The "Textyness" of the Textbook in a Digital Age

I must admit that I have never been a big fan of the "textbook", especially at university level.  University students are at the stage where they should be reading a range of primary and secondary materials and over-dependence on an introductory-level single-authored book will not bring out the best in them.  I appreciate, at the same time, that students often want something that will help them out with introducing a new topic and it can perform a useful function in guiding them through the early stages of something complex, and so it is a crutch that I have sometimes recommended, though always with lots of warnings and with a good range of different introductory textbooks too to illustrate the point.

Recent discussions about the possibilities of an online Old Testament Textbook (AKMA, NT Blog, Sansblogue, Anumma, AKMA, NT Blog) might cause us to reflect on the whole scenario of textbook-writing a bit further.  As several have implied already, the digital age allows us to rethink the way we do textbooks and I'd like to support Tim, Brooke and AKMA in that kind of thinking, and then to encourage still more radical thinking about what we are trying to do when we conceptualize textbooks.  I think textbooks have a couple of shortcomings, both of which can be overcome in the digital age.  One relates to the "text" bit and the the other relates to the "book" bit.  In this post, I'd like to address briefly the text bit.

Old-fashioned textbooks are just too texty.  For those of us who have some investment in the digital world, and that is all of us who are engaging in this discussion, we are familiar with the fact that it is now possible to access audio and video material far more straightforwardly than it was in the past.  In our area, there is a wealth of good audio and video material and this is only going to increase with time.  Think, just for starters, about Bibledex from the University of Nottingham, or the several resources available at St John's Nottingham.  I have added audio and video pages to lots of the NT Gateway pages in order to gather together the best of these resources.  The importance of this should not be underestimated.  Different students learn better with different media,   Some respond much more positively and learn much more quickly by listening to audio, others by seeing things represented graphically.  And that is to say nothing of the importance of thinking through how we work with students with disabilities, in particular, in this context, those who are blind or near-sighted.  Newer, digital textbook resources can integrate, embed, link to material that is not just blocks of text.

Let me try to illustrate this point by engaging with AKMA's original post:

Hey, in a perfect world, you could persuade the authors to record their chapters so you could distribute digital audio (and video — or perhaps, a video abstract of each chapter). So at this point, you have a textbook that’s free to consult as web pages, free to download as PDFs, and (again, ideally) free to listen to/watch in digital media.

I like the sound of this because it addresses the importance of integrating multi-media into the newly conceived, digital textbook.  It is the kind of thing that makes me enthusiastic about the way that AKMA is talking.   But my point is that the authors of the textbook in question do not have to wait for the perfect world for this to happen because high quality audio and video resources are already available on the web for free.  Let's say you are talking about the topic of form-criticism and introducing Richard Bauckham's recent contributions about the involvement of alleged eye-witnesses.  You could record your own audio or video about this, in which you attempt to summarize his position, or you could watch and listen to the man himself doing it for you.  Examples of this kind could be multiplied.  My point is not that we should stop producing new resources -- of course not.  But rather that we should start thinking seriously about the integration of good existing resources into our new model.

More on the Future for Online Textbooks

AKMA, Funding Neopublishing, continues to post things of interest on the topic started by Anumma, Open Access Intro to OT. In my previous post on this topic, The Future for Textbooks Online (with thanks to Tim Bulkeley on Sansblogue for an excellent discussion of my post alongside AKMA's), I suggested that we don't have to begin working on projects like this from scratch. There are now so many fantastic resources available on the web that the big issue is not so much how we create great resources but rather how we organize and publicize the existing ones in ways that will be helpful to our students. I suggested as one model the evolving NT Gateway, though I express interest in looking at other related and overlapping models.

Let me add some related thoughts.  Anumma articulates his goals for this project as one that:

• is freely available online;
  
• is historical- and literary-critical in focus (as is a Coogan or a Collins, say; in other words, not a “theological introduction” narrowly reflecting the concerns of faith communities or other readerly social contexts);
  
• is authored by a socially diverse body of contributors.
  

The first two elements are at the heart of a site like the NT Gateway -- it links to freely available materials and is itself free; it is historical-critical in focus; and the resources to which it links are as diverse as the authors that write them (which in fact means that too many of them are from too narrow a group, but that is a reflection, of course, of the state of the guild and something we could do something about in this kind of project).

Now, the advantages of beginning with what is already available on the net are several:

• No re-inventing the wheel is necessary.  Where excellent and diverse resources already exist, freely available on the net, one may as well work to those strengths rather than attempting, at every point, to create new resources.
• There is a huge psychological boost in working with existing resources rather than beginning from scratch.  A new project can be hugely daunting.  Working collaboratively to develop existing resources, to organize, to add, to fill in areas that are lacking -- this can be encouraging and fulfilling.
• It is much, much cheaper than beginning from scratch.
• It is much less labour intensive than beginning from scratch.
• It is easier to harness the great advantage of the internet in being fully multi-media.  You can pull in a range of resources, prose paper, website, podcasts, video clips and so on without the need to develop new websites, to begin recording new audio and new video.
• As children of our age, we are unduly impressed by what is new.  But sometimes, in scholarship, the old is good.  The advantage of a dynamic approach to this issue is that it enables us to draw from the storehouse both old and new.

