I just finished a report on the “social responsibility” of a certain missions training college in regards to the website. It was basically a response to the question of what the responsibility of the training center is when people find their site through google or other searches.
It sparked some interesting thoughts - no doubt! What is the responsibility of the community of Jesus Followers when it comes to online presence? How are they reaching to meet that responsibility? What does the “W2.0? have to do with the way schools manage their online space? Should it have anything to do with it?
A couple articles fed into some of my thinking:
I still don’t get it. What is 2.0?
Forget Web 2.0, but not what it represents.It represents the change in how people and information interact on the Web. It represents designers and developers are thinking about how people use information and that users add value. It represents different approaches for making this happen.
meryl.net articles: Web 2.0: Is it just hype?
During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.
~ Shift to Programming: Separation of Structure and Style
In Web 1.0, there were two stages to visual Web design. In the early years, designers used tricks like animated GIFs and table hacks in clever, interesting and horrible ways. In the last few years, CSS came into fashion to help separate style from structure, with styling information defined in an external CSS file. Even so, the focus was still on visual design—it was the primary way to distinguish content and garner attention.
Digital Web Magazine - Web 2.0 for Designers
Is it truly possible for the mission world to move away from the static wasteland to a service and content provider - which engages the world and in part even fuels the movement of God breathed mission? What would it look like? How can the school I am part of grab a hold of it? What is the responsibility of a missions training center to educate students and missions people about technology and communications?Cool stuff to be thinking about! - I’ll try to extract some of what I think is worth passing on from the 4 pages of single spaced content. According to a recent post on the “Missional Business Blog” maybe I should do something about it!
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