The failure of policies and training

The ongoing sex scandals in the military demonstrates the failure of our culture's obsession with policies and training. Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong when persons charged with handling reports of rape and abuse are themselves accused of the same offenses and crimes.

The response, oddly enough, is to engage in further training and new policies--better training! Newer policies! Yet how long will we go on with this, before we admit that these approaches themselves are failing? Will further education truly change people's attitudes toward sexual violence?

It's hard not to think of Stanley Hauerwas here and his contention that modern, Enlightenment, universalizing thinking is what is to blame. Timeless universals don't save, and workshops and training don't really change people. Policies can, oddly enough, enable further abuse by providing a way around these offenses.

What truly changes people is specifics: character, culture, contexts, and particularities, and especially a community of right action. Religious communities can function in this manner. Although religion has, sadly enough, engendered further abuses, it has also provided a potent way of changing people's attitudes and actions. It can be a particularity that shapes and transforms people in deep ways. For example, if Christians were to agree to never commit sexual violence precisely because they are Christians (transposing one of Hauerwas' arguments about war and violence), it would accomplish much more than further sensitivity training and renewed policies.

Only the context of a strong community and a deeply formed character – what former eras would have called virtue – will truly change people's hearts and actions.

How to podcast your classes

I've been recording and posting my classes online for students to review and use ever since David Williams taught me this trick. Here's the best way I have found to do it.

I use the built-in Voice Memos app on the iPhone (or an iPod touch would do too). 

(I did try the AudioMemos app, but I found it confusing to use and the sound quality not as good, unless you let it record WAV files, and then you have a 400+MB file.)

Here's the fancy bit: I stick it in my shirt breast pocket, upside down, so that the mic is facing up towards my face. Surprisingly, it works pretty well. Wearing a jacket muffles things a bit, as does setting the iOS device down, or carrying it around. I find using the breast pocket does a nice job. This doesn't record student questions or comments very well, of course, but nothing would without microphoning everyone, which is impossible.

The next step is to get the recordings off your phone and onto your computer. You can let iTunes transfer and sync your recordings, but I found that I ended up with bad data filling up my iPhone (the nefarious Other category); old voice memos would creep back onto my phone somehow. I ended up buying the PhoneView Mac app to try and fix the data corruptions on my iPhone. Sadly, PhoneView didn't solve the problem, and I had to restore the iPhone (this is very tedious, and not recommended). 

But what PhoneView does do quite well is provide a way to pull your voice memos off your iPhone without using iTunes. This is now how I get to my class recordings without invoking iTunes and leading to further data corruptions. I have Voice Memos set not to sync with iTunes.

At the end of the week I use Sound Studio on my Mac to edit the recordings. (You can use Audacity or GarageBand, but Sound Studio is the easiest in my book.) Using Sound Studio, I reduce the sample rate sound quality from the standard 44,100 down to 11,025. I find this gives a nice balance of sound quality and file size. The point here is to make the voice recording a manageable and downloadable size.

I also use Sound Studio to check the beginning and end of the recording. Sometimes there's dead space at the beginning, or I'm interrupted and don't start class exactly as the recording starts. Similarly, at times I forget to turn off the recording after class, which is quite dangerous if you're having a confidential conversation with a student! So I want to check to make sure the beginning and ending of the sound file is the proper beginning and ending of the class. Then I save the file, which is now about 10 MB for a 50 minute class.

The next stage is renaming the file. I found the best way of naming these files is as the class code, so PHIL 205, followed by a dash and the week number. I find it easiest to label my lecture notes and these podcasts with the week number as it standardizes my notes, whether it's a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class or Tuesday-Thursday class. I then attach a period and a number for which day it is., along with a rough title for that particular class session. So the Wednesday class in the third week of the semester would be PHIL 203-3.2 Kant and Ethics.

Finally, the last step is to upload the files. I have used a shared Evernote folder in the past, and I have also used Blackboard, and I'm ambivalent about which is better. One word of advice is to upload your files from campus, as the upload speeds at your institution will be wildly better than your home connection. After uploading the files, I change their label color to green, which invokes the Hazel rule I have to squirrel the recordings away on my hard drive. (If I should need an alternate assignment for a future class, these recordings could be quite useful.)

I like recording classes because it puts the emphasis where it should be, which is on the class experience and class time. It also means that students don't have to try and transcribe the class completely, but can listen to the class afterwards. It has been helpful for me to listen to the class afterwards as well!

A Seminary Theology Reading List

What to read before going to seminary? Here's my proposal for a list of vital theological works. I've not gone into confessional differences; you should know enough to read your Calvin, Luther, Wesley, or Aquinas if you come out of those respective traditions. I've also chosen works that are fairly accessible, and have been seminal for modern theology.

Other teachers will have different lists. This one is mine, reflecting my own education and interests.

