Ken Klay, our chief technology officer, e-mailed us an article from BBC News about the digitizing of textbooks. South Korea is planning to completely replace paper textbooks with digital ones. Exciting, right? Taking advantage of technology available, being able to run electronic searches through the books, put in links to cross-references, even have animated illustrations! Should make education so much better, right?

"The sad truth is that students can learn just as badly with a class full of computers, interactive whiteboards and mobile technology as they can with wooden desks and a chalkboard," said science and ICT teacher David Weston, founder of the consultancy Informed Education. - "Digital Textbooks Open a New Chapter"

This statement is the most important one in the article – digital technology is useful, but it is all just tools. A chisel in the hand of a craftsman will produce something far more excellent than a precision saw or laser in the hand of a typical person. The real value is in the wisdom that goes into the work.

So yes, we hope to be the "cool techies" who bring digital textbooks and computerized experiments to education in Africa. But if that is all we contribute, we will have done them very poor service indeed. Our focus is to give them education that has a godly worldview, that teaches students to understand the world around them, to know God, and to know how to apply that education to every area of their lives. That's why we're going after education as a system—curriculum, teachers, administrators, school boards, all of it together needs to have this purpose if education will truly be transformational.

This was Anthony's response:

Many will be coming into this market. We cannot win with the weapons of the world, but if the Lord intends to have us help Africa have a transforming curriculum, He will help us to miraculously do it. 

I can imagine how Gideon felt when he had so few men to fight and then God whittled  him down to 300. We read the story and know the outcome, but he didn't know what was going to happen. It is not like Israel hadn't lost a fight before. I think his heart was in his throat as he approached the battle. 

I have written of storming the gates of hell, quite frankly I believe we are hitting that gate now. Yet, we are feeling our weakness and frailty greatly. Shall we rejoice like Paul? For when I am weak He is strong. 

I have no doubt we need more people, more money, more of the Holy Spirit ... wow, how can those compare? They really do not. I thank God for each of you an all you are doing. I encourage each of you to take the time to bask in the light of the Lord, for as the Holy Spirit has more way in our lives, then God can work in us to will and do as He desires.

I pray for each of you and in particular Claude and Joe who are so overworked. I pray for times of peace and rest. I pray we will all know what we are to do today, to do it with all our heart and to trust God for tomorrow as He gives us light and guidance.

Thank you Ken for this reminder that the battle is fierce and that the battle is the Lord's.

Please fight with us on your knees.

Quite a surprise!

When a package arrived via Amazon from the TEN3 team, saying to open on December 6, I figured maybe it was a book or something. Here was my reaction to the THRiVE:

In case you don't know, a THRiVE is like an iPad, but by Toshiba.

Now let me say that I've never really wanted a mobile device. We've talked about getting an Android to start working on mobile implementation of our curriculum, but I was figuring a few years in the future. I've viewed tablets like Americans in 1900 viewed the horseless carriage--a toy for the rich. Nice if you just want something to carry around and browse, but I need a workhorse. I know they are the computers of the future, but I figured that until they had F1-12 keys, full-service office programs and archive managers, it would be laptops for me.

It's kind of funny how the topic in church tonight was James 4:2-3, "You lust, and don’t have. You kill, covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask. You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures." In this case, I received what I didn't even think to ask for (and am still astonished at the generosity of my dear colleagues). So what will I spend it for? I pray it will be to teach people to use it as a tool to focus on God, rather than be distracted from Him.

Saturday I was working on the Creating Styles chapter of our Computer Essentials book, changing it to be based on OpenOffice Light on Puppy Linux, rather than the standard OpenOffice on Ubuntu. I was frustrated a lot of the day by the exercise documents. I had already rebuilt them twice. The first time it was for AbiWord, the default word processor for Puppy. Then, when I learned we could use OpenOffice Light, I jumped at the chance because that's a more powerful program that does what we teach much cleaner. So I made the documents over again to work on OpenOffice, this time with a more simplified template than we had in the original. And when I was working on chapter 4, I had realized that I didn't have certain styles we needed in the template, so I had to add them to the template and reload it onto each of the files. Then in the Creating Styles chapter (chapter 5), I tested the exercise modifying the Internet Link style, and found that it messed up things everywhere, and it was something that could look fixed but still carry a hidden problem. So I spent a lot of the day cleaning out those files and restructuring the exercises to avoid this issue. Great, I was thinking. A huge part of the day put into re-re-redoing these same files.
Then, when I just had a couple of hours left in the evening, I was finally ready to go through the chapter. It transitioned almost perfectly! I've never gone through a chapter so fast!

I've been reading Proverbs lately, praying certain verses over myself and TEN3. We are having to make so many critical decisions towards our huge vision:

to receive instruction in wise dealing,
in righteousness, justice, and equity;
to give prudence to the simple,
knowledge and discretion to the youth—
...
For the upright will inhabit the land,
and those with integrity will remain in it,
...
discretion will watch over you,
understanding will guard you,
delivering you from the way of evil,
from men of perverted speech

The education we are building will never prosper and remain without wisdom from the Lord. So often during our arduous Skype meetings, talking about how to expand the types of education we are doing and how to serve the schools in all the countries that are asking us, how to become the top education provider in Africa, I wish I could see down the years to know what we need to anticipate. But we are given just to see today, and we must pray for wisdom to act on what we know now, trusting that God will see to the steps that come after.

