more thoughts on Web 2.0
With all the talk about Web 2.0 these days, web technology users in all walks of life are learning many of the same lesson. One of the most important of these is how important it is to let an organization’s mission drive its use of this technology rather than vice versa.
Corporate users simply are usually a bit out ahead of non-profits in their experience with the Web — they are both earlier-adopters of technology, but also ahead of nonprofits in what they are learning about being effective adopters, as well.
Anne van Dusen, my colleague at Congregational Resource Guide, just sent me a post from searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com — a blog for Chief Information Officers in business settings. Although it’s actually two years old, she sent it as a graphic reminder that nonprofits still need to learn in 2008 what corporate Web users were realizing already in 2006, that “the real … value” in Web 2.0 “lies in what the technology enables: better collaboration among users.”
It’s one thing to add Web 2.0 interactivity to an organization’s Web-presence. It’s another to “know how to … encourage the social interaction that is integral to the concept” of Web 2.0, by both attracting users and encouraging them to contribute content, and thus “to build intellectual capital.”
Here at Alban, for example, we’re currently experimenting with Ning, an inexpensive online site that allows virtually anyone to build a simple FaceBook-type social network that is either open to anyone or protected by login-procedures that allow users to decide who can and cannot take part in ongoing collaboration and conversation on a subject. For more about the possibilities, check out the comment on the NingBlog.
What we must not forget is that the point in going to the effort to learn how to use something like Ning is that our mission as a learning organization pushes us towards finding ever more effective ways not just to deliver information but also to encourage interaction among the very people who depend on Alban’s online presence to put them in touch with the best available resources for sustaining congregational vitality and leadership-excellence.
We hope you will join the conversation about the very best in online learning for the leaders of today’s and tomorrow’s congregations.
Technologies for Learning
Alban Weekly feature article, May 19, 2008
Wayne Whitson Floyd, Education Department Manager
At Alban we take seriously our educational mission to provide an independent center of learning that creates spaces where people from different denominations and faith traditions can work toward their goals and learn from one another in an atmosphere of respect and collegiality. Whatever the style of an Alban Learning event – keynote address, seminar, online webinar – in every case our intent is to examine the questions, challenges, and opportunities that face real congregations in today’s world, focusing on the needs of their leaders, both clergy and laity. The growing number of possibilities for using Web-based technologies for learning makes it even more crucial that we know our educational mission first, and then ask whether and how specific technologies may help us accomplish that mission most effectively.
We are discovering that there are Web-based learning technologies that can contribute significantly to the quality of your continuing education and that can allow you to do more of it at your own pace and schedule. These technological tools are commended to you here not for their whiz-bang ingenuity—although there is plenty of that—but for their ability to help us fulfill our goal of transforming congregational leaders so that you can accomplish your own missional objectives most effectively.
How adults learn
One of the least discussed topics in adult religious and theological education seems to be the distinctive
qualities of adult learners. How adults learn simply is different from the way we learn at earlier ages; yet so much about our approach to adult-education has been drawn from the models of ‘education’ that we learned as children and youth.
Among the adult educators who have taught me the importance of attending to ‘how adults learn’ is Marcia Conner, who has held such nifty titles as “information futurist” for PeopleSoft (since merged with Oracle), senior manager of worldwide training at Microsoft, and blogger writing the “Learn At All Levels” for FastCompany.
Her website AgelessLearner has a number of helpful links about adult learners, including her brief, interactive Learning Style Assessment as well as a detailed article that is the title of this post, “How Adults Learn,” and an interesting reflection, “Introduction to an eLearning Culture.”
I’m interested in knowing what resources you have found most helpful for understanding how adults learn in distinctive ways, with unique challenges.
Lake Junaluska and Alban Form New Partnership
Lake Junaluska, N.C.: Two pioneers in Christian leadership have formed a new partnership to advance the holistic ministry of United Methodist leaders. The Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center and the Alban Institute partnership brings 130 years of experience in church leadership training. Clergy and laity in The United Methodist Church will benefit from this union through three learning experiences in 2008.
Wayne Floyd, Education Program Manager at The Alban Institute, said the partnership unites Alban’s 35 years of experience in consulting, continuing education and research with the long tradition of clergy education at Lake Junaluska.
“We would hope that people would go away with a deeper and richer sense of the way of their own ministries contribute to the health and vitality of the congregations they serve and the ways in which congregational leaders among clergy and laity continue to have much to teach one another,” he said.
