Open Source Idea

Here's an idea for an open source project:

Lesson Exchange

What about a web site with several sections: e.g. primary, sunday school, relieft society, priesthood.

A person has the ability to log in and upload lesson plans (in a very simple format) and to categorize them.

People can download the lesson plans and rate them (and "veto" ones which are created by trolls).

So when people go to find lesson plans they search by category (or by specific lesson number, if they want) and see a list of lessons, sorted by the highest rated ones.

You could break it down even further by good quotes, good stories, relevant scriptures, etc.

This seems pretty isolated and wouldn't need a ton of integration.

What think?

Would this be an add-on to lds.org? This is more for trying to get people to use it then anything else.

It would be great for the same reason as a wiki is great, you gather the knowledge of a body together for improving a single resource and the result is a better product then any one person could produce by themselves.

So include the ability to update a lesson and of course the author of administrator/moderator could veto those changes and it would be great.

Joel Dehlin wrote:Here's an idea for an open source project:

Lesson Exchange

I've seen a few posts about this very topic elsewhere on the forum. The main concern expressed was that of teachers beginning to abandon their own preparation of lessons, in favor of taking a lesson from a site like the one you describe.

What are your thoughts on that Joel? Thanks.

I think it would be a good idea. Many teachers (in our ward anyway) search on the web for lesson helps. There are several good sites like Meridian Magazine and others that compile quotes and stories pertaining to the lesson. I think some people might take the lazy way as Mike mentioned but the teachers in our ward use those sites as tools to aid in their own preparation. They never take the lessons as-is in full, they usually take bits and pieces, I assume, as the Spirit directs. I think a Lesson Exchange would be a good thing for most people.

My two bits...

Yes, there is a concern that teachers might cease listening to the spirit and just take lessons verbatim. We should be aware of that danger.

On the other hand, the spirit can work as you browse various lesson objects and in inspire you to use particular ones. Is that better or worse than what we have today where many people open up the lesson plan during sacrament meeting and start preparing their lesson?

Whatever we do, we don't to pull people to this exclusively.

Let's keep talking.

Joel Dehlin wrote:Is that better or worse than what we have today where many people open up the lesson plan during sacrament meeting and start preparing their lesson?

You bring up a good point. I think if teachers are going to be lazy it would be better that they copy a well planned out lesson compiled by someone else than a quick skimming of the lesson during sacrament meeting. I think the benefits of this sort of project would out weigh the negatives.

bhofmann wrote:You bring up a good point. I think if teachers are going to be lazy it would be better that they copy a well planned out lesson compiled by someone else than a quick skimming of the lesson during sacrament meeting. I think the benefits of this sort of project would out weigh the negatives.

I think I also agree then. This resource will greatly help those who are really preparing and trying to find the right topics to hit for their particular audience and situation. And even in the lazy scenario, at least it will be a better lesson than just read from the manual.

Maybe the idea would be to allow people to post stories or lessons "snippets". A person would then have to pull several stories or snippets together to create a whole lesson. Also, we could allow users (not the author) the ability to assign categories that they found appropriate. Say I submit a snippet that I think goes well with Tithing but someone else may find it works well under the category of "sacrafice" or "obedience".

Tom

So would the lesson snippets be just stories that go along with everything and maybe their application?

Here's my idea:

When you go to prepare a lesson, provide the manual as a base to work from, then have a 'lesson builder' API.

What would you do with the API? In your account on lds.org, you would be able to see links on each article or book chapter allowing you to add paragraphs to your lesson builder. You could then use searching to find what you needed, such as additional scriptures, quotes from other books, or the magazines, music, or additional addresses. In the future audio and video clips could be put in so that you could use those more efectively via other means we have yet to fully integrate.

Given such a tremendous wealth of information already on the site, which is growing monthly if not weekly, this could be a tremendous opportunity for members to become more familiar with the words of the Prophets as they have been in the last 36 years of the magazines, along with whatever else might be in the magazines and make that even more accessible and useful.

There are sites all over the internet that have the tools and resource we are discussing in this thread. Our stake president made a good point...the church spends a lot of money and time to construct the outline that they want teachers to use and provide it in a manual. Those items are inspired and allow for the teachers to build upon it.

