Table of contents : CoverTitleCopyrightContentsPrefaceSeries Editor IntroductionPart I Technology in the Classroom 1 Third-Screen Teaching: Enhancing Classroom Learning With Mobile Devices 2 Student-Created Podcasts as a Means of Knowledge Assessment 3 Who Do You Vote That I Am?: Using Student Response Systems in Religion Courses 4 Teaching Religion With Clickers 5 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape: A Digital Geographies Approach to Contextualizing Ancient Sites in Religious EducationPart II Leveraging Technology in and out of the Classroom 6 “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me”: Effectively Using Social Media in Religious Education 7 Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 8 Blended Learning in Religious Education: What, Why and How 9 Character-izing Gameful Learning: Using Student-Guided Narratives to Motivate, Engage and Inform LearnersPart III Using Technology to Expand Your Classroom 10 Technology Twist on the Visiting Professor 11 Taming the MOOS: Massive Online Open Seminars in Religion 12 Welcoming the Stranger to the Conversation 13 Comparing Spiritual Outcomes in Face-to-Face Versus Online Delivery of a Religion CourseContributors Index Citation previewTeaching Religion Using Technology in Higher Education This edited collection helps those teaching religion in higher education utilize technology to increase student learning both inside and outside of the classroom. Recent times have seen major technological shifts that have important implications for how religion is taught at a post-secondary level. Providing multiple perspectives on a range of topics—including social media use and interactive classroom learning—this book presents a series of original case studies and insights on how technology can be used in religion classes in higher education to improve student learning. John Hilton III is Associate Professor of Religious Education at Brigham Young University, USA. Routledge Research in Religion and Education Series Editor Michael D. Waggoner, University of Northern Iowa, USA 1 Religion in Education Innovation in International Research Edited by Joyce Miller, Kevin O’Grady and Ursula McKenna 2 Civility, Religious Pluralism, and Education Edited by Vincent F. Biondo III and Andrew Fiala 3 International Perspectives on Education, Religion and Law Edited by Charles J. Russo 4 Philosophies of Islamic Education Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses Edited by Nadeem Memon and Mujadad Zaman 5 Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries Edited by Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin 6 God, Education, and Modern Metaphysics: The Logic of Know “Thyself” Nigel Tubbs 7 Migration, Religion, and Schooling in Liberal Democratic States Bruce A. Collet 8 Teaching Religion Using Technology in Higher Education Edited by John Hilton III Teaching Religion Using Technology in Higher Education Edited by John Hilton III First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of John Hilton III to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-08722-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11061-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Prefacevii JOHN HILTON III Series Editor Introductionxii MICHAEL D. WAGGONER PART I Technology in the Classroom1 1 Third-Screen Teaching: Enhancing Classroom Learning With Mobile Devices 3 RICHARD NEWTON 2 Student-Created Podcasts as a Means of Knowledge Assessment 18 DAVID KNEIP 3 Who Do You Vote That I Am?: Using Student Response Systems in Religion Courses 34 RENATE HOOD 4 Teaching Religion With Clickers 44 KRISTY L. SLOMINSKI 5 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape: A Digital Geographies Approach to Contextualizing Ancient Sites in Religious Education KYLE M. OLIVER 57 vi Contents PART II Leveraging Technology in and out of the Classroom77 6 “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me”: Effectively Using Social Media in Religious Education 79 ROB O’LYNN 7 Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 92 BROOKE LESTER 8 Blended Learning in Religious Education: What, Why and How 109 ANTHONY SWEAT 9 Character-izing Gameful Learning: Using Student-Guided Narratives to Motivate, Engage and Inform Learners 127 CHRISTOPHER HEARD, STEVEN V. ROUSE PART III Using Technology to Expand Your Classroom143 10 Technology Twist on the Visiting Professor 145 GERALD L. STEVENS 11 Taming the MOOS: Massive Online Open Seminars in Religion 157 PHYLLIS ZAGANO 12 Welcoming the Stranger to the Conversation 173 CHARLOTTE HEEG 13 Comparing Spiritual Outcomes in Face-to-Face Versus Online Delivery of a Religion Course 186 JOHN HILTON III, KENNETH PLUMMER, BEN FRYAR, RYAN GARDNER Contributors207 Index208 Preface PrefacePreface Throughout the past decades, technology has played an increasingly important role in society. I remember my parents purchasing a computer when I was ten years old; it used a 5.25-inch floppy drive and could do little apart from word processing. Within two years, we had upgraded to a computer that had a 40-megabyte hard drive—much more space than we knew what to do with. Shortly before graduating from high school, I began to hear of something called e-mail, and I knew a few people who had access to “the Internet”—whatever that was. As I have grown older, the pace of technological innovation has rapidly accelerated. By the time I received my undergraduate degree, some of my peers had their own computers and cell phones. When I returned to graduate school for a master’s degree three years later, both were ubiquitous. Four years later, when I began my PhD program, one of the first courses I took was called “New Media,” which explored blogs and social media, and demonstrated how to create websites and upload videos to YouTube. When I consider the fact that my ten-year-old can do all of these things and more (compared to where I was with technology at that age), I am amazed at how technology permeates nearly every part of society. Advances in technology have influenced all aspects of our lives, including education. Opportunities for online learning, such as iTunes U, open educational resources and Wikipedia have proliferated, influencing the way learners consume information. Students today approach classes with expectations about technology’s integration in education that are dramatically different from those of their counterparts from previous generations. Distance learning, which once required a heavy use of postal services, is becoming increasingly common and is even mandated at some universities. Changes in technology have led to many educational innovations, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), blended learning, learning management systems, podcasts, student response systems and others. These changes provide instructors with a range of new opportunities: they can use online services to host expert lecturers, create online forums where students can collaborate or conduct digital field trips using viii Preface virtual reality. Methods of learning for students now extend beyond writing papers or taking exams. With the increasing opportunities come many difficult questions. For example, when access to factual information is just a few clicks away, do learning outcomes change? Given the questionable veracity of online information, what role do educators play in helping students become critical receivers of information? What type of emphasis will there be on the ability of students to create learning resources? Will advances in technology lead to learning opportunities that are more advanced or simply result in students who lose focus while multitasking in class? This book examines several facets of using technology to teach religion. The present volume is divided into three sections. The first section, Technology in the Classroom, explores a variety of ways that the Internet, along with a variety of digital devices, can influence processes of learning, teaching and assessing. In Chapter 1, Newton describes the role of mobile devices, such as smartphones, in the classroom. He provides context for discussions of “digital natives” and “learning styles,” and suggests ways smartphones can be used as learning tools. Newton focuses on pedagogical innovations in classroom practice (e.g., providing a backchannel for conversation) and other strategies for successful preparation for exams (e.g., using collaborative note-taking). In Chapter 2, Kniep focuses on podcasts and their use in teaching religion. He claims that, while assigning students to listen to podcasts can be beneficial, instructors might consider assigning students to create podcasts, by which instructors can assess their knowledge. Drawing on his personal experience with this approach, Kniep describes how studentcreated podcasts help overcome the common difficulty of working both with students who are verbose and those who remain quiet, particularly when discussing sensitive topics such as religion. Kniep provides both technical and pedagogical suggestions for meaningful student podcasts and argues that this approach helps educators grade more efficiently and interact more deeply with students. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on an increasingly important topic: that of student response systems. In Chapter 3, Hood defines student response systems and explains several benefits that stem from their use, including increased student motivation and participation, and relief from some of the anxieties that may attend religion classes. She details the approaches of several response systems and explores their relative advantages as effective technological resources in religious education. Hood provides a strong case that when properly implemented, student response systems offer multiple pedagogical benefits in teaching religion. In Chapter 4, Slominski focuses on clickers—a specific type of student response system. Clickers allow students who are uncomfortable raising their hands to express themselves, and they provide variety from traditional lecture formats. Slominski outlines some further benefits of Preface ix this approach, including the way it encourages students to take stances on complex religious issues and to acknowledge the diverse religious perspectives within a classroom. She explains how instructors can use clickers to receive instantaneous feedback and customize the class as necessary. At state-funded institutions, where professors might be cautious about students sharing personal beliefs in the classroom, clickers can transform deeply personal viewpoints into indirect data, providing distance and a level of anonymity that aids critical analysis. In the final chapter of the first section, Chapter 5, Oliver describes how instructors can use digital technologies to contextualize ancient sites that are vital to a deeper understanding of religious issues. While most students will not have the opportunity to travel to distant sacred sites, the Internet can help students visualize such places. Using a lens of digital geographies, Oliver offers ways to use media to help students explore religious sites through online videos, online picture repositories, Google Earth and virtual reality content. The second section of the present volume describes how to leverage technology both in and out of the classroom. The first two chapters in this section focus on one of the most important technological developments of the past decade: social media. In Chapter 6, O’Lynn introduces social media and its applications in the religious education classroom. O’Lynn offers practical advice for implementing social media practices in religious education using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, among many other social media outlets. In Chapter 7, Lester explores how to use social media to create community when teaching religion and describes both positive and negative aspects of its use. Using social media in the classroom can help students form connections and communities; however, social media is not a panacea. Its use limits anonymity and, in some cases, subjects users to online abuse. Lester describes how to ameliorate problems with social media in the classroom and how to use it successfully in both traditional and distance-based religion courses. In Chapter 8, Sweat discusses blended learning, a relatively recent form of learning that has been heavily discussed in educational technology circles. Blended learning combines face-to-face instruction with electronic learning, delivering content outside the classroom via technology. Theoretically, a blended-learning model helps students achieve lower-order, knowledge-level outcomes outside of class so that in class they can focus on higher-order participatory outcomes, such as analyzing, evaluating and creating—outcomes that are vital in many settings where religion is taught. Sweat defines blended learning and its relationship to flipped classrooms, briefly reviews its research literature and explores potential applications in religious education. In the final chapter of the second section, Chapter 9, Heard and Rouse focus on ways computer games may or may not inform, motivate, and x Preface engage students learning about religion. Drawing on theoretical considerations relating to learning and games, the authors replaced 6 of 18 homework assignments with interactive fiction stories on a computer. Although empirical results from other contexts suggested this approach could benefit students, data from students’ survey responses showed otherwise. Students indicated that they felt no more motivated by the experimental mode than by the standard mode, and a significant number of students learned more from traditional homework. These results indicate that not all types of technology adaptation will improve learning outcomes. The final section of this book describes how to use technology to expand the classroom. In Chapter 10, Stevens describes how to use the Internet to increase, dramatically, the opportunity to host guest lecturers. Stevens argues that a visiting expert in a field can infuse students with interest through his or her live and spontaneous remarks, and that students gain significantly more when they can interact with such an expert in a question-and-answer period. While instructors used to need to maneuver multiple logistical obstacles to invite guest lecturers, technology eliminates most of these obstacles. Stevens narrates a case study in which technology allowed students to bridge the distance of time and place, and learn directly from a specialist on first-century Roman roads, an experience that would not have been possible without technology. In Chapter 11, Zagano touches on another recent phenomenon in educational technology: MOOCs. Zagano describes her foray into this genre of education by creating an open online seminar related to a specific topic in religious studies. More than 300 people from five continents registered for the seminar, and 292 remained until the end. Zagano explains how she created this course, providing a template that others can follow. She also shares survey responses that indicate that most participants had very positive experiences. In Chapter 12, Heeg describes how some specific Google Hangout videos, originally created for an open online “Introduction to the Old Testament” course, were repurposed in a small Bible study group to integrate neophytes into scholarly discourse concerning texts of the Bible. By viewing informal conversations between biblical studies professors, Heeg’s learners were better able to integrate academic vocabulary and concepts within congregational Bible study discussions. This approach demonstrates one of many ways that online technologies can be used to journey beyond formal classroom spaces on campuses into broader learning environments. In this book’s final chapter, Chapter 13, Hilton, Plummer, Fryar and Gardner report on the results of an experiment that compared the spiritual outcomes of students who took an online religion course with those who took a face-to-face version of the same course. Using an instrument that measured affective outcomes, they surveyed 789 students—both Preface xi on-site and online—enrolled in a general education religion course at a private religious college. Some educators have argued that distance learning could negatively affect students’ religiosity, but researchers observed no significant differences between groups. These results indicate that even when focusing on affective outcomes, distance education may be a useful tool for teaching religion. Taken collectively, the chapters in this book offer fresh perspectives on using technology in the context of teaching religion. The educators and researchers in this book effectively argue that both students and faculty can benefit from using technology in the classroom when teaching religion. While technology is not a panacea for concerns religious educators face in the classroom, it does afford many new opportunities to enhance learning and teaching. John Hilton III Series Editor Introduction Series Editor IntroductionSeries Editor Introduction The opening years of the twenty-first century brought increased attention to religion as an important dimension of culture and politics. The dramatic multipronged attacks of September 11, 2001, came as a jolting reminder of the potential for violent action that can have bases in religious motivations. Over the same period, we came to see an increase in religious group activity in politics. In the United States, this may be seen as an evolution most recently from the Moral Majority movement led by televangelist Jerry Falwell that emerged as a force in the late 1970s as the beginning of the New Religious Right. On further reflection, however, we can see the involvement of religion extending much further back as a fundamental part of our social organization rather than a new or emerging phenomenon. We need only recall the religious wars of early modern Europe through to the contentious development of US church and state relations as evidence of the long-standing role religion has played as a source of competing values and beliefs with consequences for our life together in a democratic society. That said, there has been a significant upturn in research and scholarship across many disciplines relative to the study of religion in the last two decades. This is particularly the case with issues at the intersection of education and religion. While religious education—study toward formation in a particular faith tradition—has been with us for millennia, study about religion as an academic subject apart from theology is more recent. Whereas theology departments proceeded from religious assumptions aiming to promulgate a faith tradition, the religious studies field emerged as a discipline that sought to bring a more disinterested social scientific approach to the study of religion. The origins of this approach date back to the European research centers that influenced US scholars beginning in the eighteenth century. The formalization of this trend, however, is a fairly recent phenomenon as illustrated by the 1949 formation of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion with its own scholarly journal and the creation of religious studies departments across the US in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in 1963 that allowed teaching about religion (rather than for) in public education institutions. It was also that same year that the Series Editor Introduction xiii American Academy of Religion was born out of a group of scholars that had since 1909 been meeting under the various names related to biblical study. It is out of this increase in scholarly attention to religion and education that this book series arises. Routledge has long been an important presence in the respective fields of religion and of education. It seemed like a natural step to introduce a book series focused particularly on Research in Religion and Education. My appreciation extends to Max Novick at Routledge for working with me to guide this series into being, and to Stacy Noto, Christina Chronister, Karen Adler, and now Matthew Friberg for continuing Routledge’s oversight. In this eighth volume in this series, Professor John Hilton III brings together 17 scholars to explore multiple uses of technology in the teaching of religion. The challenges and opportunities inherent in the use of technology in teaching explored here apply to both religious education in faith-based formation and to education about religion in the secular academic teaching about religion. Technology changes rapidly and continually, so the target of understanding what is out there and mastering its use will also change and move as will the students with whom it is intended to be used. There is a wide range of experience with technology currently in college classrooms. Current students, Generation Z, born in the mid to late 1990s to the mid-2000s, are the students in college who grew up with the smartphone. Many baby boomers are still faculty teaching these students and many of those faculty members may be found everywhere—from basic to advanced—along the tech-savvy spectrum. Of course, generalizations are just that, broad and often misleading. There are also many millennials that are beginning to take their place in faculty and administrative positions and, therefore, are bringing greater technology experience with them into the classroom. Nevertheless, there is arguably wide variance in acquaintance and comfort with technology that may be used to advantage in teaching. It is this challenge that this volume and collection of authors address. Michael D. Waggoner Part I Technology in the Classroom 1 Third-Screen Teaching Richard NewtonThird-Screen Teaching Enhancing Classroom Learning With Mobile Devices Richard Newton Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. —Intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation The future of education is now. We may not have distilled its best practices or mandated evaluative rubrics for it, but humans are always at work, teaching and learning to make sense of the world around them. We have even euphemized its processes and politics with the term culture. Our histories can scarcely imagine a time when we were not cultivating the know-how to nurture the next generation. The root agricultural metaphor testifies to our dependence on this life-giving act. Our aspirations are predicated on improving what we have already witnessed. Thus we should not be surprised by the way our educational fantasies expand on our present reality. You need not be a science-fiction fanatic to see the resonance of Star Trek with today’s classroom. Gene Roddenberry’s brainchild follows the galactic adventures of an intrepid crew. Though equipped with interstellar vehicles, laser weapons and plasma shields, the characters’ martial adornments are rationalized in subservience to a larger educational enterprise. It is a story about cultural expansion. In Star Trek, the tools for cultivation are as familiar as they are fantastic. Since its 1966 premiere, viewers have tuned into a three-screen future.1 There is the large televisual screen that frames the galaxy, other ships and strange celestial bodies. There are the computer consoles from which the crew performs complicated operations. But it is the third screen that communicates the focus of this dramatic metacommentary on the human condition. The mobile, trifunction recorder—or “tricorder”—provides the means through which individual characters can sense, analyze and record data around them.2 With a tricorder, a person can communicate the information collected to other crewmates and consoles. The integration of these technologies has remained a sight to behold, but the possibilities 4 Richard Newton of the tricorder are a poetic reminder of the wonder of an individual’s freedom to think. Of the three devices, the tricorder was once the furthest from a realworld analog, though eventually life imitated art in what has come to be known as the “smartphone.” According to NASA, “Your cell phone has more computing power than the computers used during the Apollo era.”3 It combines cellular telecommunication, Internet connectivity and an application-based operating system. Early twenty-first-century style has kept Roddenberry’s three-screen artifice largely intact. Televisions have never been clearer and computers never faster, but phones—and, thus, their users—have had a chance to be smarter. Not surprisingly, education is a controversial site for adopting emergent technologies such as smartphones. In the late 1960s and 1970s (before government regulations on child-friendly programming), television’s ability to mesmerize young audiences earned the device the slanderous title of “the idiot tube.”4 And while learning software played a key role in the rise of the personal computer, parents of the 1980s and 1990s were concerned that overexposure to these machines would “rot” children’s brains.5 These fears seem quaint, even archaic, in a time when television and computer consoles are inescapable from “first-world” life. Pundits resort to similar hyperbole to decry the “zombification” of society.6 The concern is born out of an observation that mobile device users (especially youth) increasingly focus on life as presented on their screens with little regard for the outside world. As we increasingly engage the world through the third screen, gatekeepers of culture call for the resurgence of paper and pencil, the printed book and vocal conversation. To be certain, the concerns are serious. As humans increasingly depend on mobile connectivity to the Internet, our brains develop a compulsive addiction to the potential dopamine release from positive online interaction—giving added currency to the stars, hearts, likes and happy faces of social networking.7 Educators fear that this cybernetic feedback loop can give way to distracting and detrimental obsessions—from attentiondeficit concerns, to “fear of missing out,” to harmful psychiatric disorders.8 Also decried is the digitization of educational resources such as e-books, dictation programs and search-oriented applications. The argument goes that these learning aids stimulate the brain less than reading physical books and manual note-taking.9 The visceral reading and writing experience leaves a sensory impression on students to the extent that our brains construct a mental map of the text. Electronic versions of these activities—less bound to the smells, textures and displays of the page—do not engage our senses in that way, leaving us subject to the orientation of a device’s cursor. By banning devices such as smartphones from the classroom, teachers hope to create a healthier, more stimulating learning environment. Third-Screen Teaching 5 But this exclusivistic approach to the third-screen technologies betrays some assumptions that the history of religion would have us qualify. Kelly J. Baker, a historian of American religion, would prod us to unpack the discourse on zombification in the new millennium. The fearsome creatures are symbolic “agents of the end of the world, often visualized as an end of the American nation as we know it.”10 Zombies embody a fear that the tools we received in the past to grapple with our present will be inefficient in helping us survive in the future. Hence the metaphor has been applied to “anything from consumerism to terrorism to mindless politics/politicians to banking to epidemics to smart phone users.”11 In the case of third-screen devices, educators feel ill equipped to help students manage this powerful technology. We are out of our authoritative comfort zones, not unlike clergy at the cusp of the Gutenberg era, when some of their flock began reading the Bible for themselves for the first time. We have had centuries to hone bibliocentric pedagogy and millennia to master the lecture format, but third screens open up a classroom window onto an exciting world that we sometimes wish students—and we ourselves—would rather not see. It is hard to remember that even in the last 200 years, the word bookish was used to deride students who had checked out from the world around them. Our failure to do so should give us pause. In working out my own digital-age teaching philosophy, I am reminded of Donald Kraybill’s sociological studies of the Amish. The plain-dressed Christian community is famous for resisting technology. Kraybill has argued that this is a misrepresentation of the Anabaptist group’s piety. The Amish are not antitechnology, he has frequently commented, just more thoughtful.12 With the advent of a new contraption, Amish elders have asked what this tool will say about their community’s dependence on God and commitment to the way of Jesus Christ. It is in that spirit that they decide between asceticism and acculturation. And that is the point. Rational usage is determined by the possibility of community enrichment, not having the latest and greatest thing (whether it is technology or pedagogical ideology). Our approach to mobile devices in the classroom should exhibit a similar discernment process. Somewhere between being a Luddite and being tech tethered is the possibility of cultural creativity (cf. ludics) upon which humanity is ultimately dependent.13 As teachers, we are in the vocation of intellectual transformation. So how might we use the third screen to transform the flow of information in the classroom so that students not only consume knowledge but also produce it? In this chapter, I invite you to find out. We will begin by theorizing about the function of third screens in our classrooms. Then rather than trying to survey the ever-changing landscape of apps or devices, we will 6 Richard Newton look at four types of educational tasks where third screens might enhance teaching-learning as well as sample activities for you to consider. Retheorizing Digital-Age Myths We are grappling with the reality that smartphones mediate Millennials’ sociocultural interactions in a way that exceeds their predecessors. The 2015 Pew Research Center’s Teen Relationships Survey projects that 73 percent of American teens (13–17 years old) have smartphones.14 Gallup reports that text messaging (either through Short Message Services (SMS) or an app equivalent) has supplanted aural/oral conversation as the preferred means of distance communication.15 Teenagers use mobilebased applications such as Instagram are used not only for describing experiences but also for soliciting visitor feedback (e.g., “hearts”) to inform clothing decisions, eating choices and interactions with peers.16 The question is not whether third screens are affecting the classroom experience. It is how. Teachers often fall back on two pedagogical myths—the “digital native/ digital immigrant” divide and “learning style” preference—to inform their response to Millennial technology use. I use myth in the technical sense to question these explanations’ historical-critical validity and to provoke deeper thought about what we want them to be.17 The digital native/digital immigrant divide comes from a discourse popularized by Marc Prensky to highlight the impasse between “oldschool” analog teachers and their computer-savvy students.18 The idea is that the proliferation of personal computing, the centrality of the Internet and the primacy of digitized media ushered in a new information age. Those born in this epoch speak in a native tongue marked by hypertextual communication and multimedia exchange, modes largely foreign to those born in the predigital world. Prensky opined that many of our educational problems stem from the shaky assumption that “digital immigrant” teachers are equipped to prepare digital native students despite their own culture shock. In turn, our society has been quicker to critique Millennial idiocy than to acquire competency in the field of digital pedagogy. Heeding Prensky’s call, institutions of higher education have heavily invested in retrofitting brick-and-mortar classrooms in an attempt to cater to prospective digital native students. These efforts coincide with the consumer-oriented mentality of college students who have fluency in the language of “learning styles,” a framework that suggests that student brains have varied preferred avenues for knowledge acquisition in accordance with one of many rubrics with a host of categories (i.e., kinesthetic, visual learning, auditory, reflective, theorist, activist).19 In practice, these models help teachers to differentiate instructional techniques to a student’s learning style in order to increase performance. Upon this Third-Screen Teaching 7 premise, the generational preference for digital technology makes educators negligent for not using the latest electronic tools. Despite the popularity of the digital native/immigrant and learning style theories, researchers in education and social psychology have heavily criticized both. For instance, Prensky’s 2001 argument does not wholly take into account that many of the social media technologies used today were developed by pre-Millennials.20 Similarly, the theory does not account for the social factors that determine a student’s access to technology and the means for building digital literacy.21 And at this point, the case for discrete learning styles remains thin. There is little evidence to suggest that one can meaningfully register learning preference in a way that matches up to effectiveness measures.22 Once we are aware of the limits of the two aforementioned pedagogical presumptions, we can free ourselves to imagine the truths to which they may otherwise point. When I started reflecting on third-screen teaching, I quickly realized that while my students have smartphones, they hardly make the students smarter. They were still asking me what certain words meant, how to calculate their grades or when assignments would be due. All of this— and more—was available to them through their mobile devices, but they hardly use them as such. When I asked them why, they said, “I never thought about using it that way,” or “Because we’re usually not allowed to use cell phones in class. I never thought about what I’d do if I was allowed to.” There is a digital divide here, but I would characterize it differently than Prensky did. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a reconceptualization of what it means to talk about digital technology. Those living during the period came to understand digital technology as a tool. Each new device and app could help you do something you could not do as easily before.23 My students (generally born after 1995) know a world where digital technology is furniture. It is there to be used with little reference to a manual analog or frame of reference. They do not know what to make of a card catalog, slide rule, telephone book or bound encyclopedia because they never had to cultivate anything with them. This is not a bad thing but rather the circumstance of an increasingly singular technological environment. They do not know to see mobile devices as an enhancement to life. They are a part of living. Yesterday’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s routine, but in the liminal discomfort of today, classroom culture must come to terms with this key difference. It is to answer with students the unexamined question of what they could do with the smartphone that they were not doing before. Backward design helped me isolate four tasks central to the teachinglearning process in my praxis. I knew I wanted my classroom to use mobile devices more effectively, but I needed to determine areas to focus my implementation. From student centered to teacher centered, the tasks I arrived at include (1) personal study, (2) cooperative learning, 8 Richard Newton (3) external referencing and (4) information production. A “problemcentered” approach also removes the temptation to fetishize any particular application or device. Accordingly, any mention of a particular technology should be read as an example rather than as an exemplar of a task. Selection is always a negotiation between function, cost, availability, learning context, device/operating system/platform compatibility and personal preference. I used Jim Collins’s notion of “good to great” to build on my pedagogical strengths as a means of addressing teaching-learning deficiencies in the classroom.24 So with each task, I discuss the particular issue I wanted to resolve along with the important step of naming what has worked thus far. As you reflect on your own praxis, you may find that you have different strengths and needs. I encourage you to approach the list with a “growth mind-set” to inspire your own creative third-screen solutions. Third-Screen Teaching in Practice 1. Personal Study First impressions make a difference. By definition, new material is bound to make students uncomfortable, but those who lack confidence in the act of learning will struggle no matter what material is being covered. How might we ameliorate the early transmission of logistical (e.g., due dates and study recommendations) and content knowledge? Because students are already tethered to their mobile devices, we can cut the distance in places where students might otherwise find themselves lost. Note-Taking I like to begin classes by emphasizing that there is a difference between dictation and note-taking. Dictation is the mere verbatim representation of information as presented by someone else. It lacks the intimacy of making that information one’s own. While recording information is a key part of the latter, the ability to do this more efficiently should free up a student’s time to appropriate the material for him- or herself. As I put it to my students, “If your technology can save you time, what are you now free to do?” Third screens can remove the apprehension of missing out on information, freeing them to focus on reengagement of the material. I make clear that they have not studied unless they are doing both. When I do board work, I have students develop the board with me as they go along. During dense presentations, I may provide a worksheet for students to fill in the blanks. Otherwise, they are creating their own copy of what I am doing, step by step. I model for them that we are putting pieces together—not just preparing a single product to regurgitate. I assure them that at the end of the presentation, they may snap Third-Screen Teaching 9 a picture of the board but only after having gone through the process with me. Their homework is then to go back over the process of putting the pieces together, consulting their image as needed. Similarly, one could have them record lectures on their own devices. In any case, make the student responsible for getting the final product on his or her personal device—even if you are providing slideshow handouts or your own media files. This is not a novel idea. Versions of these techniques have been used in language paradigm instruction for decades. By explicitly incorporating the mobile phone, you can backward-engineer tethered students to “hide your word in ‘their’ hearts,” to borrow from the opening of Psalm 119. They now have a picture or audio file always near them to consult along with the memory of having put it there. In some cases, this is enough to build students’ confidence to revisit the material on their own. Office Hours A theme of my pedagogy is matching personal responsibility with expert guidance (aspirations on both ends). I strongly encourage students to take advantage of my office hours in a purposeful manner. Some students will do this on their own and others only when I personally invite them. And then there are students who will, for whatever reason, pass up the opportunity for advisement. Regardless, I want to make it as easy as possible to help as many students as I can have an effective session. For me, the key is making them work for it. I require students to make an appointment using an online, mobilefriendly booking service (e.g., YouCanBookMe.com). Students must sign up and tell me their contact information (i.e., name, e-mail address, course) and the area in which they need assistance. My times are limited to thirty-minute blocks (rather than an hour or some less-descript period). This trains students to set goals and use their time wisely. Students can link to the appointment service through a short URL, a QR code, our class learning management system or my personal website. For those students who want to drop by for an appointment, I have them register at my office door. The student and I then receive an e-mail and calendar notification of the expectations for our meeting. They are building good professional habits and helping me help them. Talk to Yourself For all the wizardry of smartphones, students forget that they are telephonic devices. When I encounter students who are “stuck in their heads” or have trouble getting ideas down on the proverbial paper, I remind them to talk it out with themselves. They can use their phones to ask themselves the questions they are already asking cerebrally. The 10 Richard Newton device can create that Socratic distance necessary to see the problem from a different point of view. Have the student locate the voice-memo app (or even call their own voice mail). Their job is to talk through ideas, read aloud drafts or lecture on the problem subject. When they have exhausted themselves, have them take a brief break and listen to the show while taking notes on what is working and not working. Have them record another “show” that improves upon the previous one. Students will quickly become adept at the process of drafting. 2. Cooperative Learning Mobile devices can siphon student attention away from the people, places and concerns around them. But under the right circumstances, the hyperfocus and groupthink we associate with zombification could become the traits of an interactive classroom. It requires us to change the terms of engagement. Cooperative learning is about leveraging the third screen to facilitate this kind of interaction toward your student learning outcomes. Collaborative Note-Taking I have spent many semesters encouraging students to form study groups with little avail. When they did form groups, they either used the opportunity to complete homework assignments together before spending time on honing their skills individually or waited until just before an examination to review burning questions. I know that these groups can be successful, but I realized that I had to teach students how to work together. Within my seminar and midsized courses, I had begun incorporating cooperative learning strategies. I regularly used quick lower-stakes assignments to insist students come to class having completed either formal study guides (in lower-level courses) or substantial review (in upperlevel courses). Then I guided students through “think-pair-share,” create and teach a group infographic and other such classroom activities. It habituated them to the idea of working together to turn their individual notes into an intelligible form for another person. Students grew accustomed to addressing each other’s questions while working out a mutual understanding. That is when I stumbled on another development. At the end of the semester—in both a seminar and a midsized course— I found that students maintained an ongoing “chat” that ran parallel to the class.25 They exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and posed questions to each other as they worked. Strangely, the students did not admit doing this until the very end of the semester during our course debrief. I suspect they were anxious about whether I would consider this plagiarism. I had to assure them that this is called studying. Third-Screen Teaching 11 With their permission, I probed their conversations. Students shared that they would raise questions either during their regular individual note review or in preparation for major assessments. These were the points that would usually concern me. But I noticed that the chat worked under the self-governed presumption that participants had tried first and were to reciprocate assistance. Peer pressure was their ally, and then there was the extra step of having to go to the phone during personal study (rather than doing personal study in a group). When done, they had created a study guide that I could hardly have devised for them, and they were near it at all times. Backchanneling Class Films Backchanneling, or “live-tweeting” as it is commonly known, is one of my go-to activities. Sometimes the most efficient way to present course material is to show students a relevant film. I have students use their mobile devices to answer a single guiding question while watching a film. The question can be conceptual: “How do you see theories of mythmaking being acted out in the following film?” Or you can ground the question in a direct task: “Identify ten vocabulary words connected to the activities on-screen without repeating each other’s submissions.” Make the prompt challenging enough to keep students so busy that they do not have time to get off track. This is a relatively easy way to enhance an otherwise pedantic activity. A few additional considerations, however, are in order. For this activity to work, students need to be able see the film, their input field and their classmates’ responses at the same time. If you do not have access to a program that lets you do this, you can adapt this activity. The film can be shown on a large communal screen or wherever and whenever students are allowed to stream the film. The input field will be on the third-screen device. To run all of the responses, students can either be tasked with consulting the response feed on their own individual devices (with the possible drawback of having to switch back and forth between input and output fields) or displaying the response feed on another screen. I have seen instructors bring in another screen dedicated to the response feed. I myself have just adjusted window sizes on the computer playing the film so that I can have a window scrolling the response feed or acting like a chyron. You will also need to determine how you want students to share their responses. Generally using a hashtag on a microblogging social media app like Twitter is the easiest way to do this. However, this requires insisting that students sign up for an account and make their responses open to the public. Out of concern for student privacy, I used an inwardfacing, third-screen polling service called Poll Everywhere to do this. There are many services that boast such capability, but be on the lookout 12 Richard Newton for services that work with your own assessment workflow. I chose Poll Everywhere because it syncs with my school’s learning management system—a key consideration when I scaled it up to large-class usage. Others I know have used Kahoot because they enjoy the gamelike interface and its compatibility with streaming media sites. 3. External Referencing In the early days of the Internet, educators latched on to the “World Wide Web” tagline to highlight the worlds of information students could connect to with the help of a computer. With third-screen devices, students bring those worlds with them into the classroom. The following activities remind students of the resources at their fingertips. Help-Less Teaching In smaller institutions, students may be prone to take advantage of faculty—relying on them to become corporeal dictionaries, syllabi and library databases. Junior and contingent faculty may oblige these onerous requests out of fear of negative teaching evaluations. The politics of higher education as a consumer market cannot be underestimated. But there is something to be said about teaching a person to fish rather than fishing for him or her. Use these requests as teachable moments. Going back to the technologyas-furniture concept, many students do not think about using their phones as a resource. Take a moment and see if they have a mobile device on their person. If so, prompt them to find the appropriate resource via web browser or app. At the end of the conversation, make a sell for the value of professionalism (e.g., “resourcefulness is a virtue in the workplace”) and initiative (e.g., “You have space-age computing power in the palm of your hand. You are cheating yourself if you don’t use it”). Even this basic use of third-screen technology can be a game changer in the classroom. Virtual Reality The metaphor of the brick-and-mortar classroom will become less helpful as students grow closer to third-screen devices. Institutions have retrofitted classrooms to accommodate power outlets for computers and the lighting necessary for projectors. The rise of movable classroom furniture bespeaks of the demand for more nimble pedagogies. With mobile devices, teachers can take students on a field trip within the classroom. Full-fledged virtual reality is for the most part beyond the veil. In the meantime, there are some rich digital environment renderings ready for classroom use. Panoramic cameras can capture the environment of holy sites for students to view through the third screen. In some instances, Third-Screen Teaching 13 the images will be calibrated for immersive viewing—that is, the image changes in relation to the viewer’s own movement. Students can explore with high-end headsets, cardboard rigs (e.g., Google Cardboard) or devices in hand. I have had the most success with this activity when I have students explore a site for which they have a 2-D image. For example, in my New Testament class, I will show students a locus map of an archeology site and then have them find loci within the virtual landscape. Similarly, students in my Islam class may be familiar with common architectural features of a mosque or synagogue vis-à-vis a textbook picture. From there, I can send them on a scavenger hunt in one of the many 3-D examples online. 4. Information Production Third-screen devices challenge not only how we think of study but also the type of work students can create. When educators remain flexible with their understanding of “work,” then students can surprise us with well-thought-out productions. Re-imag(in)ing Course Material Contemporary Internet usage is highly referential. Students communicate with emoji (the battery of glyphs used in lieu of text) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs) from television, music videos and film. When conventional text is used, they often index comments with the use of hashtags, sometimes to the extent that a purposefully hyperspecific or whimsical hashtag can supplant the primary message. During a lecture where I cover periods of history or narrative, I will sometimes translate the material into emoji or GIFs as a way to help students reimagine the content. In my New Testament survey, I had a Buddhist student from Thailand who entered the class with very limited knowledge of the Bible. When I asked someone to put into context a complicated multi-church dispute discussed in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, a student was able to do so with stunning command by approaching it as a message board with metacomments such as #TeamPaul and #TeamCephas. Lest one think she was being flippant, she outscored nearly all of the self-identified Christians in the class. She then texted the image to the students in the class, who incorporated it into their later review materials. Third-Screen Interactivity as Genre Third-screen interactivity may best be seen as a genre of student output that is every bit as legitimate as the worksheet or essay. Since students seek out mobile-friendly applications in and out of the classroom, we might reconsider how students present knowledge in these forms. 14 Richard Newton Have students create a mobile-friendly companion website to your course in lieu of a traditional essay assignment. The same skills they use to embed media and links in their social networks can be used on a number of website and blog platforms. If this seems daunting or excessive, establish a course hashtag on one or more designated social networks. Invite them to curate an ongoing thread with images, videos and links related to course content. Lastly, ask them to show you how to further course aims with the third screen. When students take ownership, they are preparing themselves to succeed. Conclusion Nobody knows your classroom better than you. Nobody thinks more about your students as students than you. Locate an area or two where you want to nurture student growth. Identify a relevant tactic that excites you and explore the possibilities. Use these tactics to plant seeds that will enliven the learning process in your context. Third-screen teaching should not be an educational gimmick but an organic teaching solution. Whatever application you have students use, ultimately you are creating a community. Let the device remind all participants that personal communication is key to your mutual venture toward a learned future Notes 1 “Star Trek,” IMDb, accessed August 22, 2017, www.imdb.com/title/tt00 60028/. 2 Kevin Anderton, “The Contest to Build the First Star Trek Tricorder Has a Winner [Infographic],” Forbes, last updated April 22, 2017, www.forbes. com/sites/ kevinanderton/2017/04/22/the-contest-to-build-the-first-startrektricorder-has-a-winner-infographic/. 3 Shelley Canright, NASA: Do-It-Yourself Podcast: Rocket Evolution, last updated July 13, 2009, www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/diypodcast/ rocket-evolution-index-diy.html. 4 According to The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English (2009), the phrase “idiot tube” dates to 1968. For more on American government regulation of educational programming, see “Children’s Educational Television,” Federal Communications Commission, last updated October 25, 2016, www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrenseducational-television. 5 Ted Friedman, Electronic Dreams: Computers in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 116. 6 James Fields, “How Your Smartphone Is Turning You into a Zombie,” Tennessean, last updated May 2, 2014, www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/ 2014/05/01/james-fields-zombies-obsessed-smartphones/8582485/. 7 Ira Glass, “Status Update: Prologue,” This American Life, WBEZ, first aired November 27, 2015, www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/573/ status-update?act=0#play. Third-Screen Teaching 15 8 Bill Davidow, “Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction,” Atlantic, last updated July 18, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/ exploiting-the-neuroscience-of-internet-addiction/259820/. 9 Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014): 1159–1168; Ferris Jabr, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens,” Scientific American, last updated April 11, 2013, www.scientificamerican.com/article/ reading-paper-screens/. 10 Kelly J. Baker, The Zombies Are Coming! The Realities of the Zombie (Colorado Springs: Bondfire Books, 2013), Kindle edition, location 60–64. 11 Ibid., 74. 12 Jeff Brady, “Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughtful,” All Things Considered, NPR, last updated September 2, 2013, www.npr. org/ sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/217287028/amish-community-notanti-technology-just-more-thoughful. See also Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 13 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element (Towbridge, UK: Redwood Burn, 1980 [1944]). For Huizinga, the notion of play within culture is the typifying aspect of Homo sapiens as “Homo ludens”—“the knowing human” as the human in sport or re-creation. 14 Amanda Lenhart, “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015,” Pew Research & Technology, last updated April 9, 2015, www.pewinternet.org/ 2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/. 15 Frank Newport, “The New Era of Communication among Americans,” Gallup, last updated November 10, 2014, www.gallup.com/poll/179288/new-eracommunication-americans.aspx. 16 Ira Glass, “Status Update: Finding the Self in Selfie,” This American Life, WBEZ, first aired November 27, 2015, www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/ 573/status-update?act=1#play. 17 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 208–9. 18 Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” www.marcprensky.com/ writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20%20Part1.pdf. Originally published in On the Horizon 9, no. 5 (2001). 19 Harold Pashler et al., “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9, no. 3 (2008): 106–8. 20 Jeff DeGraff, “Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants,” Huffington Post, last updated September 7, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-degraff/digitalnatives-vs-digita_b_5499606.html. Jeff DeGraff makes this point but qualifies that the “digital immigrants” who created many of our popular technologies did so without expecting the way “digital natives” would come to use them. 21 European Computer Driving License Foundation, “The Fallacy of the ‘Digital Native’: Why Young People Need to Develop Their Digital Skills,” 2014, accessed September 27, 2017, http://ecdl.org/media/TheFallacyofthe'Digital Native'PositionPaper1.pdf. 22 Joshua Cuevas, “Is Learning Styles-based Instruction Effective? A Comprehensive Analysis of Recent Research on Learning Styles,” Theory and Research in Education 13, no. 3 (2015): 308–333; Pashler et al., “Learning Styles,” 112. 23 The best discussion of this age cohort and technology is Anna Garvey’s “The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech,” Social Media Week, last updated April 21, 2015, https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/ 2015/04/oregon-trail-generation/. 16 Richard Newton 24 Jim Collins, Good to Great (San Francisco: HarperBusiness, 2001), 92–103. 25 My students used standard text messaging. Stephanie McKellop (@McKellogs) had a similar teaching experience with Google Docs. Stephanie McKellop, Twitter post, December 20, 2016, https://twitter.com/McKellogs/status/ 811339472205910016. Bibliography Anderton, Kevin. “The Contest to Build the First Star Trek Tricorder Has a Winner [Infographic].” Forbes. Last updated April 22, 2017. www.forbes.com/sites/ kevinanderton/2017/04/22/the-contest-to-build-the-first-startrek-tricorderhas-a-winner-infographic/. Baker, Kelly J. The Zombies Are Coming! The Realities of the Zombie. Colorado Springs: Bondfire Books, 2013. Kindle edition. Brady, Jeff. “Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughtful.” All Things Considered. NPR. Last updated September 2, 2013. www.npr.org/ sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/217287028/amish-community-notanti-technology-just-more-thoughful. Canright, Shelley. NASA: Do-It-Yourself Podcast: Rocket Evolution. Last updated July 13, 2009. www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/diypodcast/ rocketevolution-index-diy.html. Collins, Jim. Good to Great. San Francisco: Harper Business, 2001. Cuevas, Joshua. “Is Learning Styles-Based Instruction Effective? A Comprehensive Analysis of Recent Research on Learning Styles.” Theory and Research in Education 13, no. 3 (2015): 308–333. Davidow, Bill. “Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction.” The Atlantic. Last updated July 18, 2012. www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/ exploiting-the-neuroscience-of-internet-addiction/259820/. DeGraff, Jeff. “Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants.” Huffington Post. Last updated September 7, 2014. www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-degraff/digitalnatives-vs-digita_b_5499606.html. European Computer Driving License Foundation. “The Fallacy of the ‘Digital Native’: Why Young People Need to Develop Their Digital Skills.” 2014. Accessed September 27, 2017. http://ecdl.org/media/TheFallacyofthe’DigitalN ative’PositionPaper1.pdf. Federal Communications Commission. “Children’s Educational Television.” Last updated October 25, 2016. www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-edu cational-television. Fields, James. “How Your Smartphone Is Turning You into a Zombie.” Tennessean. Last updated May 2, 2014. www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/ 2014/05/01/james-fields-zombies-obsessed-smartphones/8582485/. Friedman, Ted. Electronic Dreams: Computers in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Garvey, Anna. “The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before and After Mainstream Tech.” Social Media Week. Last updated April 21, 2015. https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/ 2015/04/oregon-trail-generation/. Glass, Ira. “Status Update: Finding the Self in Selfie.” This American Life. WBEZ. First aired November 27, 2015. www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/epi sode/573/status-update?act=1#play. Third-Screen Teaching 17 ———. “Status Update: Prologue.” This American Life. WBEZ. First aired November 27, 2015. www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/573/ status-update?act=0#play. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element. Towbridge, UK: Redwood Burn, 1980 [1944]. Jabr, Ferris. “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.” Scientific American. Last updated April 11, 2013. www.scientific american.com/article/reading-paper-screens/. Kraybill, Donald B. The Riddle of Amish Culture. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lenhart, Amanda. “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015.” Pew Research & Technology. Last updated April 9, 2015. www.pewinternet.org/ 2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/. Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. McKellop, Stephanie. Twitter post. December 20, 2016. https://twitter.com/ McKellogs/ status/811339472205910016. Mueller, Pam A., and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking.” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014): 1159–1168. Newport, Frank. “The New Era of Communication Among Americans.” Gallup. Last updated November 10, 2014. www.gallup.com/poll/179288/new-eracommunication-americans.aspx. Pashler, Harold, Mark A. McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert A. Bjork. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9, no. 3 (2008): 106–119. Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” www.marcprensky.com/ writing/Prensky%20%-20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants% 20%20Part1.pdf. Originally published in On the Horizon 9, no. 5 (2001): 1–6. “Star Trek.” IMDb. Accessed August 22, 2017. www.imdb.com/title/tt0060028/. 2 Student-Created Podcasts as a Means of Knowledge Assessment David KneipStudent-Created Podcasts David Kneip Student-Created Podcasts as a Means of Knowledge Assessment1 In the spring of 2014, I concluded my teaching semester by listening to one of my students talk for five minutes straight, at great personal depth, about a service opportunity in which she had engaged during that school year, also making connections with the attitude toward ministry that the Christian apostle Paul described in his letter called “2 Corinthians” that is preserved in the Bible. This experience may sound mundane for a religion course; however, the student in question is one who is rather shy, never spoke in class unless called upon, never came to my office hours to discuss course content, comes from a nonculturally dominant ethnicity and grew up in a remote, economically disadvantaged town of fewer than 300 people (according to the most recent census). In other words, from those bare descriptors alone, one would not be surprised by such a student simply blending into (or, sadly, drifting away from) a course in a four-year liberal arts college. The reason that I had this window into her mind was that she was not speaking to me in person; rather, she had recorded a podcast as part of a course assignment, and I had the privilege of listening to it. Over the past decade, the digital genre of the “podcast” has experienced a significant boom. A podcast is a digital file used to disseminate information—usually audio, although sometimes video, and typically in the form of a monologue (e.g., lecture and commentary) or discussion (panel, conversation, etc.). As two educational practitioners who have used podcasts in their teaching have described them, podcasts are “assembled packages of audio (and increasingly video) content that can be accessed through computers and digital media players.”2 Many scholars have noted and described the wide range of uses for podcasts in universities since the early 2000s, but most of these uses involve “top-down” production such as professors podcasting their lectures for students who miss class or want a review or universities disseminating information to students in audio form rather than through brochures or Student-Created Podcasts 19 e-mails.3 Not surprisingly, as Alpay and Gulati show, results and opinions are somewhat mixed on the benefits of podcasts, especially when they are used to replace face-to-face lectures.4 Nonetheless, because such “top-down” uses have been in place for over a decade, there is more extensive literature on that topic; far fewer studies, though, have focused on student-created podcasts and their uses in education.5 The present chapter will describe a set of discoveries and experiences surrounding the use of student-created podcasts in a religion course in an American comprehensive university; here I will argue that podcasts are a valuable new tool that educators can use to assess student knowledge. Digital Media and “Canned” Assignments Years ago, while pinching pennies on a graduate student budget, I shared a hotel room with some colleagues at the US meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. One evening in our hotel room, I noticed one of my roommates sitting hunched over at his computer, headphones on, listening intently to something. He seemed to be working quite intently, opening and closing this, and organizing that. When he took a break, I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was listening to podcasts. I had not heard of them at that point, and so I inquired further. He gave me some sort of definition, explaining how interesting it was to be able to have interviews, discussions and lectures sent right to his computer and (optionally) to a mobile device for consumption whenever he wanted them. It sounded interesting, but I did not have any idea how I might use that information, and so we moved on in our conversation. As the years went on, I heard and learned more about podcasts, but I did not yet engage in any consumption or creation of media of that genre. In 2009, however, my current institution, Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Abilene, Texas, hired me, and upon my arrival on campus, I was issued an iPod Touch for use in the classroom as part of a “Mobile Learning Initiative.”6 One of the unexpected benefits of having this device was that it was already tailor-made for downloading, storing and playing podcasts; having heard of podcasts before, I quickly came to enjoy listening to them on all sorts of topics. At the same time, I was preparing to teach two sections of an interdisciplinary course that is required of all ACU students; the course is called Cornerstone and is intended to function as a foundation for our undergraduate education program. For that semester—the course’s full campus rollout after having been piloted for a few semesters—the course developers crafted an assignment that required all students to create a podcast containing their reflections on their learning that semester. The students had also been issued iPhones or iPod Touches, and both of those devices had a preloaded app called “Voice Memos” that is perfect for 20 David Kneip creating rudimentary podcasts. Further, the students had access to a “how-to” video for assistance in creating the podcast. The course developers had worked with our on-campus Speaking Center (connected with our Communications Department) to develop an appropriate rubric, and the students had access to that same Speaking Center to help them prepare their podcasts. My understanding at the time was that the purpose of the assignment was for students to learn a new technology while also doing something different from a traditional paper assignment. I was not yet aware that this kind of assignment was similar to a pedagogical strategy called “Guided Discovery” in which students actually create course content (in this case, the fruits of personal reflection) by means of an instructor-designed activity that takes students through a series of steps to discover information.7 Not surprisingly, that first venture with podcasts met with mixed results. My e-mail records from that class indicate some technical problems (e.g., “I lost my audio—is there any way to recover it?” and “The file is too big to upload; can I e-mail it to you?”), but most students were able to complete the assignment with my help and that of the on-campus technology help desk. As a teacher, though, that first exposure to studentcreated podcasts opened the door to a wonderful tool for assessing my students’ knowledge (in this case, a deeper awareness of their own thinking) and also getting to know the students on a deeper level. What I discovered was that, from an educator’s perspective, podcasts in their content are often quite like traditional papers—single-voice presentations of data, opinions, analysis and so forth—and instructors can employ various means to ensure that the words students speak are crafted just as closely. However, in their form, they are quite different in some important ways: while a podcast can be replayed just as a paper can be reread, podcasts are audio files in which the audience can listen to a presenter (typically the author) share content orally rather than the traditional consumption model of reading the words on a page. The experience is not unlike the difference between reading a Tennessee Williams play or Joss Whedon screenplay and seeing that same script live on stage or in a cinema: the textual content is the same, but the experience is different. Because of the similarities between papers and podcasts, the podcasts helped my students meet the course learning outcomes at a rate approximate to that of a paper. Further, because the classes were small (27 and 28 students in the two sections, respectively), I did not notice any difference in the amount of time it took me to grade the papers. In other words, the situation seemed like a seamless integration of new technology: no new burden on the teacher, with minimal disruption for students. However, there was an unexpected benefit to the podcasts that was compelling enough to lead me to create my own podcast assignment for a religion course that I would teach the following spring. From a teaching perspective, the difference described earlier using a comparison between Student-Created Podcasts 21 a screenplay and a movie turned out to be highly important, because it has nothing with aesthetics (although that may come into play) but rather with my students’ voices. When my students recorded podcasts in that first fall of our Cornerstone class, I got to hear the living voices of all of my students—not just the ones who typically spoke up in class. Most educators, not least in religion courses, have experienced the common phenomenon of some students speaking up repeatedly and enthusiastically, while other students remain quiet or participate only occasionally and sometimes under duress. Of course, students are free to participate as they will, but teachers often want to hear from more of our students—or more often from many of them. When my students shared their selfreflections via podcast, I could hear their inflections, emotions that occasionally surfaced and pauses and pace of speaking that gave me insight into how they understand their own words and thinking. And I could hear those things from every single one of my students. As one scholar has written concerning podcasting in education, “There is magic in the human voice.”8 Widening My Scope At our university, all students take five courses in the Bible, Missions and Ministry Department; with an enrollment of almost 4,000 undergraduates and a typical graduation time frame of four to four-and-one-half years, our department teaches, on average, at least half of our student body (if not more) every single semester. Teaching that many students with our current faculty size means that, despite our best efforts and in light of the inevitable budget constraints that universities face, many of our religion classes are larger than we would like them to be. For a university that takes its religious heritage seriously, and for a department that views its teaching as fundamentally pastoral as well as intellectual, those class sizes can become a problem: we simply cannot get to know our students as well as we would like. For each of my years at ACU but one, I have taught at least one section of our spring course for first-year students that focuses on the second half of the New Testament (the biblical books from Acts through Revelation). That course is a joy to teach, not least because we get to immerse students in the biblical text in newer and deeper ways than those to which they have been exposed before. However, as a survey-style class required of all first-year students, it is often larger and more content heavy than we might prefer, especially since we want students to have meaningful contact with the sacred scriptures of Christianity. I have taught sections of fewer than 30 students but also of more than 100. A common pedagogical coping mechanism for the large class size and the amount of material to be “covered” is to give objective tests as the primary or exclusive measure of knowledge acquisition, despite their limitations as appropriate means 22 David Kneip of such assessment.9 My colleagues and I often wish that we could assign papers and other kinds of projects to assess more knowledge and more kinds of knowledge, but class size almost always limits the possibilities here (and students typically do not prefer group work as a different strategy to manage this problem, especially when grades are involved). Without robust help from assistants or a reduced teaching load, it becomes nearly impossible to grade the kinds of assignments that we would like to give and that are repeatedly shown to increase the constructive learning of students. Enter podcasts. In the spring semester after that first exposure to podcasts in the classroom, I taught two sections of this New Testament class: 1 general education section of 44 students and 1 honors section of 25 students. In an effort to go beyond objective testing, I had planned to assign papers to both of these sections. However, as I noted earlier, my positive experiences with podcasts in the fall—very few technical difficulties, a similar “rate of return” in terms of knowledge