Since my paper focuses on the roles played by the internet and the blogs in the teaching of Mark, I would love to get some input from the blogging community on this one. My problem is that I am fine talking about the generalities, and I have a good general sweep through. However, when it comes down to using good, precise examples, I realize how few actual blog posts I can remember. I can remember most of my own, but I really don't want this paper to be about me!
So I would like to ask my fellow bloggers if they have any ideas on this topic and, in particular, if they have any specific blog posts and series of posts that they think impact on this topic of teaching, researching and communicating Mark via the internet. Many thanks in advance. If you blog about this, please could you add a comment below too so that I don't miss anything good? Thanks.
Here's my abstract so that you can get an idea of the lines along which my project is moving:
Teaching Mark's Gospel in the internet age presents multiple challenges and opportunities. The difficulty for most instructors is that they are digital immigrants, trained to access Mark in linear fashion in printed Greek New Testaments, Synopses of the Gospels and Biblical Translations, while their students are all digital natives, whose first access to the text may be via phone, tablet and laptop, with many navigational possibilities and different layers. So too with so-called secondary literature, the contemporary student is as likely to access Youtube, iTunes U and the blogosphere as they are the dusty articles and dated monographs that we love.
But to embrace the new opportunities provided by the internet encourages instructors to rethink their approach to Mark in several ways: (1) The informal, often colloquial nature of blog posts can make the scholarship far more accessible to students, as well as encouraging them to try their hand at blogging about Mark themselves; (2) Podcasts make access to scholarship for blind and visually impaired students more straightforward and they enable all students to study away from the desk; (3) Websites that use dynamic ways of representing the Gospels and Gospel scholarship open up new avenues for both instructors and their students. Examples (good and bad) of the these phenomena in the teaching of Mark illustrate how to get the best out of digital Mark and digital Marcan scholarship.
