The Bible Student's Cockpit

THE BIBLE STUDENT'S COCKPIT
Or better yet "The Growing Christian's Environment"

An aircraft flight panel is designed to provide efficient access to all resources a pilot needs to fly in all weather and conditions. What we need it an equivalent environment for the growing Christian. There are some good tools, but a Biblically complete learning environment has not been engineered yet.

What We're Fixing

Most Bible study programs to date have had no agenda and no ability to interact with others, they are just a search tool. The Great Commission describes a learning process in which the student is provided wise mentors who teach, train, answer questions, challenge and support them. Anything less is not what the Bible describes as the minimum essential requirements for Christian growth.

Introduction

The goal of the program is to help create maturing followers of Jesus - and help them understand how to understand how to weave/integrate Godly thinking into everyday life.

The environment must provide a goal, expectations of progress, an agenda, exercises and examples, interaction with more and less mature folks, testing, and certification of accomplishments.

The chat window is necessary so that every person using the library daily also invests in the lives of others. There is nobody alive who can't help someone every day - and it is a false choice to divide study with ministry to and from others. Most people don't recognize and personally find the solutions to many of life's problems directly from Matthew Henry or even Matthew - they learn them from the lips of a friend and discipler best or perhaps from a trusted teacher.

Entertainment has not been integrated into Bible study tools in the past, thus you have an easy dichotomy between pleasure and drudgery. If you get tired of suffering while studying the Bible, you leave that environment and watch TV or something. This environment should offer more inside it than is available outside it.

Essential elements:
1. Entertainment
2. Reading
3. Assessment/testing/being challenged
4. Training/Learning
5. Planning
6. Search
7. Communication
8. Display
9. Taking and organizing notes, organizing notes into studies,
create and organize teaching presentations, including
documenting (and hiding) dead ends and curious ideas not
developed fully

Random Comments on how to do stuff:

Comments on Search.

Part 1, incremental improvement. I like the feature where you can click on any word in the text you are reading and run down new concepts. In your current program,
http://www.sabda.org/netbible/bible.php , clicking on a word starts a search for all of the other instances of that word. I like that very much, but see 2 more options which add to the user's experience. Consider the BibleQuote program - when you click on a word there you get the contents of multiple indexes brought to bear on that topic, word, or concept.

If I click on any word (on examples we'll use "Covenant"), we could offer:

1. The word search feature you've already done.

2. What is better is a topic search or a topical index on the
topic selected. A Bible dictionary article on what a
covenant is, a list of covenants, and hot links to each
passage, and links to Wikipedia style explorations of each
covenant (Salt, Abrahamic, Mosaic, New, etc). The
BibleQuote program does this in a very good way.
Rather than doing a search, it links to an article on
that word. I don't know if you have the program, so there
are 4 screen captures to show how this works. There is room
for an innovation here! In BibleQuote, it is inefficient to
figure out that there are several different articles on any
topic and you often see the worst one first…

3. When I use the BibleQuote program, I like these topical
articles but see that a similar feature that is much better
would be to offer a training agenda rather than just
lookups. While it is great to read about concepts
associated with a passage, I also want training with an
agenda rather than just a random walk through topics. I
think it is important to add a new feature - instead of
just dictionaries and topical lookups, similarly linked
articles should be an teaching classroom with an agenda,
all with hot links so we can guide Bible students through
lessons and teach people in a methodical manner. Bible
study programs come equipped without the most essential
element - an agenda to make the user smarter over time.

4. Unrelated Future extension: Pronoun links "if you violate
it you shall surely die", where "it" is a named covenant.
(Works better when you click on David and get all the
passages where he is not named, but "king" or "he" is
David.