My concern is that the lessons they provide should be "BUILT UPON" and not replaced. I have found that too many resources end up with a lesson that doesn't incorporate enough of the inspired lessons that are provided directly by the church.

Another thing, we as a church teach that the doctrine we share is universal throughout the church. That means we should be able to travel and get the same lesson, at least structure, as we would in our home ward. I am lucky to have family thorughout our stake and we have found on the occasions we get together for dinner and discuss the lessons that they are completely different and many times one of us gets the manual lesson and the other gets something completely different...

I encourage our teachers to use the manuals and build upon the lessons based on the suggestions and experiences at the end of the lessons.

That's just my thought...too much of even a good thing in the end....is still just too much...IMHO.

I think my concern is that the uploaded lessons will "build upon" the gospel. Faith-promoting rumor will become fact and guidance will become commandment. How do we protect against that? Just because it's popular, doesn't make it so. I'm not sure as peer review is enough. Especially for a official church site.

Secondly, to make a lesson work, you have to have space for members to share their own experiences. It's more powerful to have one from your own group then from the manual. I'd be concerned that a uploaded lesson would be so crammed with references there wouldn't be time to do anything but read it verbatim.

RussellHltn wrote:I think my concern is that the uploaded lessons will "build upon" the gospel. Faith-promoting rumor will become fact and guidance will become commandment. How do we protect against that? Just because it's popular, doesn't make it so. I'm not sure as peer review is enough. Especially for a official church site.

Secondly, to make a lesson work, you have to have space for members to share their own experiences. It's more powerful to have one from your own group then from the manual. I'd be concerned that a uploaded lesson would be so crammed with references there wouldn't be time to do anything but read it verbatim.

I agree that we need to make sure urban mormon myths don't crop up. Maybe have moderators or require references?

I'm not too concerned about having crammed lessons. Many of the lesson manuals the Church provides include too much information anyway. The teacher needs to be lead by the Spirit during the class and know that they can't use everything. I think good teacher training would help and encouraging viewing the Worldwide Training broadcasts. In the last one Elder Holland talked about this very subject.

bhofmann wrote:Maybe ... require references?

The problem is even with references I can probably find something uttered by a GA or higher that can back a marginal position - especially if I dig though the writings of early church leaders. References would limit and slow any drift. But I don't know as it would halt it.

As I understand it, the current manuals are heavily reviewed. The new site couldn't get the same level of review simply because of the volume of lessons.

Joel Dehlin wrote:What think?

From years of technical troubleshooting, I've learned not to answer the question asked, but to answer the problem behind the question.

So the first thing (now that my brain is fully in gear) I'd ask back, is purpose to solicit technical ideas, workflow ideas, or just throwing something against the wall to see what kind of ideas come out of it?

From a technical standpoint, it seems easy enough. Workflow would need to be hammered out. The real thing I'd like to address is "purpose". If the idea is to harness the collective to come up with and grade lesson plans with an eye toward easing the burden of the Sunday School planning committee (or whatever it's called), I think the idea has a lot of merit.

The biggest concern I'd have is people trying to put some plans into action before they are really ready. I think members are naturally attracted to the fringe stuff because that seems to be were the new information to learn is. (The mainstream stuff was drilled into our heads ages ago.) I'd be concerned that the submitted lessons would have a pull to that direction. I'm not sure how to address that without an authoritative review of each and every plan - a major burden to the committee. Perhaps if the site solicited lesson plans for next year rather then things for the current year, that might help with the goal while minimizing the problems. You'd get a list of past lesson plans that teachers have used and can use them to devise the new manual. It would limit the number of submissions, but I think they'd probably be of higher quality.

I also think the question should be posed on a list of Sunday School teacher types who would understand the dynamics of such a thing better then the current crowd of techies.

The church website is currently designed as an information portal. That is, a user goes their when they want information about/from the church. It is not designed as a collaboration tool where users interact with each other. The most obvious reason is that this is the easiest way for the church to control its message (which happens to be the most important message in the world). Opening up the church website to user collaboration instantly threatens the security of the churches message. I would prefer to see a third party site set up as a 'niche' site for teachers looking for support and help.

