Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

A friend of our ministry started a church in Georgia not long ago. He promised his parishioners that if the congregation reaches a certain number by a certain date, he will preach from the rooftop. He sent to my cell a picture from his pulpit before preaching on Sunday.

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Written by: Bradley Grainger

Introduction

The Visitor Pattern allows new functionality to be added to a class hierarchy without modifying the hierarchy. It accomplishes this by having one (virtual) “accept” method that can call back many different visitor implementations.

The Visitor Pattern is a way of implementing double dispatch in languages (like C#) that don’t support it natively; as a result, many have argued (1, 2, 3) that the existence of this pattern is an indication of a missing language feature.

C# 4 addresses this limitation with the addition of the dynamic keyword, which allows method calls to be dispatched dynamically at runtime based on the runtime types of the objects involved. This can be used to implement the visitor pattern more simply.

Example

Consider a typical pedagogical class hierarchy:

Written by: Sean Boisen

The MIT Technology Review echoes an AP story about how, despite the proliferation of smart phones (and the digerati’s consequent obsession with them), “most wireless use is still centered on laptops”. So what do people do when they’re on the road and need something? They call a friend and ask them to look it up/book it/etc., as a human internet proxy.

Donna and i do this all the time: we don’t have web-connected phones, so if i’m driving and lost, i call her. She’s very likely to be either sitting at or within 50 feet of an Internet-connected computer, so she can relay the information back to me. Maybe not quite as cool as having my own pocket Internet , but very workable, a whole cheaper (no data plan), and it reinforces our relationship at the same time.

Technology Review: Info on the go for travelers without smart phones.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

This is worth the time it would take to read. Not just because of the perspective – and how much it will snap reality into the Western-side of the Body, but in the explanation of Technology, Rising Middle Class, and the Future of Evangelism in Africa in Africa, we can see even more why the mobile lens is so important to understand for its abilities and it implications. Here’s a snippet:

…Utilize Africa’s New PC to Preach the Gospel…Rather African Christians had better utilize their “New Mobile Phone PCs” to effectively evangelize and mobilize for the Gospel. I recall a New Testament Teaching Seminar I helped organize in Uganda, Africa about three years ago; much of the mobilization was through Text Messages to the many Phone numbers given to us. Interestingly, we did not need to put up radio advertisements and posters, rather we wrote a few letters inviting Pastors and relied on SMS Text messages to the many individuals who then passed over that information to others…

Read the rest of Technology, Rising Middle Class, and the Future of Evangelism in Africa at Yesu Mulungi.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Given the energy around the recent post about moving MMM to Google Wave, I thought it good to link to a post at my personal site which gives a bit of the history behind me (Antoine) and the technology that’s penned a good deal of my life. Key thing to keep in mind, this is just my story, the Body has to enable folks to see this and tell their story and the story of the Gospel within whatever lens is appropriate. How MMM does this is something to be further opened as we get closer to BibleTech.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

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Written by: Sean Boisen

camaris has started a Bible Data Visualization blog to practice some visualizations. The goal:

… show 40 visualizations of the Holy Bible. Most of the visualizations will be self-made, but sometimes I will cover the work from other people.

Looks like there’s also some narration of the process, which may be useful if you’re thinking about how to do some visualizations yourself.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Continuing the discussion on the implications of mobile/web technology. Here are some more questions to spark the discussion. Remember, you can answer here or over at Twitter.

• How does the globalization of mobile/web effect the perception of community?
• Does it matter on a local level where the affluence of mobile/web isn’t as felt?
• What are the negatives of mobile/web? How do we adjust?
• What legislation has helped or hindered the Body’s ability to respond to these negative issues, and what are the future challenges?

Ok, that’s all that I’ll throw out there for now. Let’s open the box and come to terms with what is the now of this intersection of faith and mobile tech. And start talking about how we’ll address these items.

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

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Written by: Sean Boisen

John Hobbins over at the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog has been musing about this question:

What do you think a state-of-the-art electronic journal in biblical studies would look like?

This question lives right where so many interesting discussions are currently taking place around topics like

• the future of publishing and the book
• how collaboration, user contribution, and social media change the nature of publication
• open access journals and publishing (see for example this list of 63 open access journals in the broad area of religion from the Directory of Open Access Journals)
• how vendors and publishers might facilitate this new world: Microsoft is definitely thinking about it, and Dave Weinberger has some rough notes here from a talk. Science publisher Elsevier is working toward the (research journal) article of the future.
  

It’s still too early to know the answers, but here are a few areas of interest to me:

1. The value of search, hyperlinked information, and other digital conveniences seems indisputable.
2. There’s a lot of momentum from openness so far. Wikipedia has clearly won the day against the Encyclopedia Britannica, through its combination of free access, timely update of content, and tremendous scope – and despite criticisms of its lack of authoritativeness and editorial control (a caution to those who want peer review to be a control gate). But clearly part of Wikipedia’s real success is its ability to motivate and manage an enormous community of volunteers: it remains to be seen how easily others can replicate that feat. Hobbins rightly questions how this will all work with databases that are behind pay walls.
3. In the five years of Web 2.0, we’ve all learned the value of having a community that can tag, rate, and comment on content. But the network effects here require a certain critical mass to pay off: how would that be accomplished in a field like Biblical studies? How will authors feel having others leave comments directly on their articles (including those of a contrary nature)?
4. Can such a thing really work out on the open web, or does it need a rich community of resources like Logos to really thrive?

The technical issues aren’t likely to prove stumbling blocks: there are plenty of solutions there. I expect the tough problems will have a lot more to do with community building, rethinking scholarship and publication, clarifying the value propositions and business issues, and gaining traction.

This post originally appeared on Blogos