I suspect that our difficulty in this area is that we are still inclined to think too narrowly in terms of the old-fashioned "textbook".  I would like to brainstorm a bit more about this, but I think it might need a separate post.

The Future for Textbooks Online

AKMA has an excellent post on FOSOTT (Free and Open Source Old Testament Textbook).  It's full of the kind of "blue sky thinking" that we surely need to engage in if we are interested in harnessing the values of the internet and the possibilities it provides for collaborative, educational models for our students.  I have been talking about something similar in relation to the New Testament Gateway for a little, looking to expand and develop it as a resource into something that will work as a kind of uber-textbook for New Testament studies.  My thoughts have been derived in part from my antipathy towards that kind of textbook culture that straitjackets students into becoming over-reliant on just one voice.

In the light of this, I hope readers won't mind my repeating a section from my talk at the SBL 2009 (CARG) on How and why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched:

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There are pedagogical and economical advantages, I think, in the kind of approach that I have been describing, of attempting to provide introductory materials for new students and flagging these up in the clearest way possible. These advantages relate to our reliance on a text book culture. Many students become over-dependent on the one text book that their lecturer or professor has recommended. Instead of seeing the Introduction to the New Testament as one person's survey, they take the author's views as gospel (even when the author is encouraging a critical approach to the gospels!). What the text book says, the student should believe. This is frustrating enough at secondary school level, but it really should not obtain in universities and colleges. But what is the alternative? To recommend ten text books?

And so we arrive at the problem of access to good secondary texts. The average student spends a fortune on text books (book costs, source: Jim Linville) and still the bright university student will need more. If you have a large class, even the multiple copies in the library will quickly vanish. Since moving to Duke, I have been moving more and more towards reliance on free internet resources in teaching. There are now so many of them, so many very good ones, that the job is becoming easier all the time. It occurred to me that what I do in my teaching I could do also on the NT Gateway, and to show people where to find strong academic materials for free online. No more complaints about the books missing from the library! No more complaints about the cost of the text books!

This kind of approach brings with it a huge advantage, that students can get used to hearing a range of voices on the range of topics in their curriculum. They can read across a range of resources both old and new. They won't be constrained to hearing just the text book's view on canon, or the Synoptic Problem, or the authorship of the deutero-Paulines. And the more interested they become in a topic in question, the more than can dig down deeper and find yet more resources.

I am not, of course, advocating the end of print resources in teaching but I am suggesting that sites like the NT Gateway can provide a means by which we can think differently about the text book culture. A range of voices, a range of topics, with guidance for the student about how to access them. There are, after all, things that you can do on the internet that you can never do in a text book, like listening to podcasts, watching videos and playing games. In the long run, when resources like this are attractive, free and easily accessible, what will be the impetus to stay focused on the single-authored-text book? (Full post here; full series here).
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Of course those comments were in the context of a discussion specifically about the future of the NT Gateway, and I think the NT Gateway could continue to evolve to make itself ever more useful as a kind of uber-text book for students, but it does not need to be the only portal providing that kind of service, and collaboration could work not purely within sites like this but also between different sites, different projects, different "books" until we are at the point where talking about a textbook sounds very old hat.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched VI

This post continues the series on the changes at the NT Gateway (I, II, III, IV and V).

There are pedagogical and economical advantages, I think, in the kind of approach that I have been describing, of attempting to provide introductory materials for new students and flagging these up in the clearest way possible. These advantages relate to our reliance on a text book culture. Many students become over-dependent on the one text book that their lecturer or professor has recommended. Instead of seeing the Introduction to the New Testament as one person's survey, they take the author's views as gospel (even when the author is encouraging a critical approach to the gospels!). What the text book says, the student should believe. This is frustrating enough at secondary school level, but it really should not obtain in universities and colleges. But what is the alternative? To recommend ten text books?

And so we arrive at the problem of access to good secondary texts. The average student spends a fortune on text books (book costs, source: Jim Linville) and still the bright university student will need more. If you have a large class, even the multiple copies in the library will quickly vanish. Since moving to Duke, I have been moving more and more towards reliance on free internet resources in teaching. There are now so many of them, so many very good ones, that the job is becoming easier all the time. It occurred to me that what I do in my teaching I could do also on the NT Gateway, and to show people where to find strong academic materials for free online. No more complaints about the books missing from the library! No more complaints about the cost of the text books!

This kind of approach brings with it a huge advantage, that students can get used to hearing a range of voices on the range of topics in their curriculum. They can read across a range of resources both old and new. They won't be constrained to hearing just the text book's view on canon, or the Synoptic Problem, or the authorship of the deutero-Paulines. And the more interested they become in a topic in question, the more than can dig down deeper and find yet more resources.

