Mutual Collaboration

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today was a good day in class. We shared all our final media projects as well as our frustrations with the use of technology.  I am always resistant to using new things but for my final assignment I decided to create my project in a video platform that I never used before. Animoto website is attractive and easy to use but as I was working on creating my video I discovered that this web site does not give you a lot of options to expand your creativity. I liked the fact that I could download my own music in the body of the video, but when I wanted to include text the number of characters allowed per photo was so restricted.

My learning creating this video was to be aware that sometimes we do not have all the resources to accomplish our task the way we want and this leads us to be frustrated. In the “Fourth Sign” or the Miraculous Feeding in the Gospel of John chapter six, we can see that Jesus fed a group of five thousand  people. He relied only in five barley loaves and two fish that belonged to a boy among the multitude. The story of the miraculous feeding with bread and fish is so powerful that it is the only miracle story that occurs in all four Gospels, and Matthew and Mark even tells the same story twice. What we can learn from this story is that Jesus used only what he had at his disposal (five barley loaves and two fish) and the help of his disciples: Philip, Andrew and Simon Peter.  

Howard Rheingold in his section “Crowdsourcing, Supersizing Cooperation”  quoting Ankit Sharma, he points out that in crowdsourcing the participation of the crowd is voluntary  and the contribution of a wide network of people is required for any initiative to reach a substantial scale. Among the critical success factors for crowdsourcing projects, human capital with a variety of skills, abilities and literacies is required.  This human capital and the mutual collaboration is what I experienced during this week in my class. We really embodied Palmer Parker’s Community of Truth model. Each of us was a knower in relationship to the “great thing” and each of us was in relationship to each other. 

 

 

 

 

Alfredo /That all may be one

Alfredo /That all may be one.

Language privilege?

Una de las cosas que me sorprendió hoy en clase fue la entrevista de Susan Crawford con Bill Moyers  en donde señaló  que uno no puede solicitar empleo o  beneficios si no se tiene acceso al internet. Poco a poco en nuestra época,  se tiende a ver este acceso a la comunicación como un derecho más que como un lujo.

El propósito de este blog es para mí un experimento en el que quiero comprobar cuanta gente realmente entra a leer en otro idioma para  interactuar con el mundo más allá de sus fronteras. Sin acceso al internet y sus distintas aplicaciones,  es difícil poder  traducir otros idiomas  al menos que uno sea versátil en la lengua a tratar. Con esto seguimos comprobando que el internet  es una herramienta  súper indispensable en estos tiempos.

Dentro de este contexto  quiero incluir el punto  de vista de  Dra. Hess. En el  capítulo sexto de su libro nos habla sobre los diseños de aprendizaje y el uso de los medios digitales en las comunidades marginalizadas y  menciona que podemos trascender la geografía y el tiempo y dejar de lado las interpretaciones preconcebidas sobre una determinada cultura o un grupo racial. Posteriormente  ella agrega  elementos a la lista de los privilegios de los  blancos  que proporciona McIntosh. Nos dice  que cuando ella enseña, delega libros a sus estudiantes  asumiendo que estos autores tienen su color. Al final, todo es una presunción.

Me pregunto si el uso de lenguaje y nuestra apatía de interactuar en otros idiomas o nuestra presunción  de creer que la gente en el orbe tiene que comunicarse necesariamente en ingles puede ser considerado como un privilegio del lenguaje. Si es así, quién controla estas definiciones?

De nosotros dependerá el cómo utilizar estas herramientas   y en su buen uso  expandir nuestros horizontes. 

http://translate.google.com/#es/en/

What is real presence?

What is real presence?

An interesting conversation happened in class today in terms of the “portability” of the sacrament.

The Outline of Our Faith section in the Book of Common Prayer defines our two Sacraments: Baptism and Holy Eucharist as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as clear instruments by which we receive that grace. ( BCP 857). The Holy Eucharist  is the sacrament commanded by Christ for the continual remembrance of his life, death and resurrection. The outward and visible sign in the Eucharist is the bread and wine, given and received according to Christ’s command. The inward and spiritual grace in Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ to his people and received by faith. (BCP  859)

I believe that the forms of our worship do not change through a course of a slow steady evolution, but rather undergo significant development at critical moments in history. We are living now in one of those critical moments and in a paradigm shift where “all that is solid melts into air”.

So, when we have a television ministry as our TV Eucharist for those unable to attend church for many reasons, the question that we confront is this:  can the transmission of audio and video by a digitally processed and multiplexed signal really convey the real presence of the sacrament?

Trinity

Of special interest for me in the class today was the question of how the doctrine of the Trinity shapes my reality and how the fusion of plausible promise, effective tool and acceptable bargain relates to this doctrine and my sense of what is real. I have to confess that as Dr. Hess pointed out, it was a cognitive exercise.

Dorothy Sayers famously observed that if people depended upon the Church to answer the question, “What is the Trinity?” the vast majority of people would respond: “‘The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the whole thing incomprehensible.’ Something put in by the theologians to make it more difficult – nothing to do with daily life or ethics.”

For me the relevant model of the Trinity in my daily life is a community model in which the three persons are present in the unfolding of history. The model of the Trinity for me does not reflect a model of domination but of convergence in which there is a mutual acceptance and these three persons accept each other: “Source of all being, eternal Word and Holy Spirit.” All of them are interconnected as creation is interconnected. Under this doctrine of the Trinity, God teaches me that without diversity we would not have a Triune God. There would not be unity. Diversity is important and it is part of this mystery.

The experience of the Trinity in my daily life is also the experience of God’s mystery. Live in the mystery is the plausible promise. The tools that allow me to live in the mystery are gratitude, sacred intention and compassion and the acceptable bargain is my understanding that all human language about God is metaphorical.

The name of the Trinity consequently is a metaphor.

Padre Alfredo post 1

I enjoyed the Click 2 Save book. It expanded my understanding of digital social media. This is a book that is easy to follow and provides an overview of the main features of the major digital platforms. Of special interest for me was the chapter of remapping the world. I am personally fascinated with maps and I can see how this graphic construct can outline ideologies and its relationship with power. The fact that the countries that have power have been portrayed themselves in the map  over  and above the more unfortunate ones is an example of this. The position of the North at the top of the map is arbitrary.  Normally “up” is associated with good and  “down” with bad. Therefore North is good and South is bad. A medieval mappa mundi  constructed by mediaeval mapmakers  marked spiritual and psychological terrains. The author points out that those maps told stories about how people imagined  themselves in the world in which they lived.   Maps in the evolving digital world are now representations where social networks have allowed people to cross boundaries, to transcend  nationality, ethnicity, political ideology and religion.  I wonder if the Gospel writer in Matthew 28  ever imagined the Great Commission pronouncement for the world in which we live now: “go and make disciples of all nations”