My Writings. My Thoughts.

Benedictions

// August 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Spiritual

The following benediction, written by Marcus Curnow, (who has a great website http://www.seeds.org.au/), is a great encouragement and inspiration to us….

benediction

Incarnation Benediction

Benediction:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God….and the Word became flesh and dwelt tabernacled,pitched the tent, moved into the neighbourhood,hit the street, among us.

God became a body!

As we prepare to leave, I want you to be aware of your bodyYour butt sitting on the seat, Your cake sitting at the bottom of your gut, Your mind full of the many thoughts of this day.

You too are a body!

But you are more than just body.

More than “consumer.”

More than your appetites and your urges.

May your body be charged, fired, infused with by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Like the saints of old may you blessed with the knowledge of the profound connection between flesh and spirit.

May you feel it in your body.

May you feel this connection when you eat.

May it be impossible for you to read the gospels without getting hungry.

May you know what your food cost, not just what you paid for it.

May it taste good!May you feel this connection with the earth and all creation,

May your hands and feet get dirty.

May you grow some good fruit.

May you feel this connection with others.

May you love your neighbour, not the ones you wish you had but the ones you have; human and creature!

May you be connected to community built on good sex and intimate friendships.

May you know peace and reconciliation in the war zones of relationship, family, household, church and culture.

You are the body of Christ!

Christ has no body here on earth but yours!

Christ has no hands but yours.

Christ has no feet but yours.

Christ has no butt but yours!

So get it up off your seat.

Take it, tabernacle it, pitch it, move it into the neighbourhood, hit the street with it.

And may God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all bodies go with you.

Amen

By Marcus Curnow

and here is another benediction on his website:

Discomfort Benediction

Benediction:

May God bless us with Discomfort…
at Easy Answers, Half-Truths and Superficial Relationships
so that we may live Deep Within Our Hearts

May God bless us with Anger…
at Injustice, Oppression and Exploitation of People,
so that we may work for Justice, Freedom and Peace.

May God bless us with Tears…
to shed for those who suffer from Pain, Rejection, Starvation and War,
So that We may reach out Our Hands to Comfort them and to turn their Pain into Joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness…
to Believe that We can Make a Difference in this World,
so that we can DO what others claim cannot be Done.

Amen

Poverty Simulation Game

// August 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Classroom Activities, Education, Uncategorized

After playing this online simulation game http://ayiti.newzcrew.org/globalkids/ with my Chaplaincy elective class I got them to make some comments on a discussion forum I set up on the Chaplaincy website.

cost-of-life

These were the questions:

After playing this online simulation game write down some response you had whilst playing the simulator eg what feelings did you experience or things did you find yourself saying .

Did playing this game change your thinking about what life is like for people who live in these circumstances?

Here are some comments from the children:

“I observed how hard it is to survive off little money, the problem is if you don’t have money you cant get educated to get money. its a sad fact but the jobs that you can get without money are very hard and you can easily get sick. everything costs lots of money so no matter how hard i tried, i just couldn’t afford any of the expenses. this game opened my eyes as to how hard it is to survive in places like Cambodia and I’m glad that our school could help out. After playing this game i realize how just a simple bag of rice can make a big difference in the community.”

“I felt like whenever I made them work and they lost money, it was just a waste of time. When I saw how well my friends were doing in making them live decently it made me question what I was doing wrong. I kept asking myself “Why are they not gaining money when they are working?!” and “They just keep getting sicker and sicker!” It made me realise that life is so much harder for people living in Haiti in that they are always concerned about the amount of money they have and that sickness is a major problem. In Australia, we rarely worry about not being able to afford food or being able to pay for hospital care. They have a hard life so it is important for us to donate money to help them.”

“Well… After playing that game, I am VERY motivated to do the very best I can to help those less fortunate than myself! I feel very blessed to have what I have. I think that I should use what God has given me to help others!”

New 3D Studies of Religion Course

// August 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Education, Technology, Uncategorized, second life

My colleague Steve Collis just blogged about some exciting things on the horizon for my year 11  Studies of Religion course next year. I will post some of the blog I got from his site www.happysteve.com. Its all pretty exciting and ground breaking stuff.

What if a School Subject was 3D?

Read on to see how Tim Barrett is creating a school subject in 3D virtual form, so that students literally walk through the course in a virtual world.