communication when compared with papers, a similar degree of rigor with regard to content and no noticeable difference in turnaround time for grading podcasts against that of grading papers—led me to assign them instead of papers in the spring. My hope was twofold: (1) that my assignments would help students have that meaningful contact with the Christian scriptures that we desire and (2) that the fact that they were podcasts would allow me to have meaningful contact with my students because of the opportunity to hear their voices. For that semester of teaching my New Testament course, and for the three spring semesters that followed (a total of 8 sections and 369 students), I observed an implicit recommendation described in Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do: to give repeated assessments of the same type so that students can show their growing competence with a given skill or a content base.10 My goal was to conceive of assignments that would approximate the kinds of things that individuals might be asked to speak about; my hypothesis was that most laypeople will rarely, if ever, be asked to write about religion, but they might be asked to speak about it in one context or another. As it happened, this hypothesis helped me “sell” the assignment to my students; while they might not question paper assignments, since they are so typical in higher education, they might wonder about the “need” for podcasts, and the real-life connection helped convince the students of their value. Ultimately, I assigned three podcasts, due periodically throughout the semester, with content keyed to various landmarks in the semester.11 Because one of the course goals is to teach students to look for the Christology apparent in various New Testament epistles so that they can see how the author’s theology affects the ethical instructions the author gives, the first podcast invited the students to interview adult Christians whom they admired and then create a script that contains analysis of Student-Created Podcasts 23 how the interviewees’ own Christology leads to their ethics. Because a common phenomenon midway through a college religion course is some amount of disorientation regarding one’s previously held beliefs, the second podcast asked students to choose a topic that has been considered in the first half of the semester, describe their prior understanding and then explain how the course material has challenged or deepened that prior understanding. Finally, because a course goal is to increase students’ ability to contextualize the biblical texts into their contemporary world, the third podcast assignment required students to choose among a variety of prompts, all of which pushed them to connect the scriptural text with their own world (e.g., through service opportunities, ethical reflection).12 My assessment criteria were tied to the course goals and to the aims for the assignment. As the years progressed and I refined my primary criteria, these came to focus on how the students demonstrated understanding of the biblical text, connections with course materials (i.e., readings, discussions, etc.) and depth of understanding. Early on, I had emphasized more strongly the reflective component; to my dismay, I discovered that my students were much better at journal-style assignments, in which they were asked simply to share their opinions or experiences, than they were at more analytical tasks that asked them to interact with course material. As a result, I balanced the two emphases so that the podcasts functioned as reflective assignments that were also based in course content; in other words, they allowed for reflective work that simple objective testing struggles to measure, and they remained rooted in course content by going beyond a simple journaling assignment. However, podcasts are not simply about the content, just as papers are not, and so some assessment criteria were focused on students’ behavior rather than their understanding. Examples here include whether they followed the directions for the assignment, whether they did appropriate preparation work with a script, whether they stayed on topic and so forth. However, as the years progressed, I realized that I had two separate classes of criteria; if I designed my rubrics such that content and behavior criteria were treated the same way, students could “behave well” with regard to the assignments’ logistics while doing poorly on their content, resulting in a grade that did not accurately reflect their actual learning. As it happens, my hopes were met and even exceeded. As before, students were able to complete the assignments with minimal technical difficulty and with approximately the same effort necessary for creating papers. Further, the content of the assignments allowed them the kind of meaningful contact with the sacred texts that I had intended and in a way that was connected with their own lives.13 However, other benefits emerged that were either unexpected or outside of my primary focus. At least two benefits accrued for the students. First, as originally intended by the Cornerstone assignment, my students’ having three opportunities to create podcasts allowed them experience and increased 24 David Kneip their expertise with regard to this new form of digital media.14 My experience was similar to that of Kemp et al., who reported a clear student sense of increased proficiency with the new technology after completing podcasting assignments.15 We know that the ability to learn new skills, especially with regard to technology, is a key workplace skill in the twenty-first century, according to many employers;16 as Armstrong, Tucker and Massad noted, podcasting allows students to gain experience and expertise doing just that.17 Second, many educators have noticed that contemporary students often write like they speak rather than in a more formal academic register. As a result, it is not uncommon for students in classes outside of English, writing or composition departments to complain when writing papers; I suspect that part of this discomfort is that they know they are not good at formal writing, and they disdain “losing points” for their bad writing. However, because podcasts are typically performed in a more informal register, the students can speak in a more natural voice. To be sure, I am strongly in favor of students learning to write for academic audiences; however, in my prior experience teaching the course, I found that the burden of writing was impeding that meaningful contact with the Christian scriptures that I desired for my students. That was especially true with first-year students, many of whom may not have had a significant number of courses or depth of instruction in formal academic writing. By making preparation an explicit criterion for assessment and including examples of such on my grading rubric, I strongly encouraged my students to prepare a script, to rehearse and so forth; the results in my classes were that students were able to engage in the assignment, create podcasts with professional-quality scripts and avoid the anxiety that some of them experienced with a typical paper assignment.18 From the educator’s perspective, I found multiple benefits as well. As I grew in my own competence in grading the podcasts, I learned that podcasts could actually be graded more quickly than papers, not merely at the same rate. The reason is the length of podcasts and their medium: I assigned podcasts with lengths of three to four minutes and five to seven minutes, which correspond to approximately two and three pages of double-spaced writing, respectively. Because I use rubrics for grading purposes, I found that I am able to accomplish a significant amount of grading while I am listening to the podcasts. As I determine which level a podcast will achieve on a given criterion, I can indicate that achievement in the appropriate way (whether the rubric is on paper or on-screen), and I can also write or type comments as I listen, even providing “in medias res” notes such as “We’re halfway through, and you haven’t said anything about the Bible yet.” Should there be difficulties with the audio, I can pause, rewind, change the volume on whatever speakers I am using and so forth, and then I can continue grading. All in all, I found that I can grade a podcast of three to four minutes in (on average) seven Student-Created Podcasts 25 minutes, and one of five to seven minutes in approximately ten minutes, without sacrificing meaningful comments and feedback for the students. Students noted the quality of the feedback in their conversations with me; one evaluation comment noted (with perhaps a bit of irony), “He actually provided feedback on the podcasts—that was wonderful!” Were I to grade papers of the same length, I would likely spend the same amount of time commenting on the content of the paper, but I would expect to spend more time critiquing the writing exhibited in the paper. With podcasts that last demand disappears, thus allowing me to move through the grading stack more quickly. That time efficiency is a significant gain for educators, who typically find that there is not enough time to do all that is required of them or that they desire, no matter the school level at which they teach. That gain only magnifies as the number of students grows—a change that typically results in more difficulty rather than success.19 From the perspective of religious education, however, the opportunity to hear my students’ voices was perhaps the most satisfying benefit. Having had the experience of hearing my students’ voices in the Cornerstone class, I was excited about the possibility of hearing them speak on religious topics. Sure enough, podcasts provided another even richer opportunity to accomplish this goal, because of the way that I set up the assignment. Because all of the podcast assignments had both reflective and analytical elements to them, I was allowed a window into the students’ minds by listening to them talk. And as many educators know, getting students to talk about matters of religion can be quite challenging, especially in institutions (like mine) where they are required to do so by means of compulsory courses. The podcast achieves many benefits of an oral exam or conversation (face-to-face contact) without the stresses that often come for the student (having to perform “on the spot”); similarly, as already noted, it achieves many benefits of a paper (content communication) without the stresses associated therewith (the demands of formal academic writing). Finally, on a personal/pastoral level, the podcasts were an excellent way to get to know my students and to connect with them, as I desired. One option I have not yet exercised with these assignments, but have used on other occasions, is creating my own simple podcasts for audio feedback on assignments of various kinds; this task can be accomplished in many ways, including Evernote, which requires e-mailing an audio file to students, or increasingly and much more simply with online learning management systems (such as Canvas, the learning management system that my university uses).20 Far more often, my continuing the conversation has taken place face-to-face. On the first assignment, many students spoke about youth pastors, grandparents or other significant adult figures in their lives; their comments made it easy to initiate a conversation before or after a future class session with a simple comment such as, “Thank you for sharing about your grandmother; she sounds like an amazing 26 David Kneip woman!” Because the second assignment asked students to share texts on which their views had been challenged or deepened, I could do the same by saying, “What you said about Romans 9–11 was really interesting! Where do you think your views came from?” The third assignment allowed our conversation to focus on future plans as the semester came to a close: “I love your idea for living out Philippians 2 while you’re on your summer internship! Let me know how it goes—I’d love to hear from you.” As noted earlier, while our class sizes are sometimes large, our campus as a whole is not, and so students often expect or hope their religion professors will function as pastors, to some degree. These assignments provided conversational openings for me to fulfill that role. Theological Reflections The foregoing discussion may convince some educators to experiment with podcasts in their courses based on their pedagogical benefits alone. I would be thrilled if such were the case. However, as a confessing Christian myself, I cannot help but notice that there are connections between my experience teaching with podcasts and some theological convictions regarding the spoken word. Among the other courses I teach at ACU are our classes in Christian worship. One of the fundamental features of Christian worship—and, in fact, in that of the other two monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam)—is the importance of words, and spoken words at that. As Ruth Duck has written, “Worship is much more than words, and yet words bear much of the burden of interpreting the meaning of our actions, evoking our faith, and expressing our theology.”21 This claim should not surprise those of us who practice or teach the Abrahamic faiths, since all three of them claim that God has spoken to his people by a word.22 Indeed, in the Christian tradition, believers speak of Jesus as the “Word of God” (influenced by biblical texts such as John 1:1ff.). In Christian worship, words may derive from various sources, among them ancient liturgies, historic confessions of faith, worldwide consensus texts, the words of scripture, local compositions and others, often in combination with one another. Regardless of their sources, though, the words Christians use in worship teach us of the power of the spoken word. As Duck has said, the reward of careful labor over the words of worship “is enlivened worship that nurtures Christian faith and discipleship in ourselves and those among whom we minister.”23 In her compelling book The Worshiping Body, Kimberly Bracken Long began her chapter on “The Mouth: Voice and Speech” by noting the standard observation of the modern world as shifting from being “wordbased” to “image-based”—along with some critiques of the view that that shift is benign.24 Long then attempted to argue that “[s]peaking is at the core of what it means to be Christian” and that our speaking is Student-Created Podcasts 27 a manifestation of our being made in the image of a God who speaks.25 The reading and proclamation of the Bible is a key feature of worship in most of the branches of Christianity, and many Christians believe some version of the doctrine that Christ (again, the “Word” of God) is mysteriously made present in that reading and proclamation. This idea should certainly shape worship leading, but also the mundane, everyday speech that emerges from our mouths.26 As both Jesus (as narrated in the Gospel of Matthew) and a writer who may have been his brother (in the epistle of James) remind us, our words can be deeply damaging and also wonderfully life-giving.27 Jesus teaches, we learn in worship and we know from teaching that “speaking is not only about explaining, and hearing is not simply about understanding; they are also about apprehending, even experiencing, words.”28 This last consideration is precisely what I experienced in listening to my students’ podcasts. Although they may have thought that their speaking was merely “explaining” and that my hearing would be merely “understanding” (in the best-case scenario), much more was happening. I was being “caught” by their words and the thoughts that lay behind them—understanding more than just the words they said as I listened to their voices. I was invited into connection, into relationship—even if that relationship was something intended by the students to be shallow and perfunctory—just as Christians believe that we are invited into relationship with God even as God speaks to us today through a whole range of means. Concluding Recommendations Readers who are convinced by the foregoing presentation and rationale may yet wonder how one might get started and succeed with such a project. I conclude by offering some recommendations based on my own experience and research: Choose Podcasts Assignments Wisely I hope that this chapter has shown how podcasts can help students in reflective and analytical tasks. Lee, McLoughlin and Chan reported more broadly that podcasts are effective tools for helping students to conceptualize, whether they are teacher or student created.29 In other words, podcasts are quite appropriate for tasks that demand the higher levels of thinking on Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain (in its various forms), including application, synthesis and evaluation. However, if educators need to check student learning at the lower levels, I do not recommend podcasts, because they are simply unnecessary. Other forms of assessment are familiar to students and appropriate to that task so that introducing the variable of new technology becomes unnecessary. Further, 28 David Kneip educators should choose assignments that mirror actual (or imagined) real-life scenarios in which professionals may be asked to speak about their content. I mentioned earlier my choosing topics that mirror situations in which people might be asked to speak about matters of religion rather than write about them; Kemp et al. invited their science students to imagine giving a radio interview about geomorphology, as it is more likely that engineers may give an interview to a television station than to create written material for general consumption.30 Develop Prompts and Rubrics With a High Degree of Specificity I have learned that highly specific prompts and rubrics are generally helpful in my teaching; that benefit is even stronger in this case because students sometimes wonder about the assignment as a whole, especially how to create a podcast. Unsurprisingly, less confusion about content helps reduce anxiety and concomitantly the number of questions about the technology.31 One student commented in an evaluation that I needed to “explain the podcasts more”—a suggestion that I attempted to apply in future semesters with more specific prompts and better oral explanation. Privilege Audio Over Video Podcasts As more and more bandwidth has become available to individuals and institutions, more and more Internet usage has shifted toward bandwidthheavy tasks (e.g., from text to image, from silence to audio, from image to video), as the usage patterns of YouTube and Netflix can attest. Consequently, both teachers and students might be attracted to the idea of creating video podcasts (perhaps as a more challenging task) rather than simple audio podcasts. Unfortunately, the challenges of creating video are numerous, such that I recommend avoiding this option. Video files are much larger than audio files, a difference that complicates matters for podcast creation and editing, as well as for file sharing. Further, video production creates opportunities—but also challenges—for matters that are not necessarily content related, such as lighting, costumes and others.32 Finally, with the rising use of social media platforms (especially applications such as Snapchat), students have become quite comfortable seeing themselves in video such that it could be hard for them to switch to a more serious “register” in their performance. Discover and Recommend User-Friendly Production Technological Tools Because some students will be concerned about their competence in creating podcasts given their lack of background with that task (and despite Student-Created Podcasts 29 whatever technological affinity and ability they may demonstrate with other tasks), it is best to find software that is simple to use. On the hardware side, the simplest recording option may be smartphones or other similar handheld or wearable devices; another simple solution (that can provide higher-quality audio) may be a microphone that can plug into a computer. On the software side, Evernote (many platforms) and the aforementioned Voice Memos app (iOS) are quite simple for producing voice-only podcasts. That goal can also be reached using Microsoft’s program OneNote; as software designed for note-taking, it includes an option to record and insert audio tracks. As a result, teachers could assign students to type their scripts in OneNote, record them as audio, and then share them with the instructor. For more editing options, including the use of background music or multiple tracks, GarageBand is popular with Macintosh users but has a bit of a learning curve. Audacity has long been a program that is popular for creating podcasts; it is free, open-source and usable on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Teachers report ease of use for their students, and many online tools are available to help both teachers and students learn the program.33 Create or Identify a Sample Podcast Especially with new kinds of assignments, students often ask whether there are samples of prior work for them to view or listen to. Two ways instructors may address this concern are to either create or identify podcasts that match precisely or approximately the desired product. Identifying outside podcasts requires less technical work on the instructor’s part, but it does necessitate explanations to students about which parts to imitate and which to ignore. On the other hand, creating one’s own sample podcast requires more technical labor but less explanatory time. On that note, Bolden is right that creating a sample podcast is a wonderful way for educators to learn the technology themselves before teaching it to students, to recognize common pitfalls in creating podcasts and to prompt new thoughts on the part of students.34 Consider Opportunities for Making Students’ Podcasts Available to Others Some teachers will want all students to have access to the other students’ podcasts for this or that pedagogical reason. One useful tool, available at some universities, is iTunes U, which allows students to share their own podcasts and access those of their classmates.35 Should a particular instructor’s institution not participate in iTunes U, the institutional technology support office or team can likely help instructors find out what software would offer similar solutions and work best with the 30 David Kneip institution’s system. Another option instructors may consider is to create or use their own podcast to broadcast student work. There are many instructional resources online that instructors may consult to begin a podcast. Instructors may then choose certain podcasts to publish or may simply make them all available, and students can then use their devices of choice to listen as they choose or are required. As with more traditional forms of student artifacts, there are many potential benefits for students’ having access to their peers’ work. Start Small I conclude with an adaptation of the advice given by Weyant and Gardner: I hope that educators who are convinced by this chapter feel no obligation to “go big” in their first implementation of a podcast assignment.36 I was fortunate that my first experience was with a single assignment; I recommend that instructors find one or two activities that can be transformed into podcast assignments. That scope can make for an excellent pilot program. An alternative would be a single assignment that is repeated through a semester or year (as described earlier) so that students gain proficiency and educators limit variables that could complicate the learning process. Notes 1 This chapter is the fruit of presentations made at the Faculty Fusion event at Abilene Christian University (Abilene, Texas) in August 2012 and at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in November 2013 in Baltimore, Maryland. I am grateful to the leaders of ACU’s Adams Center for Teaching and Learning and the SBL program unit Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies for their sponsoring of the events in question, and to the many participants in the sessions for their helpful feedback and suggestions. I am further grateful to the editors of this volume for their invaluable assistance. Any errors or infelicities remain, of course, my own. Readers may correspond with me at [email protected]; I am quite content to share any assignment prompts or rubrics related to the class activities described in this chapter. 2 Benjamin Bolden and James Nahachewsky, “Podcast Creation as Transformative Music Engagement,” Music Education Research 17, no. 1 (2015): 17–33, doi:10.1080/14613808.2014.969219. 3 Howard Harris and Sungmin Park, “Educational Usages of Podcasting,” British Journal of Educational Technology 39, no. 3 (2008): 548–551, doi:10.1111/j.1467–8535.2007.00788.x. See also Richelle V. Adams’s and Erik Blair’s interesting and recent essay, “The Learner-Generated Podcast: Engaging Postgraduate Engineering Students in a Mathematics-Intensive Course,” Research in Post-Compulsory Education 19, no. 2 (2014): 132–146, doi:10.1080/13596748.2014.897502. 4 Esat Alpay and Shelly Gulati, “Student-Led Podcasting for Engineering Education,” European Journal of Engineering Education 35, no. 4 (August 2010): 415–427, doi:10.1080/03043797.2010.487557. Student-Created Podcasts 31 5 A recent review of literature on both kinds of podcasts can be found in Bolden and Nahachewsky, “Podcast Creation,” 17–18. 6 “Evaluating a Campus-Wide Mobile Learning Initiative,” EDUCAUSE, https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/LIVE115b.pdf. See also one of ACU’s own publications on the topic at https://issuu.com/abilenechristian/docs/ acu_ml_report_2010-11. 7 Cari L. Crumly, “Student-Centered Pedagogies and Tactics,” in Pedagogies for Student-Centered Learning: Online and On-Ground, with contributions by Pamela Dietz and Sarah d’Angelo (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 36. 8 Gardner Campbell, “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education,” EDUCAUSE Review (November/December 2005): 40. 9 In chapter 2 of Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman, How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2010), 40–65, the authors note the importance of deep and complex connections among the various discrete “units” of knowledge, if students want to progress from beginner-level understanding toward expertise. As they say, when students can more effectively categorize and connect their knowledge, they can enrich their learning. Unfortunately, because objective testing often encourages simply the memorization of those discrete units apart from context, it is only too easy for students to learn them and then forget them. 10 Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 35–36. 11 As the reader will discover, I continued the path of assigning podcasts as individual tasks. For an interesting study of podcasts as a group assignment, see Lynne Powell and Fiona Robson, “Learner-Generated Podcasts: A Useful Approach to Assessment?” Innovations in Education and Teaching International 51, no. 3 (2014): 326–337, doi:10.1080/14703297.2013.796710. 12 To simplify the assignment by limiting the variables that students needed to consider, I instructed them to consider me the primary audience of the podcast. In other words, they did not need to attempt to conceive of a hypothetical audience. However, the work of Justine Kemp, Antony Mellor, Richard Kotter, and Jan W. Oosthoek, “Student-Produced Podcasts as an Assessment Tool: An Example from Geomorphology,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 36, no. 1 (2012): 117–130, doi:10.1080/03098265.2011.576754, has made me reconsider that position. As I will outline in the “Concluding Recommendations” section of this essay, I do think it is helpful for students to imagine a real-life situation in which they will need to be able to speak on the topic under consideration. Perhaps it is also useful for students to have to think of a hypothetical audience, at least in some assignments, since it might be useful pedagogically for students to reckon with a nonspecialist audience (i.e., not what the instructor represents). 13 These assignments connect admirably with the deep “learning principle” that Colleen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner call “contextual”: the new knowledge “builds on the learner’s existing knowledge” and “is integrated into the learner’s world.” “Mind over Matter: Transforming Course Management Systems into Effective Learning Environments,” EDUCAUSE Review (November/ December 2002): 29. 14 Happily, as Vivian Maria Vasquez notes in her article “Podcasting as Transformative Work,” Theory Into Practice 54 (2015): 148, doi:10.1080/00405 841.2015.1010848, basically all laptops sold on the current market already come equipped with all the hardware needed for students to make podcasts, thus overcoming a first potential hurdle automatically. 32 David Kneip 5 Kemp et al., “Student-Produced Podcasts,” 123, 126. 1 16 See the summary of research on this topic conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) entitled “It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success: Overview and Key Findings,” www.aacu.org/leap/presidentstrust/ compact/2013SurveySummary. The AAC&U reports that the employers surveyed see “the capacity for continued new learning” as a crucial trait, and they affirm pedagogical practices that improve “application of skills.” 17 Gary R. Armstrong, Joanne M. Tucker, and Victor J. Massad, “Achieving Learning Goals with Student-Created Podcasts,” Decision Sciences: Journal of Innovative Education 7, no. 1 (2009): 149–54, doi:10.1111/j. 1540–4609.2008.00209.x. 18 I have not conducted any research comparing the learning of my students who do complete the podcast assignments with some who do not (for example, if I taught two sections and used podcasts in only one of them). Perhaps not surprisingly, some students indicated on their student evaluations that the podcasts seemed unnecessary—that papers would have worked just as well. The research described and cited in Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) would suggest that at least the assignments do increase the students’ learning, but it may not matter for their content acquisition as to whether it issues in a paper or a podcast. See pages 220–223 for the authors’ discussion of the importance of generation of knowledge and reflection on learning as productive strategies for lifelong learners. To this point, one of my students noted in a course evaluation that “the podcasts really helps [sic] me dig deep and truly understand what I had been learning.” 19 In fact, taken together, this quicker grading and the use of clear criteria communicated by rubrics meet two of the assessment recommendations in L. Dee Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 89–96. 20 For an interesting study on this topic, see Steve Cooper, “Delivering Student Feedback in Higher Education: The Role of Podcasting,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1, nos. 2/3 (2008): 153–65, doi:10.1386/jmte.1.2. 21 Ruth Duck, Worship for the Whole People of God: Vital Worship for the 21st Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 97. 22 To cite merely one example from each faith’s text, see in the Hebrew Bible Exodus 19–20 (God’s self-revelation on Mount Sinai), in the Christian New Testament the Synoptic narratives of Jesus’s baptism and transfiguration (e.g., Mark 1 and 9) and in the Qur’an Sura 4:163–165. 23 Duck, Worship, 108. 24 Kimberly Bracken Long, The Worshiping Body: The Art of Leading Worship (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 51–52. 25 Ibid., 52–53. 26 Ibid., 58–59. 27 Matthew 5:21–26, 43–44; James 3:1–12. 28 Long, Worshiping Body, 68. 29 Mark J. W. Lee, Catherine McLoughlin, and Anthony Chan, “Talk the Talk: Learner-Generated Podcasts as Catalysts for Knowledge Creation,” British Journal of Educational Technology 39, no. 3 (2008): 517–518, doi:10.1111/j.1467–8535.2007.00746.x. 30 Kemp et al., “Student-Produced Podcasts,” 119–121, 125–128. 31 A useful resource here is Shinjeng Lin, J. Christopher Zimmer and Velma Lee, “Podcasting Acceptance on Campus: The Differing Perspectives of Student-Created Podcasts 33 Teachers and Students,” Computers & Education 68 (October 2013): 416– 428, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2013.06.003, which offers thought-provoking research results about ways educators might be more conscious of their own expectations and values, as well as those of students. 32 Gary R. Armstrong, Joanne M. Tucker, and Victor J. Massad, “Interviewing the Experts: Student Produced Podcast,” Journal of Information Technology Education: Innovations in Practice 8 (2009): 82, http://jite.org/documents/ Vol8/JITEv8IIP079-090Armstrong333.pdf. This page contains a brief section called “Podcast Basics” that is quite useful for interested parties. 33 See Powell and Robson, “Learner-Generated Podcasts,” 332–333. In terms of tutorials, by the time this chapter is read, some of the links in Armstrong, Tucker and Massad, “Achieving Learning Goals,” 152 may no longer function, but they may give readers ideas for their own online searching. The same is true for Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson’s excellent suggestions and links in their article “Podcasting in the School Library, Part 2: Creating Powerful Podcasts with Your Students,” Teacher Librarian 34, no. 4 (April 2007): 61–64; the setting in question is that of an elementary school, but as a result, the recommendations assume very little in terms of technological proficiency. 34 Benjamin Bolden, “Learner-Created Podcasts: Students’ Stories with Music,” Music Educators Journal 100, no. 1 (September 2013): 75–80, doi:10.1177/0027432113493757. 35 Myke Bartlett, “A Voice in the World: Podcasts and the Classroom,” Screen Education 64 (Summer 2012): 70, http://theeducationshop.com.au/downloads/ metro-and-screen-education-articles/screen-education-articles/a-voice-in-theworld-podcasts-and-the-classroom/, has suggested that there may be a certain cachet in students’ seeing their names next to their favorite artists’ in their iTunes library; students’ actual reactions, of course, will vary. 36 Lee E. Weyant and Carolyn Gardner, “Wikis and Podcasts: An Application in Undergraduate Management Education,” Academy of Educational Leadership Journal 15, no. 3 (2011): 139. 