I am a big fan of effectively using technology, both for academic study and teaching. Due to my position at ADC as an I.T. Manager, my boss and I have been able to think through and implement what I consider to be an ideal setup.

While formerly the ideal was to be able to allow anyone to bring up their own laptop, everyone knows that this invariably causes time delays and problems with the screen hookup —you can only hit F5 on a PC so many times before you want to throw it out the window! It really came to a head this past year, as the many Dell laptops seemed to extremely dislike the Dell docking stations they were placed upon in the classroom.

So here is the philosophy— put a computer in the classroom that can handle almost any file that is thrown at it, and play any media that would be used in the classroom. Do it in such a way that there is a minimum amount of setup. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve had to rewire classrooms as students or faculty tried to ‘fix up’ the wires and made it worse. We chose to minimize this, by making the volume— wherever it comes from— all come from the computer, and the volume controlled only by the computer. As to files used by teachers and students, we made it so that people only have to bring up a USB stick (sometimes, not even that. If someone has a Mac, it is exceedingly easy to drop files to another Mac on the same network). iWork, MS Office, and OpenOffice files are all supported. Accordance Bible software is also available on the computer for teacher use.

The result is the image below, a 20inch iMac with all the fixins’. Our trial classroom test was such a success that we have expanded the set up to two our other main classrooms.

I post this all in the hopes that it may inspire other to place technology in the classroom that helps teaching, saves time, and just works. Any questions, feel free to post them.

I’ll start with 2 apologies. I am pretty swamped with work and haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like, my sincere apologies for all my adoring fans that hang on my every word. There will be a few book blurbs coming up this week and hopefully some posts in the not too distant future.
Second, I had not been receiving notes from Wordpress regarding comments. I had just assumed that I was talking to myself all this time. Paul fixed some setting and I was bombarded with emails by Wordpress about comments. So if you asked me a question in the past five months in the comments of posts, my apologies for not responding. I have responded to a few.

And now my announcement. Last semester I was hard at work revamping Acadia Divinity College’s website (a shameless pat on the back). The reason I mention this here is because I have started the process of placing ADC’s Hayward lectures online.

This means that at this very moment you can enjoy some excellent lectures from the likes of James Dunn, N. T. Wright, Craig Evans, Christopher Seitz, Lee McDonald, James Charlesworth, John Stackhouse, Emanuel Tov, to name but a few.

Visit ADC’s site at http://adc.acadiau.ca and check on the Hayward online page (under the Continuing Education menu). Enjoy!

Danny

This past week Acadia hosted its annual Hayward lectures. Dr. Christopher Seitz was the speaker and his topic was having to do with the canonical order of the Hebrew Bible. Not surprisingly, he is an advocate for the tripartite division of the Hebrew Bible — I’m not sure I have heard a Hebrew Bible professor who wasn’t. What he aimed to show, though, was that the tripartite order of Torah, Prophets, and Writings causes us when reading to associate some books with others. His focus primarily was on the area of the prophets in particular, and it was this area that most interested me. In a nutshell, putting the latter prophets with the former prophets causes us to associate the 12, Isaiah, etc., with the Deuteronomistic history. This is a welcome word in a modern day church that thinks Tim LaHaye has figured out how to understand the Hebrew prophets.

During Dr. Seitz’s lectures, he emphasized, with a handout from Lee McDonald’s book, that the traditional Protestant order (torah, history, poetry, prophecy) is not represented in any early canonical list. While there is some shuffling of the Tanak order in ancient lists, the tripartite division is still there.

This got me to thinking, and it came up in the lectures as well, is there any trained biblical scholar today who argues for the protestant order of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament? My guess is no. And yet almost every Bible sold today follows this improper order. Why is that? There is nothing inherently “Christian” about the current order, aside perhaps from Malachi being a nice ‘closer’ that leads into the NT. And yet this order persists. Dr. Seitz mentioned the JPS translation as being the only one to follow the tripartite order. This is the only translation I know of as well and I know that there are very few Christians buying the JPS translation. Are there any others? I suspect not, and I really have to wonder why.

Which leads me to the title of this blog. Is there any popular publisher like Zondervan or HarperCollins that is willing to acknowledge current (and ancient) consensus regarding the order of the HB/OT and henceforth publish their Bibles in this order? Is there really any legitimate reason not to? I would contend that there could actually be much to be gained intellectually. The average Christian in the pew, somewhat puzzled by an unfamiliar order, may actually look into the reason why and learn a little about the Jewish heritage of their Old Testament. The association factor may also cause more fruitful reading of the Bible in Protestant churches.

Any publishers dare to rise to the challenge?

The Latest Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology has just released its latest volume, from 2005 Hayward lecturer Roger Olson.

Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology
Roger E. Olson
Edited by Craig A. Evans and Lee Martin McDonald

purchase from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com