Roger Dowdy, Director of Ministry at Lake Junaluska, said the events will enrich the life of churches all over the Jurisdiction.
“Through this partnership, both clergy and laity in the Southeastern Jurisdiction will have access to three cutting-edge learning experiences in 2008 amidst the beautiful setting of Lake Junaluska,” Dowdy said.
Two seminars for congregations and a ministry summit are part of the first year of this partnership:
o April 13 – 16 Healthy Congregations seminar:
“Leading your congregation to health, holiness, and hospitality.”
Ed White, Alban Senior Consultant, facilitator.
o July 6 – 10 2008 Ministry Summit (formerly SEJ Ministers’ Conference)
“Narrative Forms of Leadership and Congregation Formation.”
A team of Alban consultants, facilitators.
o September 26 – 28 “Moving Churches from Maintenance to Mission
“Building Disciple-making Communities.”
Ed White, Alban Senior Consultant, facilitator.
For more information please contact:
Roger Dowdy,
Director of Ministry
rdowdy@sejumc.org
www.lakejunaluska.com
Pam Moser
pmoser@sejumc.org
Phone: 828-452-2881
www.lakejunaluska.com
Pam Naplen
pnaplen@sejumc.org
Phone: 828-452-2881
www.lakejunaluska.com
“nothing definitive”
I just got home from an interesting small conference at the Blackwell Hotel and Conference Center at Ohio State, “Life Long Learning - Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age,” sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Continuing Education for Ministry” or SACEM. Keynote speaker for the conference was Dr. Mary Hess from Luther Seminary; a short clip of her speaking in another venue on technology and religious education can be seen here.
Although I had already encountered much of the information being presented, it nevertheless was instructive to watch the group try to “connect the dots” and make constellations out of the plethora of challenges … and opportunities … of educating people for their ministries in a post-modern age.
• “No one can be definitive in a time of change” as profound as the one we live.
• ‘Experts’ frame the world they see, rather than rendering it totally intelligible.
• If we’re not careful the most important part can be left outside the frame.
• When “everything is miscellaneous” before you Google it, the authority of ‘teaching’ becomes very different.
This was not a gathering of left-wing nihilists; we were a diverse group of Christians who worshiped together regularly over three days. And as a “Broad Church” Episcopalian (enamored equally of scripture, reason, and tradition), I found myself sometimes squirming because of the uniformly ‘evangelical’ style of the music and liturgy. This wasn’t a conference based on style, however, but a gathering of educators, and consultants, and church officials, trying to be faithful both to the God-focus of our world as Christians, and to the challenges … and opportunities … that face us in a digital age.
In the end, it was the group’s ability to wrestle faithfully with “nothing definitive” that really made me hopeful. The unquestioning certainties of our culture’s recent-past and current times — the blacklists of the cold war, intolerances based on race and gender, the division of the world into reds and blues — seemed far less important that our ability to recognize and bear ambiguity into the midst of our enduring commitments about faith. We were asking the question one of my recent favorite theological voices, James Alison, asked in the title of his provocative book about whether there there can really be “Faith Beyond Resentment”?
We were able to begin to ask - sometimes for the first time, often for the nth — what happens to our role as learners, and as teachers, in a culture that seem perpetually caught between harsh-dichotomies, on the the one hand, while others believe in “nothing definitive” anymore, on the other? How do we prepare for ministry “without a net” to catch us when we tumble? And will we dare learn how to become that network of inquiry and commitment that can sustain the church not just today, but the day after, and the day maybe after that?
New Assets for Educating Congregational Leaders
Alban Weekly feature article, March 17, 2008
Wayne Whitson Floyd, Education Department Manager
Depending on whom you ask, continuing-education for ministry is either flourishing, with assets that have never existed before, or struggling to survive.
Troubling symptoms include increasing costs amidst anecdotal reports of decreasing support for staff and programs sponsored both by seminaries and by national as well as regional denominational structures. Among mainline Protestant denominations, for example, only the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America any longer has a full-time national staff member focusing on lifelong learning and vocational education.
This, however, is clearly not the whole story, for there are sure signs of an ever-widening array of continuing-education programs, on-site and online, designed to nourish the intellect, cultivate the gifts of the spirit, and sustain the traditions of faith communities of shared memory and practice.