I am not, of course, advocating the end of print resources in teaching but I am suggesting that sites like the NT Gateway can provide a means by which we can think differently about the text book culture. A range of voices, a range of topics, with guidance for the student about how to access them. There are, after all, things that you can do on the internet that you can never do in a text book, like listening to podcasts, watching videos and playing games. In the long run, when resources like this are attractive, free and easily accessible, what will be the impetus to stay focused on the single-authored-text book?

Perhaps this was what was wrong with the NT Gateway too. It was too strongly associated with just one person. Its best chance of continuing to develop, and of prospering in the future, was to break free from me and to begin new partnerships, to expand its team of contributors, and to change. Perhaps next time there is a talk on the NT Gateway at the SBL, someone else will be giving it!

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched V

This post continues the series on the changes at the NT Gateway (I, II, III, IV).

Now that the new version of the site was in place, I was finally able to do what I had wanted to do for years, to invite others in to join the team. I have moved cautiously, approaching people one at a time in these early stages, so that we could ease into the new arrangement, allowing each person to find their niche. The first person I approached was Holger Szesnat who for years had been a help to me behind the scenes, offering suggestions for new links and so on. Holger agreed to lend a hand and he has done extensive work in the last few months refreshing links and adding new ones. Then I was lucky to have as my research assistant Maxim Cardew, a new PhD student at Duke, and he has been working with me on the site since September and has done some great work. So with an expanding team in place, how has the site changed and what are the plans for the future?

When I spoke to the CARG two years ago, I suggested that there had been a major shift over the last decade in the way that subject gateways worked. Because of the explosion in internet resources, subject gateways are becoming more and not less important for students. The proliferation in online materials means that the new student has little idea where to start. Googling in the dark is not a realistic option for the student serious about their research. So what the NT Gateway and sites like it can provide is a means by which students can find their way to the best available materials in the subject they are researching.

The difficulty with the site as it was configured was that it provided a massive number of links on each subject, and the first time user might quickly become daunted and then leave. I was concerned that it was failing in its mission to serve its primary constituency, the students for whom I had created it in the first place. I wanted to maintain the comprehensive treatment as far as possible, drawing attention to useful materials for scholars and graduate students, but at the same time provide instant pathways to good academic material for undergraduates on their first visit. How could it be done?

I like to walk around websites and imagine myself into the role of different users and to see what kind of experiences they might have. When I went on walks like this on the NT Gateway, I noticed that I had not provided enough signposts for undergraduate students. I had pages on which I had listed introductory resources, but they were not flagged up. Sometimes, the clearest introductory chapters in books were buried in pages of books, dissertations and articles. The first order of business, therefore, has been to move Introductory materials to the top of the sections in which they appear, and then to underline some of the best resources for new students among those introductory materials.

So on the Gospel of Mark, for example, Introductory Materials are now prominent. Students will quickly find a selection of the best places to begin their study of Mark. Nevertheless, we were concerned that students may still need a little more grounding before they begin to read these materials, and Maxim Cardew has therefore been writing bite-sized introductory essays that slot in to a given section even above the Introductory Materials, as here: Introduction to Mark's Gospel. We have begun to add these in several places on the site and the hope is that this will make the NT Gateway much more useful to students setting out on their study of the New Testament.

In the final post in this series, I will attempt to explain the pedagogical and economic advantages of this new endeavour.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched IV

This post continues the series on the changes at the NT Gateway (I, II, III).

The new version of the NT Gateway went live on Valentine's Day 2009. It was the result of weeks of superb work from Ryan Burns at Logos. We moved the entire site over to Logos's servers in Bellingham, WA, and away from Canary Wharf in London, England where the site had been since 2001. We kept the old, familiar NTGateway.com domain name so that no one had to change their bookmarks, and everyone could instantly see the new site.

To the user, it did not look a great deal different. The logo was updated and there was a new silver-grey and green colour scheme to replace the old maroon and cream, but the fundamental structure remained the same, with the site map on the first page, and menus on the left of every subsequent page. This was a conscious effort to provide continuity and ease of navigation for our users. We didn't want the kind of annoyance that comes when our familiar supermarket pointlessly rearranges its produce and adding to our shopping time.

But underneath, the site was all new. Ryan used WordPress as the site's CMS and built a structure that was easy to manage and straightforward to expand. Adding new pages and new entries on those pages is really straightforward. Although unfamiliar with WordPress, it was very easy to use once Ryan had done all the hard work of porting over all the old content.

There were new features that brought site into 2009 too, with the chance to become a fan on Facebook, or to follow us on Twitter. The site was becoming more dynamic and less static. It was also more lean than it had been before, and several features were quietly retired. I decided to lose the Scholars section, a piece of the site that had made a lot of sense in the past, when it was the exception rather than the rule for a New Testament scholar to make it to the web, but had no become unwieldy.