I would be more interested in a site that used the churches manual as a base, and then allowed users to share ideas and experiences regarding the lesson in particular. "I tried this object lesson and it worked really well . . ." or "This GA quote seemed to be just what the class needed." In this manner the focus is on the doctrine in the lesson but we are still able to support each other in our roles as teachers.

It appears Joel has been thinking a lot about Wikinomics. (See Joel's post). Following up on the idea that collectives are better at finding solutions than identifying problems, I think this idea can be used to extend the current practice of the Church Magazines of inviting stories from members about living a particular gospel principle. The quote below was taken from page 2 of the current Ensign. I think such an online repository of stories illustrating the gospel in action would be more valuable than having members share their lesson plans.

I enjoyed the demonstrated classroom in the recent Worldwide Training Broadcast in which Elder Holland acted as facilitator and church members shared their own stories and favorite scriptures on a particular topic. If we could develop a community that shares personal experiences, quotes from recent General Conferences, etc. and link them back to the lessons according to user-generated tag/keywords, I think we could create a similar dynamic--a worldwide classroom of sorts that can be used to support and enhance teaching and learning of the Church-approved curriculum.

DO YOU HAVE A STORY TO TELL?
The Ensign invites you to share your testimony of family home evening. What kinds of lessons and activities have generated love and positive behavior? How do you successfully have family home evening with young children, with teenagers, with no children, or when family members are separated by distance? Please send us your ideas and success stories, labeled “FHE,” by July 15. We also welcome other submissions that show the gospel of Jesus Christ at work in your life. Publication criteria are posted at www.lds.org under Gospel Library. Send submissions to ensign@ldschurch.org or Ensign Editorial, 50 E. North Temple Street, Room 2420, Salt Lake City, UT 84150-3220, USA. Include your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, ward (or branch), and stake (or district). Due to the volume of submissions, we cannot acknowledge receipt. Authors whose work is selected for publication will be notified. If you would like your material returned, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

There is already more material in the lesson manuals than can be covered in a single lesson, and even the manuals say not to try to cover it all (not to mention the recent training). It seems that we are periodically reminded that we should be sticking to approved materials (the lesson manuals, scriptures, conference talks, etc.) and the approved curriculum. Yes, we are counseled to use personal experiences and testimony and adapt the message to the needs of the class, and of course it is appropriate to use quotes by General Authorities that are fitting for the lesson we are teaching, but it seems that there is already enough material for the teachers that there is no need to be using lessons prepared by some other non-approved source (from Meridian or elsewhere).
I have been in a few lessons that hardly even resemble the lesson from the approved curriculum because the teacher has brought in so many related quotes and materials, that I would be wary of encouraging that further by providing a forum for exchanging ideas of what non-approved curriculum to share. In my experience, when there is class participation and the members of the class are being edified together and teaching each other, there is too much to try to cover, not too little. And if I'm too busy trying to fit in lots of extra cool quotes and additional materials, there probably isn't much discussion and participation going on.

-Doug

dougk wrote:There is already more material in the lesson manuals than can be covered in a single lesson, and even the manuals say not to try to cover it all (not to mention the recent training). It seems that we are periodically reminded that we should be sticking to approved materials (the lesson manuals, scriptures, conference talks, etc.) and the approved curriculum. Yes, we are counseled to use personal experiences and testimony and adapt the message to the needs of the class, and of course it is appropriate to use quotes by General Authorities that are fitting for the lesson we are teaching, but it seems that there is already enough material for the teachers that there is no need to be using lessons prepared by some other non-approved source.

I love teaching and over the years have taught in Sunday School, RS, Primary, and Young Women. I thought Doug's post was right on target. In addition, I would be very unlikely to use someone else's lesson plan--each teaching experience is unique, and I've found it best to use the Church-approved curriculum as a basis, with additional quotes/experiences as guided by the Spirit.

As current Primary president in our ward, I’d also be uncomfortable with our teachers using member-contributed lesson plans unless I knew they had gone through Correlation. Not only that, I’m not sure I see the need: the Primary lessons are simple but powerful, and it would be unlikely that a member's individual lesson plan would improve on the lesson in the manual (except as guided by the Spirit for that member's stewardship).

Russell's spin-off idea of collaborating on new lessons to assist Church curriculum development would be another matter. I would be very interested in participating in a project like that.