3 Who Do You Vote That I Am? Renate HoodWho Do You Vote That I Am? Using Student Response Systems in Religion Courses Renate Hood Introduction Religious education faces challenges in addressing both the cognitive and affective domains in residential and online classrooms. Increasingly, institutions of higher education seek to meet expectations of student-centered learning while simultaneously paying attention to matters of religious formation and student retention. Using student response systems, also known as classroom response systems or audience response systems, is an effective means of boosting student motivation, augmenting classroom interaction and lowering the threshold for engaging religious, ethical and personal subject matter. Using student response systems enables the formation of safe classroom environments, which is desirable in introductory religion classes, such as Bible survey courses, since a large portion of the student population often feels ill prepared to share its knowledge of or experience with the class content. Learning methods associated with the technology used by the teachers, rather than the technology itself, directly influences students’ learning.1 Hence student response technology that supports student learning methods in religion courses is the focus in this chapter. Introducing Student Response Systems Response activities provide effective opportunities for addressing religious subjects. Icebreakers facilitated by student response systems can lower subject-matter anxiety often associated with students’ anticipated unfamiliarity with course content. Students appreciate the use of digital devices and anonymous or nonanonymous participation in polls and games. Student response systems create positive classroom environments in which lectures and learning activities increase student motivation and course engagement.2,3 They are effective tools for extending and regaining students’ attention in the twenty-first-century classroom.4,5 They are effective both in Who Do You Vote That I Am? 35 large classrooms and in small-group teaching.6 Not only are response activities helpful in the affective learning domain but also voting systems in particular lead to increased conceptual understanding.7 This cognitive understanding is measured by checking students’ comprehension of classroom learning activities by taking quick polls. Moreover, student response systems improve student learning by assisting instructors with the task of clarifying misconceptions about certain subjects based on instant student feedback.8 Student response systems likewise can aid students in retaining information from class sessions by reexposing students to the presented material through survey-style summative response quizzes at the end of class. Students typically find response systems appealing, thereby enhancing learning effectiveness.9 In all, mobile response systems promote active learning,10 increase student performance,11 aid in collecting feedback and taking anonymous polls and serve as a useful tool for brainstorming in the classroom. In terms of classroom structure and course management, response systems are advantageous for keeping attendance and organizing tutorial sessions. Audience response systems have been used for the last 40 years.12 Of these years, student response systems have been used in education since 2003.13 At this time, a variety of response systems are available that are fit for educational purposes. First, there are the traditional systems, often called “clickers” or “zappers,” which are handheld devices that come in a variety of sizes. Known as personal or audience response systems, clickers operate with purchased software and student receivers, often depending on institutional support or student purchases. Online student response systems, or web-based response systems, are replacing these technologies at a fast pace since students can use them with any browser on various devices. Many students have computers or at least a mobile phone. Nearly all university students have cell phones (99.8 percent) and use texting as their main mode of written communication (97 percent).14 Most online student response systems are free. Device-agnostic response systems are both accessible and cost effective, and hence preferred by institutions, instructors and students over paid systems and devices. When comparing web-based response systems with traditional systems, the versatility of web-based approaches is apparent. Practical limitations of clickers include not only the cost of clickers but also the reality that polling can take place only during lectures since the connection of the device takes place live. Current examples of web-based response systems include systems that are used both synchronously and asynchronously. There are a variety of web-based systems currently available, some synchronous and some asynchronous. Here are a few examples: Poll Everywhere makes use of multiple choice polling and open survey polling. Additionally, Poll Everywhere uses word clouds and is easily accessible from a smartphone, 36 Renate Hood computer or other devices that have access to a browser. Kahoot is popular with students because of its colorful display. Instructors can prepare real-time quizzes or polls in multiple-choice format that students can take individually or in teams. Kahoot is used for quick student preparedness inventories and discussion starters. Socrative, another student response system, allows for polling on the fly and maintenance of classroom flow. Instructors like the structure that Socrative provides for post-polling follow-up. Quizlet, on the other hand, is more content focused and is often used as a review aid or exam preparation tool. Quizizz has steadily gained popularity as a student response system since it provides a group-wide, individually paced polling or learning opportunity that is visual to the entire group. Some students appreciate the “cool factor,” since it has avatars and meme options. AnswerGarden is yet another growing web-based response method that enables the fielding of questions from the entire group and the gathering of group feedback. GoSoapBox offers students the ability to indicate subject-matter confusion anonymously by allowing the instructor to turn off names. Pear Deck, a web-based platform that requires a membership, enables live sessions. Students can connect with the instructors’ presentation on their own devices, allowing interaction during lectures. Instructors can upload previously developed PowerPoint presentations and insert response activities such as multiple-choice questions, interactive drawings and draggable pins and images. Additional web-based response sites and methods include Let’s Go Vote, VotApedia, SMS Poll, Survnvote, Text the Mob and TurningPoint ResponseWare. With so many options available, the pedagogical applications are numerous. Practical Issues When Implementing Student Response Systems Awareness of practical matters when implementing the careful use of technological teaching tools such as student response systems is essential. Student feedback indicates not only successes but also drawbacks when these teaching aids are employed. Instructors’ levels of confidence in the use of such technology is important. Students have observed that different teachers have divergent comfort levels in the use of student response systems, and, hence, effectiveness may vary.15 Instructors may use varied amounts of preparation time and set up student response systems and time distribution on synchronous questions in different ways, some more suitable to their learning objectives than others. Most students, for instance, deem 30 seconds too long to answer a question, so preparation and structured lining up of the questions and answers is important.16 A relaxed feel is most desired by students, with polls and questions implemented as a natural part of the classroom flow. When multiplechoice questions are used, students deem it of utmost importance to have Who Do You Vote That I Am? 37 the instructor explain all alternatives, both why the correct answer is the right one and why the incorrect answers are not valid.17 Furthermore, the inclusion of the answer “I don’t know” is strongly preferred by students, as it provides a pedagogical alternative to guessing.18 Benefits of Using Student Response Systems Student interaction entails behavioral, emotional and cognitive engagement. Technology can facilitate a conducive environment for engaged learning. Clicker-based response systems can enable polling only during a classroom session. Web-based polling, on the other hand, facilitates pre-class polling and equips the instructor with data to adapt the planned student learning assessments and lecture accordingly. Student response systems, in fact, are useful at various stages of the learning experience: prior to starting the lecture, about 30 minutes into the lecture and at the end of the lecture.19 Using a student response system at the beginning of class ensures that topics from the previous class are related to key topics in the current lecture by way of review questions. Using a student response system halfway through the classroom flow aids in keeping the students’ attention and ensuring the students’ comprehension. Polling at the end of class time enables reflection on the presented subject matter and highlighting of key elements of the lecture. Using Student Response Systems When Teaching Religion In many institutions, introductory religion courses are a required part of a core curriculum. Varied student populations form the makeup of these course classrooms—some students are familiar with the course content and others have an affinity for the course content, while yet other students are unaccustomed to or even uncomfortable with or indifferent to the course content. Furthermore, subject-matter anxiety is a reality in these settings. Response activities provide opportunities for engaging students by addressing both the cognitive and affective domains in a manner that lowers possible course subject-matter apprehension. Icebreakers can introduce a welcoming course environment and increase classroom cohesion. Specifically, icebreaker polls in the form of forced-choice surveys with movie titles or vacation destinations can facilitate an inviting atmosphere for course participation. Kahoot is uniquely suited for such polls. Other options for icebreaker activities include asking similar questions by way of a word-cloud student response system facilitated by systems such as Poll Everywhere. Word associations can form low-threshold emotional engagement in religious subject matters in the classroom. The instructor can start the word cloud, for example, by typing “God” on a blank screen. As students provide their one-word or short-phrase submissions, the student response system builds a word 38 Renate Hood cloud that is visible to the entire class on the screen. Because of the anonymous nature of the submissions, students are free to express themselves. Students value anonymity in answering questions.20, 21 The open atmosphere this anonymity sets determines the tone for the remainder of the course and develops the contours of a learning community. In some circumstances, students may think a certain spiritual vocabulary or set of religious presuppositions is required to succeed in a religion course. However, when certain unbound associated words appear on the screen in a word cloud, the instructor can seize the opportunity to invite the students to speak their minds in class and in assignments, and assure them of freedom of opinion in religious and confessional matters. Classroom mechanics are shaped and improved when students have a visual idea of the classroom makeup. Initial polling at the beginning of the course in terms of familiarity with the subject matter provides grounding to the course dynamics and in-class participation. In a general education course called Engaging the New Testament, one such poll gathered through the web-based student response system Poll Everywhere uses the following polling responses when asking students how they feel about their preparation for the course: • • • • • I grew up with Sunday School—this will be a breeze. I’m nervous but am quite familiar. I’m from a Christian family, but the Bible is a bit vague. Goodness, I have hardly ever read the Bible. Seriously, what is a Bible? Ha! Poll results typically display a broad spectrum, which allows for an opportunity to lighten the classroom atmosphere. The instructor can use these responses to tell all students that the course will be taught from an academic perspective. This reinforces the premise that prior familiarity with course material is not required. The other answers, too, are used in the classroom to create an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding. An open atmosphere likewise is encouraged when an open-ended poll facilitated by a student response system is used. Poll Everywhere and AnswerGarden are conducive for such open-ended surveys. Questions such as “What did Jesus look like?” provoke interesting perspectives: from funny comments to clichés and ethnocentric misnomers. The instructor can engage the answers gathered in the survey in a constructive manner and coach the class in this particular example toward a discussion of Jesus as an ancient Middle Eastern man. At some point during a lecture, a poll facilitated by a student response system can introduce a new topic for discussion. One such discussion in a religion class may concern the identity of the historical Jesus. Kahoot is helpful as a conversation starter since it presents four answers with Who Do You Vote That I Am? 39 the option of a video or a picture to accompany the question. The question potentially asked is, “Who is the historical Jesus?” The four possible answers represent four main perspectives. Another option is to have three of the four answers represent main perspectives with an alternative “I don’t know” answer. Either way, after the students take the poll, the answers form the class talking points and can evolve into lengthy discussions.22 Each one of the potential answers is reviewed by the instructor in class, including attention given to “I don’t know.” Religious and ethical subjects are sensitive or deemed a private matter in the eyes of some students. Hence, in the case of general education courses, response activities, in particular, those incorporated into the classroom presentation, provide effective means for broaching religious subject matters with diverse student populations. Student response system polling platforms such as Socrative or Kahoot, or a fully integrated method such as Pear Deck, are helpful in taking inventory of students’ religious leanings through options and then using the voting outcome to divide students into groups according to their indicated preferences for further student-oriented, group-learning exercises. Polls can engage students in lectures by posing questions from the material in real time. In a Bible course, for example, the instructor may discuss a question posed by Jesus in Mark 8:29, “Who do you say that I am?”23 In the text of the New Testament in which Mark is located, the question is answered in various ways in the narrative. A real-time poll engages students by asking them the same question, “Who do you say [vote] that I am?” Poll Everywhere or Kahoot would allow for various answers. An open survey approach, such as is possible with Poll Everywhere, enables students to formulate their answers and post them on the screen. The lecture can continue with the real-time participation by students as a bridge to the next part of the classroom learning experience. General education religion course instructors often struggle with lack of student motivation. Greater course autonomy can increase student motivation with regard to intrinsic goal orientation, task value and selfefficacy.24 Students often appreciate the use of student response systems as part of educational technology.25 Student response systems are useful in gathering feedback regarding course structure; suggestions by students about course components to keep, adjust or add; and input concerning dispersion of the course grade components, all contributing to course autonomy. High rates of feedback are achieved when student input and surveys are an intentional part of the social environment of the classroom.26 Not only are response tools valuable aids in encouraging motivation but also they are effective tools for increased student attention spans. Periodically checking in with students to gauge comprehension with an interactive poll maintains students’ engagement and regains students’ 40 Renate Hood attention. Pear Deck enables such a periodic check-in throughout the lecture. Quizizz likewise is conducive for this task since it is self-paced and allows students to pair up. A Quizizz quiz game allows for real-time viewing, which increases student involvement. When discussing religious subjects, a firm knowledge base is essential. Hence introductory religion courses are typically information heavy. Many students who are unfamiliar with religion are concerned about their academic success in such courses. Proper understanding of course content is important. Ensuring student comprehension of course material leads to greater conceptual understanding and informed religious and ethical discussions. Kahoot, Pear Deck and Quizizz are helpful response systems that provide instant feedback and clarify misconceptions about subject matter. Quizizz furthermore has a “homework” option that can keep a quiz open for one or two weeks. At any point within this window of time, an instructor can discuss the progress in a classroom setting. This approach can reinforce key concepts and assist in students retaining information from class sessions. AnswerGarden enhances learning effectiveness and openness and is particularly helpful in advanced religion classes because it allows instructors to ask a question and the group to provide answers. Most universities have a learning management system such as Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle that includes some form of a discussion board. However, the benefit of AnswerGarden is the element of anonymity. An example of a question asked prior to an advanced religion class is, “Why does suffering exist?” or, “Why does God allow suffering?” Answers gathered provide a guide for small-group or large-group discussions, or can frame the direction of the classroom lecture. Midcourse surveys provide helpful feedback for the instructor and aid in the planning of the second half of the course. These surveys are helpful not only in residential classes but also in hybrid or fully online courses as well.27 Poll questions can include questions regarding specific course design such as course assignments or comprehending course content. Survey questions aimed at students’ openness to discuss various religious views or differing theological stances empower them and provide valuable information. For those students who are hesitant about taking religion courses, student response system tutorial sessions are effective methods for student success. Moreover, student presentations, which are part of both introductory religion courses and advanced religion courses, are greatly enhanced by students using student response systems. Guest-speaker-facilitated religion classes or presentations benefit from the use of response activities as a framework for introducing subject matter and speakers. As student response systems continue to develop and expand, so will their ability to enhance meaningful learning environments for religious studies. Who Do You Vote That I Am? 41 Conclusion Student response systems are among the many helpful technology tools that enhance learning in religion courses. They have proven their effectiveness over the past four decades. Now a regular tool in the twenty-first-century classroom, religion instructors are encouraged to embrace this technology. Students respond positively to implementation of the use of web-based technology, as it facilitates student-centered learning. Student response systems favorably affect student motivation, enhance student interaction and lower students’ apprehension concerning religious studies matters. Notes 1 Richard E. Clark, “Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media,” Review of Educational Research 52 (1983): 453. 2 Stuart Draper and Michael I. Brown, “Increasing Interactivity in Lectures Using an Electronic Voting System,” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20 (2004): 94. 3 George Masikunas, Andreas Panayiotidis, and Linda Burke, “The Use of Electronic Voting Systems in Lectures Within Business and Marketing: A Case Study of Their Impact on Student Learning,” Research in Learning Technology 15 (2007): 20. 4 Gerald Bergtrom, “Clicker Sets as Learning Objects,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 2 (2006): 106. 5 Jane E. Caldwell, “Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips,” Life Sciences Education 6 (2007): 15. 6 Harin Sellahewa, “Using an Online Student Response System in Small Group System: A Pilot Study,” ITALICS: Innovations in Teaching & Learning in Information & Computer Sciences 10 (2011): 5. 7 Catherine H. Crouch and Eric Mazur, “Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results,” American Journal of Physics 69 (2001): 978. 8 Madal Lal Gupta, “Interactive Teaching and Learning by Using Student Response Systems,” The International Journal of Learning 17 (2010): 372, 383. 9 Abram Walton, Scott Homan, Linda Naimi, and Cynthia Tomovic, “Student Perceptions of a Wireless Audience Response System,” Interactive Technology and Smart Education 5 (2008): 214. 10 James T. Boyle and David J. Nicol, “Using Classroom Communication Systems to Support Interaction and Discussion in Large Class Settings,” Association for Learning Technology Journal 3 (2003): 57. 11 Sumangala P. Rao and Stephen E. DiCarlo, “Peer Instruction Improves Performance on Quizzes,” Advances in Physiology Education 24 (2000): 55. 12 Selcuk Karaman, “Effects of Audience Response Systems on Student Achievement and Long-Term Retention,” Social Behaviour and Personality 39 (2011): 1431–1440. Cited in Pete Bridge and Mary-Anne Carmichael, “Audience Response Systems Can Facilitate Communal Course Feedback,” Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 16 (2015): 74. 13 Robin H. Kay and Ann LeSage, “Examining the Benefits and Challenges of Using Audience Response Systems: A Review of the Literature,” Computers and Education 53 (2009): 827. 42 Renate Hood 14 M. Hanley, “Feature Phone Versus Smartphone Usage and Advertising Acceptance Among College Students: A Six-Year Analysis,” (Unpublished manuscript 2010). Cited in Herb Shon and Laurie Smith, “A Review of Poll Everywhere Audience Response System,” Journal of Technology in Human Service 29 (2011): 237. 15 Kjetil L. Nielsen, Gabrielle Hansen, and John B. Stav, “Teaching with Student Response Systems (SRS): Teacher-Centric Aspects That Can Negatively Affect Students’ Experience of Using SRS,” Research in Learning Technology 21 (2013): 4. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Ibid. 19 Sellahewa, “Online Student Response Survey,” 3. 20 Gupta, “Interactive Teaching and Learning,” 380. 21 Bridge and Carmichael, “Audience Response Systems,” 82. 22 Bridge and Carmichael, “Audience Response Systems,” 80. 23 English Standard Version. 24 Teresa Garcia and Paul R. Pintrich, “The Effects of Autonomy on Motivation and Performance in the College Classroom,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 21 (1994): 477. 25 Bridge and Carmichael, “Audience Response Systems,” 82. 26 Ibid. 27 Keith Farwell, “Keeping an Online Class Interesting and Interactive,” Distance Learning 10 (2013): 31. Bibliography Bergtrom, Gerald. “Clicker Sets as Learning Objects.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 2 (2006): 105–110. Boyle, James T., and David J. Nicol. “Using Classroom Communication Systems to Support Interaction and Discussion in Large Class Settings.” Association for Learning Technology Journal 3 (2003): 43–57. Bridge, Pete, and Mary-Ann Carmichael. “Audience Response Systems Can Facilitate Communal Course Feedback.” Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2015): 73–85. Caldwell, Jane E. “Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and BestPractice Tips.” Life Sciences Education 6, no. 1 (2007): 9–20. Clark, Richard E. “Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media.” Review of Educational Research 52 (1983): 445–459. Crouch, Catherine H., and Eric Mazur. “Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results.” American Journal of Physics 69 (2001): 970–978. Draper, Stuart, and Michael I. Brown. “Increasing Interactivity in Lectures Using an Electronic Voting System.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20 (2004): 81–94. Farwell, Keith. “Keeping an Online Class Interesting and Interactive.” Distance Learning 10 (2013): 27–32. Garcia, Teresa, and Paul R. Pintrich. “The Effects of Autonomy on Motivation and Performance in the College Classroom.” Contemporary Educational Psychology 21 (1994): 477–486. Gupta, Madal Lal. “Interactive Teaching and Learning by Using Student Response Systems.” The International Journal of Learning 17 (2010): 371–384. Who Do You Vote That I Am? 43 Hanley, M. “Feature Phone Versus Smartphone Usage and Advertising Acceptance Among College Students: A Six-Year Analysis.” Unpublished manuscript, 2010. Cited in Herb Shon and Laurie Smith. “A Review of Poll Everywhere Audience Response System.” Journal of Technology in Human Service 29 (2011): 237. Karaman, Selcuk. “Effects of Audience Response Systems on Student Achievement and Long-Term Retention.” Social Behaviour and Personality 39 (2011): 1431–1440. Cited in Bridge and Carmichael. “Audience Response Systems Can Facilitate Communal Course Feedback.” Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2015): 73–85. Kay, Robin H., and Ann LeSage. “Examining the Benefits and Challenges of Using Audience Response Systems: A Review of the Literature.” Computers and Education 53 (2009): 819–827. Masikunas, George, Andreas Panayiotidis, and Linda Burke. “The Use of Electronic Voting Systems in Lectures Within Business and Marketing: A Case Study of Their Impact on Student Learning.” Research in Learning Technology 15 (2007): 3–20. Nielsen, Kjetil L., Gabrielle Hansen, and John B. Stav. “Teaching with Student Response Systems (SRS): Teacher-Centric Aspects That Can Negatively Affect Students’ Experience of Using SRS.” Research in Learning Technology 21 (2013): 1–13. Rao, Sumangala P., and Stephen E. DiCarlo. “Peer Instruction Improves Performance on Quizzes.” Advances in Physiology Education 24 (2000): 51–55. Sellahewa, Harin. “Using an Online Student Response System in Small Group Teaching: A Pilot Study.” ITALICS: Innovations in Teaching & Learning in Information & Computer Sciences 10 (2011): 1–5. Walton, Abram, Scott Homan, Linda Naimi, and Cynthia Tomovic. “Student Perceptions of a Wireless Audience Response System.” Interactive Technology and Smart Education 5 (2008): 214–229. 4 Teaching Religion With Clickers Kristy L. SlominskiTeaching Religion With Clickers Kristy L. Slominski Student response systems such as clickers can be used to address various challenges of teaching religious studies. These multiple-choice remotes or mobile apps, which allow users to select an answer and see a real-time chart of the aggregate responses, encourage students to take stances on complex religious issues and to acknowledge the range of perspectives within the classroom. Students using clickers are less likely to conform to the answers of their peers compared to hand raising, thus maximizing the presence of diversity on the topic of religion.1 Moreover, response systems provide an opportunity to integrate students’ assumptions and perspectives about religion without putting individuals on the spot for their beliefs. Within the secular settings of public colleges and universities, where religious studies professors might be cautious about students sharing their own religious beliefs, this controlled form of input is especially useful. Clickers transform deeply personal viewpoints into indirect data, providing distance to aid critical analysis and a level of anonymity that protects students from having to identify themselves visibly with subject matter that is academically scrutinized in the classroom. While clickers easily translate into a variety of educational settings, this chapter focuses on teaching religious studies within state-funded institutions of higher education. It is informed by my experiences using iClicker remotes to teach introductory courses on American religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and courses on religious diversity and world religions at Georgia State University.2 I initially began using clickers to record and manage attendance, participation and quiz scores within classes that ranged from 90 to 200 undergraduates. Although clickers are often associated with large classes, many of their uses and advantages can be adapted for smaller settings.3 I have increasingly come to appreciate their benefits for gathering feedback, soliciting opinions, prompting discussion and highlighting diverse viewpoints regarding religion. Benefits of Clickers in the Classroom Although a growing variety of mobile apps are available with similar functions, clicker remotes are particularly advantageous for instructors Teaching Religion With Clickers 45 who do not permit cell phones within their classrooms. The main reason for banning cell phones is to avoid the distractions that texting and other noneducational phone functions pose to the users and those around them. According to one study, 90 percent of students reported that they notice when other students check their phones, which pulls attention away from class material.4 When professors are distracted by students’ cell phone habits, it disrupts the learning environment for everyone. Several studies indicate that cell phone usage in class negatively affects academic performance, and substantial research confirms that “students cannot multitask nearly as effectively as they think they can.”5 Clicker remotes can also bypass the challenges of inconsistent wireless service and cell phone plan limitations that students sometimes face with mobile apps. For classes that require participation as part of the grade, clicker remotes are a reliable data gathering option. Remote prices range between $20 and $55 depending on the brand. At the universities where I have taught, many students needed iClicker remotes for other classes and therefore already had the product or could borrow it from someone not using it that semester. They also had the option of selling them back to the campus bookstore at the end of the semester, making costs comparable to the subscriptions required of some mobile apps. Whether remotes or mobile devices are used, most of the examples described next can be adapted for a variety of student response systems. The general benefits of student response systems are widely cited, although little work has been done on their implementation for the teaching of religion.6 As Derek Bruff has summarized, most studies agree that clicker implementation “often increases student attendance, participation, and enjoyment of classes and provides students and instructors with useful feedback on student learning.”7 Clickers fit the preferences of Millennial students for instantaneous feedback, personalization and opportunities to share opinions using technology. As John Immerwahr has emphasized, members of today’s “thumb generation” integrate technology into most aspects of their lives and are often very positive about sharing opinions through technologically mediated means.8 Students who are generally not outspoken in class tend to like clickers more than those who are comfortable raising their hands, since verbal participation is not a problem for the latter group.9 Another study indicates that a student’s level of enjoyment of clickers does not necessarily correlate to his or her performance in the course. While students with lower technology proficiency had a less favorable view of clickers than those with high proficiency, the former had stronger levels of engagement and better grades than the latter.10 Clickers allow each student to contribute and engage materials regularly in class. They let users provide anonymous feedback on the course, comprehension, progress and interests while also supplying incentives to come prepared, opportunities to take stances and to learn about the opinions and assumptions of peers and chances to test their understanding 46 Kristy L. Slominski of readings and lectures. Student-generated data can be used to inspire discussions and to make lectures more relevant to student experiences. Prior to introducing a topic, clicker questions pique students’ interest and alert them to critical issues, while those asked after a lesson assess their grasp of key points and provide a chance for them to further process the material. Clicker questions alter the traditional lecture format, resetting students’ attention.11 They also save paper, time otherwise spent hand grading and much of the guesswork regarding students’ interests and command of the material. To maximize the benefits of clickers, especially for increasing attendance and engagement, researchers recommend making them a part of the course grade. Most clickers coordinate with classroom management systems such as Blackboard to make uploading and managing grades simple. I generally assign clicker scores 10 to 20 percent of the final course grade to create a low-pressure incentive to attend class, to read before class, to study for quizzes and to stay actively engaged in our sessions. Students earn up to six points in each class period through three quiz questions and three opinion or feedback questions. Students therefore earn 50 percent participation for the day by just clicking and full credit for answering all quiz questions correctly. Since the iClicker system lets instructors manually assign and adjust points after class, on some days, I offer just one opinion question worth three participation points. At the end of the semester, I drop the three lowest clicker scores for each student, which includes the zero points received for days absent. The software’s flexibility, automatic grading and compatibility with classroom management systems make managing attendance, participation and quiz scores significantly easier for my large courses. While the benefits outweigh the costs for my own teaching style and some of my teaching contexts, it is important to acknowledge limitations of this technology. Teachers might find it difficult to adjust to clicker software or hardware, and some clicker settings might not sync with university systems. Some will find that the process of waiting for clicker responses (typically about 45 seconds depending on the question’s complexity) creates awkward interruptions in the flow of class, although this helped me to become more comfortable with silences and to improve my transitions between activities. Professors can also talk during the polling time to offer additional factors to consider as students finalize their selections. Most instructors integrate clicker questions within PowerPoint or other presentation software, providing an additional hurdle for those who prefer to teach without computers. Furthermore, it is difficult to develop effective multiple-choice questions that encourage critical thinking and do not feel redundant. Fortunately, many resources exist to assist instructors with this challenge.12 One risk is that topics become oversimplified when reduced to multiplechoice formats. However, assessing students through electronically graded Teaching Religion With Clickers 47 quizzes is sometimes necessary within large classes that do not have teaching assistants and for non-tenure-track educators who have heavy teaching loads and minimal institutional support. Pairing clicker questions with discussions or writing tasks helps to prevent students from believing that all issues boil down to A, B, C, D or E. A study by Stephanie Cole and Gregory Kosc has affirmed the importance of discussions based on clicker questions, since these “offer students an opportunity to instruct one another, and to start working with the material while still in class.”13 Another study encourages professors to turn the multiple-choice format into an advantage by using it to explore the limitations of survey methods.14 Since religious studies uses sociological surveys, this is a way for students to engage with one of our discipline’s methods. One student, for example, told me that although he enjoyed seeing the diversity of religious opinions, sometimes the choices were worded in ways that did not match his views. This realization provided a teaching moment to highlight the pros and cons of survey methods, and the need to analyze how questions and answer choices are phrased. Clicker Questions for Religious Studies At the beginning of a course, I use clickers to get to know my students. For example, I ask them how many prior religious studies courses they have taken to determine the class’s degree of knowledge about the discipline. Showing the results assures those who select zero courses that they are not alone and that I know that not everyone has religious studies experience. Clickers also assess their primary goal for the course, with options such as “to learn about my own religion,” “to learn about a variety of religions,” “to learn about history and culture,” “to complete a university requirement” or “other.” Choosing an answer requires them to reflect on what they want to get out of the course, which, hopefully, reminds them that there is something at stake and that I am committed to helping them achieve their goals. It allows me to understand their motivations better while also providing them information about the discipline as I walk through how the course could contribute to each of the goals. I introduce strategies to maximize their potential success in each area, emphasizing the need for them to be actively engaged in their own learning. For those who indicate that their main goal is to learn about their own religion, I elaborate on the differences between learning a religion within a faith-based setting and learning about it within a secular university from the interdisciplinary academic perspective of religious studies. By encouraging students to reflect on their own views and then translating their beliefs into analyzable data, clickers can help to mediate the gap between some students’ goals of developing their own faith and my objective of teaching about religious diversity from a nonconfessional standpoint. 