By the same token, I want to try again already. You see, there's this verse that's been on my mind for 2 weeks. So, I am going to launch another Bible Study here in a day or two. I figured this might be a good place for everyone to leave any critiques, thoughts, enhancements on the first one.
My thoughts:
- Passing the whole study around really got bulky in a hurry! I felt a little daft for not predicting that one from the start, but I never claimed to be a prophet.
- It was still fun to get everyone's thoughts, in their own way, at their own depth. Much more fun than just studying the verse alone and presenting my conclusions. More complete, too. Everything from Dee's short take, to Milly adding the chapter in context, and Danny Kaye bringing in Hebrews was really great.
- I'm a big fan of study tools, so on the next one I will probably use some of them.
New ideas:
- I think maybe the person who starts the bible study should probably aggregate all the comments on their own site. Some people will have little thoughts that can be put in the comments, and others will have big thoughts that deserve their own posts. Either way, the person who called bible study is responsible to aggregate all those thoughts into a coherent(-ish) post at the end.
- Maybe the bible study should consist of at least 2 rounds. The first round would be brainstorming for questions. Everyone should bring up everything they can think of that might be confusing about the verse. After there are some questions on the table, I think the study might be more interesting.
Your thoughts? What did you like? What would you like to see different? Anyone else got something on their mind before I play again?
6 comments:
Play on my friend, play on.
You are right about it becoming too bulky too quickly. (I will take the blame on that one since I tend to go a bit.)
But I think the new way you are suggesting is actually just blogging and commenting. Which is fine. I like the idea of the originator of the study creating new posts from comments he/she deemed worthy.
Let's have some fun!
I think the new way you are suggesting is actually just blogging and commenting.
You're right, of course. I was hoping to do something more than blogging and commenting, but if the discussion got even a little bit heavier the pass-it-around format would fail. Andreia and Dee also made their contributions via comment.
I can see two other formats that might work better.
1) Some kind of "group" blog.
2) An actual groupware-type site
Both of those would involve a little bit of time-investment from everyone involved, so I don't think we are ready for them yet. Let's see whether we do this more than once or twice, first.
It puts a little more burden on the study owner, but I'm cool with that. What's worse is that it takes away control from all the contributors. I'm not happy about that, but I will do my best to make sure everyone is fully heard. After all, if I didn't want everyone to be heard, I wouldn't be asking!
Ah. Maybe it will help if I eat my own dog food.
I will put the post up, then not comment to it directly. I will put up another post for my thoughts and comments on the verse. Then, when I am aggregating everyone else's comments, I will just treat mine the same.
I think there should also be a way to separate the comments somehow. It got a little "wierd" toward the end to figure out which words were attributed to whom.
Any thoughts? Colored text? Alternating bold and Italics? Borders?
Good thought. Colors usually work pretty well.
At some point, I would think it all gets blended into one continuous stream. It would be cool if everyone's thoughts were still colored, and it looked rainbow-ish.
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