Great article this morning about a brother, Heath Nielson) who felt prompted to explore a new process for digitizing all the data in the church’s geneological records department. He took a process that was supposed to take over a century and made it possible to digitize them in 8-10 years! How awesome is that.

The story really deserves a read… it not only talks about the technology, but how the Lord prepared and led him to his job in the church and inspired him. This is what everything I do is all about. Great job Heath! Keep up the good work… and all the rest of you that are doing great things to more the work of the Lord forward!

This is the first in a series of posts about using web technologies to augment spiritual education. In this post I would like to being laying out the framework for why technology is so important in the church and how the Lord has been using it to further his work on the earth.

I believe, like Elder Ballard,¹ that God inspires man to invent tools that bring his work forward here on the earth. The Internet is one of the most powerful modern tools out there. I am excited about all that is going on with the web and believe it will continue to have a large impact on the world. More important than that though, I believe web technologies like all other media, are going to have a huge impact on people that will last through the eternities.

The Internet already effects every part of the mission of the church. For years the church has used computers to trance your ancestry. And now, with the rollout of the new family search site, families will be able to collaborate and work efficiently on family history like they never have before! In addition to this there are dozens of other services available on the web to help connect families with their ancestors.

As we look to preaching the Gospel, we need look no further than this month’s Ensign and numerous talks given by the Brethren as of late. Here is a great YouTube clip from Elder Ballard from last year encouraging us as members of the church to join the internet conversation.

There are also dozens of other ways technology is helping missionaries do their work better. I would love to write another series of articles just like this one focused on missionary work.

When it comes to perfecting the saints, there is even more than any other area. As you look at the way the church website has grown, and the ever increasing availability of the words of our leaders across the earth, and often in their own language, it is staggering. And then the tools that people are building to manage our lives and help us keep the things that are most important as a priority are amazing as well. The Perfect the Saints category of this webpage has dozens of examples of services (free in most cases).

The Church Educational System is no less progressive. They have been relentless in moving technology forward on their website. There is a plethura of information for teachers and administrators across the world. In the following essays I would like to explore how the web, and
applications that already exist can be integrated into these religious
classroom, both in institutes and seminaries across to world to
increase the effectivness bringing the gospel into the hearts of those that hear the gospel.

1. “The Lord, over the centuries, has had a hand in inspiring people to invent tools that facilitate the spreading of the gospel. The Church has adopted and embraced those tools, including print, broadcast media, and the Internet.” [↩]

So I have long been in search of a program to mark up the web. I love to read online and have even gone as far as creating my own copy of the scriptures in a wiki form, but it never seems to get it all there for me. Well, Diigo get’s pretty close for me, and it has nice social features as well…

Scripture Study

Diigo allows has four basic functions that I think are useful in scripture study.

• Bookmarking
• Highlighting
• Commenting
• Tagging (for organizing your bookmarks and comments)

Social Features

Diigo also allows you to make your highlights/comments public. If you do, then anyone that goes to this page with the Diigo Toolbar installed will see your annotations and be able to comment on them.

In addition to this, you can also create public and private groups where you can collaborate on resources. This could be fun for a family to collaborate on a talk someone is preparing, or a class to work on a lesson. Because it is different some students (think seminary/institute) will be more apt to play with it. You could do a class project annotating resources from the church’s amazing resources! Here is a clip from this month’s First Presidency Message from President Monson:

In addition to this there is a nice dashboard that allows you to see new annotations in a group.

LDS Groups

I was suprised this morning when I couldn’t find any LDS groups to join… so I created one: LDS Study and Resources Group. Upon further analysis… it appears the search engine is broken. I still can’t find my group in search, or any other LDS groups… hmmm… Any other Diigo users out there? Come and join… perhaps we could make a LDS Tech group for technologies that we are working on. Good for commenting online with stuff… What do you think?

I am just touching on some of the functionality of Diigo… there is a lot of extra tools and widget’s. Good Web 2.0 technology! What other uses can you forsee?

So our Lindon Utah based friends at Footnote have been getting a lot of press this week for their work in putting the Vietnam memorial online and indexing all of the names. It is a fantastic project. Check out this video:

I read about Footnote a while ago and even checked it out, but haven’t been back. They really are doing some good work there. I got back on and decided to do a search for my surname. I figure if they have anything with van Drimmelen in there… they are good… well, they have two entries… both from some immigration office in New York from the early part of the 20th century… one for a John and one for a Jasper… awesome!

Unfortunately these images are considered premium content so to see the whole thing I have to pay… but still… awesome! Maybe the footnote guys would hook a blogger up with a free membership if he wrote about them every once in a while…

I have been doing some thinking about family history as of late… quite a bit.  You know what would really be an awesome addition to our ability to do family history work?  If we were able to get the family history library online with Google Books. 

Google is notorious for making deals with libraries to put stuff online.  It would be especially important for much of the material in the Family History Library.  I believe that we are working on some of it right now with FamilySearchIndexing.  But there is a lot more out there that I don’t think we can get to.  The LDS.org website about the library says there are 278,000 books in there! 

For those who are not familiar with Google Books, there is an AWESOME about page for each book that links books to other books (helpful for trancing ancestors).  When they scan it in they also do it using Optical Recognition, so you can search for individual names through an entire book in seconds!  There is even a map function that searches the book and places markers on a map from the book. 

It would be awesome…

I have been very impressed with Google Translate for a while.  The ability to translate chat’s, and pretty much anything is changing the way I can do research at work and especially for my family history.

I recently started getting more into family history, but my family roots come from Holland.  I speak German, but that is only good to a small extent.  A distant relative in France sent me several books, but some of them are written in Dutch.  I tried reading them, but could only get the basics.  I pasted the words in google translate and was able to easily follow the story.  Granted, it’s not the best translation, but you certainly can follow it!  Awesome!  

Today I read about a new Firefox extension today called gTranslate.  It allows you to select text on any page and translate it to any of the languages that GoogleTranslate supports.  That could be useful… :) 

So I keep hearing about these nice new layers on Google maps to find stuff (Weather, Gas Prices).  Anyone have any idea how hard it would be to add a layer to Google maps of Church stuff like buildings, and temples with schedule information on it?  I know the church has meetinghouse locator, but the results are in a list format.  Sometimes it is easier to visualize.

I posted a similar entry last week about mapping the ward membership and received a good tip from Darrell.  I followed his directions using batchgeocode.com and was able to import a map into Google Earth and export it into a .kml file, and import it into Google Maps.  It worked great.  I guess the hardest part would be getting all the information about where all the buildings/temple are located… does anyone know if that is public knowledge?  I would love to create the map and make it public… :) 

So I am sure that most of the people reading this blog have heard of Geni.com, but just in case you haven’t.  Geni is a new startup within the past year that allows you to put your family tree online and share it with friends.  You can also collaborate on tree’s together.  Share photo’s and so forth.  There is also a nice German offshoot called Verwandt.de (verwandt means related in German).  Here is my immediate family…

What do you think? Do we need another application or does FamilySearch.org do it for you?