Evaluate the class

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations was the first one I read before the on-campus class this June. I have to say that I was skeptical of the book because the title is not a real grabber nor did it give me much insight into the content of the book until I actually got into it. Then I loved it so much I was reading portions of it to my husband while we were driving. It grabbed me because it was such an academic/sociological look at something many think is just a trend or a passing fad. It was fascinating to look at the ramifications of the internet, social networking, and electronic communications. These changes are real and the internet is not going away so we all have to think about how this affects our ministry.

Mary Hess's book Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can't Leave Behind did a great job of giving us the background knowledge behind this distributed learning program of which many of us are a part. It explained the meaning and reasoning behind many aspects of our program. It was also a good review of the Parker Palmer book we read for Education I, and it pulled what we learned in that class into our current context.

Michael Wesch's video An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube also was a great resource for this class to make us aware of the dynamics and the incredible mass behind this phenomenon. Again, it informed me of the consequences of these huge shifts in our world and made me think about ways to use YouTube and other resources in ministry.

The on-campus portion of the class was informative and at a great pace. I didn't feel like we were just trying to cram in a ton of information in that limited amount of time. It felt like we had a chance to experience some great activities in person -- as a DL student, those 'in-person' times are pretty rare and very valuable. The amount of time we spent there on Friday evening and Saturday morning went by fast for me. I thought it was a great way to do the class with some work before, a face-to-face opportunity and then more work online following.

My only problem was that I underestimated how much time I would spend reading and commenting on other people's blogs. It has pushed me right up to the deadline of the class. (Part of that was that I put this class on the back burner while I finished up work in my other two classes.) I am really enjoying the depth of the information and the 'time' I get to spend with each of my other classmates through these blogs. It would be really tough to add very many others to the class. I think the amount of blogs we have to work on is about right.

Thank you for this opportunity to explore more of the technological side of ministry. I do okay on computers and with other electronic media, but it always helps to have an assignment and a class to push me to learn something new.