2004 Cyberminister Report
In the last several weeks, some of the key projects for the
CLF’s cyberministry have been finally coming together;
I wish that they were just a bit further along for this reporting
period but I will summarize where we are now and where we
are going.
I see three main directions for CLF’s ministry using
electronic communication:
1) Online adult religious education: this should be the immediate
priority. Currently, we are able to support such courses using
UUA email lists for discussion and a forum for instructors/facilitators
to post readings and general instructions. I am installing,
this week and next, a much better automated platform for both
self-study and instructor-facilitated group courses. (To slip
into technical speech: we are held up right now by testing
whether a new version of PHP, a server program required for
the course software, can support the already-installed.)
2) Small group ministry – covenant groups: these need
to be thought through more thoroughly before implementing.
Every congregation that has successfully implemented SGM has
said that there are key factors for success: that covenant
group facilitators be trained and carefully selected, that
they meet regularly with a minister of the congregation for
support, direction, and to keep the program in touch with
the larger ministry of the church; that the small group ministry
needs the active support of the board and the staff of the
congregation because it will, in subtle and not-so-subtle
ways, transform the life of the congregation. Thus, taking
some time at a future Board meeting to lay out and talk through
the implications and the structure needed to support this
effort is, in my opinion, essential.
In the interim: over a year ago, a small group of volunteers
offered to train to become covenant group leaders by experimenting
with their own email list. We’ve recently moved that
list to the UUA’s email list server (in the last two
weeks), and have begun discussing how two or three of those
people will offer to lead small group discussion lists as
a transition to covenant groups – a way to keep them
involved, help them learn skills carefully developed this
past year, yet not jump into the full-scale covenant group
model. It looks likely that we’ll be able to offer to
host two lists at least, meeting some expressed needs for
discussion among “demographically similar” groups:
one for widows, another for family primary breadwinners who
face issues of busy-ness, responsibility and parenting. They
will go into the project with the express goal of finding
the next list leaders during the list’s first year,
so they can transition back out of that role.
3) Offering alternate, smaller, discussions so that we are
not asking the email list CLF-L to try to meet almost all
discussion needs. The transition project with the covenant
group leaders-in-training is part of this. Two other projects
along this line have volunteers who have tentatively offered
to lead them, just in the last couple of weeks, both to operate
the discussions on a forum rather than on an email list: one,
to propose some study questions related to Quest, and then
host the discussion on the CLF forum; the other, to propose
some audio sermons available online on a variety of topic,
about 4 per month or 4 per two months, linking to the sermons,
and then hosting responses to these. As these become known
and we develop comfort with working with several discussions
on email and forums, we can accept proposals for more such
opportunities for members to communicate with each other.
I should note that a considerable amount of my effort over
the last months has gone into what I can only term “tending
to the culture” of the current cyberspace ministry:
CLF-L discussion culture, especially. I’ve also spent
considerable time talking with others who have ventured into
such projects as adult education online, to add their experience
to our planning. Recent attendance at the Small Group Ministry
conference in Arlington, Virginia, added many other new ideas
to how we can best implement that project (and I’m focusing
for a few weeks on getting our technology platform stable
and finalized, so a more detailed report on that conference
will be coming in May.) Too much effort, in my own assessment,
has gone into false starts on technology, but each failure
has helped to define further what we need, so that the final
mix of technologies will be better, I think, than we could
have defined initially.
Technology:
When email lists are likely to have 5 or more members, the
UUA is willing to host those lists.
When possible, we’ll use the existing CLF website on
the UUA server.
We need to use additional web resources for our projects,
as the UUA server cannot host all of what we want to do. After
a false start with a server company that could not provide
support, nor get some of the products we need working right,
we are working with a consultant who is installing what we
need on the server now, before he begins to charge us anything
for the server space. The cost per month when this is ready
will be less than $25.
The forum is currently at http://www.uurgl.com/forum/
-- it will have a URL with CLF in it when it is finalized,
by the end of April. You can see some sample online courses
using this technology posted there now, and also sample forums
for Quest Study Questions and Sermon Discussion.
We are also beginning, this week, to use a “blog”
format to report on projects and progress on the cyberministry
projects. I will be transferring over to that our list of
to-be-done and wish-list projects in the coming two weeks,
and have begun this week adding small and large items of activity
and accomplishment so that what is happening is more transparent.
The address for that is now http://www.uurgl.com/progress/
-- that too will change to a URL with CLF in it, and will
be placed behind a password for privacy.
Either the forum software or a “blog” can be
used to provide more current news, to keep the announcements
of CLF-Announce available on the web, and other such purposes
– this direction is not as high a priority as other
projects but we’ll be exploring how to implement something
along this line before GA. At a minimum, we’ll be able
to post CLF-Announce posts on the forum, and be able to point
to that open forum from the current CLF website.
The server will also be able to support email lists which
are smaller than the UUA is willing to support, if we need
those; the software used is also Mailman.
The new course platform that the consultant and I are testing
this week is called “Moodle.” It is an open-source
(i.e. free of charge) software platform for course development
that encourages interaction in either self-study mode or group
study, with active facilitators or less active, “canned”
instructional technology. It is currently in use by several
thousands of online learning sites, from universities to religious
organizations to independent companies. It’s also designed
to be fairly simple and very flexible for use by non-technical
instructors to prepare materials for courses.
The models of using email lists or a forum online for class
discussion are the closest parallels to group adult R.E. classes
in a bricks-and-mortar congregation; in addition, the software
can be used to guide an individual through a self-study reading
or skills-based program. One of the latter that we can develop
fairly quickly, for instance, would be a self-study course
in “I-statements” – many groups (especially
covenant groups) encourage use of I-statements but that becomes
simply jargon if there’s no way for an individual to
learn more about what those are and how to learn them. The
UUA’s current study guide for self-guided reading of
“Our Chosen Faith” is another example of content
that could be transformed quickly into online education using
this platform.
Policies and Procedures:
During the next month, I’ll also be working on policies
and procedures needed to support these projects. As a first
step, I’ll identify the “chunks” of such
policies and procedures which can be developed separately,
and provide a working space on our CLF server for volunteers
from the ECC and elsewhere, plus myself, to work on those
policies so they can be ready by June 1.
(For instance, for the transition email lists mentioned above,
the covenant group leaders-in-training are currently working
on finding a short list of guidelines for group participation.)
Summary
There is much that is happening, though at 10 hours a week
I’m often frustrated that it’s difficult to keep
at the technical sides of the project at the same time as
doing reports, being in teleconferences, and doing quick projects
that meet immediate needs. I’m trying at this point
to stay focused on “what will allow us to implement
online education to roll it out at General Assembly”
and “what will allow us to implement small group ministry/covenant
groups by GA 2005” – and at the same time tend
to the “cyberculture” of CLF so that we meet the
current needs of as many as we can.
Respectfully submitted,
Jone Johnson Lewis, CLF Cyberminister
Last updated June 12, 2005
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