I don’t know why, but I was thinking through David Clines’ SBL Presidential Address on learner-centered instruction again today. I can remember thinking it was a good address, but having done research in pedagogy, I don’t remember feeling like I had learned much new. Yet I was thinking about the address today in the context of this blog. My tagline is “Helping Ordinary People Understand the Old Testament.” The main way that I accomplish this is in conjunction with my e-mail list, which is made up primarily of lay people who want to gain a better understanding, none of whom to my knowledge is a professional academic in the area of Biblical Studies.
With that in mind, I started to think about the fact that my blog takes a fairly traditional approach to accomplishing what is set forth in the tagline. I write down information and if people who read the blog wish to learn from it they must simply digest that information. That is nothing like a learner-center approach that I have seen in my research, or that professor Clines spoke of in his presidential address. So, I’m asking myself the question (and I do not know that I have a good answer for it yet), what would a learner-centered blog on Biblical Studies, particularly the Old Testament, look like? For that, I think I’m going to start with this blog on Constructivist Education and see where that takes me.
I don’t know that I have seen many, if any, Biblioblogs that are very learner-centered. No offense to anyone. It is just that the blogs that I read focus more on news posts, book announcements, books reviews, informational posts, etc., i.e. the dissemination of information. Some of them focus on discussion, which I think is a move in the right direction, but then again this does not seem to make up a majority of the posts. Also, I think that memes, though some bloggers are not very fond of them, could be a means of more collaboration, which is a major tenet of constructivism. I don’t think I will abandon traditional type posts, but I would like to move toward having this blog a bit more learner-centered, though I have no idea what that would look like yet.
We’ll see …
Related Posts:
Brooke Lester on Teaching the Hebrew Bible Backwards