design Posts

I've just signed up for Beacon Hill's Friends House's Quaker Studies class on "Moodle, Technique / Technology" that begins First Month 12.

An educator F/friend of mine has gushed on about Moodle, the open source education system and I have to admit it's always looked intriguing. I've taught a number of real-world Quakerism classes and I've wondered whether online courses could help connect Friends and seekers isolated by distance or theology. I've been wanting to try out one of Beacon Hill's online classes for awhile.

From the description:

Is online teaching new to you?

Don't know where to start?

We'll begin with the simplest interactive course: a "welcome to the class" section with a reading and one forum. We'll talk about technology: how settings change the forum interface; but we'll also discuss teaching technique: how to present introductory material to students who may have a wide range of experience and expectations.

Over the 10 weeks, we'll cover: introducing the moodle environment; chats; forums; choices and surveys; lessons; assignments; databases; wikis; quizzes.

You will have your own lesson space to explore all these tools and will be expected to look at each other's work and react to it. By March we should all be ready to design and offer creative Moodle courses of our own.

Classes only cost $25. You can find out more about the Beacon Hill's Moodle online class and all their Quaker Studies classes. If anyone would be interested in some sort of QuakerQuaker-sponsored classes, let me know. We've got a lot of well-qualified Quaker teachers in the network and a lot of isolated Friends wanting to learn more.

Henry Jenkins (right) mixes up the names but has good commentary on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I've been quoting lines over on my Tumblr blog but this is a good one for Quaker readers because I think it says something about the Convergent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

Susan Boyle's video was produced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that border. In the Convergent Friends movement, we're discovering "content which wasn't designed for our market"--Friends of all different stripes having direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost immediately. In this context, the "networks and productions companies" would be our yearly meetings and larger Friends bodies.

Update: I'll be adding #qqtalk to tonight's live Twitter blog of the Presidential debate. If you have a Twitter account you can just follow me at "martin_kelley" and non-Twitter users can see all the qqtalk posts by going to this "qqtalk" page. And definitely check out the fascinating discussions happening in the comments of this post!

Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.

I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.

Part of the problem with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.

So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.

I'll start off:

I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we're all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it's yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn't anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? "Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." And yet... it's clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever "confessions" can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it's also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it's could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

• sIFR
  Flash/javascript rich fonts for websites
  (tags: tech.design)
• Google Maps adds geotagged photos
  But only from their own service, Panoramio. Yahoo's Flickr is snubbed. Does Google really need to use it's dominant mapping service to wrest control from one of the few well-known services it doesn't own?
  (tags: comment tech)

Long in the works, my O'Reilly Media-published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators" is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to "hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat" but it's more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: "folksonomic density" (Google it now kids and you'll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).

A hundred thank you's to my fine and patient editor S. (don't know if you want to be outed here). I've been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I've sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it's amazing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I've just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O'Reilly website.

Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.