One difficulty with the new site, though, was that so much of the old site was integrated with me and with my stuff. I located all my web materials there, homepage, blog, Case Against Q website, Aseneth website and so on. There were also external websites there, the British New Testament Society, the Library of New Testament Studies and so on. Sometimes I don't think I knew, let alone anyone else, where the NT Gateway ended and I began. Disentangling materials was not straightforward. The toughest question was my blog. I had run the NT Gateway blog alongside the NT Gateway for five years and although I often used it to discuss updates on the New Testament Gateway, more often it was my personal academic blog for discussing my research as well as other general items of interest in the field. After some to-and-fro, we decided that it would be best to create a new NT Gateway blog in connection with the revamped site and for me to take the blog archives with me to NT Blog, where they are now, and which you are reading now.

Well, that's how the change took place. But what happened next and what is the future for the site? In the next post I will explain how the NT Gateway is evolving and what there is to look forward to.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched III

This post continues the series on the changes at the NT Gateway (I and II).

I was walking from Sarah P. Duke Gardens to my office one day about eighteen months ago and listening to the Whocast, one of my favourite podcasts, all about Doctor Who. The presenters, Paul and Seb, announced tearfully that they were going to have to stand down because other projects were overwhelming their ability to keep up. But the Whocast would continue with new presenters. The transition happened, and the show went from strength to strength. I thought to myself, "This is what I need to do. I simply must find someone to ease the burden". But who would do it? Who could I trust?

I had talked already, in my CARG presentation of two years ago, about the idea of bringing others on board. My idea was to make the site more of a team effort. I would edit, advise, consult, but others would bring along their ideas and content. The difficulty, though, was that the site's structure was clunky and old-fashioned, its CMS (content management system) simply a matter of my editing and uploading individual HTML pages, with some basic stylesheets. I was still working the same way that I had worked in 1997. This was hardly conducive to a collaborative effort with multiple contributors. What I needed was not only a new team, but also a new CMS.

I experimented myself with a new template, using blogger, and I talked about it at the CARG two years ago, with this page of The Greek New Testament Gateway. This, I explained, would allow me to manage the site more easily, and to collaborate with others. I must admit that I was pretty pleased with what I came up with, but as the months rolled by, it became clear that there were insurmountable problems that I had been ignoring in my naïve optimism. Blogger is simply not designed to do the kind of work I was trying to make it do. I had to go on all sorts of run-arounds to make it work. And once again, the daunting size of the job of transferring content to the new CMS was making the project completely unmanageable.

What then to do? Late one night I had a revelation. The thought just popped into my head: why not ask my friends at Logos? I had visited them in Bellingham in June 2007, and we had often chatted, though without having hatched any kind of plan with respect to the NT Gateway. I sent Mike Heiser an email in the autumn of 2008 asking for his thoughts on our working together on the site. To my delight they said yes, and we worked out a deal.

It is a partnership that has completely transformed the NT Gateway. It has placed it on a new, firm footing. It has made it more than manageable. Its future is now secure, and the prospects are better than ever. In the next post, I will explain what has changed and why, and how this has improved the site.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched II

In this post, I will begin exploring the history and evolution of the NT Gateway as part of a series of posts related to my forthcoming presentation at SBL.

I am actually tempted to subtitle my talk, "How the Logos changed my life". This is a story about how I came to the brink of despair with the site I had created, nurtured and developed over many years. I had devoted countless hours to the NT Gateway. I loved the site. I was proud of it. Everyone seemed to know about it. Students in their thousands were using it regularly, and even the crustiest technophobe scholars were recommending it as a kind of one-stop shop for finding reputable online resources on the New Testament. It won awards. Libraries all over the world were linking to it. People used to tell me that if you googled for "New Testament", and hit "I feel lucky", you'd end up on the NT Gateway. I would get daily emails thanking me for the work I had done. I felt lucky.

All this time, a problem was brewing. The site was getting bigger and bigger as internet resources expanded out of all recognition. And as my career progressed, I was getting less and less time to devote to the site, with the kind of demands that suck the time and energy out of the academic's life. The NT Gateway was beginning to suffer. I began to worry that the naysayers might have been right all along. Perhaps, after all, it is too much work for one person. Perhaps I should have been concentrating only on my research. I knew that if I had devoted less time to it, I would indeed have published much more. I had become a victim of my site's success.

But I did not want to call time on the site. I had already had to retire its sister, the All-in-One Biblical Resources Search. That site was born ten years ago, and in 2003 I announced the latest version to CARG. Not long afterwards, I had to concede that I had been overtaken by changes in technology and my own inability to pour the hours needed into maintaining it effectively. It would be an admission of defeat to let the NT Gateway go too and by now I felt a kind of responsibility to keep it going for the sake of my colleagues who were still telling me how useful they found it. But what was to be done?

In my next post, I will explain how Logos came to the rescue, and what happened next.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched I

I would like to share here a bit of my presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, coming up next Monday. Here are the session details:

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Computer Assisted Research, 11/23/2009, 4pm, Rhythms Ballroom 3 - SH.

