I just came across an announcement on Twitter that an online education company (2tor - "tutor") has announced partnerships with institutions like Georgetown University and USC to provide for credit graduate degrees through online work. Can this work for seminaries?
UPDATED BELOW: Those of you who read the Lead or Daily Episcopalian on the Episcopal Café site have probably noticed that we haven’t updated the site since Saturday evening. It’s a server error. The Café was migrated to another server at the site where we get our donated space. But something seems to have gone wrong in the latter stages of the migration and the editors are not able to access the back-end of the […]
Quantum Entanglement should be an incredibly useful tool for communications. Though it won’t ever become an ansible, or even the basis for subspace radio, the ability to communicate through entangled pairs of quantum particles would, in theory, create a situation where no third party could intercept the message. Which means that we’d finally have unbreakable secure communications. In theory at least. There are a number of practical problems. One of the problems is that it’s […]
So Monday I posted a note calling on Episcopalians to start thinking how we ought to be moving ourselves toward providing content on mobile platforms, since all the projections look like mobile internet use is going to soon eclipse traditional access. And just like that, the Communications people at the Episcopal Church offices in New York release a new application on the iTunes store called “Wayfarer”! (I swear, I had no prior knowledge of this […]
There are very few Episcopal churches right now that have their own phone application. We don't. I'm not sure that's the right place to spend money for what it's worth. But I do think we need to be intentional about thinking through how people will use their mobile devices on a Sunday morning.
We've effectively funded theological education for the past four decades by asking mid-life students to cash out the equity in their homes and use that to subsidize their and younger student's educations. But the equity disappeared with the recent housing price collapse, and with it the business model of most of the seminaries in the Mainline denominations.
So earlier today Apple released two new tools for educators; a tool that makes creating a multimedia text book very very easy, and a publishing service that allows you to create a curriculum and distribute it and materials remotely. Both can have a major impact on the way we do Christian Formation. We have a consistent challenge here in Arizona – there are many postulants for priesthood and diaconate for whom a three year residential […]
Have you noticed how many people, as they reflect on Steve Jobs life, talk about their computing devices. One writer, noting this, says that it’s as if people feel that they have met Steve Jobs in the machines and gadgets his company created. It’s as if they know the man because of what he made. Heck, read my reflections on Steve’s death just below this post. I did exactly the same thing. That’s worth reflecting […]
I got a push notification on my iPhone this afternoon that Steve Jobs had died earlier today. That in itself, as the President of the United States noted, was astonishing because so many of us learned the news the same way. Here’s a man who had a vision of where he was headed, stuck to his vision, and moved the world. The first computer I ever saw was a TRS-80 Model 1 back in 1977. […]
I ordered the original Kindle the day it was released. I’d been dreaming of a device like that for years; a small, energy efficient tool optimized for reading long form writing. I’ve not been disappointed. I ordered the iPad the day it came out. I ordered it for the iBookstore and the Kindle application. Adding color, email, web browsing, etc, to the ability to carry my whole library with me seemed like the next step […]
