071 – Electronic Church Doors

This week the WELSTech podcast examines the platforms and methods available to spread the Word in the 21st century.

The discussion:

Pastor Mike HintzAnswering the question – Pastor Mike Hintz, Administrator for WELS Commission on Evangelism, joins in on Martin and Sallie’s discussion of chapter’s 6 and 7 of Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.  In terms of evangelism today, the question isn’t “Where or what is the church?” but “Who is God?”, and we can use the power of the Internet to share our confessional response to that question.

New Technology Showcase:

Picks of the week:

  • (33:30) Free Animoto for Educators – Create animated videos of your photos
    • Thanks to Jason Schmidt from Gethsemane in Omaha, NE for this link!
    • Check out their FAQ for a great Gmail method of creating “dummy” student e-mail accounts
  • FoxitPDF

Of interest:

  • (41:29) This week features live streaming of MLC Graduation and Call Service as well as Vicar Call Service
  • Check the schedule and watch the events at streams.wels.net/site/live

Community feedback:

  • (43:53) Welcome WELSTech listeners, Prof. Bob Anderson and Missionary Mike Hartman
  • Are you a WELSTech listener with a ministry technology idea to share?  We’d love to interview you!  Contact us to get the ball rolling!
  • Pastor Dan Witte from Risen Savior in Lakewood Ranch, FL shared several great links:
    • OneLicense.net announces licensing to cover podcasts
    • Enroll in the upcoming Google Teacher Academy – August 5 in Boulder, CO
    • Handle comments on your blog with IntenseDebate
    • Need a desert island Bible software pick?  Pastor Witte wouldn’t want to live without BibleWorks
    • The New York Times is talking Twitter, just like WELSTech

Coming up on WELSTech:

(50:29) Episode 072 – We’ll talk with Dan Lohrmann, author of Virtual Integrity and discuss accountability software options.

The featured artist:

(52:15) This week we close with piano music of Dawn Gehlhar – Beautiful Savior from her CD titled “Inspiration”

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1 reply
  1. Jeremy Johnson
    Jeremy Johnson says:

    I enjoyed the software picks section because you mentioned two things that I have been using for a while now.

    First of all, I really like the Gmail extensions. Adding “+something” to your e-mail address allows you to do a lot of interesting things. For one, it allows you to easily filter your incoming mail. For example, I signed up on the WELSTech listserve using the +welstech extension on my address, and I post to WELSTech sites using the same extension. I can filter all incoming WELSTech related e-mail easily by checking what e-mail address is being used. You can also use this feature as a junk filter. For example, if you sign up for a service but are afraid they might send you unwanted ads, sign up using an extended e-mail address.

    You can also use the Gmail interface to send e-mail from an extended address. In fact, the WELSTech listserve won’t publish my e-mail unless I send from the extension because that’s what I used when I signed up.

    I’ve been enjoying Foxit PDF Reader for years. I completely agree that it runs much better than Adobe. I switched from Adobe when I accidentally discovered that Adobe Reader was trying to secretly install adware on my machine. If I could find a working replacement for Adobe Flash Player, I would happily be free from using any Adobe products. I’ve tried Gnash but it’s too incomplete right now.

    On my Linux builds, PDF readers are installed by default. Gnome uses Evince and KDE uses Kpdf, and both seem to work great. I think both are basically front ends for Xpdf. The Xpdf website does have a Windows build available, but I’ve never tried it. It would be interesting to see how it compares to Foxit.

    On the subject of Bible software, I like using biblegateway.com as an online reference.

    I also like using conservapedia.com instead of Wikipedia because of the issues Wikipedia has with censoring conservative/Christian information. It doesn’t have as much content, but it’s still a breath of fresh air. This might fit in with your upcoming discussion on virtual integrity.

    By the way, when you discuss accountability software next week, would you mind addressing how the software might take measures to prevent “workarounds” that hide activity from accountability partners? I understand that a determined person cannot be totally prevented from doing what they want to do (locks keep honest people out), but I think it’s a topic worth considering.

    Jeremy Johnson

    Reply

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