How and Why the NT Gateway was Rebooted, Revitalized and Relaunched

Abstract: In a CARG presentation in 2007, I laid out my plans for the future of the New Testament Gateway (NTGateway.com), the academic directory of internet resources on the New Testament and Christian Origins. Within months of that presentation, it became clear that I would need a major partner to help in the realization of these plans and in 2009 I went into partnership with Logos Bible Software who have worked to produce a superb new version of the site, with a changed look, improved navigation and dynamic features that will take the site forward for the next generation. This presentation reviews the new version of the site, explaining the benefits of moving over to a professional, collaborative model. It reflects on the changing face of subject gateway sites over the last twelve years since the NT Gateway began, exploring their future role in teaching and research, and arguing that with the massive expansion of internet resources, sites like this are now more important than ever.

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I will release each section in bite-sized chunks for those who, like me, are inclined to skim through long posts.

New NT Gateway now live

The new version of the NT Gateway site is now live and it appears to have percolated nicely across the internet. Thanks for all the positive comments so far.

Just to clarify where things stand:

The New Testament Gateway: still at NTGateway.com, but with a major facelift courtesy of the fine work of the people at Logos.

NT Gateway Blog: visit the new NT Gateway blog for all the latest news about the site, with regular updates about the new content. Make sure you remember to point your RSS reader to the new feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NTGatewayWeblog.

Mark Goodacre's NT Blog: this blog, for my own academic thoughts and reflections. Make sure you remember to point your RSS reader to the new feed: http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

New NT Gateway site launched

The new version of the NT Gateway site has now launched. We flipped the switch at about 6.30pm ET tonight. Apparently it takes a while for these things to percolate through the internet. I can't see it myself yet, here in North Carolina, but Ryan Burns at Logos reported that it's appearing out there in Bellingham, Washington, and a friend reports that he can see the new version in Austin, Texas. If you can see the new version of the site, with its new blog, I'd love to see your comments below. Thanks. It's the same address -- NTGateway.com.

New blog URL

I am aiming to point my new academic blog at the following URL:

Mark Goodacre's NT Blog

It is not there yet, and it is possible that the migration will be a disaster (I have backed up all six-and-a-half years' worth just in case), but my aim is simply to switch from hosting the blog on the current NT Gateway to hosting it over on blogger. If things go wrong, check twitter for updates.

Blog changes

Because of the exciting developments at the NT Gateway, I need to make some changes to the way that I blog. The NT Gateway blog will continue with updates and information relevant to the NT Gateway site. Meanwhile, I am keen to continue with my own academic blog for my teaching and research thoughts, ideas, reflections. In the last few years, such material has been included on the NT Gateway blog. Now it will move to its own new location, along with the old NT Gateway blog archives. Details of the move, and where to point your browsers and Readers, will be coming soon. The Resident Alien blog is unaffected by these changes and will continue as normal.

Developments at the NT Gateway

Regular readers will be aware that I have been rethinking The New Testament Gateway for some time now, asking questions about how it is to adapt to the changing face of the internet, making suggestions for the future, and engaging in discussions with others about how they can help. I am now delighted to be able to announce that the NT Gateway is partnering with Logos. Logos will be providing hosting for the site as well as installing a CMS and giving it a design facelift. I will continue to be the Editor. The address (NTGateway.com) will stay the same, so there will be no need to adjust your links or bookmarks. I am sure that readers will like the new version of the site as much as I do. It has a lot in common with older versions but at the same time introduces some major improvements.

These exciting changes impact a little on this blog and on others of my web materials, and I will be explaining what is happening with these over the next few days. Stay tuned!

End of the Philo Blog, Birth of the RPBS blog

I have been meaning to comment for some time on the sad news of The End of Torrey Seland's Philo of Alexandria Blog, announced at the end of March. It seemed sad to me because Torrey's blog was one of the earliest of the biblioblogs and he was on the panel with us at the SBL session on blogging in November 2005, when the panel for that session effectively chose itself. But it's good to see that with death comes new birth, and the R B P S Blog (Resource Pages for Biblical Studies Blog) comes onto the scene. I am greatly encouraged by this development because I have continued to think about the future of the New Testament Gateway, and I am encouraged that one of the pioneers of the gateway site (RPBS predates the New Testament Gateway by a good couple of years, and the New Testament Gateway is now over a decade old) is still working on his site and thinking of fresh ways to keep it vibrant.

SBL Annual Meeting, San Diego, Sunday afternoon

Sunday afternoon: having left the bibliobloggers lunch, without eating, at 12.40, I went to present in the Computer Assisted Research Section. The theme was Pedagogy, and there were several interesting papers. Mine was on The Future of the New Testament Gateway and the substance of the talk is in posts here (previous link). Indeed, I began from this blog, assembling my links from there. I quite enjoyed the presentation. Speaking in CARG tends to be pretty non-confrontational. It's more in the nature of a group of friendly and encouraging enthusiasts who wish to listen and offer gentle advice. I did begin by saying that I had been tempted to begin the talk by saying that there was, in fact, no future for the New Testament Gateway and that I was simply going to close it down and say thank you and goodnight. But good sense and optimism prevailed and I set out my plans for the future. One useful piece of feedback: one questioner asked that I not retire the Journals page, which he said he found particularly useful.