Another idea (somewhat related to Tom’s suggestion) might be to allow members to contribute additions to the Gospel Topics pages. The rule could be that members could only contribute material already found on lds.org, which would take care of the Correlation issue. That would be a great resource for teachers.

Kathryn

I think I see where some of you are going with this, it sounds like there might be something workable here.

The idea of working as a worldwide community on the Gospel Topics pages could really make them useful.

Take the category 'Divorce'. Right now I don't think it has Elder Oaks' talk on that subject referenced. So lets say one is looking for talks about that subject and it's not there, so he/she goes to the search page nad finds Elder Oaks' talk. If it were possible to submit that for inclusion in the topics page listings for the subject, it could make that more valuable. It would only have to be submitted once maybe twice to get all the relevant topics cross referenced.

Typically, a talk or magazine article may have more than one category as we have seen. Now that might not be so hard to do, all they have to do is update the Gospel Topics page once each month for the topics covered in that month's magazines.

The challenging one is tagging articles to go with particular lessons, I've not seen that except in the YM/YW topics in the November Ensign but it might prove extremely useful to some. That is where the best collaboration can likely be. Also, updating the topics for before the time they did the topics at the end of the articles could prove to take longer as well.

Same goes for other materials on the site like the talks in the Additional Addresses area. And the CES talks and Worldwide Leadership materials there, and anything else that might be added to that in the future.

In case nobody noticed, the originator of this thread, Joel Dehlin, is the Church CIO. This wasn't some half-baked idea from the rank and file. This was tossed out as a Open Source project, and yet none of the responses seem to run with it.

Personally, I'm still interested in the "idea behind the post". If it was serious, then I think there's probably more to it and we need to know that to construct the workflow properly. Or it could have been a practice run to see if the troops would rally around the Open Source flag. I don't know. That's why I'd like to hear the rest of the story.

I think the community is more than happy to rally behind Open Source, but not every idea can be acted on. Before delving into a project it's best for the community to look at all to determine need, usability, and appropriateness.

If Joel is presenting an idea from an official church capacity, that's one thing. If the church wants to do it I'm sure the community would support it. But if he's asking for feedback on a personal idea, he's gotten it from both sides of the isle.

nimebe wrote:I think the community is more than happy to rally behind Open Source, but not every idea can be acted on. Before delving into a project it's best for the community to look at all to determine need, usability, and appropriateness.

If Joel is presenting an idea from an official church capacity, that's one thing. If the church wants to do it I'm sure the community would support it. But if he's asking for feedback on a personal idea, he's gotten it from both sides of the isle.

What we are looking for is a project that 1) technology minded folks can get behind to develop so that 2) non technology folks can participate. Both would require the "community" for participation.

Tom

RussellHltn wrote:In case nobody noticed, the originator of this thread, Joel Dehlin, is the Church CIO. This wasn't some half-baked idea from the rank and file. This was tossed out as a Open Source project, and yet none of the responses seem to run with it.

Yes, I was aware that the idea came from Joel, whom I heard at the recent Bay Area tech talk and whom I admire a great deal.

He asked for our assessment of this idea. I know from reading his blogs that he's not looking for yes-men (or women ). So my response was thoughtfully considered. I was trying to give him the kind of feedback I thought he was looking for.

Hope that helps clarify!

Kathryn

JamesAnderson wrote:The idea of working as a worldwide community on the Gospel Topics pages could really make them useful.

Take the category 'Divorce'. Right now I don't think it has Elder Oaks' talk on that subject referenced. So lets say one is looking for talks about that subject and it's not there, so he/she goes to the search page nad finds Elder Oaks' talk. If it were possible to submit that for inclusion in the topics page listings for the subject, it could make that more valuable. It would only have to be submitted once maybe twice to get all the relevant topics cross referenced.

Building on this idea... this morning I was working on Primary Sharing Time for Sunday on the topic of the sacrament. I looked up the topic on the Gospel Topics page... and realized the materials there are only geared toward adults. Those materials are helpful for my personal preparation, but Sharing Time itself needs to be at the children's level. So I thought...it would be nice to have a section for Children's Resources on the Gospel Topics page. This is something the community could help build by contributing links to past articles in The Friend or other lds.org resources.