1. The Confessions by Saint Augustine. Look for all the theology he incorporates into this hugely influential work, which is also the first autobiography ever written. Read it twice. Also, The City of God has become very important recently, but this is a longer work.

2. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. A classic work that points to the end of modernity as seen in its broken ethical systems and vocabulary. Very influential on a range of theologians.

3. Dogmatics in Outline by Karl Barth. A dense work, but it summarizes much of what he was about, and why he is the most significant and influential theologian since the Reformation.

4. Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank. Another dense and difficult work (Milbank can be notoriously impenetrable), but it has been very influential in his critique of modernity and its violence. You will see the influence of MacIntyre and Saint Augustine on Milbank.

5. Rowan Williams. The keenest theological mind in English today. The former Archbishop of Canterbury (retired, now the head of Magdalene College, Cambridge) is suffused with sacramentality, theological insight, and liturgical sensibilities. Anything by Williams will be good.

6. Stanley Hauerwas. The keenest American ethicist and theologian. There is a Reader of his writings, or The Peaceable Kingdom is quite seminal. He has been influenced by MacIntyre, is a persuasive pacifist, and is part of a postmodern turn to the church and its practices.

7. Sarah Coakley is a Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, an Anglican priest, and a feminist. She is liturgical and sacramental, and writes about gender and sexuality in deeply thoughtful ways. She is working on a systematic theology at this very moment. Anything by her will give you a sense of contemporary Anglican theology.

8. Follow Ben Myers' blog at http://www.faith-theology.com for keen observations on theology and academics today (along with some wit).

9. For other suggestions, see the The 3 Books Shelf series at The Theology Studio. 
http://theologystudio.org/content/3-books-shelf-0.

Markdown and Academics

I've toyed with Markdown before, but never really understood it or got it. I think now I get it, especially for academics.

It is the Mac Power Users episode that has really brought this home for me. I have personally seen how Microsoft Word files get outdated, especially after I spent some time a few years ago opening and re-saving old Word 5.x files into the newer formats. I do think, however, that there is some security with Word, since Word is so dominant in businesses and academics; there is always safety in numbers, and there is a very good chance that someone somewhere will always offer conversion services, such as Zamzar. Yet this kind of service/conversion is a bit of a pain, might involve cost, and is certainly not guaranteed.

One of the things I have struggled with, and where I think Markdown will be quite helpful, is notes in the classroom. I'm convinced that simple outlines work best for classtime, as they encourage flexibility, a focus on the actual text being studied, and dialogue between students and teacher. They also make for quick re-usage of material in other contexts, classes, and lectures. I have played with various approaches here, from plain text files to OmniOutliner and Evernote. What I need is something simple, yet with some sort of formatting to make scanning the words quick and easy; I need ways to bullet, indent, and title key phrases and elements. So complete plain text is out, as it can't indent and bullet as I would like.

OmniOutliner works great in many ways (I especially like the ability to hide or reveal parent lines, even though I sometimes miss the closed icon and forget text is hiding there), but is too fiddly – I seem to always be messing around with fonts and sizes – and it doesn't have a good sync option (at least not yet, but it's coming soon). The other problem is still the issue of data rot; will OmniOutliner be around and accessible in 5 years? (I hope and expect so.) I've also been disappointed that moving OmniOutliner data to other formats tends to mess up the formatting, so that bulleted indents get wackily thrown off their proper alignments (I've tried various exporting options, but no luck.)

Evernote works quite well for formatting, with some nice abilities to create lists and make text bold. The sync is great in many ways (especially its omnipresence), but it's not quite as lithe as I would like. Because I do use Evernote for archiving lots of different kinds of files, I end up having sync and discovery lags as I look for my lecture notes among my various items. There is still the data rot issue, along with formatting issues. Additionally, one must always wonder about file corruptions with these formats; with plain text, corruption is much less likely.

Using Markdown, as David Sparks says, you have simple, plain text files that can be converted into unsophisticated formatted text – and that's just what I need. So I would have my original text files, which are fairly future-proof, and I can have my peek at those TXT files during classtime with a Markdown conversion so that they are easy to read quickly. Byword works quite well, as you can quickly toggle the preview of the formatted Markdown file for classroom purposes. It has an easy, fast sync; further, it's not a closed garden, in that the files are still TXT files and not a proprietary format. That's pretty close to what I was wanting, and so I'm experimenting with this.

The next stage for academicians is long text and professional writing, which Markdown is not designed for. Academic citations are fairly rigorous and need more robustness than even MultiMarkdown provides. Until there is a Markdown more oriented towards the printed page (or its simulacrum, the PDF file) instead of HTML – or, until academic writing becomes more fully web-oriented – Markdown isn't probably a good option for peer-reviewed works or manuscripts.

Probably. Yet.