Later in the afternoon I got to the second Q section of the conference. It met in a tiny room and only 20-25 or so were there, but it was quality rather than quantity because several famous Q scholars were present. There were five papers including Joseph Verheyden on Q and judgement, Ken Olson on compositional practices and the Synoptic Problem, with special reference to Luke's use of Matthew's additions to Mark, and Steve Black on the Minor Agreement at Mark 14.65 and parallels.

I just managed to catch all of these before dashing to the T and T Clark reception; I took a cab so that I could make it in time. These days, T and T Clark do not hold a big publishers' reception but just have a small, selected event in a restaurant by invitation only. It makes it a useful occasion, with the chance to catch up with people involved in the Library of New Testament Studies series.

I had been hoping to make it to the Oxford reception afterwards, but time was too tight, and I went instead straight to the Duke reception. This was an enjoyable affair, and it's nice to feel part of such a prestigious family. It was the third time I had been along to this event and, as usual, I met new friends and old.

The Future of the New Testament Gateway II

This is the second of two posts on the future of the New Testament Gateway (part one here), which I am using to summarise and reflect on my presentation at CARG (Computer Assisted Research Section) at the SBL Annual Meeting in San Diego. I had become so wrapped up in my Mark-Q Overlap posts that I neglected to blog about this other presentation too, and now I am filling that gap.

I began by defining what I mean by The New Testament Gateway, something that is not self-evident given the fact that I use the NTGateway.com domain name for all my web materials (and some others too). I went on to ask who it was for, arguing that the internet has changed in the last decade, and that an elaborate public book-marking system is no longer important for scholars in the field, who know how to search for relevant scholarly material on the net. Next, I would like to explore the implications of this.

3. The New Testament Gateway as a teaching resource

If the future for gateway sites like this is for them to be targeted specially at students, there are some implications for the direction of the site. And here comes what may be the most risky part of my presentation: my plans to retire elements of The New Testament Gateway. I would like to retire (a) some major sections of the site and (b) some individual elements within existing sections in order to refine those sections for the focus on teaching. In using the word "retire", let me explain what I mean. I will not delete anything from the server, but will stop updating certain sections of the site. I will be letting them enjoy their retirement, in other words. There is no cull. Regular readers may know that I have already done this with other sister sites, like the All-in-One Biblical Resources Site, which I had to retire last year. It is still on the web, it is still getting used, but I can't any longer update it, for technical and time reasons. I have also previously retired other sections of the site. Notices, Featured Links, Logbook and Bookshelves were all retired in 2003, when I began this blog.

(a) Retiring Major Sections of the Site

Among the sections that I am retiring is the one on Scholars and Societies. This began as an attempt to find a central location for listing New Testament scholars, largely on the grounds that it was not always easy to hunt them out on the web, and also on the grounds that there were not that many of them on the web. These days, everyone has a web presence of some kind, even if just a faculty page, and it is very easy to find people. This part of the site takes a lot of upkeep for relatively little reward. The same sorts of considerations are true with respect to Journals, Art and Images and some of the General Resources.

There are also background and context sections that perform no reasonable function now on this site, and which are done elsewhere far, far better, and these include Early Church and Patristics, Ancient World (but keeping Maps) and Judaica.

One other major part of the site needs a major overhaul, the Jesus in Film pages. This is something of a speciality niche, but it is a very popular section of the site, so it needs a major update rather than retirement. I will be asking for help on this section, and may even consider loosing it off from the main site and giving it its own lease of life.

(b) Retiring Individual Elements in Site Sections

There are several superfluous pages on the site which can be retired. I have separate pages, for example, on the e-lists related to each subject area, which means that I have to keep not only the main e-lists page (which will stay), but also all these individual pages. There are other pages too that, while potentially useful , have never taken off, like course materials (e.g. Historical Jesus course materials). This act of trimming down the site will help it to be leaner, more focused, I hope stronger.

(c) Refining Existing Sections -- Articles

Those are the negative sides of the overhaul. The positive side to it will be the focus on providing a strong gateway site for students. When I began all the many pages on the site that list on-line articles, it was actually possible to be exhaustive, so any academic article that was available free-to-all online made it onto the section in question. However, there are now so many free-for-all articles available, and many of them will never be of interest to undergraduate students, so it is worth focusing attention on articles that are genuinely useful to undergraduates who are exploring the topics in question.

4. Not forgetting learners outside the academy

I realize that many of the users of The New Testament Gateway are people with no current direct involvement in the academy, and I would like to add a word of reassurance that I have not forgotten them and will not forget them. One of the things that this large group of users brings to the site is an interest in participating extra-murally in the academy, to explore a range of academic resources in their subject area of interest. My hope is that the needs of this group will be adequately served in the reworked site. I will continually to be interested to hear their input.