I also noticed the Scripture References section for this particular topic didn't include two key citations (3 Nephi and the NT). These citations are mentioned in the introductory paragraph, so perhaps that was the logic for not including them in the Scripture References section. But if someone is just reading the Scripture References section, they might not notice the citations in the intro (which, incidentally, aren't hyperlinked). So there could be benefit in allowing users to contribute scripture citations as well.

This is fun stuff! I can really see some possibilities here.

Kathryn

Kathryn wrote:Building on this idea... this morning I was working on Primary Sharing Time for Sunday on the topic of the sacrament. I looked up the topic on the Gospel Topics page... and realized the materials there are only geared toward adults. Those materials are helpful for my personal preparation, but Sharing Time itself needs to be at the children's level. So I thought...it would be nice to have a section for Children's Resources on the Gospel Topics page. This is something the community could help build by contributing links to past articles in The Friend or other lds.org resources.

This is fun stuff! I can really see some possibilities here.

Kathryn

This is a great idea. Taking it further, it would be neat to see
an ldskids domain (similiar to pbskids but with a church slant).
Computers are being used by younger and younger people
each year- it would interesting to see specific audiences
being addressed via domains or even "sections" on the main site.
And the community could easily categorize and even create
content (subject to a review process, probably).

- Atticus Ewig

RussellHltn wrote:In case nobody noticed, the originator of this thread, Joel Dehlin, is the Church CIO. This wasn't some half-baked idea from the rank and file. This was tossed out as a Open Source project, and yet none of the responses seem to run with it.

Like Kathryn, I also recognized that the idea was presented by the Church CIO before I responded with my honest opinion. Now, if the idea were more along the lines of people sharing ideas and materials that they felt could be beneficial and that could be considered by Correlation as they prepared, updated, and approved curriculum, then that is something I would be less uneasy about. Or even for personal study and family use, in the "prepare a talk" or "Gospel Topics" sections of lds.org, or the like (but again, going through some sort of committee to verify doctrinal accuracy and appropriateness before being approved to go "live" on the site). My particular concern was that it seemed the idea was to create a "sharing place" for all the teachers that feel like the approved curriculum is "not good enough" for their lessons at Church. That is an idea I would not support, and to be honest, I doubt it would fly.

(Joel or Tom, please correct me if I am wrong on the following):

I think that Joel and the others are working hard to come up with good ideas that would be useful and beneficial, and that will allow people to contribute and become involved. They are doing a great job of doing that. But that does not necessarily mean that every idea that is proposed by them on this forum (or that they ask for our input and ideas about) is already sanctioned/approved by the Church any more than the ideas posted by others of the "rank-and-file", nor that it necessarily will be. I think they really do want our honest input on the ideas or they wouldn't bother asking.

Doug

Yes, I do feel that as long as the submissions to the proposed 'lesson exchange' site are passed somehow through correlation to ensure the doctrinal concepts and quotes or whatever are correct, the idea could really be beneficial.

Joels idea is the next logical step in my opinion of development for the 'prepare a lesson' area on lds.org, Enhance it maybe with some of the other ideas myself and others have put forward in this forum thread as well.

Hmm, Doctrinal WIKI, doesn't strike me as a good idea.....

I understand the desire for lesson resources, but I don't see where LDS.ORG fits the problem. I do not think it is a fundemental problem with a repository for lessons, I have even debated such a thing for myself, but I do not think the IMPLEMENTATION would work.

I see two implementation extremes:

1. LDS Wiki
People come to post their lesson ideas, resources, links to whatever. Peer review or moderation weeds out the bad.


2. Correlated published lesson resources.
People submit ideas to a correlating body (existing church dept, or community panel). Good ideas / lesson plans are published. Bad ones get a nice email back to the submitter.

The problem I have is that the wiki would never work. We on the technical forum have to work really hard to keep threads here from turning into doctrinal debate. Opening a forum or wiki to such is almost guaranteed to become either a horribly apostate resource, or a flame-war. The only benefit of such an open implementation would be the short cycle between submit and publish.

A correlated publishing group would work, but how is that different than the current published manuals and periodicals? If I send you my happy tithing story, and you publish it on LDS.ORG, how is that different than putting my story in the next months Ensign?