You may be aware we established a new 3D virtual island using free software called “Open Sim”. This is open source software, meaning it was created by volunteers who allow anyone to use it without paying. Admittedly, we do then have to pay a company, “Reaction Grid”, to run the software for us. This is as cheap s $75 a month, and they take much of the hassle out of actually getting your virtual world to work. This is much less expensive than Linden Lab’s Second Life, where we run our original island.

This new Open Sim island is 8 times as large as our original, and we have a great deal more control over it, including the ability to allow our young primary students to access the world.

I’ve been spending some time preparing the island for a huge influx of students. I’ve already granted some students access, and also created an account for every member of staff at our school (they’ve been wandering in out of curiosity and having a walk around!)

The next step is for me to recruit student leaders from every grade and train them up rigorously to be ‘moderators’ of the new virtual world. They will protect the space against misbehaviour, cyber-bullying, or vandalism. They will set the tone and culture of the virtual world.

I’ve been busy ‘terra-forming’ our virtual world, adding trees, streams, and a huge mountain, so students have something to explore when they first log in. I’ve disabled flying so they have to walk around, unless they program for themselves a car or plane.

When they first log in, this is what they will see:

They have an invitation to follow a forest path through to a ’sandbox’, which is an area of the virtual world where any student can start building.

They also see another arrow:

You see, I don’t want students to feel forced into doing the training immediately. They can walk through the forest for a bit, if they want, but they’ll be told they have to do the training before they wander far!

So, the student follows the arrow towards training, and sees:

There are some simple posters telling the student to approach the booth and click on it. What happens next is quite magical: the Open Sim software sends a signal to our ‘Moodle’ course management software and links the students virtual world account to their general school learning account. Many thanks to my colleague Grant Harbor for his input and assistance in getting this to work!

From this point onwards, a whole variety of 3D objects will recognise them. These 3D objects are virtual manifestations of learning materials that would have otherwise just been listed on a Moodle subject web page in our school poral.

……Our first steps into true virtual 3D courses are beginning immediately with my dear colleague Mr Tim Barrett: http://twitter.com/tim__barrett

http://www.chaplaincymatters.org/

Tim is our school chaplain and has been teaching ‘Studies of Religion’ for a few years now in an entirely online mode, and in a face to face mode.

He will be our pioneer at taking everything we’ve learnt about student learning in Moodle, and recreating the learning in a 3D space.

It might blow up in his face! Maybe it won’t work! This is an experiment – our first steps!

But imagine, students walking through mosques, cathedrals, churches, temples, monasteries, or recreating scenes or situations at Medina, Galilee, Bodh Gaya. Consider: the imagination gives us the power to connect with ‘otherness’, putting ourselves in others’ shoes and gaining insight into the universal human condition. In Tim’s course, students will literally walk in the shoes of others. Not a bad thing, since many of our students are from the culturally monolithic northern beaches of Sydney.

I’ll keep you posted and I am sure Tim will too…

I’ll finish with some more images of our work-in-progress virtual island:

MasterChef

// July 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

With the popularity of MasterChef around the world this video is great to show when promoting social justice issues.

The Patience Test

// June 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Chaplaincy

Our school Chapel topic today was ‘patience’ so we conducted a test to see how patient drivers were. Here are the results.

66 Clouds

// June 10th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Classroom Activities

Sixty-Six Clouds is a visual exploration of word frequency in the Bible. Each book of the Bible was individually imported into www.wordle.net to create a unique word cloud for all sixty-six books. The significance of word clouds is that they quickly present the gist of large bodies of written materials at a glance. Wordle gives greater prominence and size to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Therefore, the larger the word is in the cloud, the more prominent it is in the text. Within Wordle, clouds can be adjusted with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. A specific set of parameters was set within Wordle and then each book of the Bible was individually imported to generate a corresponding word cloud. The exact same parameters were used for all sixty-six books of the Bible to give Sixty-Six Clouds a consistent style and appearance. The word limit was set at 150. Many common words and all numbers were filtered out of the text. Sixty-Six Clouds attributes all images to http://www.wordle.net/. A free PDF version is available for download.

I am currently using 66 clouds to make a timeline around my office wall that will contain when the books of the Bible were written and other religious events over the centuries. I will finish the timeline with what our school has been doing over the past 5 years (missions etc). This will not only make a visually interesting and stimulating display but will be a great learning tool.