5. What about the Scholars? We use it too!

I would like to underline that just because the primary focus of the site is for teaching, that does not mean, I hope, that it will stop being useful to scholars too. Indeed, since New Testament scholars are almost all New Testament teachers, I hope that they will continue to stay familiar with the site and to recommend it to their students as well as outside enquirers. I hope too that they will continue to make suggestions, provide feedback and so on. It is worth adding that it should always be possible to find lots of material of interest to the scholar on the site. To take one important example, I get regular queries about Greek fonts and Greek texts, and one of the most valuable elements in the site, apparently, is the gateway I provide to the good materials here (Greek Fonts).

6. The Time Factor

When other people were talking about my site and other "megasites", they often talked about their concerns over my time. I always used to laugh it off a little and say that I enjoyed doing it and I didn't mind staying up late at night, if necessary, to keep it on the road. But their concerns were serious, and they were far more relevant than I realized. One of the things about an academic career is that there are ever more pressing demands on one's time, year on year. I look back and marvel at how much time I had to spend on the site a decade ago. To some extent I have attempted to alleviate this problem by getting very good at saying "No". I have turned down many, many interesting projects because I would rather focus on the New Testament Gateway in my spare time, and since I can't help thinking that there are other people who would be just as good, or better, on those other projects than I. Nevertheless, the time factor remains a major concern, all the mores so given the fact that I love writing and have to prioritize that.

There is a straightforward solution to this problem: get more people involved. But the question is one of logistics. How is it best to do it?

7. Bringing Others on Board

When I began to blog on these issues earlier this year (see The Future of the New Testament Gateway, 20 February), I mentioned that I was planning to open up the site to more team members, and even talked about adding some "Wiki functionality". The reaction to this was pretty interesting. A number of people really balked at the idea of opening up the site and argued, rather generously, that one of the reasons the people liked the site was because it had an author who was himself selecting, linking and annotating quality resources. I think the notion of "Wiki functionality" rather scares people, so I am dropping the term, but what I am bringing others on board to help with the running of the site, enthusiasts and experts who I know will make a big difference.

8. The Practical Side: How to Effect the Changes

Earlier in the year, I opened up a little consultation with a group of interested experts and we talked about a variety of ways of transforming the site, making it easier to update and adding some extra functionality. In the end, I decided on a very simple solution, and in August I revealed the New New Testament Gateway Prototype which you can see here for one major section of the site:

The Greek New Testament Gateway (Test)

I am using Blogger as my content management system, but publishing to the NTGateway.com server. Blogger does everything I need in a very simple way, an easily adjustable template, RSS feed, comments and "email to" facilities, and, of course, easy-to-add team members. Migrating the existing site to the new format will take a little while, but not very long, and progress is already well under way. The aim is to give people something similar to what they have been used to, but with a leaner, simpler look, and a bit more functionality. In this way, I hope that we are on course for a successful second decade of the New Testament Gateway. Let's hope that I am still writing blog posts about it on its twentieth anniversary in 2017.

The Future of the New Testament Gateway I: Who is it for?

As I have mentioned previously, I have been invited to present a paper on the future of The New Testament Gateway at the SBL Computer Assisted Research Section next month, in San Diego. In a series of blog posts before then, I will be mapping out the future as I see it, and throwing out some ideas that I will be discussing in the presentation.

1. What I am not talking about

Before beginning to do that, I want to make clear what I am talking about here. I am talking about The New Testament Gateway proper, the gateway site that is a series of annotated links to academic material about the New Testament. I am not talking about sister sites like the All-in-One Biblical Resources Search, which, like all of my websites, is located at NTGateway.com. Nor am I talking about this blog, which I think of as the "NT Gateway Weblog", a sister to The New Testament Gateway, but not the gateway itself. I make those things clear lest there is confusion about what I am discussing. And while discussing these sites, let me add that it is now necessary for me to retire the All-in-One Biblical Resources Search which has outlived its usefulness and has been overtaken by the technology. Meanwhile, it is my plan to resume updating The Case Against Q Website (my oldest website, now over ten years old!), the Aseneth Home Page and others.


2. Who is it for?

With those preliminary questions out of the way, I would like to begin looking to the future for The New Testament Gateway by asking a key question: Who is it for? When the site began in 1998, this question was easy to answer. It was aimed at students. Specifically, it was aimed at my students. Back in 1996 and 1997, I was giving out class hand-outs to students with typed-out links and they were failing to find the sites I was recommending. So I appended a list of "Useful links" to my homepage, which quickly morphed into its own site, Recommended New Testament Web Resources, an early version of what eventually became The New Testament Gateway. But the site evolved to become something bigger, a gateway site for scholars as well as students.

