Open Books

One of the Schopenhauer's inspirations (especially in "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of sufficient Reason") gives a classical perspective on the modern German thought. Wonderful!!!

This is a great guide. If you like hiking, follow what the author says and you will not be disappointed. Barbara knows her stuff.

Lee Schlosser and Mike Simonson have provided us with a quintessential textbook that is invaluable to anyone in the field or those who need or want to know about distance education.

David Bilyeu's chapter on libraries was brilliant

I just finished an on-line degree and I really wish I'd had this wonderful book; it would have made the entire process so much easier. The author covers everything -- from chosing an on-line class to registering to actually completing the course. And the author makes it all so easy to follow. If you're even thinking about taking an on-line class, you gotta get this book.

In this practical and timely volume, Distance Learning, The Essential Guide, authors, Marcia L. Williams, Kenneth Paprock, and Barbara Covington, provide clear commentary on the basic issues surrounding distance learning. This book presents an original combination of learning resources like reading case studies, tear-out worksheets, and checklists. In addition, the book contains templates designed to be copied and a very useful and updated glossary of terms, converting this book in a practical material indispensable for all teachers who need to go inside of the distance leaning world. The authors organized the book in six chapters that provide you with the foundation needed to teach from a distance. To begin introducing open and distance learning, the first chapter presents the history and growth of this field and the way evolving technologies have been transitioned into existing distance learning formats. The authors continue in Chapter Two by analyzing the concepts and components that make up an open and/or distance learning environment as well as including recommendations in order that the reader can appreciate a futurist view in roles and competencies for a specialization in this area. Using several case studies, Chapter Three introduces a broad overview of all practical considerations that can be applied as you set up an open and /or distance learning network. These include: equipment, network, technical, usage, cost, and also advantages and disadvantages that you can find in the process of implementation. The transitional change process, resisting change, identifying of barriers, and ways how others have overcome educational situations by building on comfortable and familiar scenarios are detailed in Chapter 4. In Chapter Five, the paradigm of teaching from a distance is radically different from teaching face-to-face is broken. The authors claim "it is true that there are differences, it is also true that the basic principles for teaching and learning from a distance are the same as the basic principles for any teaching and learning environment." The last chapter includes information to begin to turn verbal information into visual communication, including ideas on working with space, working with text and fonts, and visual relationships. Williams, Paprock, and Covington present a very practical book with a strong theoretic foundation. This book lends itself as an important resource for the every professional who needs to use distance learning, including teachers, trainers, and every person that want to transmit knowledge using the infinite possibilities of the technology in an efficient and effective way.

I think the title of the book does not do the book justice. The book covers more than OpenAFS, but covers a large laundry list of services revolving in part around Kerberos. It touches on SAMBA, single-sign-on solutions with LDAP and Kerberos, PKI (OpenSSL) as well as other integration with current technologies.

Most books covering technologies on Linux/UNIX are frankly obsolete before they are published, leaving you to pull together bountiful resources online and offline, combined with google searches. This book pulls together a lot of these services, has explanations for them, and gives arms you with practical knowledge and examples on how to integrate these solutions. The alternative would be a book shelf of O'Reilly and other books, where most would be obsoleted anyhow. And this alternative would be limited, as you would seldom gleam how to integrate desperate technologies together.

For UNIX/Linux or even MacOS X system administrators, system engineers, or the technically curious (hobbyist), this book is a most have.

Yes, God can use even me - even if I don't have a gift for witnessing for Him - just let Him schedule my appointment book! Divine Appointments is such an encouragement!

David Brown's The Divine Trinity represents a powerful attempt to meet critics of incarnational christology on their own ground. Brown argues that deist anti-incarnationalism is unstable--that it must be transformed either into a more robust theism or into straightforward atheism. After making the case for belief in an historically active God, he suggests the history of Jesus, even understood in relatively minimalist fashion, entails belief in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Basing his argument on the resurrection rather than on any feature of Jesus' practice or self-consciousness, he maintains that the exaltation evident in the resurrection disclosed Jesus as worthy of worship and that subsequent incarnational christology is best understood as an elucidation of the implications of these experiences. Then, he attempts to unpack the meaning of early Christian experience of the Holy Spirit, to the extent that we can retrieve it from the New Testament witness. He seeks to show that this experience points toward belief in the Spirit as in some sense personally distinct from both Jesus and the One to whom he prayed as Father.

With the historical evidence out of the way, Brown examines the conceptual issues. He delineates two conceptual models for the Incarnation--kenotic and Chalcedonian--and concludes that both are coherent and consistent with the available historical evidence. By contrast, when he examines alternative unity and plurality models for the Trinity, he judges only the plurality model satisfactory.

I wonder whether Brown has made as plausible a case as he thinks he has for social trinitarianism. While the social model is widely popular among orthodox Christians today, it seems to me to depend on the assumption that we know more than we do or could know about the inner life of God. I don't think Brown has made out his case that we can infer the appropriateness of this model from the NT evidence.

More seriously, I worry about Brown's account of divine action. The deist accounts he rejects are inadequate to Christian faith and experience. But I think a satisfactory response to the problem of evil requires us to think of divine action as persuasive rather than coercive. Whether this is conceived of as a product of divine free choice or (as in process thought) as a consequence of the nature of reality doesn't matter; once we understand divine action in this way, we need to ask whether we can still maintain a view like Brown's. Austin Farrer articulated an essentially persuasive account of divine action while affirming an unequivocally high christology. But he left us fewer clues than he might have as to his grounds for believing himself entitled to do so. More work needs to be done here. (For those unconvinced by Farrer, John Cobb's winsome process christology remains available.)

Other readers will doubtless find a variety of reasons to argue with Brown. But he has done a masterful job of integrating mainstream New Testament criticism, philosophical reflection, and doctrinal theology. This remains the best defense of incarnational christology for anyone who doesn't feel comfortable accepting the inerrantism or quasi-inerrantism of some of its advocates. This is a great book!

This book, as well as it's companion "Why Do Stars Twinkle?" make great reads for kids and parents. The short explanations of questions keeps kids interested and leaves the door open for demonstrations and discussion. I highly recommend it!