Doing what I had dismissed

In his awe-inspiring book The Pleasures of God, John Piper suggested that the reason there are still so many unreached people groups is that there are disproportionately few "Paul-type" missionaries as opposed to "Timothy-type" missionaries. His differentiation is that Timothy became a pastor who eventually settled down to minister in one church most of his life, whereas Paul was always on the move, planting churches in many places. Piper called for more Paul-type missionaries. I could see his point, but thought it seemed impractical--engaging a culture requires being able to communicate fluently with them, which for most unreached groups means many months of language study and training, and even longer in culture immersion before they will really hear what you have to say. Paul had the benefit of a common language used everywhere he went, many Greco-Roman cultural ties, and religious influence from the Diaspora he could rely on to make his message understood. So I dismissed Piper's plea as largely wishful thinking.

So I was surprised to be reminded of what he said when we talked with Christie a few weeks ago. She said that our ministry is very much like Paul's--he would build relationships in one location, then move on to a new one, but keep up the discipleship process with letters and occasional visits. Likewise, have built relationships in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Burkina Faso, making disciples there and teaching them to pass on the word of Christ through education to more disciples. We are repeating this discipleship process with more educators in Nigeria, Zambia, Ethiopia and CAR. At the same time, we use e-mail and visits to continue teaching and consulting those we trained before.

How ironic that God given me the ministry that I had dismissed as an idealistic dream! Granted, we aren't working with unreached people groups; we are serving English-speaking Christians. But as we equip churches to take this prime opportunity to reach the next generation for Christ, I believe it will be a strong part of equipping them to send out the quarter-million missionaries the African churches want to send to the unreached peoples of the world.

Two long but blessed days

We had marathon Skype meetings yesterday and today. Praise the Lord that Christie was able to join us for many hours!

We covered our plans for 2012. A few key conclusions:

We're not going in November. We think we can get the pilot teacher/principal training kicked off via distance, and then Anthony and Joe can come up in April to wrap it up and start the next round in Nigeria, then go to Cameroon to do the same thing there.

It would be good for us in curriculum to join them to work with the writers, but it would probably be more effective if I could spend six months in Nigeria meeting personally with the writers every week. My dream would be to spend a few months in Nigeria and then the next curriculum "events" in other African countries.

Christie even told me this morning, "JennyBeth, I need you here. I will fast and pray for that." Please join her in praying for my support so that I can be available to go anywhere I need to.

Now, to unwind from all that sitting at the computer with some set dancing! :)

Planning with passion

Anthony wrote this in a planning document we reviewed today:

I’ve had chances to do things that made big bucks and I’ve passed them by. This is the first time where I’ve seen a chance to give millions of kids an education better than the one I got, one that points them to the King. I DO NOT WANT TO MISS THIS CHANCE! I DO NOT WANT TO GET 5 YEARS DOWN THE ROAD AND SEE SATAN STOLE THE CHANCE. WE MUST MOVE NOW. WE MUST TAKE THIS STRONG HOLD! OR WE MUST DIE TRYING!

This is the urgency in all our hearts. The growth of the churches in Africa, the priority they have placed on rebuilding their education infrastructure, the incoming tsunami of technology--all these things indicate to TEN3 that now is possibly the best opportunity there has ever been to make Christ known to a whole generation in dozens of countries. What never ceases to amaze me is that this is a vision as fantastic as a young person could imagine, and yet I get to work toward it with colleagues who have the maturity to pursue it realistically, and faith in the God who alone can make it happen.

Puppies and Gnomes and eternal Truth for Africa

Mom looked over my shoulder at my screen the other day and read aloud,

~~~When Ubuntu leaves Gnome these may change. However, Puppy may use these. We need to double check that when we have Internet access.

Her tone was something like, "Are these real words?" And yeah, it's pretty unconventional terminology.

That note is about what I'm working on now, which is switching the software our Computer Training Outreach (CTO) is based on. Windows is expensive, and of course we're not going to teach our schools to pirate it, so we based the CTO on Ubuntu, which is a quality free operating system that comes from South Africa. Since joining TEN3, I've come to use Ubuntu for about 70% of my computer work, even personal work.

However, in consulting our partner schools in Nigeria in August, we discovered to get enough computers, they are having to buy them old--so even though Ubuntu is "lighter" than Windows, they still can't run it well. So we've seen a need to switch to Puppy Linux, which is specifically designed to run on older machines.

Cute, isn't he? Our model is for the schools to have many older computers with Puppy Linux, from which they will teach things like typing, file browsing, and introductions to word processing, spreadsheets and drawing.
The schools will also have a few newer computers with Ubuntu and Windows on them. The students will first learn to apply what they learned in Puppy to these systems.
This is extremely strong pedagogy, because it doesn't just teach students what buttons to press to get an effect--that kind of thing changes all the time in computers. Instead, students learn how to learn, how to be comfortable with any new system or program they have to use.

This is a lot of work for Anthony and me, but if you could decipher anything from that red paragraph, it indicates that we would have had to overhaul things for Ubuntu anyway. Computers are always changing! That's a strong theme in our material, that computers, and many things in the world, are always changing, but the truth is always the same. God's Word is the only definitive source of knowledge, the only thing you can securely build your life upon.