48 Kristy L. Slominski Throughout the course, I use clickers to familiarize and engage students with the core concerns of religious studies. In order to introduce the discipline’s ongoing debates about the definition of religion and to guide students in critical thinking, I present a variety of scenarios and ask whether or not they constitute “religion.”15 For example, is practicing yoga every morning a religious practice? Is sending out Christmas cards? Is the idea that “good things happen to good people” a religious belief? For the various scenarios, students use their remotes to select yes, no or it depends. This requires them to think about their own definition of religion (as well as those introduced in class) and how “religion” might apply—or not—to the situation. I then have students turn to a partner and explain the reasons for their choice. This is followed by a large-group discussion of reasons why the example should or should not be considered religious, including unknown factors that could affect the assessment. As we contemplate why someone might choose “it depends,” students often raise the issue of religious identification (Do the people consider themselves to be religious? Do they connect these practices or beliefs to a particular religious system?) or the degree to which the practices integrate religious teachings (Does the yoga practitioner know anything about Hinduism? Do the Christmas cards include Christian references?). Pairing clicker questions with discussions provides opportunities to consider the complexity of religion, to review working definitions of religion for the course and to acknowledge alternative definitions held by academics and religious people. As a follow-up, you can alter a scenario slightly to see whether certain details affect their answers, thus pushing students to confront various assumptions and biases. For example, I might describe the yoga practitioner as an immigrant from India or a white college student, exploring whether and why social location and race may affect views about the behavior. As part of the process of getting to know the discipline, I inquire about the methods of religious studies scholars. In one exercise, students take a stance on the best way to measure religion: either through membership in religious institutions, attendance at worship services, self-identification, strength of beliefs or degree of practice. The choices introduce them to examples of survey approaches, and the responses reveal which aspects students privilege as the core markers of religion. It opens discussion about methodological challenges, the advantages and disadvantages of each way of quantifying religion and distinctions between theological and religious studies approaches. Challenging students to defend their initial perspective sharpens critical thinking, argumentation and communication skills. By showing the clicker graph—which often reveals a range of selections—students see that their ways of viewing religion are not the only ways and that each choice has limitations for understanding the complexity of religion. Teaching Religion With Clickers 49 To encourage students to think about the relationship between academics and society, I integrate questions about the roles and responsibilities of religious studies scholars. This type of question encourages students at research universities to consider the potential effects and applications of research. For example, I might say that the government is suspicious about a new religious movement and is seeking advice about how to regulate the group. Should religious studies scholars get involved? After students answer, I inquire about possible reasons that someone might select yes, no or it depends. Related questions examine whether academic experts have a responsibility to testify in court, to speak to the press or to publish their findings in formats and styles accessible to nonacademic audiences. These discussions emphasize connections between the way religion is studied and the effect of this knowledge on the treatment of religious people. During quizzes, I use clickers to assess understanding of the assigned reading and course concepts. I also add easy recall questions to test how many students completed the reading. As Cole and Kosc have pointed out, having students first consult their textbooks or one another on questions that the majority of students answered incorrectly is often more effective than simply telling them the correct answer.16 In addition to providing incentives and reminders to read before lectures—which helps students to better contextualize that day’s lecture and discussions— quizzes allow students to check their understanding of the material, to learn which concepts I consider important enough to assess and to familiarize themselves with my way of phrasing questions in preparation for exams. In my experience, many students appreciate low-stakes clicker quizzes because they can see and discuss the answers immediately, and it motivates them to do the reading before class. At the same time, the instant feedback allows me to address significant misunderstandings promptly. For introductory religious studies courses, quickly correcting misconceptions—especially those that might fuel religious intolerance— has the potential to affect how students discuss religion and interact with religious people outside of the classroom. Another way to check comprehension and to stimulate active engagement with course material is to ask comparative questions such as, “How many differences can you name between Protestantism and Catholicism? (a) zero, (b) one to three, (c) four to six, (d) seven to nine, or (e) more than ten.” This type of question invokes students’ competitive nature and causes some of them to acknowledge that they should be able to name more differences at this point in the semester. After logging their answers, I then have them turn to a partner and list the differences, which we later compile as a group. It requires that they first consider their own knowledge of the topic, then add to that information by listening to peers and, finally, hear a review as I summarize the conversations. This means that students are exposed to three versions of the information compared to 50 Kristy L. Slominski the one account they would have received in a lecture alone. Since discussions are based on student-generated ideas, the resulting lists are often more creative than my original lecture notes. Before exams, clickers allow students to shape the review session by asking them which religions and concepts to review. Often, the terms and themes that receive the most votes are not the ones I assume need review. The anonymity of clickers lets students be honest about the concepts that confuse them, since some people are embarrassed to raise questions if they think others already understand. Numerous students in my courses have indicated that the review questions were their favorite type of clicker questions because they resulted in very useful review sessions. This is in line with research findings that students perceived one of the most beneficial functions of clickers to be their assistance with exam preparation.17 There are numerous ways in which clickers can enable students to shape a course, from choosing between learning activities to deciding which topic to cover next. I sometimes offer a choice between the case studies that the class will learn since myriad examples could be used to teach the basic features of each religion. To underscore this point and to encourage students to continue learning on their own, I share optional resources about the case studies that did not “win” the clicker survey. Clicker classrooms have the potential to become more democratic about the use of class time and the direction of the course, creating a more student-centered learning environment through lessons personalized to the needs and interests of the group. Such variation in my teaching from class to class—especially when I teach multiple sections of the same course in one semester—also helps me to avoid monotony. After exams, I use clickers to determine which resources and study strategies were effective. I may ask students to identify which of the following was most helpful for exam preparation: making vocabulary cards, filling out the comparison chart, completing the review crossword, rereading texts and notes or meeting in a study group. This prompts a discussion of how to improve study habits for the next exam and reminds students that other methods exist if their previous ones failed them. Such questions also reveal which resources I should continue to offer or encourage. As a way to assess student reception of the course material, I ask them of which topic or religion they have learned the most. For example, after the first unit of my world religions course, I ask whether they learned more new information about indigenous traditions, Hinduism or Buddhism. Their selections, along with discussion, indicate where the greatest knowledge growth occurs and why this might be. Determining which aspects students deem most educational helps me to adapt those effective strategies into other parts of the course. I employ clickers in a variety of ways in relation to in-class and takehome assignments. When classroom activities include multiple steps, students use their remotes to tell me when they have progressed from step Teaching Religion With Clickers 51 A to step B and so forth. Consulting the clicker chart, therefore, tells the groups whether or not they need to speed up. If it shows that some are about to finish early, it prompts me to give further instructions on how to use the extra time, thus reducing downtime in the classroom. When introducing an activity or assignment, a clicker question—or several— checks whether students fully comprehend the task. For new writing projects, clickers can measure knowledge of library research and source gathering processes. At various points before paper or project deadlines, I often ask, “How far along are you?” and list the various stages of the project as the options. This question reviews the steps involved and tells them whether they are ahead of or behind their classmates. Students can be extremely influenced by their peers, so this tactic provides another level of encouragement beyond deadline reminders from the professor. To further assist with assignments, I use clickers to teach and assess reading and writing skills. This is important given the large number of nonmajors and nonhumanities students in lower-division religious studies courses. For close readings, I present a passage and pose a series of questions about it, such as, “Who is the audience of this passage?” or, “Which course concept does this exemplify?” I also ask them to identify the best paraphrase of the passage. Using this mini-exercise, we discuss why the wrong answers are incorrect and how to improve paraphrasing within their papers. A similar strategy can be done with citations by having them select which citation represents the format requested for their assignment. Another approach is to post writing samples and have students grade them based on specific criteria, requiring them to evaluate various writing techniques and to articulate what makes them effective or ineffective. This exercise could be used as practice for peer reviewing. Seeing how peers would grade the same paper can create more consistency across the peer-reviewing process and perhaps provide a reality check for what an A+ paper in a religious studies course looks like. As we dig deeper into the topics of the course and the parameters of religious studies, I integrate more clicker questions that ask students to take stances on controversial issues. I appreciate this function the most because clickers can be used to scaffold and otherwise structure important discussions. Using their remotes, students record their positions on a broad debate and then brainstorm possible factors that might influence people to select each option. Phrasing the discussion broadly allows students to acknowledge and discuss the complicated factors freely without needing to defend their own answers. Next, I introduce specific details of a related case, followed by a reevaluation using the original clicker question to see whether the concrete case study changed their positions. This serves to reinforce the complexity and historically situated nature of many debates, to show that it is okay to revise conclusions in the presence of new information and to provide visual evidence of the variety of opinions present within the classroom. While often there is some shift in 52 Kristy L. Slominski reactions after discussing specific cases, I am careful to remind students that the public university is a place of diverse opinions. The goal is to encourage students to develop thoughtful, evidence-based stances and respectful strategies of discussion rather than enforce any one particular viewpoint. For example, I often ask students to weigh in on legal cases concerning religious freedom, challenging them to recognize the intricacy of these situations. On the topic of Native American religion, I introduce the following: a mountain within a national park is considered both a sacred site and the best place for rock climbing. Would you (a) allow both groups to use the site, (b) ban rock climbing, (c) ban religious rituals, (d) designate separate areas for climbing and rituals or (e) designate separate times for climbing and ritual. After they answer and discuss the choices, I then introduce the actual case to which I am alluding: the controversy involving rock climbers on Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a site considered sacred to a number of indigenous tribes, including the Lakota. This case is particularly useful for introducing First Amendment issues. Here, claims to religious freedom are in tension with the “separation of church and state” since the site is designated as public land within a national park. It is also valuable for discussing the history of governmental policies and military actions against Native Americans, Native American religious views of the land, various rulings on what constitutes “religion” within America and the fact that decisions regarding the treatment of religion are complex and ongoing. The National Park Services’ resolution in this case aligned most closely with the option of designating separate times for climbing and ritual, since they instituted a voluntary ban on climbing in the month of June, when a number of sacred rituals occur. However, I emphasize how none of the choices would have made everyone involved happy, so there is no “perfect” answer in this complicated reality. Prefacing this case with a clicker question meant that the students were already thinking about what they might do, were listening for factors that could change their stance and, hopefully, had more of a stake in learning about the background and outcome of the situation. As one study of clickers argued, asking students to take a stand increases their “emotional investment” in an issue.18 I found this to be true for my class; students were able to envision different perspectives while engaging their emotions productively. One student explained during office hours that being encouraged to take a stance on various cases gave her a chance to reflect on her own religious beliefs, which was one of her goals for the course. Clickers let students connect their personal experiences and viewpoints to the course material without encouraging confessional debates. As a religious studies professor at a state university, I discourage students from sharing their own religious beliefs during in-class discussions. This extends to the types of questions that they ask, and I spend time teaching Teaching Religion With Clickers 53 them how to translate faith-based curiosities into critically framed academic questions that can be answered using the tools of religious studies. There are many reasons for my cautiousness surrounding students’ religious commitments, from the desire to keep students from proselytizing to my concerns about blurring the lines between faith-based and secular studies of religion. At the same time, however, I cannot completely overlook this important facet of students’ lives, especially because it affects how some of them engage (or resist) the course material. In ongoing debates about how to teach world religion courses and whether professors of religion should engage with students’ beliefs, many have concluded, “Ignoring students’ personal interests in religion is counterproductive for effective learning.”19 Clickers provide a more controlled way of acknowledging and soliciting students’ opinions about religious situations. Asking a clicker question creates the space for students to think through any personal relevance that the topic has for them and then share their perspectives in a limited way. The answer chart enables us to build a discussion around the compiled data, which can be analyzed without putting any one student on the spot for his or her viewpoint. For each choice, I ask them to brainstorm some reasons why their peers might have made that selection. This requires them to consider other perspectives without feeling the need to explain or defend their own answers (although I am sure that many students share their own rationales as they explain why someone else might select a certain answer). Compiling student views in this way transforms personal stances into indirect data, allowing students to transition from being the subjects of inquiry to the critical investigators. While some questions can be adapted for use without clickers, and some feedback could be gathered through hand raising, clickers offer a visual, formal way to acknowledge students’ answers and perspectives, and a private means of communicating with their peers and with me. Anonymity is important for sensitive topics relating to religion so that students do not feel the need to self-censor if they think that their instructor or peers would find their stance unpopular. When I post the graph of responses and keep the poll open during opinion questions, students also see if someone switches answers during discussion, emphasizing the message that hearing multiple perspectives can change attitudes about religion. Perhaps more than the transformation of students, clickers can inspire the “transformation of teachers.” As one study argued, the effective use of clickers can “help instructors move from teacher-focused approaches to more learner-focused approaches in teaching.”20 The questions discussed earlier highlight how, in many ways, clickers helped me to teach about religion. I have become a more creative teacher as I strive to find useful and varied ways of incorporating clickers and structuring multiple-choice questions. I am better at “listening” to student responses, 54 Kristy L. Slominski integrating diverse viewpoints and adapting my class plans based on the surprises and feedback. Most importantly for religious studies, clickers enable me to balance the need to acknowledge the views and experiences that students bring into the classroom, including religious commitments, with my objective of teaching students how to analyze religion from secular academic perspectives. Notes 1 Jeffrey R. Stowell, Terrah Oldham, and Dan Bennett, “Using Student Response Systems (‘Clickers’) to Combat Conformity and Shyness,” Teaching of Psychology 37, no. 2 (April 2010): 135. 2 The iClicker remotes that I assigned run on the iClicker Classic software, which uses an instructor base and does not require an Internet connection. See www.iclicker.com/. Another widely used remote system is Turning Technologies: www.turningtechnologies.com/. 3 Hannah Sevian and William E. Robinson, “Clickers Promote Learning in All Kinds of Classes‑ Small and Large, Graduate and Undergraduate, Lecture and Lab,” Journal of College Science Teaching 40, no. 3 (January 2011): 14–18. 4 Michael J. Berry and Aubrey Westfall, “Dial D for Distraction: The Making and Breaking of Cell Phone Policies in the College Classroom,” College Teaching 63, no. 2 (2015): 65. 5 Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff and Scott Titsworth, “The Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on Student Learning,” Communication Education 62, no. 3 (2013): 233–252. Quotation from Douglas K. Duncan, Angel R. Hoekstra and Bethany R. Wilcox, “Digital Devices, Distraction, and Student Performance: Does In-Class Cell Phone Use Reduce Learning?” Astronomy Education Review 11, no. 1 (2012): 1. 6 The primary teaching journal for scholars of religion, Teaching Theology and Religion, does not contain articles that exclusively address student response systems as of June 2017. Only one article mentions clickers, but the discussion is limited to one paragraph. Amy DeRogatis et al., “Teaching Very Large Classes,” Teaching Theology and Religion 17, no. 4 (2014): 357. 7 Derek Bruff, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 5. 8 John Immerwahr, “Engaging the ‘Thumb Generation’ with Clickers,” Teaching Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2009): 233–245. 9 Stephanie Cole and Gregory Kosc, “Quit Surfing and Start Clicking: One Professor’s Effort to Combat the Problems of Teaching the U.S. Survey in a Large Lecture Hall,” History Teacher 43, no. 3 (2010): 407. 10 Jennifer A. Zapf and Adolfo J. Garcia, “The Influence of Tech-Savvyness and Clicker Use on Student Learning,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 5, no. 1 (2011): 1. 11 Diane M. Bunce, Elizabeth A. Flens, and Kelly Y. Neiles, “How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers,” Journal of Chemical Education 87, no. 12 (December 2010): 1438–1443. 12 Roberta Sullivan, “Principles for Constructing Good Clicker Questions: Going Beyond Rote Learning and Stimulating Active Engagement with Course Content,” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 37, no. 3 (March 2009): 335–347. 13 Cole and Kosc, “Quit Surfing,” 403. Teaching Religion With Clickers 55 14 Stephanie Mollborn and Angel Hoekstra, “ ‘A Meeting of Minds’: Using Clickers for Critical Thinking and Discussion in Large Sociology Classes,” Teaching Sociology 38, no. 1 (2010): 25. 15 In this approach, I was influenced by Catherine L. Albanese’s Introduction to American Religion course at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Although she did not use clickers, her questions about whether scenarios constituted “religion” always prompted a handful of students to debate the issue and raise important questions about the boundaries of religious life. 16 Cole and Kosc, “Quit Surfing,” 403. 17 Marc Patry, “Clickers in Large Classes: From Student Perceptions Towards an Understanding of Best Practices,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3, no. 2 (2009): 9. 18 Immerwahr, “Engaging,” 236. 19 Brian H. Smith, “Teaching the Devout Student: Faith and Scholarship in the Classroom,” Teaching Theology and Religion 16, no. 2 (April 2013): 133. See also Carolyn M. Jones Medine, Todd Penner, and Marjorie Lehman, “Forum: Teaching With, Against, and To Faith,” Teaching Theology & Religion 18, no. 4 (October 2015): 363–386. 20 Yifat Ben-David Kolikant, Denise Drane, and Susanna Calkins, “ ‘Clickers’ as Catalysts for Transformation of Teachers,” College Teaching 58, no. 4 (2010): 127. Bibliography Berry, Michael J., and Aubrey Westfall. “Dial D for Distraction: The Making and Breaking of Cell Phone Policies in the College Classroom.” College Teaching 63, no. 2 (2015): 62‑71. Bruff, Derek. Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. Bunce, Diane M., Elizabeth A. Flens, and Kelly Y. Neiles. “How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers.” Journal of Chemical Education 87, no. 12 (December 2010): 1438–1443. Cole, Stephanie, and Gregory Kosc. “Quit Surfing and Start Clicking: One Professor’s Effort to Combat the Problems of Teaching the U.S. Survey in a Large Lecture Hall.” History Teacher 43, no. 3 (2010): 397–410. DeRogatis, Amy, Kenneth Honerkamp, Justin McDaniel, Carolyn Medine, Vivian-Lee Nyitray, and Thomas Pearson. “Teaching Very Large Classes.” Teaching Theology and Religion 17, no. 4 (2014): 352–368. Duncan, Douglas K., Angel R. Hoekstra, and Bethany R. Wilcox. “Digital Devices, Distraction, and Student Performance: Does In-Class Cell Phone Use Reduce Learning?” Astronomy Education Review 11, no. 1 (2012): 1–4. Immerwahr, John. “Engaging the ‘Thumb Generation’ with Clickers.” Teaching Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2009): 233–245. Jones Medine, Carolyn M., Todd Penner, and Marjorie Lehman. “Forum: Teaching With, Against, and To Faith.” Teaching Theology & Religion 18, no. 4 (October 2015): 363–386. Kolikant, Yifat Ben-David, Denise Drane, and Susanna Calkins. “ ‘Clickers’ as Catalysts for Transformation of Teachers.” College Teaching 58, no. 4 (2010): 127–135. Kuznekoff, Jeffrey H., and Scott Titsworth. “The Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on Student Learning.” Communication Education 62, no. 3 (2013): 233–252. 56 Kristy L. Slominski Mollborn, Stephanie, and Angel Hoekstra. “ ‘A Meeting of Minds’: Using Clickers for Critical Thinking and Discussion in Large Sociology Classes.” Teaching Sociology 38, no. 1 (2010): 18–27. Patry, Marc. “Clickers in Large Classes: From Student Perceptions Towards an Understanding of Best Practices.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3, no. 2 (2009): 1–11. Sevian, Hannah, and William E. Robinson. “Clickers Promote Learning in All Kinds of Classes- Small and Large, Graduate and Undergraduate, Lecture and Lab.” Journal of College Science Teaching 40, no. 3 (January 2011): 14–18. Smith, Brian H. “Teaching the Devout Student: Faith and Scholarship in the Classroom.” Teaching Theology and Religion 16, no. 2 (April 2013): 132–149. Stowell, Jeffrey R., Terrah Oldham, and Dan Bennett. “Using Student Response Systems (‘Clickers’) to Combat Conformity and Shyness.” Teaching of Psychology 37, no. 2 (April 2010): 135–140. Sullivan, Roberta. “Principles for Constructing Good Clicker Questions: Going Beyond Rote Learning and Stimulating Active Engagement with Course Content.” Journal of Educational Technology Systems 37, no. 3 (March 2009): 335–347. Zapf, Jennifer A., and Adolfo J. Garcia. “The Influence of Tech-Savvyness and Clicker Use on Student Learning.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 5, no. 1 (2011): 1–11. 5 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape Kyle M. Oliver“Seeing” the Sacred Landscape A Digital Geographies Approach to Contextualizing Ancient Sites in Religious Education Kyle M. Oliver Introduction: The Case for Context When my wife, now an Episcopal priest, returned from the Holy Land in the final year of her M.Div. studies, she brought with her a renewed and deepened excitement for the scripture and history of our faith. This formation phenomenon had become familiar to me as a student and then staff member at a seminary that encouraged intercultural immersion experiences, especially in sites important to the development of the Anglican/Episcopal tradition. Those who have been on a trip like this, or spoken with someone who has, will know the kind of enthusiasm I mean. For example, my wife and others on the Palestine of Jesus Pilgrimage testified to a better understanding of the role that walking played in Jesus’s ministry. To include such trips in seminary curricula is part of a broader strategy that Foster et al. call in their landmark study of clergy education “pedagogies of contextualization.”1 This approach acknowledges the “dynamic character of the content and agency of contexts”—both those where the trainees will serve and those that helped form the traditions for which these students will serve as stewards and guides.2 Of course, learners need not literally travel in order to explore the context of scripture and religious practice. For example, in a recent “Race Matters” blog post for the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Wil Gafney provides a detailed description of the activities that support her introductory Hebrew Bible course’s objective to introduce “the West Asian, East African and ancient Near Eastern contexts of the Hebrew Bible” to students who rarely understand even the “basic regional geography”—let alone, for example, the “white cultural constructions that have been imported onto and into the text.”3 These activities include exploring linguistic connections to other Afro-Asiatic languages, conducting detailed map work and studying the problematic “visual representations of Egyptians, Israelites and other ancient peoples as Europeans” in 58 Kyle M. Oliver widely used popular, educational and devotional resources.4 Her discussion underscores the importance of sophisticated contextual understanding, not only for the purpose of treating the scriptures with integrity but also for decentering whiteness in contemporary church and classroom. Although I have chosen the two concrete examples earlier from my own primary setting, Christian seminary education, I hope it is clear that the importance of context extends to all areas of religious education and religious studies. Even the earliest effort I could find to establish learning standards in American religious education presented as a model Bible curriculum that devoted two of its five themes to substantially contextual questions rather than to content as such.5 A century later, we live in an era of pervasive religious illiteracy and increasing exposure to religious diversity.6 Against this backdrop, it becomes even more urgent for us to teach and learn about difference generously and knowledgeably7— toward what Mary Hess calls a “community of communities” understanding of faith identity.8 That cannot happen in an environment where believers and nonbelievers ignore the historical, sociocultural and geophysical contexts that nurtured and continue to nurture their own faiths (if any) and the faiths of their neighbors. This chapter focuses on a very particular pedagogy of contextualization common to religious education classrooms of many faiths, learning contexts and grade levels: teaching about important religious sites. In particular, our goal is to help students encounter these sites. Pilgrimages and immersions are the pedagogy of contextualization par excellence, as my wife and her travel companions can attest. Consider their experience as it relates to the contextual learning activities in Gafney’s Biblical Studies course. Certainly, the pilgrims experienced or re-experienced the linguistic distance between their native English (or other Indo-European tongue) and the Afro-Asiatic Hebrew and Arabic (both modern and ancient) that surrounded them while in the Holy Land. The students also embodied (by foot and by bus ride) a great deal of “map work”—hence the comments about appreciating how far Jesus and his disciples walked. Finally, the pilgrims met not “visual representations” of Middle Easterners but actual people living in the region, most of them nonwhite. Of course, a physical visit has plenty of pedagogical limitations besides being prohibitively expensive and otherwise inappropriate for a significant majority of religious education contexts. Perhaps a virtual visit offers some of the best of both worlds. Such an experience is now easily and inexpensively available through new media technologies such as searchable religious photo, sound and video archives; interactive and annotatable mapping software; and even virtual reality tours. Learners can see the sites, their surroundings and the people making religious meaning in these landscapes. They can take in something of the language, the “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 59 visual and sonic culture and the ritual spaces. And they can do so in an increasingly high-fidelity manner that privileges first-person perspectives and even simulated embodiment. Critical Tool: New Digital Geographies Although this is a practical volume, I believe a small amount of theory is necessary for asking sound pedagogical questions about this endeavor. It is with this need in mind that I introduce the new digital geographies. Literacy scholar and educational anthropologist Lalitha Vasudevan defines digital geographies as “emerging landscapes that are being produced through the confluence of new communicative practices and available media and technologies.”9 She gives the example of photo-sharing application Flickr, engagement with which constructs a (hybrid) digital geography that connects the physical spaces where users take the photographs, the tools and environments (both physical and digital) in which users edit them and the online platform where they upload, explore and comment on their own and others’ creations.10 Moreover, Vasudevan notes that mobile devices with Internet access contribute to the fluidity with which learners can move among, communicate in and make connections between physical spaces and online spaces.11 In a related piece, she and Kevin Leander further expand this multimodal understanding of hybrid spatiality while discussing the “cycling” behavior of a teenager playing an online video game and switching rapidly between the overhead map view of a planet and the virtually embodied view of the player’s avatar moving through the landscape.12 In this final sense, any visitor navigating a physical religious site with help from a smartphone mapping application is having a digital geographies experience. I find this theoretical lens useful for a discussion of religious educational site-seeing because it extends rather than substitutes for our pre-Internet experience of place, and because it allows us to ground our thinking in everyday experiences of hybrid spatiality. Indeed, nearly all of us directly experience digital geographies as we engage common, integrated social practices.13 For example, I was recently quite mesmerized by Facebook posts from a colleague in congregational ministry, whose trip to the Holy Land served as the opportunity to create a digital geography connecting the physical sites she visited to the hybrid community she convenes among Facebook friends—many of them members of the congregation she and I serve together. Here are a few representative examples of her photo annotations (see also Figure 5.1): 1. Followed the pilgrim path in Jerusalem, in Gethsemane, with its ancient olive trees and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Crowds and more crowds like the Passion story. 60 Kyle M. Oliver 2. The place of the Incarnation at Bethlehem. Where the wall divides the traditional “shepherd’s fields,” and people’s hearts. Lord, have mercy. 3. A day in the desert: Masada, Qumran, Jericho. Hot dry air and the extremity of devotion, zeal, and ongoing desperation. 4. Our last day. One more splash in the Mediterranean at Jaffa, and a final prayer at Emmaus. Now to figure out how to share this all with others!14 Figure 5.1 Informal Religious Education Through a Digital Geography Connecting Bethlehem and a Congregational Minister’s Facebook Followers15 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 61 To my reading, her contemplative tone and accessible brevity reflect a range of implicit design considerations in constructing this hybrid educational space. She knows her followers are unlikely to read lengthy captions in the course of their casual encounters with her content in the midst of everyday life. She understands that the visual mode is likely more effective than the text mode in communicating both a general “sense of place” and the spiritual impact of the sites she is visiting. Finally, she chooses in her role as a faith leader visiting one religiously diverse setting (Israel/Palestine) and serving another (New York City’s Upper West Side) to use a prayerful rather than an analytical tone and, where possible, to highlight the shared anguish of religious conflict. Both Vasudevan’s definition of digital geographies and my ministry colleague’s example of informal instruction within them foreground for us some central opportunities and challenges facing educators who wish to use new media to help their students explore religious sites. In my view, these include the following interrelated principles: 1. New media tools and spaces provide finite, selective and socially constructed representations of the sites we want our students to encounter. A great many sociocultural, geopolitical, technical and temporal considerations determine our students’ access to ancient sites via new digital geographies.16 While there is no “neutral” way to visit a site, including in person,17 both ideology and happenstance shape mediated experiences still more significantly. As Gafney’s discussion of representation exemplifies,18 this selectivity and shaping is not limited to new media representations of ancient religious cultures and locations. Nevertheless, when a mediated experience promises to be immersive, to simulate the experience of being “really there,” it may be harder for students (and teachers) to identify, critically, how the people who designed and implemented the hybrid experience shaped it even in unintentional ways. For example, Christian vlogger/educator Matthew Moretz created a two-part YouTube series19 re-enacting and explaining a Stations of the Cross devotional experience as part of his Father Matthew Presents series. These videos are a useful (and free) teaching resources created by a gifted amateur media maker. One obvious way Moretz’s perspective frames the immersion experience is through the very decision to present a tour of Jerusalem as a Stations of the Cross activity. There’s nothing wrong with this choice, but it shapes the literal path Moretz takes through the city as well as the commentary he presents at stops along the way. A Jewish or Muslim guide would have a different story to tell—a different route with different stops and verbal annotations. It’s also worth noting how complex some of these design decisions can become for resource creators and how that complexity trickles down 62 Kyle M. Oliver to the user experience. In these videos, the title music that plays over the opening credits comes from a European and likely Christian classical tradition. This choice, on first listen, seemed to me to undercut the value of the video for providing a culturally authentic immersion in contemporary Jerusalem. Even the Christian experience of Jerusalem is likely to “sound” quite different from this opening sequence more often than not. However, viewers of these videos later learn that this music was actually recorded during an encounter that happened on the tour, when Moretz visits a church and stops to listen to a rehearsing brass ensemble. Given this additional information, is the editorial choice of music “authentic” or “representative”? Well, yes and no, which is exactly why Jerusalem is such a fascinating, vibrant and tortured place. The more important point from a pedagogical perspective is that I had watched this video several times before even thinking to ask this question. That should be a cautionary tale for educators wishing to use media artifacts for contextual study. Again, there is no neutral or perfectly representative experience. 