So I have a few ideas:

1. Put printed church materials online. Make submitting suggestions easy and fluid. It would be great for me to be able to print my lesson materials from LDS.ORG, and get references to Apr. conference. I could even suggest a few references or corrections for existing church publication depts. to include.

2. Allow peer reviewed lessons consisting of existing LDS.ORG resources.

I thought an interesting social project would be to allow people to footnote scriptures. It would be great to build a topical guide of community provided scriptural references. If you limited posts to short comments and a scriptural reference, it should be easy to moderate. It would also be difficult to pull information out of context, since the verse would always appear in context. This would kind of be like de.lico.us for scriptures. (http://del.icio.us/)
This idea would work well for other published works, like the Ensign, and online talks. This would allow 'Lesson Plan' type resources, but keep things from straying to far from the original source's intent.

3. Unofficial resource.

Try the wiki. Do not endorse it at all. See what happens. If it works out, make it official.

I would think that an unofficial wiki would at some point or another cause heartburn at CHQ. I worry that even percieved hostility to the community or the site admins would disenfranchise people. For this to work, I think an amnesty period to get the site working, and a clear purpose and exit strategy for the admins would be needed.

dougk wrote:(Joel or Tom, please correct me if I am wrong on the following):

I think that Joel and the others are working hard to come up with good ideas that would be useful and beneficial, and that will allow people to contribute and become involved. They are doing a great job of doing that. But that does not necessarily mean that every idea that is proposed by them on this forum (or that they ask for our input and ideas about) is already sanctioned/approved by the Church any more than the ideas posted by others of the "rank-and-file", nor that it necessarily will be. I think they really do want our honest input on the ideas or they wouldn't bother asking.

Doug

I think you are correct. We are shooting ideas off of you as the community. We have not gotten these ideas approved yet.

Tom

JamesAnderson wrote:The challenging one is tagging articles to go with particular lessons, I've not seen that except in the YM/YW topics in the November Ensign but it might prove extremely useful to some. That is where the best collaboration can likely be.

What about using social tagging on the existing resources in the gospel library. Allowing users to tag existing articles might make them more accessible with a broader range of subjects. Then we could have a topics page. Someone could use the topic of Divorce and find more results than a simple search with the keyword "divorce".

Social tagging allows more for implied meaning rather than straight keyword matching.

This would also eliminate the need for additional approval since the content in the gospel library is already approved.

bhofmann wrote:Social tagging allows more for implied meaning rather than straight keyword matching.

This would also eliminate the need for additional approval since the content in the gospel library is already approved.

I would almost agree with a slight caveat that some light moderation might be needed to ensure that the social tags used are appropriate to the topic at hand and not completely off-base.

kgthunder wrote:I would almost agree with a slight caveat that some light moderation might be needed to ensure that the social tags used are appropriate to the topic at hand and not completely off-base.

Aw, and here I had plans to tag all the times the ancient prophets sinned or when someone committed adultery. :rolleyes:

Seriously, we probably do need to think about what kinds of malicious tags might be applied.

RussellHltn wrote:Aw, and here I had plans to tag all the times the ancient prophets sinned or when someone committed adultery. :rolleyes:

You are going to do some serious old testament study. (Yes there is at least some infraction by a prophet or someone committing adultery in all the standard works)

Anyway I think if we have the tags be basically the topical guide topics then we'd be pretty safe.

A couple other things come to mind then.

Cross-referencing talks to other talks on the same subject. This will also catch some talks that have been printed later, such as a talk that was first given in 1993 but reused as a First Presidency Message earlier this year. I discovered this while looking for something else, vetted it via the search engine, the only difference was the footnoting was more comprehensive than in the original.

The second idea comes from the fact that sometimes a scripture is paraphrased and not noted in the talk. A talk given in 1971 by Spencer W. Kimball mentions Amos 3:7 but does not cite it because it was a paraphrase of it. That way, there could be a way of correlating things more closely with the scriptures.

This is already done to some extent by BYU's scripture pages, but could end up proving invaluable.

And I also agree on using the Topical Guide subjects as tags. Also tagging things in talks with a topical guide subject tag could be a way of handling things mentioned above as well.

Then we could see right at a glance in some other area who said what and used what scripture and what other talks or articles mentioned that same talk or scripture or subject. This has very significant possibilities.

I'm not sure how the programming or layout would work, but that's what this thread is about I think.

