Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Wish that MMM could take credit for this line of thought, but really, this is where mobile and web are going. The idea is that the effects of mature networks and platforms are going to turn traditional models of software ownership on its head. Those companies who lead or adapt quickly to this trend will find the business side of the connected economy easier to deal with. Those who wish to lock people into the former model will have a harder time growing marketshare, and might find their content – while the same as a network/platform – diminished in value because it cannot be extended by the user or user communities to draw even more relevance and value from it.

Get your networks/platforms/apps ready, things are changing.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Another great look at mobile use in Africa, this time from the side of mobile enabling social change. Here’s a snippet:

Technology in itself does not lead to social change. For change to take place technology needs to be appropriate and rooted in local knowledge. People decide why and how a particular technology will be used and, depending on the political and socio-economic environment in which they live, adapt it accordingly. As we shall see from the case studies in this book, there are considerable local innovations and non-instrumental uses of the phone – using phones in ways not intended, that step outside their technological aspects and which attempt to bypass traditional power structures. Firoze Manji describes this process as ordinary people taking control of their destiny rather than technology driving the change: ‘Social change is actually driven not by technologies but by ordinary people being able to exert an authority over their own experience and, through common actions, developing the courage to determine their own destiny.’

Read the rest of the excerpted chapter of SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and order the entire book from Pambazuka Press.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

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

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

Traveling Schedule | Follow us on Twitter | Ministry Website | The Volvo

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

Traveling Schedule | Follow us on Twitter | Ministry Website | The Volvo

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