over the weekend a post was made on ITFORUM, an instructional technology listserv, posing questions about discussing religion in education and how to do it. happily a thoughtful and respectful conversation followed and the original poster summarized all the points at the end of the weekend on the list, and on his weblog.
now, this morning as people get back to work the list is being hit with a lot of unsubscriptions. it is suspected that the nature of the conversation has caused the unsubscriptions. personally, i think that before the suspicion is acted upon and that those of us who participated are scolded for taking part in such a discussion, we should follow up with those folks. but, lets pretend that the suspicion is correct – the question arises – does religion belong on the forum?
well, if you read the post, you’ll see that my opinion is that yes – discussions of religion do belong on a forum about education because religion is such an integral part of people’s lives. we live in a multicultural world and if we are designing and delivering instruction for that world religion is going to be a part of that. people bring perspectives influenced by religion to their learning, and if we are to instruct in meaningful ways we have to acknowledge that.
further there’s the whole world peace issue. i know, everyone says they want it. well, it seems as though today religion and world peace are intertwined – we can’t seem to have peace unless the world religions learn to live in peace. to me it seems as though that isn’t likely to happen if a bunch of educators can’t talk about religion, especially if that conversation is about – how do we talk about the topic. how are we going to educate if we can’t talk about seemingly controversial topics?
i think (the collective) we spend too much time dancing around the difficult topics because they are difficult. how can we truly make the world a better place if we rely on only politicians to do the difficult work of talking about these topics? how are we going to educate those young politicians into older thoughtful politicians who do the talking if we continue to skirt around these issues in forums like ITFORUM? in such a diverse world i think that if we skirt these issues we are only doing the world a disservice. we cannot continue to relegate these issues out of our offices and back to home. learning / educating is about discourse, its about tackling the hard problems, it’s about coming up with possible solutions. where can we start to tackle these issues? why can’t we talk about these issues on a forum like ITFORUM – a forum full of brilliant minds devoted to education of all ages and industries? to me, if we all want world peace, it’s got to start somewhere – we’ve got to stop brushing these topics under the rug, because they are going to come up over and over and over again, and at some point we’re going to have to look it squarely in the face. wouldn’t it be nice of a bunch of educators (define that word as you wish) could say – hey! we’ve figured out different ways to tackle these difficult problems? i think so.
I'm Brooke, a second year PhD student at Utah State University in Instructional Technology. My interests include digital resources, reuse and localization. Specifically I'm interested in the interplay between culture and reuse of oer's (open educational resources). How can we reuse instructional materials so that they are culturally relevant to users. What is culture? How do we define it in an educational setting? Is making something more culturally relevant more motivating and will that make it more instructionally effective? How can we quantify culture so that we can create processes to more easily adapt instructional resources for the complexities and depth of culture? It's a lifetime of work. 
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