Westwood The Net and U
Part 2
Terry Anderson
terrya@athabascau.ca

• May 13
– What can our youth teach us about Net use
– Web affordances - Demos, and Questions
• May 20
– Taxonomy of the Soul in Cyberspace

Five technological capabilities
Awareness Recognise the new technologies, their
products and applications.
User Use the new technological tools to support
learning, work and life.
Maker Apply the new technologies to produce new
‘products’ and services.
Evaluator Make critical judgments about the new
technologies, their products and their impacts.
Holistic Recognise the impact of the new technologies
on how we think.
Prof. David Layton

Introductions
• Tell us about an instance when you used
effectively (or ineffectively) web resources, or
their use added confusion.
• Do you have something you want to learn or
share about the net in these sessions?

Terry’s Soul in Cyberspace
• 2001 paper delivered at Westwood and CUC
with a taxonomy of three major Uses of the
Net by religious Organizations:
1. Enhancing place bound churches
2. Substituting Net for face-to-face
activities
3. Net Native Religious activities

Taxonomy of the ‘Many’
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Group
Conscious membership
Leadership and organization
Cohorts and paced
Rules and guidelines Metaphor :
Access and privacy controls
Virtual classroom
Focused and often time limited
May be blended F2F
6

Network
Shared interest/practice
Fluid membership
Friends of friends
Group
Reputation and altruism driven
Emergent norms, structures
Activity ebbs and flows
Rarely F2F
Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice
7

Group Network
Collective
‘Aggregated other’
Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’
Stigmergic aggregation
Algorithmic rules
Augmentation and annotation
More used, more useful
Data Mining Metaphor:
Never F2F Wisdom of Crowds
8

Enhancing Face-to-Face Churches
• Administration - Making things more efficient
and more effective
– A tour of Westwood’s Home Page
– Picking meeting dates – Meetingwizard.com
– Our Yahoo mailing list and committee mailing lists
– Email makes the world go round! (and drives
some of us crazy. Strategies for survival!
– Collaborative reports,
– Google docs and cloud computing

Enhancing Face-to-Face Churches
• The role of Social Networks:
– Profiles
– Groups
– Calendars
– Personal updates – “the wall” blogs
– Sharing of photos
• Church Based Social Networks sites:
– On Facebook
– On Ning
– On Athabasca’s Me2u

2. Replacing or extending Face-to-Face
• Conferences:
– Virtual Conferences
• Green savings, time savings, disruption and opportunity
costs
– UUTeens from many churches on Ning
• Church of the Larger Fellowship
• Attend church when travelling, sick or feeling
green - Celebration Church of Jacksonville
example

3. Net Centric Religious Organizations
• Unitarians on SecondLife
• Church of Reality
• The Methodist's Church of Fools
See Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet

Moral Struggles in Cyberspace
• Brenda E. Brasher author of Give Me That Online
Religion describes four types of attitudes
contending for moral conquest of cyberspace:
– Utopians – Land of opportunity
– Anarchists – Goodbye constraints
– Tourists – ‘golly gee’ what will they think of next???
– Oblivious – I just don’t get it!
To interact via a computer screen with an online Hindu temple is
a profoundly different religious experience” Brasher, 2004, p. 4

Your turn
• Is there a net site or application you would like
to share with us??
• Do you have a burning question?
• How can the tools of the net best sewrve
Westwood, its members and friends.