66 clouds

Facebook’s 10 commandments

// June 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Facebook’s 10 commandments
Graham Stanton
May 31st, 2010

It’s been a difficult few weeks for facebook.

The news story of 18 year old Nona Belomesoff who was found dead after going to meet two men she ‘met’ online was every parents’ nightmare for children obsessed by social networking.  Close on the heels of this tragedy, facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has faced a series of complaints about changes to the privacy settings on members’ accounts.  Thankfully the pressure has led to changes at facebook with new simplified privacy settings to be rolled out in the next couple of weeks.

Welcome though those changes are, I’ve spoken with a number of parents who have either decided to not let their children have a social networking presence or who are considering whether they need to turn off their childrens’ existing accounts.  As an avid facebook user myself I’m not one to suggest pulling the pin.  However I do think there’s a crying need for some teaching in social networking wisdom.

The difference between skill and wisdom is important:  most young people have lots of skill when it comes to finding their way around facebook or the various other vehicles of social networking.  But knowing how to do it isn’t the same as knowing the wisest way to do it.

Remember that in the end things like facebook, myspace, twitter are just different technologies of communication in essence no different to letter writing or the telephone.  Letters can be used for the most wonderful exchanges of human life and can also be used to leave a ransom note for a kidnapped child.  You can use a telephone to share good news or to make prank calls to random numbers at midnight.  Similarly a teenager could become so obsessed with writing letters or making phone-calls that they never emerge from the confines of their bedroom, or they can use these technologies to fill in the gaps between being face-to-face.

As with any communication technology learning how to use it has to be accompanied with learning how to use it wisely.

In the hope of drawing on the collective wisdom of those who frequent this particular communication technology which is the sydneyanglicans blog forums, here’s 10 commandments for social networking wisdom for teenagers (written by me with input from various facebook friends!):

1.  Don’t ‘friend’ anyone who you don’t already know face-to-face.  You might possibly want to expand this to people that your friends know face-to-face, afterall, social networking is about growing your networks.  But just because someone is asking to become your friend doesn’t mean you have to say yes to them.

2.  If someone is making comments that you find offensive or upsetting then either hide them from your newsfeed or ‘de-friend’ them.

3.  Don’t arrange to meet anyone you’ve contacted only through social networking in any non-public location without anyone else with you.  Ever.

4.  Don’t put personal contact information such as your address or mobile phone number online.  If your ‘real friends’ need to contact your or visit you then give them your details in person.  Don’t put your full date of birth on your profile – your dob is often used for proof of identity over the phone, perfect for identity thieves (thanks Su)

5.  Keep your privacy settings up to date.  Unfortunately, at least in the case of facebook in the past, this hasn’t been a ‘set and forget’ type of task.  Regularly check your privacy settings. http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ has a useful facebook privacy scanning utility.

6.  Don’t write anything online that you wouldn’t want the world to read – so think about whether you’d be happy for whatever you’re about to post to be broadcast to everyone in the world, or think about whether you’d be happy for your grandmother to see what you’ve just posted (because she’s probably one of your friends anyway.)

7.  Don’t imagine that the ‘online you’ is different to the ‘real you’.  You can’t write, photograph or video something for all to see and expect that it won’t be viewed as a representation of the ‘real you.’ (thanks Graham B)

8.  Don’t let anyone else know your username and password, and make sure you log-off before quitting your browser.  And don’t hack someone else’s account even if they’ve forgotten to log-off.  (mea culpa - I know it’s been fun to change my niece’s status update to say, “Just sitting here thinking how wonderful my uncle is”; but now I think of it, there’s enormous potential for relationship stress from this sort of thing on those days when it all goes wrong.  So my resolve from now on is to just quietly log off for them; and encourage others to do the same.)

9.  Don’t attempt to resolve conflicts online.  Don’t break up with someone in a status update. Don’t propose by email.  I.e. don’t forget that life is best lived face-to-face and some interactions are too important to not do in person.

10.  Don’t forget that there are other forms of communication technology available to use - go old-school one day and write a letter; if your instant chat conversation has gone beyond three lines pick up the phone and speak to them in person (and if you can’t do this because you’re in class or church then log off and speak to them later!); and if your friend does make you ROTFL then why not arrange to meet them face-to-face and LOL together.

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/ministry/modernministry/facebooks_10_commandments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sa_allnews+Sydneyanglicans.net+all+news&utm_content=Google+Reader

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