For most of its life, then, I have conceived of it as a site for both scholars and students. Now, there is no question that it is still broadly used by students. It is still useful to students. It is recommended in standard student introductions like Bart Ehrman's. If they are set a research paper on the Historical Jesus, googling is not going to be especially helpful -- far too many resources, far too undifferentiated for academic quality. But going to the section here on the Historical Jesus gives them a selection of pre-selected links by an academic working in the field. There are many, many examples of scholars using it this way in their teaching, recommending the site as a whole, or specific pages, as gateways to reliable academic material on the topic.

The explosion of internet resources has in fact increased the need for good gateway sites for students, to guide them through the maze, and using the site in my own teaching has persuaded me that its relevance here has, if anything, increased. But at the same time, the explosion of internet resources has impacted quite differently on the usefulness of the site for scholars. I think The New Testament Gateway has become far less relevant and far less useful for scholars now than it used to be. Think back to the early days of the internet, when searching with Yahoo! and Excite was pretty hopeless. If you found a decent resource, you needed to bookmark it because you might not find it again. And this was where something like the New Testament Gateway came in. A gateway site used to provide an elaborate public bookmarking system. These were the days when people used to submit their sites to search engines in the hope that they might get them picked up. Googleization has changed all that. Now, if you want to find it, you google it. And even the more techno-tentative academics are learning how to tackle Google Scholar and Google Books (as well as databases like ATLA). The scholar doing research now knows, or ought to know, how to use the internet. If they need an article on a given subject, they know how to find it. The New Testament scholar finds less of value in The New Testament Gateway than s/he once did.

To be continued . . .

SBL Annual Meeting: My Papers

Several have noted that the SBL Annual Meeting 2007 Program Book is now online. I have two papers this year, and it's a case of out with the new and in with the old for me, with some internet stuff and some Synoptic problem stuff, but I was delighted to receive an invitation to speak in the Q section, not something that happens every year. First, in Computer Assisted Research (18 November 2007, 1pm, "Pedagogical Resources for Teaching the Bible"):

The Future of the New Testament Gateway

When academic subject gateway sites began to emerge in the mid 1990s, it was possible for every major internet resource on the site’s subject area to be covered. It was also possible for one enthusiastic and energetic individual to do all the work, designing the site, researching content, adding links, writing annotations and correcting ever-changing URLs. The massive growth of the internet has now made it impossible for one individual to do all the necessary work and gateway sites are beginning to suffer. While newer technologies like blogging have opened up new possibilities, and dealt with some of the difficulties of maintaining a gateway site, the larger questions of effort and workload remain. It is now essential for gateway sites to embrace new technologies and different models that aid collaboration if they are to avoid becoming moribund. This presentation explores the future for subject gateways by focusing on The New Testament Gateway (http://NTGateway.com), which is now ten years old, and demonstrates a new collaborative model which will enable it to build on existing strengths and to adapt to the future.

The Q section I am speaking in is dealing with "The Mark Q overlaps" (19 November, 4-6.30pm):

Taking Leave of Mark-Q Overlaps: Major Agreements in Matthew 3.7-12 // Mark 1.7-8 // Luke 3.7-9, 15-17

Matt. 3.7-12 // Mark 1.7-8 // Luke 3.7-9, 15-17 (John's Preaching) features substantial agreement between Matthew and Luke against Mark. The Two-Source Theory explains this by appeal to the overlapping of Mark and Q while the Farrer Theory suggests that Luke was dependent on Matthew as well as Mark. This paper argues that Luke's use of Matthew is the preferable option because (1) the degree of verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke against Mark is too high for it to have been mediated by a shared source; (2) the agreement here represents a mid point in a continuum of influence of Matthew on Luke, which spans triple tradition to Mark-Q overlap passages to double tradition; and (3) the theory of Mark-Q overlap necessitates major contacts between the structure and thought of Mark and Q, which causes problems for the architecture of the Two-Source Theory.

More on the future of sites like the New Testament Gateway

On Philo of Alexandria blog, Torrey Seland talks about RPBS - Resource Pages - going into sleep?, looking at the difficulty of continuing to maintain what I have always regarded as the pioneering Biblical Studies megasite on the net. I still remember the happy day when I discovered the site in 1996, two or three days after my first experience of the internet, and at about the same time that I was delighted to discover Stephen Carlson's Synoptic Problem homepage. In those early days, one was so grateful for any decent academic materials on the internet. Now Torrey is feeling the strain a little, rather as I have been doing with the New Testament Gateway. While I am trying to reinvent the New Testament Gateway a bit, Torrey is more inclined to retire his Resource Pages. I have some sympathy. I am planning to retire one of my own sites, the All-in-One Biblical Resources Search, because technology has overtaken the forms-based work I did with that, and I ran out of time to work on that site a good couple of years ago. It is with some regret that I do retire it, because I spent huge amounts of time developing it and updating it. But I take comfort in the thought that it provided a good service for lots of people for a long time (and once even got a mention in People magazine!). I could have written several more articles, or half a book, in the time I spent on it, but I don't regret it, I don't think.

But it's not goodbye to Torrey's pages. He is keeping them going at least for now, and will continue to update the Philo pages for the foreseeable future, which is great news.