Back home.

For those who've read my mum's blog which is linked on the side, you'll know I've been in Singapore, now back home. Free places with wireless internet (McDonalds and Coffee Bean in Singapore) were bearable, but half-way decent internet is wonderful. Doing WebCT and other bits while there, but not my full schedule--Monday it's back to the grindstone. Need to install the new wireless router we brought while there so that I get internet in my room.

Tim

Well...

I've finally got login access to the Web Classroom--good thing too, as it started yesterday. Rather fun really--although being around a lot of people older than me is a little frightening! It's really a glorified forum, and written in Java, which is decidedly not my prefered way of working, Java not being tabbable or anything, but hey, it works. At least mostly--having a few login probs at present, but nothing serious.

Well, finally a positve.

I am loving this course, now I'm started. It's absolutely brilliant. Well written, erudite, and incredibly sound, making points that to me in many places coming from a thinking christian family are a bit obvious, but I can see how vital some of those points are just by talking to some of my friends. So far we're just looking at the Old Testament, and they're nailing home such things as context of who things are written to, how we differentiate different books and how they have different affects on our lives. The course I did previously (the ACE-based NCSC for those interested) was in many places distinctly unsound, Calvinist and painted with very broad strokes of the brush negative things about everyone who disagreed with them, which really didn't go down well with me, but the OT section of it did at least get me reading the Old Testament--even if I disagreed with their interpretations--and thus I have quite a solid foundation for dealing with this course in. Intruigingly the only thing I've actually learnt so far is about Tanakh as opposed to the ACE model of splitting up the Old Testament. Fascinating stuff really.

I guess I'll give a bit of a step-by-step review, the first Unit had a whole load of stuff I am incapable of doing without by student number, getting used to the WebCT, etcetera, but had a lot of general distance learning stuff. I had read the required book on distance learning anyhow (The Distance Learner from St. John's, Nottingham) which is very good, so I skimmed through unit one, intending on coming back to it. Unit Two is a bit of an overview of the Old Testament and the different types of literature. Having read the OT about 3 times so far now, it hasn't given anything new or fascinatingly different to me, but for those who have just been pew-sitting Christians up til they start this course it might be quite a startle to discover just how disparate the OT is. The third unit (the one I'm starting today) is all about the background and history to the Old Testament. Again, some of it I'm familiar with, history being one of those subjects that I'm actually quite good at and enjoy doing, so I tend to read up on historical background. One of the points I am very glad they're making is that to truly understand a text you need to understand the people, language and culture to which it was written. So many people-in-the-pews and even worse preachers-in-the-pulpits (and still worse best-selling authors like Rick Warren) seem to ignore this, and just preach as if the Bible was written in 21st Century English to a 21st Century Congregation, and frequently end up producing sermons/ideas that probably makes Paul, Moses, Peter and all that lot look down from heaven, shake their heads and say 'that really wasn't what I said...'