Travel-log+page+3

Conservapedia.com is a religious right conservative version of Wikipedia. It was an effort by a groups of homeschooled and Christian college students to create a wiki encyclopedia with a conservative religious stance. They felt that Wikipedia was 7 times more liberal than US society in general and that many of the articles were not accurate. They have a list of commandments to follow in creating wiki edits and require people to cite their sources. Anything that is vulgar, silly or found to be inaccurate is removed. You must create a profile in order to edit and can be blocked from posting if your content does not meet the standards. The top 50 users who are found to be most accurate are given administration rights. I read through several entries (Jesus, Nero, homosexuality, Sanhedrin). The views were conservative, but were backed up with Scripture references, historical citations and other valid citations. MyChurch.org is a social networking site designed to mimic MySpace or Facebook. However, it's offerings are sparse in comparison. It looks to me as though this site has just begun. It is set up so that users who log-in can join a church (churches all over the nation are listed- you can find your church, see how many people have "joined" in this community, and join to be a part of that church group). I logged-in and joined my actual church- River Valley Community Church in Grants Pass. There was one other person who was a member so far. Some churches in Wisconsin, South Dakota, Texas had 50-60 members participating online. The largest I saw in Oregon was one in Portland that had 40 and one in Medford with 18. So Oregon must be a newcomer to this site. Once you have joined the church you can invite the pastor, friends, put up pictures of the church, post blogs or videos and create discussion groups. There is also an "explore" section that offers video clips, blogs, reviews of movies by members, Bible verse posts and discusssions. If a church were to get a large number of members to join it looks at though it might have possibilities for group interaction. Nov. 18th- I got back onto MyChurch.org to see if anyone from my church had added their membership or if the other girl had sent me a reply- but there was no further interaction except for a welcome e-mail from MyChurch. No one had responded to my earlier blog about a video I viewed. But I posted a new blog on my homepage (which someone just responded to within the hour! They told me that this site has been up for about a year.) I also noticed that there was a create a survey feature, similar to that found in FaceBook, that could be used to survey members of your church about homegroups, Bible studies, etc. It looks as though this feature is normally something you have to pay an added fee to use, but it is free for a limited time. Unless you can get an entire youth group or home group to add themselves to this social community at once it seems there is very little chance for interaction. But I can see that it might be a useful tool for small groups within the church to use for communicating about the sermon, sharing information about upcoming events, sharing prayer requests and the like. Apparently students on FaceBook can add the MyChurch link and join their church while connected in FaceBook. MyChurch is presenting this as a way to reach students in online communities- they say that 50,000 students from MySpace belong to MyChurch.
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I looked over the Classroom 2.0 Ning page. This looks like a good resource for teachers and those wanting to learn about Web 2.0 uses for education. I did try "community colleges" in their forum- but none were there yet. I also typed in "religion" and only one response came up- a teacher at a Catholic school that is looking for a Web 2.0 method to use with high school students to think critically about ethics and religion. He was getting a few suggestions from other bloggers, but there did not appear to be much connection on this site to Christian usage. Then I clicked on Scot's link for The Church Ning on his page. I have logged-in and am awaiting an e-mail saying that I can join- so far there were only 5 people listed in the group.