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The World Wide Web Encourages/enables collaborative collection of knowledge
What makes it all so exciting to me , is how the World Wide Web has developed into such a vast, distributed database of ideas, references, and "collector" of resources related to the subject. It's design is to point to the work of others in addition to what we may offer from our own pen (or keyboard). We are naturally urged to offer up other work which complements our own, or other work upon which our own is based.
Prior to the rise of the Internet, collaboration was an expensive undertaking. Travel, prior high costs of technology, and the lack of some standard for electronic "meetings" made it more profitable to maintain independent storehouses of knowledge and resources. Every denomination develops their own resources. Often, this has resulted in duplication of many resources.
The Web and the relative ease in which one can "submit" a new document or update makes it a strategic time for us in the theological community to begin to explore what we can share in our task to educate the people. If we are looking at a medium of communication that allows us to distribute our knowledge across networks among ourselves, rather than from physical campus locations with their own individual libraries and teachers, then we may be looking at a significant shift in education. This wider distribution and accessibility will also make possible a wider diversity of collaboration, as educational endeavors acquire more "links" to related work, and easy integration of quality material into a dialogical treatment of the subject within a given "student" study. (I.e. A paper composed with a word processor along with an Internet "browser" program and a phone line or direct Internet connection.)
I am assuming that as Internet publishing increases, so too will standards for citation and proper credit for borrowing and responding to the work of others.
One of my dreams for this Web site would be that it could be some sort of a catalyst for encouraging all kinds of exploration that can be undertaken online. This would include the building of forums on all manner of topics, a collection of links to resources of benefit to a wide range of theological studies, and a means of "connection" between participants in any number of missions.
I have a sense that this is a very theologically sound idea. It seems very akin to the idea of body and that every member has gifts; contributions to make which provide some piece to the puzzle which works toward accomplishment of mission. The idea of getting the exchange going in the theological world would seem to be a no-brainer. Let's do it.
Alas, there are questions, hesitancies, and opposition. In some sense, this is as it should be. It's good to ask some questions about diving head first in to a "hot" and popular thing. But there are also callings emerging within the theological community to move on and pioneer some efforts in new media. The Apostle Paul took on the mediums of his day to tell a story in a variety of ways.
The way the Web is set up is to allow an extensive set of cross references; or "links" that can be followed that link together similar subject matter. To search for items by subject causes many who are looking for gatherings of information by subject to "discover" one another.
This seems to me to be an enabling circumstance for ecumenism. Diverse groups who are involved in similar issues will discover that there are commonalties which transcend denominational or theological differences.
The Web incorporates many of the former protocols of the Internet, thus insuring "backward compatibility", and so allowing many more less equipped systems to use the less graphical, older means of retrieval like telnet, email, and Gopher, to access documents even without a GUI-capable connection such as SLIP or PPP.
Web browsers can also be employed as "local readers" to view Web documents that have been retrieved online by more conventional methods such as email.
My associations of Christian life and theology with such terms as "The Great Good Place", Community, justice, and sociology or psychology brings me up in searches of various search engines, which create new associations and relationships for the "beneficiairies" of such searches. This fits with my vision that early on saw a way for "relational, community seeking persons who may be "estranged or alienated" from the church to "find some new connections" and stay "in the fold" (not in the sense that they "conform",, but that they stay abreast of the community, now knowing that there are resources within it that have promise in helping to get at the issues of what "community"is all about.