I would never sift through posted lesson plans to prepare a lesson - it is too burdensome per reward... However, there are two aspects of lesson planning in which I am constantly searching for help and inspiration: (1) object lessons and (2) historical relvance

(1) object lessons: A couple of years ago, while attending graduate school on the east coast, I taught early morning seminary. Elder Scott gave a training to all seminary teachers (Scott, R.G., 2005. To Understand and Live Truth. Talk given during An Evening with a General Authority on Febrary 4, 2005), in which he described that object lessons can provide an anchor for the spiritual aspects of the lessons to be retained. This worked exceptionally well with my teenagers. A good object lesson is NEVER forgotten and the spiritual message is written on "the fleshy tables of [their] heart" (2 Cor. 3:3). These should be simple one-paragraph descriptions of the materials required, and the doctrinal message that is connected. Others' could post comments about variations on the object theme and impact of the lesson on various audiences. All these factors could be used to sort a large and growing catelogs of object lessons. One could search by message, audience, materials available (this was frequently my largest constraint as a student), and time requirements ... to find the perfect object lesson for the lesson. The brevity of such object lesson descriptions would make doctrine-checking simple. (The seminary teacher manual has lots of great/simple object lessons that I modified for the materials available to me, preparation time, and class needs.)

(2) historical significance: The other major bits of knowledge that I seek for during a lesson are descriptions of histories that improve one's understanding of the relevant scriptures. For example, once I taught my seminary kids about how salt was used during sacrifices in the OldT. I had them remember how they can smell a well-seasoned grill from miles away. Then we read Matt 5:13 (Ye are the salt of the earth). Then I had them envision how far away they can see a bonfire on a hill and we read Matt 5:14 (Ye are the light of the world). Then THEY taught me that Jesus was teaching about sacrifice and how His atoning sacrifice would fulfill the law of Moses. THEY then taught me how important it is to make these things known to the inhabitants of the whole earth. The little piece of history (e.g., salt used in sacrifices) made the scripture have enormous significance, relevance, and meaning.

It would be excellent to have something like http://scriptures.byu.edu that would reference relevant object lessons and relevant historical facts to scriptures. Or, have a searchable database that is structured around topical guide themes. These could enhance lessons without detracting from the message or mixing doctrine and philosophy. I don't ever share stories unless they are my own, or historically referenced -- EVER! We should teach the scriptures and words of the prophets. I don't believe that entire lesson plans will ever be useful.

Just some ideas...

--kgc
Charlottesville, VA

kgcrowther wrote:However, there are two aspects of lesson planning in which I am constantly searching for help and inspiration: (1) object lessons and (2) historical relvance

We have a winner!!

That's an excellent idea! Long ago I've noticed the best talks have some kind of short story or example that's used to illustrate the talk. If you can remember the story, you can easily remember the talk.

I like this alot too. Terrific idea! I've always loved the lessons that gave me more of a historical picture of the timeframe and situation to help my understanding of the particular scripture passage or account from Church history.

What do you think, Joel?

Again another point for object lessons is that President Monson always has two or three stories in his talks and they are great. (Except when the Portuguese translators cannot keep up and just drop half the story, but that's ok since they don't have a script to follow on them.)

As for Historical relevance I've noticed that it connects the audience more to the lesson if they can imagine actually being there.

I red ALL posts of this topic and I'm enchanted about different reactions to Joel request!
Diversity is fantastic!
I'm Italian and love culture. With Paul (the ancient apostle) I enjoy read everything and retain the good.
The idea that teachers all around the world, with their culture an knowledge, could share their teaching ideas and resources is formidable, wonderful, exiting.
I think I had the same feeling when the plan of salvation was explained to as in the preexistence!
Maybe I'm sick of pioneer-ism (I don't know if in English have sense). But I think that problems, errors, etc. are part of progress.
Of course Church's manuals are enough (I think are the minimum) but are we or not invited to search the more good?
I'll would collaborate in this project, if it will take place!

For that matter, could you create a wiki site that could be used for this? I personally use http://library.lds.org when doing lesson preparations as I can pull information from all kinds of articles. A wiki portal from that site could be tremendously beneficial.

Could a scouting portal also be developed that would give ideas for scouting and mutual events?