2. New media tools and spaces are sites of active meaning making and spontaneous social exchange. Just as the “medium” of an in-person pilgrimage inevitably shapes the message in ways a trip guide cannot fully control, connecting our students to authentic digital geographies affords the opportunity for experiences that may both support and counteract the learning goals we put in place. Moreover, in the process of engagement, our students may create artifacts (e.g., comments and annotations) that become part of the environment others will experience.20 Across the two Stations of the Cross videos on Father Matthew Presents, there are 13 comments from users, including 2 from Moretz himself. In one sense, these represent spoken exchanges while “taking the tour,” such as a participant may overhear from a fellow group member on-site. In another sense, they are more like a signed guest book or even “digital graffiti,” for they are now semipermanently associated with Moretz’s original artifact and may be noticed and studied by subsequent viewers. One of these comments is worth citing verbatim: Father, I live in India. I have just returned from a Jerusalem visit, last fortnight. Had done the Via Dolorosa Stages with a guide. Father, your video is simply brilliant! I wish I had seen this before I went there. Though I am a Hindu, yet having a Christian Missionary schooling background, I had come to love the Lord (Jesus) since childhood. The Holy Sepulchre Church (stations) were “electrifying”—one could feel His Presence. . . . as I am doing now, watching your video. Thanx again.21 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 63 There’s a lot happening here. Commenter sanjoy sen explicitly acknowledges the potential value of a digitally mediated experience of the site before an in-person visit. He also complicates possible preconceived notions about how a non-Christian can experience this devotionally curated tour. Most intriguingly, he raises questions about multiple religious belonging generally and Hindu understandings of the person and role of Jesus of Nazareth in particular. It’s not difficult to imagine religious educators who would be excited to engage this comment with their students and others who might choose to try to steer them clear of it. 3. New media tools and spaces require receptive, expressive and navigational literacies to ensure students’ full participation. To see, hear, move and interact when visiting a site via digital geographies may require technical and social skills22 our students have not fully developed. Thus while our choice to engage in this particular pedagogy of contextualization has the added benefit of helping students develop digital literacy practices, it may also require supplemental instruction and support in order to realize these literacies. For example, if I wish to use Google Earth’s compelling virtual reality app to facilitate a student tour of a city important to the history of religions, I need first to acquaint that student with the somewhat complex controls for navigating movement—including how to toggle on or off the “comfort mode” feature that helps users avoid motion sickness. Just as in an on-site visit, no student wants to feel left behind, much less experience physical discomfort. The difference is that when moving through digital geographies, we cannot necessarily assume students already possess the skills they need in order to keep up and to care for themselves along the way. Pedagogical Tools: New Media Resources for Digital Contextual Study Having derived three guiding principles from digital geographies theory, we are now in a position to survey and evaluate a variety of new media tools for experiencing ancient sites in the context of religious education. What follows does not aspire to be a comprehensive list or a rigorous typology. My selections are motivated by a desire to introduce resources that readers might not have encountered or might not have considered to be useful in their place-based pedagogies of contextualization. In the spirit of participation and co-creativity that is at the heart of the approach I have been outlining, interested readers can access (and request to contribute to) a curated collection via this chapter’s companion Pinterest board.23 64 Kyle M. Oliver Resources for Immersion: Virtual Reality Virtual reality (VR) has come a long way since the days of huge helmets and suits, low resolution and excruciating loading and lag times. That being said, the high-end consumer systems are still quite expensive— probably not worth the cost for religious educators given the small amount of relevant content that is currently available. For teachers, then, the most significant development in VR technology has been the release of Google Cardboard, a low-cost ($10–$20) device that turns any iOS or Android smartphone into a passable headset for viewing VR content. All this basic system “knows” is how I am moving my head, and yet the effect it achieves is quite remarkable. If you want to give your students an understanding not only of what a site looks like but also of its scale and its architectural or topographical construction and layout, VR resources are an exciting tool. They can capture something of the grandeur of a site such as the Blue Mosque in Istanbul or the Swaminarayan Akshardham in New Delhi. They also provide some individual freedom to explore interesting details, especially when the resource connects multiple 360-degree viewing points that users can travel between. On the whole, the third of our principles from the previous section is an especially significant consideration for our use of VR resources in the classroom; navigating VR spaces is not always intuitive, and learners may bring some anxiety to the experience. Teachers wishing to use VR tools to curate immersion experiences in sacred landscapes would do well to prepare themselves and their students very thoroughly, and choose destinations that are worth the extra effort to see in this remarkable way. Google Expeditions24 is the currently available tool that most effectively brings together relevant content, accessible technology and strong pedagogical affordances. The operative metaphor for using this software is that of a multistop field trip. Google has created hundreds of tours in partnership with museums, educational publishers, research labs, nongovernmental organizations and others.25 Tours of potential interest to religious educators include Holy Places of Jerusalem, Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi, Gothic Treasures in England, Angkor Wat and a number of religion-oriented multisite tours such as Places of Faith around the World, Aztec and Mayan Ruins and Gods and Goddesses. After downloading tour content, preferably to a tablet, the guide can then recruit explorers to connect to the tour. Explorers only need a Google Cardboard headset and a phone-sized mobile device with the app and a connection to whatever Wi-Fi network the guide is connected to. Each tour is divided into a series of “scenes,” the equivalent of a stop where the guide provides narration while participants look around (see Figure 5.2). When the guide initiates a scene, that particular 360-degree photograph is displayed on explorers’ headsets. The designers of this high-quality resource have created a digital geography that is easy for “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 65 Figure 5.2 Screenshot of the First Scene of the Swaminarayan Akshardham Tour on Google Expeditions (Guide View on iPad) explorers and guides to navigate. It focuses the social exchange and meaning making on in-person connections between participating learners and it presents attractive—albeit both finite and also somewhat sterile26— views of “must-see” destinations. For now, it offers the next-best thing to visiting in person if our educational goal is a sort of embodied, visual understanding of a site. For adventurous educators and students, there are several ways to replicate some of the affordances of Google Expeditions in a more do-it-yourself manner. Sites in 3D27 is the closest experience I know of to Google Expeditions. Along with its accompanying iOS and Android apps called Sites in VR, this website is another 360-degree photograph resource. Included in the database are dozens of both well- and lesserknown (primarily) Muslim sites, including many famous mosques. All of the sites can be visited via desktop computer or by pairing the mobile apps with the impressive array of supported VR headsets. For teaching Islamic sites visually, Sites in 3D has much better coverage than any other resource I know. For an even less filtered experience, educators might consider sending students off to explore a site using Google Earth (on the desktop or paired with a high-end VR system such as the HTC Vive) and/or Google 66 Kyle M. Oliver Figure 5.3 Screenshot of the Blue Mosque Featured Tour on Sites in 3-D (FullScreen View on Desktop) Maps/Google Street View (on the desktop or with Google Cardboard). With these tools, one can cycle between an overhead map view and a virtually embodied street view, navigating the landscape in either modality just like the gamer in Leander and Vasudevan’s chapter. This full functionality is mostly available in cities, with a significant additional bias toward the developed world. Still, almost any site that is of interest to tourists will at least include user-published, 360-degree photos. For example, even though Cambodia is outside the full-featured coverage area of Google Earth, virtual visitors will still find dozens of photos, including many 360-degree views created by both Google and visitors (see Figure 5.4). Some of these viewpoints are connected for self-guided navigation. An interesting application of Google Earth for the purposes of geographical contextual exploration is Google Lit Trips.28 This educational project uses Google Earth’s annotation features to create guided tours of the sites corresponding to important works of literature. Some of the tours in this collection may be of interest to religious educators (e.g., The Diary of a Young Girl; see Figure 5.5). “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 67 Figure 5.4 Screenshot of 360-Degree Photo of Angkor Wat29 (Browser View on Desktop) Figure 5.5 Screenshot of Google Lit Trip for The Diary of a Young Girl (FullScreen View on Desktop) Resources for Immersion: Audio, Video, Conventional Photography Of course, 360-degree photos are not the only way to immerse oneself in the sights and sounds of a religious destination using online media collections. Especially for those who may feel overwhelmed, or even 68 Kyle M. Oliver occasionally physically uncomfortable, using VR tools, the more familiar fare of audio, video and still photography can still be extremely valuable. Here the creative and curatorial perspectives of contributors to these collections make our first and second digital geographies principles important to bear in mind, as we saw in the example of Moretz’s video-based Stations of the Cross. We should encourage our students to ask why certain photos, videos and sound files were posted, and what creators may have chosen, intentionally or unintentionally, to leave out. Perhaps even more importantly, we should encourage our students to be thoughtful and respectful participants in the discourse afforded by comment boards, discussion forums and other social features common on these platforms. Sacred Destinations30 is my favorite static media collection for studying religious sites. I used it extensively when preparing for my own seminary immersion trip to Rome. It’s a thorough and self-described “encyclopedic” and “ecumenical” site full of location descriptions and a lot of both original and Creative Commons–licensed photography. The creator of the site has an M.Phil. in religious history from Oxford, so while she claims not to be “an academic expert on sacred places or art,”31 she is nevertheless a credible and curious co-explorer. The coverage of the site is global but skews heavily toward European destinations. Folkways is “the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution” and offers both a powerful search engine for its extensive catalog and generous track previews on its website.32 Using the genre (sacred) and region filters on a recent visit, I was soon listening to a wedding song of the Burgi tribe in Ethiopia and “Alligator Song” by a group of Aboriginal singers from the remote Cape York Peninsula in Northeast Australia. Once I had found these tracks, I discovered each was available via YouTube, courtesy of the Smithsonian, and the complete Folkways collection seems to be included as part of the Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries collection from Alexander Street/ProQuest. While this means of exploring sacred sounds is indexed only as finely as a country search rather than by city or site, it is nevertheless an impressive collection for meaningful cultural immersion across a wide geographic range. Some museums offer excellent online access to their collections, which can be rich sources of media relevant to important sites. For example, the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recently closed exhibit Jerusalem, 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven33 is a multifaith media treasure trove. It includes annotated images of 45 of the exhibit’s objects, a gallery breakdown of the exhibit as it existed at the museum, an excellent “Voices of Jerusalem” first-person video series (also available as a YouTube playlist) and the full exhibit audio guide available as a SoundCloud playlist. Of course, I would not have known about this exhibit were I not a member of the Met. This observation raises an issue that new media content creators refer to as the “discoverability” problem. There is so much “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 69 content online about a given religious site. Some of it is excellent, but most of it is useless or worse. Finding the signal amid the noise is the educator’s constant struggle, again a matter of navigational literacy in digital geographies. When a specialist collection like the ones I’ve mentioned earlier is unavailable or unknown, I recommend narrowing the search for resources by type of media. For video, YouTube is an obvious place to look; for photography, Flickr; and for music and speech, SoundCloud.34 Even cursory searches will turn up some stunning media, especially if one is willing to make occasional use of Google Translate. My recent finds include a beautiful collection of religion-related photos by Indian photographer Natesh Ramasamy and an extensive playlist of liturgical chant from Coptic Christians in Jerusalem.35 An added advantage of wandering the world’s religious sites through the digital geographies of user-created media is the chance to interact, as did the remarkable commenters on Moretz’s video, as we discussed earlier. Resources for Expression and Synthesis: Place-Based Annotation and Curation Tools Of course, “taking in” religious sites through immersion is just one way to study their historical, sociocultural and geophysical contexts via digital geographies. Vasudevan’s definition of this concept and these latter, increasingly social, examples should make clear that sensory experiences are just one learning modality of the many available to us. Another relevant opportunity afforded by these new media spaces is for students to engage with them creatively: to bring something new into the digital world, thus extending the digital geography. What I find particularly valuable is the possibility of using place-based annotation tools and other curation software to help students become knowledgeable guides to the sites they study. From a media literacy education perspective, such a strategy corresponds to the practice of helping students become not only critical consumers of online media texts but also creators of them as well. From a religious education perspective, media creation of this kind can help students demonstrate integration of newfound contextual knowledge of religious sites with other subject-matter content from a course. Let me close with two examples of the kind of creative work I have in mind. Both build on digital immersion experiences to enrich and extend the creators’ experience of relevant religious sites and associated digital geographies. The first is an assignment36 conceived by my colleague Shamika Goddard and contributed to a resource site for incorporating digital literacy instruction across the theological education curriculum.37 Rather than write a traditional summative paper for her church history course, Goddard wanted to create a piece of media that would help her connect her history learning to the geography of the Reformation. She used Google Earth’s annotation tools along with screen recording software to 70 Kyle M. Oliver create a video that in most respects resembles an automatically advancing Google Lit Trip. Her work, and this comparison, is a testament to the fact that motivated students can create learning artifacts of the same kind and quality as instructors and even resource designers if their immersive learning experience is personally meaningful (see Figure 5.6). The second example (Figure 5.7) is a pair of lower-tech artifacts from my own seminary experience. When I used Sacred Destinations to prepare for my Rome immersion course, I found myself frustrated with my inability to keep track of where each of the sites of our upcoming study were located. I created, and shared with my classmates, a Google Maps artifact simply pinpointing each site in the city. Upon revisiting my map more than six years later, I realized that if I were using it to study Roman sites today (either in person or from home), I would have included much more in my site annotations than a simple link to the relevant page on Sacred Destinations. Had I taken the class last semester, I might have shared some of my course reflections in site reviews, geotagged my Flickr photos of the trip and used my devices to access the official websites and unofficial ephemera that connect our physical sites of study to their associated digital geographies. I have created a new learning artifact to make this speculation more concrete. It’s a curated Flickr gallery of photos that illustrate some of the connected architectural and philosophical points that I wrote about in a final essay when I took the original course. The photographers I cited Figure 5.6 Screenshot of “Mapping the Reformation—From Luther to Junker Jörg”38 “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 71 Figure 5.7 Screenshot of Reconciling Rome Gallery on Flickr (Full-Screen View on Desktop)40 will receive notification that their images have been included in a new gallery, and they may see my annotations and even the link to the essay. But of course, the main point is that constructing the artifact helped me learn. Both this activity and reviewing my original map reconnected me with and deepened the contextual knowledge of early Christianity that I developed in my studies and that has lain mostly dormant in the intervening years.39 As an educator, what’s appealing to me about these examples is that 2-D map annotation and photo gallery curation are simple technical tasks that nevertheless make visible a student’s analytical and synthetic thinking. Not everyone will want to learn the skills necessary to create an artifact similar to Goddard’s video. But the bar is much lower for these latter tasks—it’s not unreasonable to expect any religious education student to engage their contextual learning through these kinds of creative means. Whether an instructor fully embraces this “new culture of learning”41 to the extent that it shapes not only in-class activities but also assignments and assessments as Goddard and I have envisioned, I hope I have made the case that digital geographies should have some place in any 72 Kyle M. Oliver study of important sites in the religious education classroom. On a purely human level, these destinations are too beautiful and too resonant for us not to help our students see them. And on the pedagogical level, these landscapes embody powerful contextual knowledge that can make the difference in how our students understand world religions— their own and others’. The world is too divided and too violent a place not to do everything we can to create learning experiences that engender empathy and a desire for deep and humane understanding. In other words, to show my students Jerusalem is to heed the Psalmist’s plea to pray for its peace. Notes 1 Charles R. Foster et al., Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 127–155. 2 Ibid., 127. 3 Wil Gafney, “Race Matters: Biblical Representations in the Seminary Classroom,” Wabash Center Blogs: Race Matters in the Classroom, August 27, 2015, http://wabashcenter.typepad.com/antiracism_pedagogy/2015/08/racematters-in-the-classroom.html. 4 Ibid. 5 Robert L. Kelly, “Suggestions for Standardization and Supervision,” Religious Education 13, no. 5 (1918): 358. 6 See Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know And Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009). 7 Mary E. Hess, “Playing Our Way into Complex Adaptive Action in Religious Education” (presentation, Religious Education Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, November 4–6, 2016, www.religiouseducation.net/papers/ rea2016-hess.pdf), 1. 8 See Mary E. Hess, “Designing Curricular Approaches for Interfaith Competency,” in Teaching for a Multifaith World, ed. Eleasar S. Fernandez (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 34–55. 9 Lalitha Vasudevan, “Education Remix: New Media, Literacies, and the Emerging Digital Geographies,” Digital Culture & Education 2, no. 1 (2010): 62. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 65. 12 Kevin M. Leander and Lalitha Vasudevan, “Multimodality and Mobile Culture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, ed. Carey Jewitt (New York: Routledge, 2009), 134–136. 13 Hess, Engaging Technology, 2. See also Elizabeth Drescher, Tweet If You ♥ Jesus (New York: Church Publishing, 2011), especially 34–54. 14 Katharine Flexer, Facebook photo posts from Israel/Palestine visible to Flexer’s friends, May 13–17, 2017. 15 Ibid. Shared by permission of the photographer. 16 Matthew Zook et al., “New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place,” in Geography and Technology, eds. Stanley D. Brunn, Susan L. Cutter, and J. W. Harrington Jr. (New York: Springer, 2004), 155–156. 17 Vasudevan, “Education Remix,” 66. 18 Gafney, “Race Matters.” “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 73 19 Matthew Moretz, Father Matthew Presents the Stations of the Cross (Part One), YouTube video, 8:03, May 11, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ ol1VWqC7M; Matthew Moretz, Father Matthew Presents the Stations of the Cross (Part Two), YouTube video, 8:27, May 24, 2010, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4px48zXLxsg. 20 Vasudevan, “Education Remix,” 68. 21 sanjoy sen, n.d., comment on Moretz, Stations (Part Two). 22 Vasudevan, “Education Remix,” 63. 23 Kyle Matthew Oliver, Seeing the Sacred Landscape, Pinterest board, July 31, 2017, www.pinterest.com/kyleoliver/seeing-the-sacred-landscape/. 24 Google for Education, Google Expeditions, website and mobile app, accessed July 31, 2017, https://edu.google.com/expeditions/. 25 Ibid. 26 For example, there are more birds than people depicted in the tour I took of Swaminarayan Akshardham. This “after hours” feel made it possible to focus on the architectural highlights, but it also undercut the sense of being immersed in a lively site of contemporary Hindu worship. 27 Ercan Gigi, Sites in 3D[/VR], website and mobile apps, accessed August 1, 2017, www.3dmekanlar.com/sites.html. 28 Jerome Burg, Google Lit Trips, website and downloadable Google Earthcompatible media, accessed August 2, 2017, www.googlelittrips.org/. 29 Kaur Aare Saar, Angkor Wat, user-contributed Google Street View 360-degree photo, https://goo.gl/maps/jS83hqstm1M2. 30 Holly Hayes, Sacred Destinations, website with images, text and embedded maps, accessed August 2, 2017, www.sacred-destinations.com/. 31 Ibid. 32 Huib Schippers et al., Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, website with audio clips, accessed August 2, 2017, http://folkways.si.edu/. 33 The Met, Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, website with multimedia resources, accessed August 2, 2017, www.metmuseum.org/exhibi tions/listings/2016/jerusalem. 34 Say a prayer that SoundCloud survives its recent financial woes. It really is a gem. 35 Links available on the Pinterest board. 36 Shamika Goddard, Mapping the Reformation, web page with YouTube videos and documents, accessed August 2, 2017, http://digitalliteracytoolkit.org/ faculty/portfolio-item/mapping-reformation/. 37 Kyle Matthew Oliver et al., Digital Literacy Toolkit for Theological Educators, website with downloadable resources, accessed August 2, 2017, http:// digitalliteracytoolkit.org/faculty/. For background see Kyle Matthew Oliver et al., “Digital Media for Ministry Asset Mapping: An Exploratory Study in Theological Education” (presentation, Religious Education Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, November 4–6, 2016, https://religiouseducation.net/papers/rea2016-oliver1.pdf). 38 Goddard, Mapping the Reformation. 39 For those who are interested, I have made the artifacts available at http://bit. ly/rome-map, http://bit.ly/rome-gallery and http://bit.ly/rome-essay. 40 Kyle Matthew Oliver, Reconciling Rome, Flickr photo gallery, accessed August 3, 2017, www.flickr.com/photos/kyleoliver/galleries/72157684461650451/. The large photo pictured is by daryl_mitchell, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/2.0/). 41 See Mary E. Hess, “A New Culture of Learning: Digital Storytelling and Faith Formation,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 53, no. 1 (2014), 15. 74 Kyle M. Oliver Bibliography Burg, Jerome. Google Lit Trips. Website and downloadable Google Earthcompatible media. Accessed August 2, 2017. www.googlelittrips.org/. Drescher, Elizabeth. Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation. New York: Church Publishing, 2011. Foster, Charles R., Lisa Dahill, Larry Golemon, and Barbara Wang Tolentino. Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005. Gafney, Wil. “Race Matters: Biblical Representations in the Seminary Classroom.” Wabash Center Blogs: Race Matters in the Classroom. August 27, 2015. http://wabashcenter.typepad.com/antiracism_pedagogy/2015/08/race-mattersin-the-classroom.html. Gigi, Ercan. Sites in 3D[/VR]. Website [and mobile app]. Accessed August 1, 2017. www.3dmekanlar.com/sites.html. Google for Education. Google Expeditions. Website and mobile app. Accessed July 31, 2017. https://edu.google.com/expeditions/. Hayes, Holly. Sacred Destinations. Website with images, text, and embedded maps. Accessed August 2, 2017. www.sacred-destinations.com/. Hess, Mary E. “Designing Curricular Approaches for Interfaith Competency.” In Teaching for a Multifaith World, edited by Eleasar S. Fernandez, 34–55. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017. ———. Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. ———. “A New Culture of Learning: Digital Storytelling and Faith Formation.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 53, no. 1 (2014): 12–22. ———. “Playing Our Way into Complex Adaptive Action in Religious Education.” Presentation at the Religious Education Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, November 4–6, 2016. www.religiouseducation.net/papers/ rea2016-hess.pdf. Kelly, Robert L. “Suggestions for Standardization and Supervision.” Religious Education 13, no. 5 (1918): 356–363. Leander, Kevin M., and Lalitha Vasudevan. “Multimodality and Mobile Culture.” In The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by Carey Jewitt, 127–139. New York: Routledge, 2009. The Met. Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven. Website with multimedia resources. Accessed August 2, 2017. www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/ listings/2016/jerusalem. Moretz, Matthew. Father Matthew Presents the Stations of the Cross (Part One). YouTube video, 8:03. May 11, 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ ol1VWqC7M. ———. Father Matthew Presents the Stations of the Cross (Part Two). YouTube video, 8:27. May 24, 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4px48zXLxsg. Oliver, Kyle Matthew. Reconciling Rome. Flickr photo gallery. Accessed August 3, 2017. www.flickr.com/photos/kyleoliver/galleries/72157684461650451/. ———. Seeing the Sacred Landscape. Pinterest board. Accessed July 31, 2017. www.pinterest.com/kyleoliver/seeing-the-sacred-landscape/. Oliver, Kyle Matthew, Elisabeth M. Kimball, Stacy Williams-Duncan, and Isabella Blanchard. “Digital Media for Ministry Asset Mapping: An Exploratory “Seeing” the Sacred Landscape 75 Study in Theological Education.” Presentation at the Religious Education Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, November 4–6, 2016. https:// religiouseducation.net/papers/rea2016-oliver1.pdf. Oliver, Kyle Matthew, Stacy Williams-Duncan, Elisabeth M. Kimball, and Sarah Stonesifer. Digital Literacy Toolkit for Theological Educators. Website with downloadable resources. Accessed August 2, 2017. http://digitalliteracytoolkit. org/faculty/. Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to KnowAnd Doesn’t. New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009. Schippers, Huib, et al. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Website with audio clips. Accessed August 2, 2017. http://folkways.si.edu/. Vasudevan, Lalitha. “Education Remix: New Media, Literacies, and the Emerging Digital Geographies.” Digital Culture & Education 2, no. 1 (2010): 62–82. Zook, Matthew, Martin Dodge, Yuko Aoyama, and Anthony Townsend. “New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication, and Place.” In Geography and Technology, edited by Stanley D. Brunn, Susan L. Cutter, and J. W. Harrington Jr., 155–176. New York: Springer, 2004. Part II Leveraging Technology in and out of the Classroom 6 “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” Rob O’Lynn“If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” Effectively Using Social Media in Religious Education Rob O’Lynn Learn This First: All Social Media Is Relational By nature, I am a communicator, a preacher to be specific. As such, my life centers on sending and receiving messages. One way I do this is through social media. Since social media is a form of communication, we will begin with a summation of the theory of media as espoused by Marshall McLuhan. Whether we realize it or not, all communicators have been influenced by McLuhan’s theory, encapsulated in the maxim “the medium is the message.”1 As McLuhan writes, “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”2 To McLuhan, the way a message is communicated is potentially of more value than the message itself because the medium is what gives the message its context and content. Therefore, knowing how we communicate is as essential, if not more so, than what we communicate. If you do not believe this, just think back to the last misunderstanding you had over an e-mail or text message. McLuhan believed that miscommunication often occurred not only because the content was mishandled but also because an ineffective system of delivery was used. Meaning can be derived from any medium logically and rationally if the sender has properly packaged his or her content and delivered it in an effective way.3 Thus McLuhan crafted his concepts of “hot” and “cold” media to challenge communicators to be more intentional in how they communicate meaning. For McLuhan, hot media is media that “extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’ ” meaning the receiver achieves a “state of being well filled with data” with low participation.4 He says “low participation” because the receiver needs to work little in order to arrive at a meaning. McLuhan uses an example of a photograph for hot media because a photograph contains a significant amount of data. It captures a moment of time in its immediate context and can be logically understood with only the smallest amount of detail. In terms of social media, an example of hot media would be a post on Instagram. Regardless of what has been posted, the image has both content and context, and, therefore, has meaning. 