jodiemcneill.com

Ever wanted to have that seamless, face-to-face delivery for your next Christian event that only a professional news reader can present? You need an autocue. But how do you get one without breaking the bank? Read the secret in my latest article at your.sydneyanglicans.net

It was only a matter of time before the secular media began to affirm what Christians have been saying for years (if not decades) that pornography is harmful. In her incisive and challenging article in today’s SMH, Adele Horin mounts the case for concern in the ever-rising popularity of Internet porn.

Listing case study after case study, and compounding the evidence with a barrage of statistics, Horin demonstrates the effect of porn on marriage and relationships. At its best, the viewing of explicit material leads men to choose the internet instead of intimacy. At its worst, the attendant secrecy breeds distrust, and marriage failure.

Sexuality is a beautiful gift from God, for enjoyment and procreation in marriage. The sooner people wake up to this fact, the sooner marriages will be stronger, and God will be glorified.

If you are a regular visitor to my site then you will know that it’s been a while since my last post. Things have been particularly full-on with work, especially the launch of the new Year 13 Gospel Gap Year program for 2008. Check out www.year13.youthworks.net to see what’s new!

This long gap between posts has made me realise the tyranny of irregularity. When it’s been a while since the last update, the next update gets harder and harder every day of delay. You feel the need to apologise, and what’s worse, the need to fill in every thing that has happened in the meanwhile.

But the problem gets worse. Once you’ve resolved to fill in the gaps, there is a natural tendency to want to post lots of catch-up articles. Is this good nettiquete? Is it ok to fill up your feed with all the articles you should have written before, or is it better to just let it all go?

Finally, just how often does a person need to post to be regular?

PS - I’ve got to say, it feels good to post again…!

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are today running a story in the ’Next’ IT section of their newspapers on my use of the Moodle program for our online learning at Youthworks College.

The article, titled “Use your moodle to deliver lessons” outlines the benefits of online learning, and documents some of the process by which we implemented it in our teaching.

Here is an excerpt:

Jodie McNeill, priest, lecturer and technology enthusiast, fell in love with Moodle late last year.

 

The open source course management system (CMS) is at the heart of Mr McNeill’s theology course for school-leavers, Year 13. Every week he uses the online system to post texts required for the following lesson.

 

Students must read them and complete comprehension tests before moving on. At the end, they must enter a summary and ask questions. Mr McNeill then monitors the answers and uses them to prepare his weekly face-to-face lectures.

Read the full story here.

An interesting article in today’s SMH suggests that the way in which we have been using PowerPoint in many of our churches and educational institutions is in fact working against the learning process, not helping it.

I have had a hunch about this for some time, and have stopped using PowerPoint to accompany my sermons and youth talks. The main reason is that I feel that PowerPoint creates a gap between preacher/teacher and congregation/class, and that simply talking allows much more scope for relationship. The fact that Gen Y’s crave experience over explanation points further to the fact that a speaker who speaks with emotion and engages the crowd will be more likely to have an impact than those who present the information in a formal teaching style.

Even more interesting is the observation that by reading along in our Bibles when the Bible reading is spoken in church may in fact be making it harder for us to comprehend the message.