don’t get or give the impression that one day I just woke up and decided out of the blue to write a blog post criticizing Jim’s educational background, as that’s an extremely distorted picture of what happened halfway through 2006.

By the way, while I’m on the topic (and I’ve been on this topic far too long this morning), I might as well say something about John Loftus and biblioblogging. Back when the “Biblioblogger/SBL Affiliate” badge started popping up all over the place, I raised the following concern, among others:

2. The whole idea of constituting “Bibliobloggers” as an official group threatens to enshrine the perpetual “who’s in, who’s out” nonsense as a permanent feature of discourse within the group of bloggers who happen to blog frequently about academic biblical studies. Witness the recent flare-up of the perennial “Where are the female bibliobloggers?” question. Can’t we just blog about what we enjoy discussing without trying to define group boundaries (even if in/out status is self-selecting)?

Interestingly enough, in comments to that post, Jim West hotly insisted that he had no desire to arbitrate the boundaries of biblioblogdom:

Rochelle [Altman?] wrote: Official ordering of bloggers is a step towards controlling the content on the web through controlling independent bloggers.

Since when is Jim West a spokesperson for all bibliobloggers? That already implies an organization, which does not exist.

It’s not the carnivals that started this trend. Whoever started the top 50 opened the door for exactly this type of control. …

The SBL now has a self-elected blog czar. And if you do not check on Jim’s blog daily, you are now letting the the SBL and anointed bibliobloggers down — and those who do not bow to pressure will be marginalized.

Jim West wrote: you guys- you should take your comedy show on the road.

if you really, in your hearts, believe im trying to do ANYTHING besides organize a program unit for the sbl you’re idiots.

After raising the concerns I mentioned, I was assured over and over again on various blogs that neither Jim nor anyone else would attempt to draw boundary lines defining the “insiders” and “outsiders” of biblioblogdom. Not long thereafter, the new management (not including Jim) of Biblioblogs.com began to draft criteria for inclusion in Biblioblogs.com blogrolls, and a couple of months later, here comes the Jim-initiated fuss over whether John Loftus can play in the “Biblioblogs Top 50″ game.

Enough, already!

Blog about what you want to blog about. Read the blogs you want to read. Offer support for the ideas and arguments with which you agree. Offer critiques of the ideas and arguments with which you disagree. Stop arguing about names and labels (evangelicals and biblicists of all stripes may wish to invoke 1 Timothy 6:4 and/or Titus 3:9–11 at this point). Just write. Read. Comment. And enrich us all by substantive discussion of things that matter, not of artificial lines drawn in virtual sand.

Please.

For various reasons, I need to re-edit and in some cases perhaps remake the videos I posted on YouTube during the fall semester. As I get started on this project, I have a question for those of you who’ve seen the videos: do you prefer the more “natural,” less scripted videos like those on the Deuteronomistic History, or the more “formal,” tightly scripted videos like those on the Psalms?

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?

Final examination fever will hit Pepperdine in about two weeks. In my Hebrew 330 class, I will examine and assess students on their ability to perform the following communicative tasks in oral and written Biblical Hebrew, using the vocabulary introduced to them this semester (related grammatical concepts appear in square brackets).

• Recognize, form, name, and pronounce the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, using both block and cursive letter forms [orthography]
• Exchange greetings and introduce yourself by name
• Indicate whether you have (or do not have) something, and ask whether someone else has something [יש ל and אין ל to show possession; interrogative particle ה]
• Ask about an object’s name and function [using the question words מה and למה], and answer such questions [using infinitives]
• Distinguish between similar objects by describing their appearances [using adjectives] and positions [using prepositions]
• Explain what belongs to whom [using ל with nouns]
• Distinguish whether you or someone else is talking about something general ("a ship") or specific ("the ship") [using definite articles]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group is doing at the moment [using participles]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group needs or wants to do [using appropriate forms of על and חפץ]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group will do (or will finish doing) in the future [using prefix/יקטל forms]
• Describe your plans for the future [using prefix/יקטל forms and infinitives]
• Give and follow instructions [using imperatives]

Some of you may wonder about the בנינים. Thus far, students have mainly learned G or קל verbs, though they have also picked up the masculine singular participial forms of a D verb or two (דבר, בקש) and at least one H verb (השליך). Please don’t confuse my students with this information just yet. They know that different בנינים exist, but I haven’t introduced the names thereof just yet.

As always, I scheduled one day of class into this semester to give students some contact with the “mainstream” biblical wisdom tradition as represented (for example) in Proverbs, Psalm 1, and so on. However, I don’t feel like I teach the book of Proverbs very well, perhaps because I don’t really enjoy the book of Proverbs very much. Any suggestions?

My Religion 101 class will study selected psalms on Tuesday. To help lay a foundation for our in-class activities, I created the following videos, two of which I uploaded just a couple of hours ago:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry
• Poetic Structures in the Psalms
• Sorting Through the Psalms

Enjoy!