Jon Jolly

There’s lot of talk at the moment about the future of youth work. Marko’s been blogging extracts from his new book ‘Youth Ministry 3.0…‘ looking at how we’re missing the mark in [US] youth ministry, and what needs to change in order to more truly live into our calling as youth workers.

Over this side of the Atlantic, Tim Davies has been running a survey on Youth Work and Social Networking for the NYA and has set-up an online network for looking at the use of social media in informal education.

If you’re interested in exploring what social media means for youth services, participation projects, IAG, or any other organisations providing support, advice and activities to young people - do come and join us over on the UK Youth Online Ning network.

I would encourage any youth worker with an online presence to go and join the conversation with Tim. There’s a lot to be explored!

Finally, if you’re confused about the different stages of online development, Steven Flower nicely summarises the ‘Point O’ progression:

Web 1.0 was about receiving content
Web 2.0 was/is about making / contributing content
Web 3.0 is about filtering information

Where are you on this scale and how do you use it in your work with young people?

There’s been a lot of activity recently in people mapping data from the Bible into visual representations.

Chris Harrison took the King James Version and produced some beautiful images based on the connections between the passages, before developing a social network representation and distribution of people and places like the image below.

The background is the entire text of the Bible. Floating above it are all of the biblical names. These are positioned according to their average position in the text and lines are rendered to show where the names occur. Font size is proportional to the number of occurrences in the text.

Also, in a similar vein Crossway Books have put together an interactive Social Map of the New Testament that shows the connections between each of the characters.

It’s great to see the Bible being presented in new and exciting ways that allow Christians to interact with the people and stories to see the connections. I’d love to see this kind of research developed into abstract art that illustrated the various scriptures!

ht: Happy Traveller and Think Christian