80 Rob O’Lynn Cool media, then, is exactly the opposite; it extends one sense (or multiple senses) in “low definition” and requires “high participation” in order to achieve meaning.5 In short, it takes a lot of work on the part of the receiver to ascertain meaning. McLuhan uses a phone call as an example because when a person is speaking on the phone only the ear is engaged and only at an inferior level. Emotion in the voice, facial expressions and even posture are missing, and these factors normally communicate a great deal. In terms of social media, an example would be a “thin” tweet (this will be discussed in more detail next). After reading a few words from a friend in a newsfeed, we wonder what the friend means. There is simply not enough data available to understand the message fully, and thus we engage more intently than is necessary because we misinterpret the wispy comment or we scroll on rather than engage in a potentially needed conversation. It is important, then, that as we continue to integrate social media into the teaching practice, we focus on integrating “hot” approaches to media rather than “cold” approaches. Digital Citizens and Tribal Leaders When it comes to engaging social media in higher education, including religious education, there is a similar concept: digital citizenship. According to the Digital Citizenship website, digital citizenship is “a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately.”6 Digital citizenship consists of “the norms of appropriate, responsible technological use.”7 Inherent in this concept are two intertwined ideas: the idea of what defines a digital citizen and the idea of how a digital citizen functions. Understanding how these concepts operate interdependently will help us establish a concept of not only “digital citizenship” but also of pedagogical effectiveness in regards to social media and higher religious education. As both creators and users operating simultaneously, the web is in a constant state of evolutionary development. There are, however, some basic concepts that are generally agreed upon, including the following levels of citizenship: • “Digital natives” are people who use technology fluidly. They embrace new applications and operate with a sense of responsibility and stewardship. Although their ability to work fluidly is often confused with being antisocial, they demonstrate how technology can be effectively integrated into people’s lives. Digital natives believe that social media is relational (it connects people and ideas). • “Digital immigrants” are people who use technology although not fluidly. They have accepted that we live in a wired world, but the use of technology does not come easy for them. They are willing to learn “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 81 and do make valuable contributions to the technology world. Digital immigrants believe that social media is functional (it allows people to work smarter). • “Digital aliens” are people who do not use technology unless it is absolutely necessary (i.e., e-mail for work, text messaging with only select people). Opinions range from isolationist (if we ignore Facebook it will go away) to apocalyptic (didn’t we learn anything from Huxley and Orwell?). Digital aliens believe that social media is divisive (it isolates and segregates people).8 A person does not have to remain in the second or third levels of digital citizenship. It is possible to move out of the alien category to the immigrant or native category, although it will require some “reprogramming.” However, it should be understood that this first concept—digital citizenship—is mostly functional and focuses more on the user’s understanding and use of the actual technology rather than how he or she behaves in the digital world. The second concept—how a digital citizen functions—is more operational and practical. Most media scholars refer to this as “netiquette.”9 There are, however, three aspects of functioning that we can address here. First, social media users seek to be relational. Despite refrigerator magnets that say selfies are a good way to let everyone know that you are alone, we post pictures of ourselves working out, getting ready for a function or even preparing to work on an essay about using social media in higher education to share with our digital communities. We hope to make a connection and engage with another person. Second, social media users seek to be generous. Michael Hyatt solidified this aspect as one of the defining components of digital citizenship through the formulation of his “platform” concept. Responsible social media users recognize that they have something to share and are willing to share it.10 When I attend a conference, I often live-tweet so that those not in attendance can benefit from what I am learning. Also, when I read, I often share quotes both to encourage conversation about what I am reading and to introduce that book or article to my larger audience. Third, social media users seek to be influential. As one of the professors in my doctoral program reminded us, we are seeking to expand our influence, not our image. We have the potential for drawing an audience from every corner of the globe through social media and, therefore, must use our powers for doing good. This leads me to one final idea before moving on to briefly discussing the conceptual framework for this chapter—the idea of tribal leadership. Seth Godin achieved a significant amount of popularity a few years ago by talking about this concept in his book Tribes.11 Dave Logan and his associates at the University of Southern California, however, conceptualized the idea after spending ten years studying an emerging approach to leadership that they would later coin as “tribal leadership.”12 82 Rob O’Lynn When my son was playing youth soccer, I noticed that one team stayed together each season. This group of kids always played for the same coach. Eventually, they even had warm-up suits. So being the curious soul that I am, I asked some of the parents why they kept their kids with the same coach. Their answer was at the heart of tribal leadership: he had created a culture of fun and excellence that honored and supported the talent level of the kids on the team. The team’s ethic was, “Have fun, work hard and be respectful.” Did they always win? No. However, this volunteer YMCA soccer coach had successfully created a tribe that others wanted to be part of. This coach was relational, generous and influential, and, as a result, he built a tribe. His effort was small, yet it was effective, and it teaches us some basic principles about education. In terms of social media, tribal leadership relates to our followers. As of this writing, I have about 750 followers on Twitter. While some of these are “bot accounts” (accounts that simply purchase “follows” in hopes that those followed will follow back and boost the bot account’s numbers), many of my followers are students at the university where I teach, religious leaders and professional educators. Based on my experience, these persons have followed me because they like what I have to say in terms of teaching, ministry, spiritual formation or social media usage, and they enjoy the conversations we engage in regarding these topics. Practical Applications For the remainder of this chapter, we will look at several social media applications that can be used in higher religious education. Each section will include a brief introduction to the application, some considerations to keep in mind when using the application and an example or two that how the application can be used in teaching.13 Facebook At the time of this writing, Facebook is the third most accessed website among users in both the United States and the world. Originally launched in February 2004, the purpose of Facebook is to provide networking between users. The original purpose was to connect college students at Harvard University and Stanford University with one another (think an early version of LinkedIn). However, it quickly expanded to the global village to the point that it is the most widely used social networking site in the world (and even had a movie made about its inception). Nearly two billion users are connected to Facebook, and the number grows each day. And although the function of Facebook is evolving from a place to upload posts about what you are eating for lunch and to play games like Farm Story or Candy Crush to a source of news, weather and sports (not “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 83 to mention event invites) that now rivals Google, the purpose of Facebook is still very much about connecting people to one another. Facebook does have a few restrictions in terms of length of posts, the size of a photo or GIF that can be uploaded, yet it offers several useful features. One of the more popular applications in Facebook is the group application, which allows a user to establish a closed group where only invited users can join and participate. The theater where my daughter and I perform uses groups for each show to communicate important information such as rehearsal details, costume ideas and even videos of dance numbers. The group application also works well with students. You can set up closed groups easily, invite students to join (obviously, they must be Facebook users prior to being invited) and establish a semester-long discussion among the students. For example, assign each student to facilitate a conversation topic each week through the closed group. The student must search for a suitable article and post it in the closed group so the other students can reply to it. It works similarly to a discussion forum in your learning management system, but will have a more informal feel because of the social media context. Twitter Twitter has become so ingrained in Western culture that “tweeting” has become synonymous with posting updates. News programs often run tweets 24 hours a day, and many entertainment outlets will often connect celebrities with fans through “Twitter takeovers” where fans can ask questions and get actual responses from the celebrities. According to Alexa.com, Twitter holds a consistent eighth place on its popular usage scale both in the United States and in the world. The original purpose of Twitter was to be a resource exchange where news and research could be posted and disseminated quickly. Launched in 2006, it has morphed into a true social media outlet where the exchange of ideas prompts conversation almost instantly. Its popularity and influence has grown exponentially, both positively and negatively among its 319 million users, as users continue to wrestle with what it means to be “relational,” “generous” and “influential.” When it comes to engaging users with Twitter, knowing how to tweet is key. There are three basic kinds of tweets: “thick,” “thin” and “throwaway.” “Thick” tweets contain some form of discussion prompt (i.e., “read this” or “ICYMI” (in case you missed it) or a question) and a link to a website. This, then, segues to the actual media under consideration. This is what I have found most popular among my students, as they will tweet me articles or videos and engage in a conversation with me about the material (no links or open-ended questions to prompt discussion). “Thin” tweets contain some form of content, although that 84 Rob O’Lynn content is locked within the tweet. Examples of “thin” tweets are quotes from books we are reading or from speeches we are listening to (aka, “live-tweeting”) or those philosophical musings that are ubiquitous with Twitter. “Throwaway” tweets are posts such as status updates (such as when I post something silly my daughter says, when I comment about a movie that I enjoyed or when I air a frustration I have with my former cable provider) and serve to remind us that even the most enlightened user is, after all, human. In addition to the actual process of tweeting, there are two other avenues for engaging students through this social media application. The first avenue is the Twitter poll. Polls are easy to construct and will show up on any news feed that follows you. Using a hashtag, such as a course number (i.e., CMP 404 or BNT 235) will alert Twitter’s internal algorithm to push it to users who are also using that same hashtag. Recently, I used a Twitter poll in a sermon to gauge my congregation’s understanding of the doctrinal topic we discussed that morning. A similar approach could be used in a systematic theology, ethics or evangelism course. The second avenue is the thread, what David Congdon (@dwcongdon) calls #TwitterSeminary. The thread idea works by the author constructing a discussion in about 40 tweets and posting the tweets in numerical order in a fairly quick fashion. This allows other users to read along as the posts come and respond as appropriate. An instructor could assign this in place of a research paper, which compels a student to communicate fully the argument for a particular position in no more than 650 words (the average tweet is 16 words). The advantage is that any topic can be discussed in a thread. The challenge is articulating well in such a limited capacity. Instagram Originally devised as a photo and video-sharing app for Apple, Instagram was launched in 2010 and mainlined for other platforms in 2012. Although “selfies” were already popular before the advent of Instagram, this server turned any iPhone or Android user into a professional photographer overnight. With its collection of filters and editing lenses, Instagram has almost single-handedly made traditional cameras obsolete. According to Alexa.com, it is the fourteenth most popular website in the United States and the eighteenth most popular website in the world. Through a combination of geotags (location markers) and hashtags, users can search for similar posts with just a word or two. Additionally, users can upload one-minute videos to Instagram with a level of quality that is significantly better than either Facebook or Twitter. Although it is solely a mobile site when it comes to posting “grams,” Instagram does have a searchable desktop site. “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 85 One of my favorite exercises using Instagram is to have students track their reading for online courses. For example, in a course on spiritual formation, I ask students to take photos of their course reading (both from the Bible and from textbooks) and post the picture with the course hashtag and comments about what they are connecting to or struggling with in the reading. I assign points based on the frequency and quality of their posts. This same assignment can also be used to track attendance in that so many posts equal so many attendance points or simply being present for the course for that week. Snapchat The running joke in the tech world is that the applications that we have previously discussed have become generational. To be honest, there is some truth to this. Each year, I teach at a youth conference hosted by my university, and when I ask participants what applications they use, I find fewer and fewer hands going up for Facebook and Twitter, and more and more hands going up for Instagram and Snapchat. Launched initially in 2011 as Picaboo and only for iPhone users, Snapchat has become the younger Millennial social media application, allowing users to share person-to-person videos or photos called “snaps.” Although Snapchat’s temporary and self-deleting nature has given rise to concerns of encouraging frivolous and illicit behavior, most studies indicate that users’ posts have embraced a simple, fun and fairly clean (as long as you consider poop emojis clean) protocol for the app. In some ways, it is Facebook all over again, just aimed at a much younger (and, granted, more impressionable) clientele. According to Alexa.com, Snapchat does not yet rank in the top 50 United States websites on Alexa.com. However, over 165 million global users are using Snapchat on a daily basis, and it is a pretty good guess that some of them are our students. Two of the immediate issues with using Snapchat in the educational context are the need for direct connections and the temporary nature of the “snap.” Followers can see a “snap” only when it is directly sent to them, unless the user adds it to his or her “story,” which all followers have access to. Additionally, these posts are temporary and can generally only be replayed once unless the follower takes a screen shot of it. In short, my son referred to Snapchat as “private Instagram.” Despite these limitations to the application, Snapchat can be used in the highereducation context. In my evangelism course, I ask my students to craft a two-minute testimony to share with the class for feedback. Rather than sharing it in person, students can “snap” an abbreviated version of their testimony for their followers. Additionally, as part of the Integration of Faith and Learning initiative at my university, I ask new faculty to create thirty-second videos explaining how they practice integrating faith 86 Rob O’Lynn and learning. Similar short-lived assignments can be constructed and shared through Snapchat given that the concerns mentioned earlier are addressed in advance. Wikipedia Most people do not consider Wikipedia a social media site because it is a free online encyclopedia. However, because its content is user driven and open-source, it is very much a form of social media. Launched in 2001, the initial purpose of Wikipedia (then called Nupedia) was to provide free information to online users. Content was supposed to be written by experts and submitted for a formal review process. However, Wikipedia quickly embraced a free and open policy that allows any user to write about any subject, regardless of whether that content is accurate. An oft-cited example to the downside of this open policy is known as the “Seigenthaler incident,” where an anonymous editor altered information about journalist John Seigenthaler to insinuate that he had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.14 Despite its flaws, Wikipedia attempts to portray accurate and relevant information, and has evolved as the Internet has evolved, currently ranking seventh in the United States and fifth globally on Alexa.com. An example of how to use Wikipedia in the classroom is a fun little game that one of my colleagues uses to show how we are all connected through technology. The point of the game is to see how fast one can get to the entry for God by using Wikipedia. With a subject like “Iran,” it is actually as fast as three clicks: (1) type “Iran” in the search bar, (2) click on “Christianity” under Iran’s recognized religions and (3) click on “God” under theology. Another more interactive example includes having students build a wiki page. In a course on the Pentateuch, I required students to join work groups and construct a wiki page on one of the first five books in the Hebrew Bible. Students were required to choose a content section, such as author, date, themes or bibliography; draft a wiki page with help from their group; and then present the page in class. Another example is to have students verify the content and citations on a featured article on Wikipedia. It is common for the phrase “citation needed” to appear in a Wikipedia article. Find some of those and challenge the students to determine the original reference through online research. Pinterest/Evernote Although Pinterest was not initially designed to be a social media site, it has certainly become one, thus confirming the social side of social media (“all social media is relational”). The purpose behind Pinterest, initially, was to provide users a way of cataloging ideas and interests in order to “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 87 encourage them to actively pursue those interests. The app provides users a personalized way of storing ideas that is based completely on their interest. My wife’s Pinterest account, for example, has several categories, such as various travel plans, home décor ideas, special meals and recipes and artwork that has inspired her to paint her own pictures. Officially launched as an iOS-compatible-only application in 2011, Pinterest has quickly grown in popularity, at least in the United States, as it is twentysecond on Alexa.com. There are many options for using Pinterest in the classroom. Students in a course on religious history could create an art board where they “pin” pieces of art that reflect the perspectives of a particular religion. Whether it be icons, tapestries, portraits or sculptures, these images could be cataloged for discussion, helping students see how engagement with faith is demonstrated through visual art. Another example comes from a course on evangelism. In class, I use a book that includes several recipe ideas in which the ingredients or the dish itself communicate basic tenants of the Christian tradition. In a world religions class, students could use Pinterest to create a recipe group page for sharing “faith-based” recipes in which the ingredients or the dish itself represents something related to that religion. Ideas include recipes for a traditional Passover meal, a dish for celebrating the end of Ramadan or a comparison of traditional American and Chinese New Year meals. In many ways, Pinterest and Evernote are quite similar in that neither site was initially designed to be a social media site. Both sites were designed to be cloud-based storage platforms. Evernote is basically a digital note-taking app, a word-based version of Pinterest, although one can store pictures in Evernote. Although not nearly as popular as many of the other sites discussed here (it is currently around 350 on Alexa. com’s popularity scale, and its popularity has dropped since it became a pay site), it is a site worth mentioning. Initially launched in 2008, it has become as ubiquitous as a Post-It note. There are certain notes that I make publicly accessible, primarily resource lists. A creative example might be to start a resource list on essential writings for a particular faith tradition. Start the list and share it as an open-source document, meaning those with Evernote can access and edit the file. Over the course of the semester, see how many resources the students add to the list and then provide the complete list at the end of the course. YouTube/Vimeo Posting videos has, in many ways, become a profession for many Millennials and young Gen Xers by way of selling ad space on a YouTube channel. Originally launched by three PayPal employees in 2005, YouTube is now the second most popular website in the world behind Google, according to Alexa.com. Today, it is the social media site. Users can post 88 Rob O’Lynn videos, comment on videos, create playlists or channels, and even broadcast through YouTube’s ever-growing list of options. Videos can range from between just a few seconds to 600 hours. Mainstream and cable networks now rebroadcast their programming on YouTube, and some independent film companies use YouTube to distribute their programs freely to the general public. There is also a subscription version called YouTube Red, which offers ad-free programming. The possibilities for using YouTube in the classroom are limited only by the user’s imagination. In many of my preaching courses, students are required to preach before a live congregation. When I was a college and seminary student, I would take a cassette recorder with me to the church, record the sermon and then return the tape to my professor for evaluation. Today, I ask my students to film themselves preaching their sermons and upload them to either YouTube or Vimeo (I prefer Vimeo, which I will discuss next), and then share the link through either Twitter or Facebook. In one of my advanced preaching courses, I ask the students to create a media project, either a filmed testimony, a recreated Bible story or an original film that can be used as a video illustration for a sermon. Again, the video is uploaded and shared via a link on a social media site. Although my students almost always push back at the assignment, it has become a class favorite because it gets them involved in a type of creative production that is becoming more and more common in American worship services. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer Vimeo over YouTube. Although it was actually founded sooner than YouTube (2004), it has lagged behind YouTube in popularity (it currently sits just near the bottom of Alexa.com’s top-100 sites in the United States). However, it has four qualities that make it worth investigating. First, Vimeo offers higher video quality (it has been offering HD quality for nearly a decade), whereas YouTube’s quality varies according to the videos that are uploaded. Second, it is ad free at all times. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the user maintains the copyright of the material. When a user uploads content to YouTube, the user gives the copyright to YouTube, which means YouTube can use it for its purposes without the user’s permission. Finally, videos upload to Vimeo much faster than they do to YouTube. I would encourage teachers thinking of using a video site to consider these pros and cons when crafting assignments. Tumblr Blogging has been a staple component of the Internet almost since the advent of the Internet. With the publishing world becoming more and more saturated, writers seeking to get their content out quickly turned to early websites such as Blogger and now to sites such as WordPress as an outlet. And while the history and application of blogging is too “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 89 great to discuss in this chapter, we will take just a moment to discuss one site that combines the social aspect of Facebook and Instagram with the verbiage of Blogger: Tumblr. Originally founded in 2007, Tumblr promotes itself as a “microblogging” site and currently ranks seventeenth in the United States and just in the top-50 globally on Alexa.com. Tumblr allows the user to post visual blogs, primarily through images that are meant to create ongoing stories (think still-frame films or animated comic book frames). Unlike Blogger or WordPress, examples of traditional text-driven blogs, Tumblr offers content that is more visual and seeks to generate “likes” for the material produced rather than comments for interaction. Most professional education programs are moving more and more to portfolios, and Tumblr offers a great way to construct a visual portfolio with its evolving storytelling feature. This can be a helpful application for a fieldwork or field education course. Every semester, I supervise students working in congregational or parachurch organizations. They are expected to work alongside the resident ministry staff as a temporary but full-time ministry staff member. At the midpoint and endpoint of their fieldwork, students are required to write an extensive evaluation of their experience that includes examples of activities that demonstrate competency toward our department’s five standards for professional development. Through Tumblr, students can post photos chronicling their various experiences, demonstrating how they have engaged their ministry context. Additionally, in this fieldwork course, I require weekly process notes where the students comment on their weekly activities. This could also be replaced with a weekly microblog on Tumblr, where photos are uploaded to demonstrate activity.15 Google+ Google is more than a search engine; it is a cultural icon. It would be safe to say that almost everyone knows what Google is. After all, it is the most used website in the world, according to Alexa.com. And since its launch in 1998, it has become much more than just a search engine. Whether using Gmail, YouTube (yes, it is owned by Google), Google Scholar, Google Maps, Google Books or any of a host of applications, a user can log into Google one time and complete countless tasks all within one seamless application. While most people would not consider Google a form of social media, it certainly meets the relational criteria of all social media. The purpose of Google is to bring people together. I offer a couple of quick examples of using Google in the classroom as this chapter closes. First, assign a group presentation on a set of concepts that are central to the core content of the course. Have the students craft the presentation using Google Slides, and ask them to share the presentation with you. Second, as a version of 90 Rob O’Lynn the Evernote assignment mentioned earlier, construct a resource list in Google Docs. Last year, in my course on congregational administration, I required the students to build annotated bibliographies around several core subjects. The students worked in pairs through Google Docs and shared their doc with me prior to the presentation day. There are two immediate benefits here: (1) you can work with the students on crafting the presentation and (2) you can see who actually contributes to the group. Even if these presentations are not shared with the larger public, they fit the category of social media because they bring students together through media avenues. Conclusion In this chapter, we have discussed the value and meaning of social media and how to incorporate various avenues of social media into the higher religious education classroom. It is hoped that these examples will encourage the reader to experiment with the ones provided and seek out other ways of connecting students through social media. Social media is here to stay, as outlets such as Pew Research continue to detail.16 Regardless of how you engage students, remember that all social media is relational!17 Notes 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7. 2 Ibid., 8. 3 Ibid., 16–20. 4 Ibid., 22. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 Mike Ribble, “Welcome to the Digital Citizenship Website,” accessed May 29, 2017, www.digitalcitizenship.net/Home_Page.php. 7 Ibid. 8 Rob O’Lynn, “Social Media and Preaching: A Primer,” accessed May 29, 2017, www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=3267. 9 For more on the topic of “netiquette,” I would refer the reader to the Digital Citizenship (www.digitalcitizenship.net) or Commonsense Media (www. commonsensemedia.org) websites for more on this topic. 10 Michael Hyatt, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), 129. 11 Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2008). 12 Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (New York: Harper Business, 2008). This book was released in January 2008, while Godin’s book Tribe was released in October 2008. 13 All of the rankings reported in this section are according to tracking provided by Alexa.com, accessed May 29, 2017, www.alexa.com/topsites. 14 Katherine Q. Seelye, “Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar,” The New York Times, December 4, 2005, accessed July 3, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2005/12/ 04/weekinreview/snared-in-the-web-of-a-wikipedia-liar.html. “If You’ll Tweet Along With Me” 91 15 For more on a digital portfolio through Tumblr, see Aaron J. Moore, “Communicating Experiential Learning Through an Online Portfolio in Tumblr,” in The Plugged-In Professor: Tips and Techniques for Teaching with Social Media, eds. Sharmila P. Ferris and Hilary A. Wilder, Chandos Social Media Series (Oxford: Chandos Press, 2013), 201–210. 16 Pew Research Center, “Social Media Fact Sheet,” January 12, 2017, accessed July 4, 2017, www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media. 17 As the discussion continues about how to use social media in teaching, never forget the resource that is right in front of you—your institutional learning management system. Many of the applications discussed in this chapter, such as group discussions and Wiki articles, are likely available as plug-ins through a course shell. 7 Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies Brooke LesterSocial Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies Brooke Lester One instructor wages a war of inches against the distractions by which social media allures her students from the sanctuary of the classroom, while another burbles enthusiastically about the Twitter thread erupting around that day’s lecture. To one instructor, it is self-evident that real community takes shape only where bodies are physically present with each other, while another instructor testifies that her adolescent isolation ended with discovery of a “dot-sci” newsgroup about evolution in 1993. Educators yet on the near side of this experience gap will naturally have questions concerning social media’s affordances and dangers for learning and formation. Formation, Community and Social Media in Religion and Theology Formation is always an aspect of education alongside learning. If “learning” involves the development of knowledge, skills and enduring understandings,1 then “formation” involves the development of such attitudes, values, behaviors and sense of purpose as are purported to characterize a community that the learner is to understand as representing the subject matter, discipline or field at hand. Participating in a community’s educational processes, the learner is transformed toward embodiment of that community’s worldview and norms. Even prior to such considerations of a learner’s formation in relation to a community, learning itself is already irreducibly transformative and social. Put another way, “learning” is not a bare acquisition of knowledge and skills that waits for “formation” to come along and effect real change in the learner. A biblical studies student may acquire knowledge of the content and likely historical settings of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, but once she earns the enduring understanding that the Bible comprises disparate theological perspectives, she is already transformed—even before being formed into the ways that any community might reckon with this insight.2 While a “banking,” “mechanistic” or “cognitive” model of learning sees knowledge as something acquired by the learner Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 93 from an expert,3 a constructionist (or constructivist) approach, whereby learners forge knowledge by synthesizing prior understandings with new discoveries, already presumes the transformation of the learner in the process of generating knowledge.4 Further, constructionism argues that such knowledge making “happens especially felicitously” where the learning happens socially and toward the building of publicly shared artifacts.5 The construction of knowledge is already itself a process of transformation dependent on community. Community can denote geographic proximity, but in educational terms, it more often denotes a shared topic of interest (a community of interest or of inquiry),6 or in the sense of “communion,” it entails a “profound meeting or encounter”7 with other persons or with a transcendent reality. Instructors of religion and theology frequently describe their efforts to facilitate the development of communities of inquiry and of profound encounter. While the concept of “community” can be so idealized as to seem ineffable, one may helpfully break it down to such more measurable constituent parts as acceptance, reciprocity and trustworthiness. Here “acceptance” denotes openness to others, curiosity and welcome. “Reciprocity” refers to a sense of confidence that as I give to the group, the group will give also to me, albeit “over the long haul” rather than through immediate quid pro quo. “Trustworthiness” means confidence that the community’s people and institutions will “act in a consistent, honest, and appropriate way.”8 The value of social media for higher religious and theological education, then, will depend on how these various media provide opportunity for learners to thrive in transformative communities that promote acceptance, reciprocity and trustworthiness. What Are Social Media? Social media can be understood as those online media that involve usergenerated content, are organized around service-specific user profiles and facilitate the development of social networks larger than any one service.9 Additionally, social media are social, presupposing interactivity rather than mere unidirectional broadcasting. The broadcasting model of Internet content-generation is often referred to as Web 1.0 and the interactive model of social media as Web 2.0. Social media involve user-generated content, rather than ownergenerated content. New York Times columns are generated by the New York Times and its paid writers. Social media content is generated by users who are not owners of the service nor its employees or contractors; indeed, users likely pay to assume the role of content creator, whether directly through fees or indirectly by agreeing to be served advertisements or surrender valuable personal data. It is sometimes estimated that 90 percent of Internet users only consume content, with 9 percent of 94 Brooke Lester users interacting with content (as via comments) and only 1 percent creating content.10 Social media provide learners the opportunity to become, through the social and artifact-building aspects of the learning process, among those few who decide what the Internet will be. Social media are organized around service-specific user profiles. To blog using WordPress.com, one needs a WordPress.com account and a user profile, or “bio.” To upload videos to YouTube, one requires a YouTube account, providing a user-specific “channel” on which to post one’s content. A user may have half-a-dozen (or more), service-specific user profiles and enjoy the corresponding freedom to align these profiles into one recognizable persona or keep each distinct. As learners undergo transformation in education, use of social media prompts them to negotiate and declare such identities as they choose.11 Social media facilitate the development of social networks that are larger than any one service. Not all users will avail themselves of the possibility; many of Facebook’s billion-plus subscribers may never use any other social media. Yet a Facebook post may call attention to comments on a WordPress blog post. A Twitter user may include in his or her tweet a link to a Facebook status update. YouTube videos editorialize concerning discourse happening on Twitter. Though services may enforce certain kinds of closed borders, social media on the whole tends toward openness, posing challenges to educators and institutions accustomed to thinking of class-related interactions as nestled safely behind brick-and-mortar walls or the password-protected confines of a learning management system (LMS). Social media are social. Users who expect to be able to expound uninterrupted from some unassailable platform are like Web 1.0 historical dinosaurs ponderously dotting the Web 2.0 landscape. The environment is designed for interaction, whether via hyperlinks, comments sections or @mentions (“at-mentions”) and other forms of user notification. This willing surrender of total control over public discourse may trouble institutions, threatening carefully planned and centrally controlled “branding” in unpredictable ways: “What if our learners say things on social media that embarrass us? What if we receive criticism in our public social media conversations?” Educational institutions must determine how the value of social media use justifies these unfamiliar risks.12 What Are the Services, and What Can We Do With Them? Tools come and go, and for this reason, it is preferable to focus on principles and practices more than on particular tools or services.13 That said, we can only envision principles and practices with regard to existing tools. So it makes sense to briefly describe currently available services. Things change rapidly, but information here is accurate up to August 2017. Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 95 Blogging is a form of short-to-long-form writing; 250–1,000 words is typical, but any length is possible. A comment section normally permits readers to react and respond, though this feature can be disabled. As the name (short for “web log”) implies, posts are usually arranged by date, with most recent entries ordered at the top. Microblogging is a form of very short writing: Twitter permits 140 characters (not words!), and most GNU Social and Mastodon communities permit 500–1,000 characters. In 2011, Facebook increased its limit from 500 to over 63,000 characters. Relationships on microblogging platforms may be symmetrical, as on Facebook (you and I must be “friends” with one another), or asymmetrical, as on Twitter (you may “follow” me, seeing what I tweet, even if I do not “follow” you). Such asymmetry of “following” provides users very high ability to manage their “feeds,” or what they see. This is true to such a degree that what Twitter “is” is quite different for different users, so that one may speak of inhabiting “celebrity Twitter,” “academic Twitter,” “Black Twitter,” “weird Twitter” and others. Video sharing allows users to host audio-video content on services such as YouTube or Vimeo on a “channel” corresponding to the user’s account. Each video has a unique web address, or URL, that may be shared so that others may view the video. Twitch is a live-streaming video service. Photo sharing, as with, for example, Flickr or Instagram, functions largely like video sharing. Snapchat facilitates a different kind of photo sharing: short videos are shared much as one sends a text message, and then they are quickly made inaccessible to the recipient. Pinterest allows the sharing of collections of “found” images discovered on the Internet, not user-generated images. Social bookmarking allows users to collect Internet bookmarks to their user profile and share collections of bookmarks with others. Bookmarks are “tagged” for convenient searching (user-created tags might include, for example, “Buddhism,” “politics” or “Bible”). Delicious and Diigo are two popular social-bookmarking services. Other forms of social media include social gaming (as afforded through real-time chat tools such as Discord), discussion forums (as, for example, with “Google Groups”) and even product-review platforms as provided, for example, by Amazon. Asynchrony, Openness and Anonymity Learners and educators overwhelmed by the possibilities and the rapidity of change in social media might find it helpful to think about these services in terms of synchrony and asynchrony (“Are we there at the same time?”), openness and closedness (“How private or public is it?”) and anonymity and onymity (“How identifiable are the people involved?”). 