When: Friday, 1 October 2010, 9:00am to 5:00pm MDT

Where: University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Marriott Library, Gould Auditorium

What: The Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010 will explore the intersection of religion, science, spirituality and technology, from a transhumanist perspective. Transhumanism advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and observes that if our rapid technological evolution continues to accelerate then humanity will become a new species before the end of the 21st century.

Who: Keynote speakers for the conference include former director of the World Transhumanist Association, James Hughes; author of the Transhumanist Manifesto, Max More; and renowned LDS scholar and author, Terryl Givens. Sponsors of the conference are the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the Transhumanist Alliance of Utah.

How: Register online (http://transhumanism-spirituality.org) for a discount and reserved seating! Online registration is $50 ($25 for students) until 29 September. Registration on the day of the conference will be $80. Students with ID will be admitted to the conference free of charge, as space permits. Students wishing reserved seating are encouraged to register at the discounted student rate.

Long time readers know that I love the Return and Report Home Teaching and Visiting teaching reporting application.  I used it for several years as an Elders Quorum President and it greatly reduced the amount of time I spent on reporting so I could focus on the families of the ward.  In any case, Brad, the developer made up a great getting stated video that really walks you through the program and getting started.  Check it out!

So I am the ward mission leader in my ward.  As anyone who has served in any leadership position knows, one of the hardest things to do is keep track of everyone.  Well, I wanted to make it a bit easier and harness the power of technology to do that a little better.  What better way than my favorite web app (WordPress).

DISCLAIMER:  I am aware of the work the church is doing on this front.  I did do research into other similar projects, alas those projects are either dead, or on the back burner, and I need something now.  And I want to be able to easily share what I an the missionaries are learning with the rest of the ward leadership.  My real hope is that this project can help get some ideas out there as to what is possible so when the Digital Area Book project get’s revived we might have some thoughts and experiences to contribute.   So.. onto the plugin.

Functions

This is still a project under development, but check out this video for a little introduction the the tool.   I am calling this the Ward Mission Plugin 0.5 release.

• Add Families and track teaching, commitments, goals, concerns, etc.
• Add Potential Families that Members and Investigators are working with
• Keep Log of activity
• Create custom cateogories
• Assign families to other users (ward missionaries)
• Upload CSV from Ward Website

Coming Soon:

• Custom Reports based off of data in families
• Schedule Automatic Email of Reports

Usage

I need folks to test it out.  If you are interested in using it, or even just playing around I set this up in a multi-site instance at http://ward-mission.com.  That means I can create a site for you with a click up a button with a URL like slc42ward.ward-mission.com or something like that.  I will open this up to all eventually and let anyone create their own site.

I want to just say right up front that this project is a free project and my intentions are to keep it free forever.   I am not trying to turn this into a business or anything like that.  I already have one of those and it takes up all my time.

If you are comfortable with wordpress can also download the 0.5 beta plugin here, and put it on your own site.

Getting Involved

I would love your feedback and have created a dev site where you can leave your feedback at http://dev.ward-mission.com.   If you are interested in joining me on the development shoot me an email or leave a comment on the dev blog.

Today Google announced an awesome new feature for families.  The Google Family Safety Center.  It really is a great resource for parents trying to keep their families safe in the sea of immorality that is on the internet now a days.  They have the following sections right now.

• Google Safety Tools
• Advice from Child Safety Organizations (Partners)
• Learn how to report others that are sharing inappropriate materials
• Videos from Google Parents about how they manage their children’s safety.

As I mentioned yesterday, the church has opened up the new.lds.org site for everyone.  It really is a great site!

This morning I got a chance to play around with the new site and used the scripture study feature for the first time.  It took me a little while to find my way around and I thought it would be helpful for some folks to have a little intro.  So I made a video up.

Overall I am pleased with the scriptures.  I sent them a bit of feedback.  I’ll post it here.  Feel free to add your thoughts.  Perhaps you have found ways around the problems I was having.

Feedback:

• The biggest problem I have is the method for marking.  It is sometimes hinky to get the highlighting working.  You are supposed to just hover over the verse to make the highlighter open up.  But it doesn’t always work.  I think there should be a “Highlighting Mode” that you can activate when you are highlighting verses that allows you to click and select a part of a verse and then the menu pops up afterward to choose the color, add a note, AND add a tag (tag is not currently one of the options).  T
• Right now after you highlight anything it pops open a menu where you can edit the highlight, add a note, and add tags.  I think that should not automatically pop open even time.  It distracts from the scriptures.  Or at least make an global option for each user where folks can decide if they want it to have that pop open each time.
• I woud love to be able to highlight multiple verses at once (passages)
• When tagging, I would like a way to browse current Tags
• Multiple Versions of the scriptures.  Sometimes you want to just read the BOM and highlight all the places where it mentions a topic.  It would be great to have multiple copies of the scriptures for different times, and purposes.  Maybe you could use tags or folders for this as well if you could set a default tag or folder for when you were marking.  Or filter and show the markings based on the tag as you read (ie. Only show Tags: BOM Christ Reading 2010).

What are your thoughts?

I should have posted this a long time ago. I played with this again tonight and it is really, really neat. Love the new interface for everything and very excited about where this is going, especially the “Tools for your Calling.” There are so many possibilities here, and tracking stuff online can make it so much easier to pass onto others in the future.

Some New features (from Joel Dehlin)

* Great new search (try out the facets!)
* Prophets and Apostles Speak Today
* Church News and Events
* Church Organization
* Temples
* Humanitarian Service
* “Our Heavenly Father’s Plan”
* New e-store
* New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory
* My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.

You can read the article from Joel at the link below. Go and check it out. I think I read in the forums somewhere that the church is looking at a January 1, 2011 launch date for taking over the main site.

More Information

Remember about a year ago when I posted about this great browser for kids called Glubble?  Well, it is still out there and great, but I think I just found something better.

Zoodles website link

Zoodles is a Glubble like product.  It lets you create a family profile and add each kid, but it is focused on education.  What’s more, it has this amazing reporting back-end that allows partents to look at what the kids are learning based on areas like reading, math, science, etc.

I was looking around for a game tonight on my phone to entertain (and educate) my 5 year old preschooler and just ran across this on my android phone.  It is a free download to install.

I was very pleased when she opened it and it had a ton of the Starfall games (another great website for young preschool learners) right on my phone.  She had a blast.

Unfortunately it costs about $5/month to track what the kids are doing, but it lets the kids keep playing even if you don’t have an account to see what they are doing.

Of course I went ahead and set up profiles for all the rest of my kids and they had appropriate stuff for them as well.

I’m so losing my phone for the next couple of weeks to the kids… and I’m okay with that.