Using Social Media in Religious Education by Will Kahn-Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at bluesock.org.
You should have the following:
(10 minutes-ish–definitely depends on how many people are in the class.)
Activity: Introduction
Present
Hi! I’d like to welcome you all to the social media in RE workshop. Today we’re going to meet each other, make a covenant, get a feel for what the rest of the week will entail, and then talk about what we want to get out of the class.
I want to go around the room and introduce ourselves. When you introduce yourself, say your name, where you live, and what you hope to get out of this class.
Go around the room; everyone introduces themself.
One thing you can do with hopes is write them down and post them on a board somewhere to refer to again later.
When everyone’s done, reiterate the important things that were said that you want to make sure get covered over the course of the workshop.
(30 minutes)
Activity: Build a covenant
Present
Let’s create a covenant. This covenant should cover the following kinds of things:
Work on the covenant.
One way to do this is to create a pad on PiratePad [1], seed it with the questions, give everyone the url, and then let them add their bits, consolidate bits, and work through to a consensus.
| [1] | http://piratepad.net/ |
If you plan to have the participants keep a blog over the course of the workshop, you could tie that into chalice lighting in the morning.
When everyone is done, present the following.
(30 minutes)
Activity: Defining things
Present
This workshop has a technical bent and that’s scary but doesn’t have to be. It’s often the case that we talk about these things, but we don’t really know what they are. Let’s spend some time defining terms we’re going to be using throughout the workshop.
You can do this in one of a few ways:
If you have time or suspect some participants to be “beginners”, go for option 3 to alleviate the possibility that people are too embarrassed to shout out, “I don’t know what the Internet is!”
Also, feel free to add additional terms.
Loosely, the Internet is a really big network with billions of computers in it connected by a variety of network connections ranging from wireless, 3g, 4g, 10-base-T, fiber optics, DSL, cable, satellite signals, and so on. The network is world wide and even connects objects in orbit.
That massive network allows our computers to be connected to one another and allows us to run computer programs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Sometimes the Internet is called the “cloud”. The idea behind the “cloud” is that somewhere on the Internet is a computer that’s doing something for you; you don’t really care where it is so long as it gets the work done.
We’re going to define computer as any device that you can manipulate through input devices like touchpads, mice, and keyboards and displays results on output devices like monitors and screens.
There are lots of different kinds of computers out there: servers, desktop computers, tablets, notebooks, laptops, netbooks, smart phones, ... The differences between the kinds of computers usually relate to how they’re built, what function they serve, and how people are expected to use them.
Your computer is a piece of hardware. The operating system manages the hardware, provides a user interface, and implements a bunch of functionality that you use to do things like start programs, set up printers and network connections, manage files on your hard drive, and other things like that.
Often the operating system comes with programs like a web browser. For example, OSX comes with a web browser called Safari. Windows comes with a web browser called Internet Explorer. Most GNU/Linux operating systems come with a web browser called Firefox.
The World Wide Web is on the Internet. It’s the part of the Internet that we access with a web browser.
Every time we click on a link or type in a url, our web browser requests a web-page from a web server, the web server does some processing, and then the web server returns a response to our web browser.
For websites, this response is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other things that make up a web-page.
The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in December, 1990 to make it easier for physicists to build a knowledge base of material to share their research.
As a side note, Tim Berners-Lee is a Unitarian Universalist [2].
| [2] | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Personal_life |
A client/server application is an application that has a client part, a server part and a well defined protocol that the two parts communicate with.
A protocol is a formal description for what messages look like and how they’re exchanged. Protocols surround us. For example, in a worship, call and response is a protocol.
There are hundreds of protocols used by applications on the Internet. Many of them are defined with specifications called RFCs. RFCs are written by people who are interested in the protocol and how it’ll be used.
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It’s the client-server protocol that your web browser and a web server use to communicate. When you “go to a website”, your web browser requests data from that web server. The web server sends the data. Then your web browser displays it to you.
For example, that conversation could look like this:
The web browser requests the page /index.html:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.0
The web server finds the page and sends the response back to the browser:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
<html>
<body>
Hi!
</body>
</html>
A web browser is a program that runs on your computer that allows you to browse the web. When you click on a link, a bookmark, or type in a url, your web browser connects to the web server for that website, makes an HTTP request, gets back an HTTP response, and displays the response for you.
There are a variety of standards that specify how the response should be displayed.
HTML, CSS and Javascript are three standards that specify how an HTTP response should be displayed. There are more standards involved and there are different versions of these standards. There’s a couple of organizations that are set up solely to maintain the standards. The W3C is one of them.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It’s a markup language that allows you to specify how text should be displayed.
For example:
<html>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
<p>
This is a paragraph.
</p>
<p>
This is another paragraph. My favorite book is
<b>Pride and Prejudice</b>.
</p>
</body>
</html>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It allows you to split semantic markup from formatting markup which makes it easier to write web-pages. This is a lot like styles in OpenOffice and Word where instead of specifying which text is bold, you specify that certain text use the “titles of books” style and that style is always bold.
For example, the above web page using CSS:
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.title {
font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
<p>
This is a paragraph.
</p>
<p>
This is another paragraph. My favorite book is
<span class="title">Pride and Prejudice</span>.
</p>
</body>
</html>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css
HTML and CSS on a page don’t change. They’re formatting languages–not programming languages. Javascript is a programming language that allows developers to write web-pages that do things.
All social media sites use extensive amounts of Javascript in the interface.
Social media is any web site or web service that enables interaction and participation often by connecting people in a network.
Many websites have social media aspects to them: comments, forums, buttons to indicate you like something, voting, scoring, and other ways to participate.
Other websites have participation and interaction at their core. This is what I’m referring to when I’m talking about “social media”.
Social media doesn’t have to be just a website. Many successful social media systems use standard Internet protocols or expose application programming interfaces that allow developers and other people to write desktop applications, mobile applications and other things. Sometimes you can use the website or a desktop application or both.
Check to see if there are any other terms that people want defined. Also make sure that if terms pop up that participants don’t understand over the course of the workshop, they should feel free to ask.
Make sure it’s really clear that no one should feel any negative feelings for asking a question about something they don’t understand.
(30 minutes)
Activity: Advantages and concerns about social media
Present
Let’s cover a rough set of advantages and concerns of social media so we have a context in which to think about things as we go through the workshop.
Let’s talk about advantages first. I know we’re at the beginning of the workshop, but what advantages can you think of for using social media sites in your programs?
Have participants talk about advantages social media will have on RE programs. This is at the beginning of the workshop, so it’s totally fine if no one can think of anything.
After things peter out, make sure at least the following are mentioned:
Present
Let’s talk about concerns of social media. It’s best to think of these things as concerns because many of them can be alleviated or worked around . They’re things we have to keep in mind when we’re choosing systems to use and how we’re going to integrate them into our program.
What concerns can you think of when using social media in your program?
Have participants talk about disadvantages of social media. This is at the beginning of the workshop, so it’s totally fine if no one can think of anything.
After things peter out, make sure at least the following are mentioned:
(10 minutes)
Explain the outline of the workshop and what you plan to cover. If you can factor in participants’ hopes, that’d be super.