96 Brooke Lester Interactions on social media may be synchronous or asynchronous, but tend toward asynchrony. In a synchronous Twitter chat, participants use the service as a real-time “chat” platform, writing and responding to one another on some topic for, say, an hour on a given weekday evening.14 Far more typically, Twitter (as also Facebook) is used for asynchronous exchanges in which one replies to another user’s tweet perhaps long after he or she published it. Also asynchronous are comments to blog posts and online videos, and engagement with socially posted photographs and other art, as on Flickr. While instructors may relish the immediacy of real-time classroom discussion, asynchrony has its virtues. Learners often value the greater time to reflect, the ability to contribute “out of the spotlight” and the inability for a few extroverted or self-important participants to dominate the conversation. YouTube videos may be public (visible to all and included in search results), unlisted (visible to anyone with its web address or “URL” but not included in the results of web searches) or private (visible to only a specified list of users). Blogs are typically visible to all but may be private to the author or to specified subscribers. Tweets on Twitter are visible to all by default, including people who do not themselves have Twitter accounts, whereas even public Facebook status updates are visible only to people who are currently logged in to a Facebook account. Both Twitter and Facebook allow direct messages between users, which are “private” within the bounds of the platform’s terms of service. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” goes a joke first published in 1993.15 Educators and learners show reasonable concern that anonymity (and pseudonymity) on the Internet can provide a refuge for abusive behavior such as trolling (disrupting or derailing discourse for sport) or hate speech. At the same time, pseudonymity also protects persons who may suffer retribution “IRL” (in real life) for their Internet speech. Google and Facebook have both attempted to enforce “real name” policies for user accounts, though Google eventually relaxed its policy in the face of criticism.16 Facebook continues to require users to use names that they could support with “an ID or document from [their] ID list.”17 Google’s policy covers its blogging and video-hosting platforms (Blogger and YouTube), while other blogging and video-hosting services (such as WordPress and Vimeo, respectively) typically simply permit pseudonymity. Given, then, these tools with their respective constraints and affordances, to what kinds of use may they be put in higher-ed religion and theology? Social Media in Traditional and “Connected” Courses Any instructional model can incorporate the use of social media. Course designs vary in terms of how strongly they emphasize the kind Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 97 of peer-to-peer interaction for which social media suggest themselves. A face-to-face class may or may not incorporate use of a LMS such as Blackboard, Moodle, or Canvas; a traditional fully online or blended course is likely to depend on such a system. Insofar as the LMS attempts to extend or replicate the face-to-face classroom—closed, controlled and temporary—the face-to-face and online/blended classes are alike in that they may choose or not to take up the additional affordances of social media use for learning. Some learners and instructors will crave the security of the closed LMS, while others chafe at the artificiality of, say, the blogging or wiki features of the LMS, as well as the need for yet another log-in, preferring course-related interactions to happen “where they already are” on social media networks. Distinct from traditional face-to-face and online/blended learning environments, however, the “connected course” represents a remarkable evolution that is so dependent on social media for its structures that it merits attention in its own right. Traditional Face-to-Face and Online/Blended Courses For many, the traditional face-to-face class has little to do with social media. Perhaps an intrepid instructor here or there uses a Facebook group or a blog to keep learners up to date on course-related “housekeeping,” but by and large, the learning goes on as in days before Web 2.0, or even before the web itself. Other instructors do use social media in face-to-face learning, both within the classroom itself and between sessions. In the classroom, learners might be invited to take notes collaboratively on a shared Google Doc. During a “fishbowl” discussion, wherein learners rotate in and out of an “inner circle” of conversationists from an “outer circle” of listeners, the listening outer circle might be encouraged to sustain a “backchannel” of comments and questions on Twitter using an agreed-upon hashtag.18 Students inclined to browse Facebook during class might be recruited to publish provocative or inquiring Facebook status updates on the topic at hand, reporting back to the class on any engagement. Instructors favoring a “flipped classroom,” wherein learners accomplish reading and viewing (information “consumption”) outside of class in order to spend more in-class time participating in meaningmaking activities, might especially welcome the possibilities of social media for enhancing face-to-face activity. Outside the shared block of synchronous brick-and-mortar time, instructors might ask learners to contribute to a unique Twitter hashtag—for example, offering each other real-time reactions in progress to an assigned book. Also between class sessions, learners might engage one another on a (private or public) Facebook Group or Google discussion forum. The use of social media “around” the face-to-face class can help learners engage the course material and one another periodically throughout the week, preventing the dread phenomenon 98 Brooke Lester whereby the subject matter is forgotten until a night-before cram session (if even then!). For the online/blended class, all of the “between-sessions” activities described earlier for the face-to-face class are also, of course, available. Further, the online instructor likely already has practice transposing her favorite classroom activities into an online mode, probably using an LMS. For example, a debate between two teams may be organized such that learners inhabit two separate discussion forums for internal strategizing and upload statements and responses to one another into a shared LMS drop box. For this instructor, it will be an easily made imaginative leap to reorganize the debate using Google Plus “circles” and shared Google Docs or via Facebook Groups and Messenger. Student presentations find a natural home on YouTube, Vimeo or Twitch. If one likes learners to facilitate discussions, a Twitter chat is an excellent venue. Learners doing research might be encouraged to “crowdsource” their inquiries on social media—just as their professors do.19 Whether it is think-pair-share activities, games or collaborative writing, either synchronous or asynchronous, once students are familiar with a handful of services, the imagination finds few barriers to novel solutions. Connected Courses and Networked Learning Whereas face-to-face and traditional online/blended courses may use social media to extend or spice up their basic frameworks, “connected courses” depend on social media for their very being. A website serves as a kind of hub or home base, and learner activities and interactions take place on blogs, Twitter, Google Groups, YouTube—or anywhere that the designers (or learners) decide. In 2008, George Siemens and Stephen Downes organized an online course called “Connectivism and Connected Knowledge,” or CCK08. Enrolling a cohort of tuition-paying students in the conventional way, the course was also open to an effectively unlimited number of outside participants. As its name suggests, the course sought to model “connectivism,” an approach to learning building on constructivism to posit that, in the digital era, learners build knowledge on shared networks. Here and in its successor courses, including CCK09 and CCK11, the instructors developed a model wherein learners were provided the scaffolding on which to develop the networked communications on which the knowledge of the course would be built.20 Dave Cormier, in conversation with Bryan Alexander, coined the term MOOC for the experiment, though the term would only capture the larger public imagination as applied to the rather different large-scale courses later offered by MIT and Harvard, and hosted on commercial platforms such as Coursera and Udacity.21 Since that time, several “open courses” or “connected courses” have run, usually (but not always) with a subject matter related to education or Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 99 learning. In these courses, an openly available website serves as a “hub” on which a program of activities can be published (or developed in real time by participants), blog posts indexed and social media conversations and artifacts aggregated. Learners participate in such courses by blogging on their own blogs, conversing via Twitter, curating and sharing collections of web bookmarks, sharing photographs via Flickr, doing digital storytelling on YouTube—the social media sky is the limit. As Cormier would eventually propose,22 “The community is the curriculum.”23 The network building associated with such a course is virtually unlimited in scope: through the use of organizing hashtags and RSS24 feeds, all that activity happening “out there” can be aggregated back at the “hub” for easy navigation by all participants. A connected course poses challenges of organization and assessment. At the same time, its promises are unique to its unusual structure.25 The learning community is easily comingled with interested outsiders with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Project- or problem-based learning comes naturally where meaning-making activities are situated outside of any closed physical or virtual “classroom.” Finally, the basic structure is almost infinitely malleable, a proven framework with easily replaced parts. Don’t like Google? Have learners do their collaborative writing on Etherpad, TitanPad or some other alternative to Google Docs. Wary of Twitter during the throes of an ugly election cycle? Look into GNU Social or Mastodon for smaller-scale microblogging with more specialized communities. Haven’t heard of any of these and don’t have any idea where to begin looking? Ask around—on social media. Community Revisited Having offered this brief and incomplete survey of use cases, we see that social media provide educators a complex set of constraints and affordances out of which instructors may, once well-enough informed, craft learning experiences suited to their own particular goals and contexts. These experiences may be, depending on design choices, relatively private or public and largely synchronous or asynchronous, and allow learners to choose degrees of onymity. Available social media tools provide means by which a course designer can develop possibilities for learners to participate in community-building norms of acceptance, reciprocity and trustworthiness. Still, given the extent to which social media are almost irreducibly public, questions of learner safety go beyond those usually encountered in traditional course design. Whatever practices an educator habitually takes concerning face-to-face or online codes of conduct for an enrolled body of learners, her usual arsenal of enforcement strategies will hold few terrors for the larger public with whom her learners interact on Twitter or in the comments sections of blog posts or YouTube videos. 100 Brooke Lester Further, one will observe how large, for-profit corporations that are accountable to shareholders rather than to their users, who do not pay directly for their services, dominate the social media space. In what ways can platforms be considered trustworthy, as for their own veiled purposes they make sudden and unpredictable changes in user experience, feature availability and codes of conduct? Besides becoming competent with designing learning experiences that, in themselves, foment community, educators find themselves having to become prepared to guide learners knowledgeably concerning a broader array of competencies around self-disclosure, identity and harassment in the worlds of social media. Social Media and Public Learning Using social media for education means escorting learners out of the relatively closed environs of the face-to-face classroom or the LMS and into the relatively open environs of the social web. The term relative in each instance is important. Classroom covenants notwithstanding, there are few barriers to a learner sharing the words of a classmate with outsiders (another student, a school administrator, a clergy official, a reporter). The social web affords possibilities for more or less private (or at least one-on-one) conversation, though these possibilities can be abstruse. Sound, up-to-date understandings of privacy and identity in social media can promote thriving and prevent needless suffering for educators and learners alike. Of course, long before the invention of social media, educators and learners have been navigating issues around self-disclosure, identity and harassment. Women, scholars of color, LGBTQ scholars and disabled or neurodivergent scholars sometimes describe themselves as effectively having had to “present” (so far as possible) as straight, cisgender, white, able-bodied, neurotypical men in order to succeed in traditional academic spaces. More recently, learners are apt to insist that these academic spaces change in order to allow all participants to thrive while presenting themselves in the ways that they choose. Face-to-face and online educators, with their institutions, develop strategies for ensuring that learners have equal access not only to the learning space but also to the shared power to shape its discourse, its aesthetic and its norms.26 Educators and learners engage in disputes about “free speech” and “safe spaces” in highereducation classrooms, raising questions about where speech becomes incitement, whether free speech for some entails curtailed opportunities for speech for others, and whether educational institutions are obliged to provide venues for speakers representing all perspectives. Just as online educators find themselves adapting these insights in progress from the physical to the virtual classroom, educators embracing social media seek to adapt the principles and practices of diversity-embracing community Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 101 building to an ever-changing environment over which participants have only incomplete control.27 Self-Disclosure, Identity and Harassment Although warnings about excessive self-disclosure to the Internet are easily found and understandably made, experience shows that a degree of self-disclosure is a natural element of appropriately professional social media practice.28 Early participants in the academic “blogosphere” commonly—and often through the protective strategy of pseudonymity— discussed institutional matters in the context of rank, gender and home lives. Networked scholars today, when not seeking research-related help or sharing nascent ideas and projects, will take time to exchange memes, commiserate as parents, trade recipes and otherwise present publicly as “whole people.” Learners, invited or required to participate in social media in class work, will either already have habits of greater or lesser selfdisclosure on their own accounts or, if new users, will soon be socialized into the habits of self-disclosure characterizing the social media spaces they are asked to inhabit. Positively, these practices of self-disclosure create possibilities for personal learning networks that promote learning and persist beyond the last days of any given class. At the same time, experience shows that not all persons enjoy equal opportunity to “be themselves” on the Internet in relative peace. Hindrances include not only individual bad actors on social media but also specific features and systems of moderation on any given social media platform. Traditionally marginalized populations, especially when expressing opinions, are apt to experience harassment of varying kinds on social media, especially on Twitter, where posts are public by default and easily shared. A veritable glossary of terms describes the categories of harassment that are typical: mansplaining, dog-piling, sea lions, targeted harassment including death threats and rape threats, doxxing.29 Existing tools for coping with harassment, for the most part, lay the burden on the harassed user and are available only after the damage has already occurred. What is more, platform features that seem innocuous to betterprotected users may in fact lend themselves to abuse. For example, Twitter users can search all other users’ bios and tweets for strings of text. This can help well-meaning users find like-minded others (“theology,” “parenting,” “seminary,” “football”). Malicious users, however, use this search feature to find targets (“trans,” “intersectionality,” “feminist”). Similarly, Twitter allows “quote tweets,” whereby a user can effectively incorporate a screenshot of another user’s tweet into a new tweet of his or her own. In practice, this can lend itself to such malicious practices as “calling out” (spreading the original tweet for shaming purposes) or taking a tweet out of the context of a “thread” of multiple tweets of which it is a part. The relatively new social media platform Mastodon has, so far, 102 Brooke Lester avoided coding into its design these search features or anything analogous to Twitter’s “quote tweets” in large part because its original user community consisted largely of participants describing bad experiences on Twitter. Clarity about Mastodon calls for an understanding of the differences between centralized platforms and decentralized “federated” platforms such as GNU Social and Mastodon. Centralized and Decentralized Platforms for Social Media When Twitter changed the way that users are mentioned in tweets in the fall of 2016, users raised concerns that the new approach hindered strategies by which populations at particular risk of harassment protect themselves.30 In August 2017, Facebook announced a commitment to remove “violent threats and posts celebrating hate crimes,” appearing to reverse a previous tendency to err on the side of political free speech,31 and Google simultaneously refused to provide hosting to the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer.32 Users can feel by turns betrayed or elated by such changes, but will consistently feel all but powerless to affect them, as these social media behemoths make their decisions against an economic model of gathering user data, selling it to information brokers and serving it back to users as advertisements for the benefit of shareholders. The centralized, for-profit, totalizing character of the major social media services can seem almost a law of nature. If Alexa wants to interact with Brenda’s Twitter account, Alexa will need a Twitter account. If Jin wants to make a comment to Terrance’s Facebook status update, then Jin will need to do this from a Facebook account of his own. For most users, this situation seems so natural as to be all but inevitable; how else would such interactions happen? Yet at the same time, users take for granted the ability to exchange e-mails from distinct platforms, say between a Gmail account (provided by Google) and an iCloud account (provided by Apple). This is because e-mail providers agree to a decentralized ecosystem wherein different platforms share standards making interactivity possible. Just so, in contrast to Twitter’s centralized platform, there exists a “federation” of distinct microblogging services, all with their own codes of conduct and user agreements, across which account holders may freely follow one another and interact in a “fediverse” comprising as many such “mini Twitters” as anyone wishes to create. This fediverse began with communities built on the GNU Social software platform during 2010–2013 and exploded into renewed life in 2016–2017 with the technologically compatible but distinct Mastodon communities.33 Late in 2016, Twitter was reeling from Gamergate, a social media movement of targeted harassment of certain women game developers,34 as well as a US election cycle in which accounts identifying with white supremacy or Nazism were frequently judged by Twitter not to violate Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 103 their respective terms of service. In this context, the newly arrived Mastodon stood out for explicitly forbidding content promoting NationalSocialist ideology (the site is hosted in Germany where such content is illegal), racism, sexism and xenophobia. The earliest population (in the fall of 2016) was distinctly politically leftist, largely LGBTQ (and particularly transgender), often “furry”35 and enthusiastic for indie game development.36 Mastodon permits users far more granular control over privacy than does Twitter and allows users to place potentially upsetting content behind “content warnings,” meaning that readers first see the content warning (e.g., “US politics” or “cartoon gore”) and can choose to uncover the content or not. As users came to disagree about codes of conduct or areas of interest, new communities (called “instances”) using the Mastodon software were developed, usually federating with existing instances. In such an arrangement, Albert (a member of, say, the instance Mastodon.Social) can follow, and be followed by, Bianca (a member of a different instance, say Witches.Town), although their instances are distinct in flavor and may have contradictory codes of conduct. Users who desired even fewer limitations on speech than enforced by Twitter also developed several instances, and today online tools exist to help new users find instances that suit their personal needs regarding freedom of speech, use of content warnings, antiharassment policies, topics of community interest and other axes. The original community, Mastodon. Social, numbers over 81,000 users, and total users of Mastodon instances exceeds 600,000 as of August 2017. Conclusion Social media is, and will likely remain, a complex and ceaselessly changing terrain. Those instructors who desire to realize the pedagogical possibilities of social media learning activities may often find themselves autodidacts regarding the constraints and affordances of social media platforms, current and yet to come. Faculties and administrations concerned with equity of labor will need to determine how such ongoing labor can be kept visible to promotion-and-tenure committees and count toward institutional “load.”37 There is far more diversity in religious and theological higher education than could be reflected in a one-size-fits-all guide to netiquette and best practices for the use of social media in learning. Goals for learning and formation differ, as do practices. Religious studies and theology persistently call for the analysis, understanding and, sometimes, promotion of worldviews perceived as offensive and even immediately threatening to enrolled participants and to persons in their lives. Educators considering the use of social media for learning will do well to explicate first their principles and practices for facilitating acceptance, reciprocity and trustworthiness in the classroom and the closed LMS. They can then proceed 104 Brooke Lester to the necessary work of determining how they carry these principles into the more public-facing and public-engaged, interconnected and everchanging terrain of social media discourse.38 Notes 1 Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, expanded 2nd ed. (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision; Curriculum Development, 2005), 35–55. 2 Ibid., 128–30, 135–136. 3 Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 72; Eileen M. Daily, “The Promise of Mobile Technology for Public Religious Education,” Religious Education 108, no. 2 (2013): 119–120; Megan Poore, Using Social Media in the Classroom: A Best Practice Guide, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016), 6, 10. 4 “The more constructivist educational technology activities . . . correlate[] with higher test scores”: Mark Warschauer, “Addressing the Social Envelope: Education and the Digital Divide,” in Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future, eds. Christine Greenhow, Julia Sonnevend, and Colin Agur (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 39. 5 Seymour Papert and Idit Harel, Constructionism: Research Reports and Essays, 1985–1990 (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1991). 6 Daily, “Promise of Mobile Technology,” 120–121. 7 David Lee and Howard Newby, The Problem of Sociology: An Introduction to the Discipline (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1983), 43; Mark K. Smith, “Community,” in The Encyclopedia of Informal Education, 2001, http:// infed.org/mobi/community. 8 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1997), 11; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 19; Smith, “Community.” 9 Jonathan A. Obar and Steven S. Wildman, “Social Media Definition and the Governance Challenge: An Introduction to the Special Issue,” Telecommunications Policy 39, no. 9 (2015): 745–750. 10 Charles Arthur, “What Is the 1% Rule?” July 2006, www.theguardian.com/ technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2; George Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia: Networked Scholars (New York: Routledge, 2016), 65–68. 11 “Teachers in theological and religious studies are distinctly positioned to grapple with . . . practices of identity formation, media literacy, and embodiment [in networked learning]”: Whitney Bauman et al., “Teaching the Millennial Generation in the Religious and Theological Studies Classroom,” Teaching Theology & Religion 17, no. 4 (2014): 301. 12 Daily, “Promise of Mobile Technology,” 126. 13 “Focus on issues, not technologies”: Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia, 114. 14 G. Brooke Lester, “ ‘Essential Questions’ Twitter Chats,” Teaching Theology & Religion 17 (2014): 224. 15 Glenn Fleichman, “Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet,” New York Times, December 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/technology/cartooncaptures-spirit-of-the-internet.html. 16 Jillian C. York, “A Case for Pseudonyms” (Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 2011), www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/case-pseudonyms; Nicole Lee, Social Media in Higher-Ed Religion Studies 105 “Google Plus Finally Lets You Use Any Name You Like (Update: Well, Almost),” July 2014, www.engadget.com/2014/07/15/google-plus-finallylets-you-use-any-name-you-like/. 17 “What Names Are Allowed on Facebook?” (Facebook, n.d.), www.facebook. com/help/112146705538576. 18 A hashtag is any string of letters beginning with a # sign (for example, #babystories); Twitter (and now, too, Facebook, GNU Social, and Mastodon) uses hashtags as a convenient convention for search terms. 19 Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia, 39, 41–43. 20 Dave Cormier, “The CCK08 MOOC‑Connectivism Course, 1/4 Way,” October 2008, http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/10/02/the-cck08-moocconnectivism-course-14-way. 21 Minhtuyen Mai, Adam Poppe, and Christine Greenhow, “Social Media and Education on a Massive Scale: The Case of MOOCs,” in Education and Social Media, eds. Christine Greenhow, Julia Sonnevend, and Colin Agur (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 209–10; Chris Parr, “Mooc Creators Criticise Courses’ Lack of Creativity,” October 2013, www.timeshighereducation. com/news/mooc-creators-criticise-courses-lack-of-creativity/2008180.article. 22 Dave Cormier, “Rhizomatic Learning: The Community Is the Curriculum,” 2014, https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/882/content/1796/. 23 Examples of connected courses include ETMOOC by Alec Couros et al., http://etmooc.org/orientation/; Rhizomatic Learning by Dave Cormier, https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/882/rhizomatic-learning-the-communityis-the-curriculum/; MOOC MOOC by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, www.moocmooc.com/; Connected Courses by Alec Couros, Jim Groom, Alan Levine et al., http://connectedcourses.net/; and OOTLE15 through OOTLE17, G. Brooke Lester, http://ootle17.net. 24 RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is the mechanism by which content is passed from one place on the Internet to another; for example, RSS feeds can place Twitter content on a blog post or collect content from several different blogs into a single web page for easy reading. 25 For broader reflections on “distributed learning,” see Chris Dede, “Social Media and Challenges to Traditional Models of Education,” in Education and Social Media, eds. Christine Greenhow, Julia Sonnevend, and Colin Agur (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 106–108. 26 “An increasingly large number of people are ‘learning how to learn’ in ways that stress their own passion, interest, and agency”: Mary Hess, “A New Culture of Learning: Implications of Digital Culture for Communities of Faith,” Communication Research Trends 32, no. 3 (2013): 14. 27 An excellent guide to institutional self-inventory in this regard is Steve Delamarter, “Theological Educators and Their Concerns about Technology,” Teaching Theology & Religion 8, no. 3 (2005): 131–143. 28 Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia, 103–108. 29 Mansplaining describes a man condescending to explain to a woman something in which she is an expert, has already demonstrated knowledge or is likely to know. (Derivative terms are endless and include, for example, whitesplaining and ablesplaining.) A sea lion harasses persistently in a carefully reasoned and polite tone, placing unreasonable burdens of proof on his or her interlocutor. (The term originates from a comic by David Malki: http://wondermark.com/sea-lion-verb/.) Doxxing (or doxing) is to publish somebody’s personal information online, especially home or work addresses, as an implicit or explicit invitation to others to harm the victim. 106 Brooke Lester 30 Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Twitter’s New @Replies Re-Design Isn’t Just Stupid; It’s Really Stupid,” October 2016, https://medium.com/@tressiemcphd/twitters-new-replies-re-design-isn-t-just-stupid-it-s-really-stupidc471ca254f0a. 31 Hamza Shaban, “Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Remove Violent Threats from Facebook,” August 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/ 08/16/mark-zuckerberg-vows-to-remove-violent-threats-from-facebook/?utm_ term=.cd9b9a75264d. 32 Julia Carrie Wong, “Tech Companies Turn on Daily Stormer and the ‘Alt-Right’ After Charlottesville,” August 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/ aug/14/daily-stormer-alt-right-google-go-daddy-charlottesville. 33 Sarah Jeong, “Mastodon Is Like Twitter without Nazis, so Why Are We Not Using It?” April 2017, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/783akg/ mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it. 34 Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to GamerGate You Will Ever Need to Read,” October 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/ the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read/. 35 Furries refers to a kind of fandom oriented toward appreciation of fictional anthropomorphized mammals (as in, for example, Richard Adams’s Watership Down or in anime-type animation. 36 Allie Hart, “Mourning Mastodon,” April 2017, https://medium.com/@ alliethehart/gameingers-are-dead-and-so-is-mastodon-705b535ed616; Jon Pincus, “Mastodon: 14 Perspectives on a Breakthrough Month,” May 2017, https://medium.com/a-change-is-coming/mastodon-14-perspectives-on-abreakthrough-month-521ce46baa71. 37 Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia, 17–19. 38 Cf. 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I had just finished giving a 25-minute, fast-paced, PowerPoint introduction on the historical background to a chapter of scripture—who it was for, how it came about, the context of the time, what certain words may have meant in the original lexicon—all in an attempt to help my religion students dive more deeply into the religious text. I said, “With that background, let’s get to the chapter. Are you ready?” Are you ready? Really? More like, are you awake? Is anyone with me? Processing their stares, I asked myself, “Why do we bring hundreds of students together in a class anyway? It is just to disseminate information? Wouldn’t it be better to explain this material before class and then use our time together to analyze, answer and apply the concepts?” I turned my gaze and stared off blankly into the distance as I dialoged in my mind, letting my internal professorial epiphany play out in front of everyone. Now, all 200 sets of eyes were with me. Is he having a breakdown?, the students may have wondered. Is his PowerPoint frozen? Why has he stopped? After a moment of personal reflection and a bolt of sudden clarity, I let out a sigh and said, “You didn’t come here to have me give you all this information, did you?” My class did not answer the rhetorical question. Their expressions gave any needed reply. “You came here to have an experience with the information.” Their heads nodded in agreement, like an unspoken hallelujah. In the fall of 2014, I was found. The purpose of this chapter is to share how, based on this experience and others, I adjusted my religion course using a model commonly known as “blended learning,” or the “flipped classroom” approach. In 2014, I flipped one of my religion courses, creating over 140 blended-learning videos that provide class lecture content outside of the classroom. This chapter focuses on blended learning—traces the historical factors that 110 Anthony Sweat gave rise to it, defines it, analyzes its benefits and drawbacks, explores its theoretical advantages and provides practical guidelines regarding how it may be approached in religious education.The Rise of Blended Learning On the Today Show in 1994, host Bryant Gumbel turned to cohost Katie Couric and said, “I wasn’t prepared to translate that, as I was doing that little tease—that little mark with the ‘a’ and then the ring around it [gestures his fingers in a circle motion indicating the @ sign].” “At” says another co-anchor. “See, that’s what I said,” replies Gumbel, “Katie said she thought it was ‘about.’ ” “ ‘Around,’ or ‘about,’ ” Couric clarifies as she motions her fingers in the @ sign. “I had never heard it said” retorts Gumbel, “I’ve seen the mark, but never heard it said, and then it sounded stupid when I said it, ‘at NBC.’ ” On-screen, a header and Internet address appears displaying the words Internet Address, [email protected] com. Gumbel, confused, asks, “I mean, what is ‘internet’ anyway?” Couric answers, “Internet is that massive computer network, the one that is becoming really big now.” “How do you mean? What do you, like, write to it like mail?” Gumbel probes bewilderedly. “No, a lot of people use it in communicating,” Couric clarifies. Then, with a smile, she asks an off-air producer, “Allison [Davis], can you explain what ‘internet’ is?”1 Twenty years later, that exchange about the Internet has become a classic video, ironically, on the Internet. Back in 1994, however, “Internet” was not an everyday word like it is now. Although the information superhighway was buzzed about and used in primitive forms by advanced techies for many years prior to 1994, it was just coming into use in mainstream culture. Since then, it has become a defining invention of our times and a great disruptive influence in multiple fields. The Internet and the information age have changed countless aspects of daily life, from how we shop to how we connect with friends, even how we catch a ride in a foreign city. It has, and should, fundamentally change how we educate, even in religious education. Prior to the Internet’s advent, obtaining information was more difficult since it was often centralized. A person had two general choices: go to a library to obtain a physical book or go to a physical location to be present with a teacher who would disseminate his or her expertise. For hundreds of years, most campus universities have centered on this model—great books and expert teachers—as the prototypical way to give information and educate students. With the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, that began to change. Innovating educators started placing educational content online for consumers. Suddenly, anyone with an Internet connection could learn about a wide variety of subjects. No need to go to the library to get a book, just Google it! (Which, admittedly, has introduced a new set of educational needs on evaluating reliable information.) word-cloud response system 37, 38 WordPress 88, 94, 96 xMOOC 160 – 161 YouCanBookMe.com 9 YouTube 28, 61, 68, 69, 87 – 89, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 111, 115, 174, 177, 185 Zoom.us 165 |