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Learning styles

By: Yewtree —
There's an interesting post over at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist about the best way to treat different learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic) when teaching - the best way is to use the most appropriate modality for the material being delivered. This is interesting news for anyone who works in religious or other education, with adults or children.
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When to use PDFs

By: Yewtree —
When not to use PDFs
  • If the information is intended to be read online
  • If another content type could be used instead, i.e. a normal HTML web-page
When to use PDFs
  • When a document needs to be downloaded, read offline or printed
  • If a document is more than 5 pages long. But consider whether it could be broken down into smaller sections and presented as HTML
  • When attaching a document to an email
  • As an additional alternative to online content - e.g. this set of tutorials could also be provided as a single PDF document
  • When formatting needs to be preserved - e.g. a PowerPoint presentation
  • Instead of Microsoft Office documents. But HTML is better most of the time
  • See the definitive list of when to use PDFs by Joe Clark
What else to include with your PDF document
  • An online HTML version or summary of the document
  • A link to download Adobe Acrobat Reader
  • A PDF icon to indicate that it is a PDF document (see an example on the BBC website)
See also
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Why "click here" is bad

By: Yewtree —
Why "Click here" is bad linking practice (by Jukka Korpela)
  • "Click here" just looks stupid.
  • "Click here" looks especially stupid when printed on paper.
  • "Click here" is useless in a list of links or when in "links reading" mode, or whenever a link text is considered as isolated from its textual and visual context.
  • "Click here" is bad food for search engines. If you say "For information on Unitarianism, click here", search engines won't know that your document contains a link to a document about Unitarianism. Some important search engines use the link text in estimating the relevance of a link. Using descriptive link texts thus helps users in finding documents they're interested in, potentially including your document due to a link text with some key word.
  • There's usually a fairly simple way to do things better. Instead of the text "For information on Unitarianism, click here", you could simply type "About Unitarianism".
  • "Click here" is device-dependent. There are several ways to follow a link, with or without a mouse. Users probably recognize what you mean, but you are still conveying the message that you think in a device-dependent way.

Describing links correctly

Bad Good
  • Click here for information about Unitarianism
  • You can access information on Unitarianism by clicking here
  • More information on Unitarianism is here
  • More information on Unitarianism is available by following this link
  • More information on Unitarianism is available by following this link
  • Follow this link for more information on Unitarianism
  • www.unitarian.org.uk/
  • To book a place on this course click here
  • About Unitarianism
  • More information about Unitarianism
  • Find out more about Unitarianism
  • There have been a lot of news items about Unitarianism recently
  • Book a place on this course
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Cool tools

By: Yewtree —

For people who want to bring together different services to create a unique blend (also known as a mashup), there are some really useful and easy to use tools out there.

Widgetbox allows you to develop small applications for embedding in webpages. The easiest widget to set up is the blidget, which fetches an RSS feed (from a blog, news service such as the BBC or the University's News pages,del.icio.us tags, Yahoo! Pipe or Flickr) and creates a shiny widget for embedding in a web-page, or for turning into a Facebook application or Google gadget.

Yahoo! Pipes allow you to bring together (aggregate) several different RSS feeds, filter out duplicate items, add author information, and so on.

Flickr is an online photo storage site, where you can display your photos (either publicly or so that only friends and family can see them), and you can use advanced search to obtain photos for use in presentations and on websites under the Creative Commons licence.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, which means it is like bookmarking a favourite page in your web browser, but the bookmarks are saved on the del.icio.us website, and tagged with labels to make them easier for you and others to find. Each page on del.icio.us (whether it's popular tags, all tags, your bookmarks, or one of your tags) has an RSS feed associated with it, which can then be imported to a blidget or an RSS reader.

Jotform is the first web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors.

Google Scholar provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. You still need an Athens account to log in to many of the resources you can find via Google Scholar, but it searches across all of JSTOR, Ebscohost, Blackwell Synergy, the DNB, Google Books, etc.

Google Books - Google have digitised many books libraries around the world. If the book is out of copyright, you can download the entire book, and search all of its content. Books that are still in copyright only allow a limited search. » More information

These are just two of the many tools offered by Google.
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UK Unitarians on Twitter

By: Yewtree —
Twitter is a micro-blogging service where you can post links, quotes and items of interest without the need to write a full-size blogpost. Quite a number of UK Unitarians are on there already.
I have also created a group list of UK Unitarians on Twitter.

There may be many others but I haven't found them yet - add a comment and let us know your Twitter address, and if you want to be added to the group list.


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International Unitarian & UU websites

By: Yewtree —
The International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (founded 1995) is a body devoted to fostering connections between Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist groups around the world. There are about 500,000 Unitarians and Universalists in the world today. Many belong to large church organizations while others rarely meet another Unitarian face-to-face. The oldest groups, who are Hungarian speaking, have a continuous church history of more than 400 years. Some of the English speaking groups go back over 200 years. Many of the newest member and emerging groups have a much shorter history.

The International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) (founded 1901) is a UK-based charity working for freedom of religion & belief at a global level.

European Unitarian Universalists (founded 1982) is a support network and community for Unitarian Universalists (UUs) and UU fellowships in Europe.

Unitarians in other countries
A - F
G - O
P - Z
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Unitarian Universalist blogs

By: Yewtree —
Many Unitarian Universalists have blogs, and there is more than one blog aggregator for them. (A blog aggregator is a site that gathers content from other blogs - just a snippet of the text, the title and a link, and not the whole blog post, as that would be plagiarism.)

Unitarian Universalist blog aggregators:
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Unitarian websites

By: Yewtree —
There are many Unitarian websites at national, regional and local levels. Here's how to find your way around them.

National level
The General Assembly website has recently been re-launched. It has resources for congregations and explains Unitarianism for inquirers. The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is the body in which all Unitarians unite.

Unitarians in the UK & Ireland is a resource about and for Unitarians. It also offers a free website template for Unitarian communities that don't currently have one. It explains what Unitarianism is and how to find Unitarians.

There are several Unitarian societies covering special interests such as music, earth spirituality, history, meditation, peace, all of which have their own website.

There are various commissions, including the Engagement Groups Support Panel, which encourages the development of engagement groups.

Regional level
Most districts have their own website.

Local level
Most churches have their own websites, and you can find these using either the congregation finder on the General Assembly website, or the map of congregations on the Unitarians in UK & Ireland website.
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Unitarian videos

By: Yewtree —
The National Unitarian Fellowship are hosting an excellent series of videos about Unitarianism, introducing it, explaining Unitarian values, the Unitarian relationship with the Christian tradition, what a Unitarian service is like, Unitarian social responsibility, and how Unitarianism is organised.

There are also personal views of Unitarianism from Tony McNeile, Jane Barraclough, Hazel Clarke, Stephen Lingwood and Jef Jones.

If you want to write about these in your local newsletter, here are shortened versions of the web addresses: http://tinyurl.com/unitarianvideos and http://tinyurl.com/unitarianviews

There is also a UK Unitarian channel on YouTube.
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Unitarian blogs

By: Yewtree —
There are many Unitarian Universalist blogs and several blog aggregators (sites which bring UU blogs together). There are also several Unitarian bloggers in the British Isles.

Bill Darlison has a blog where he posts his sermons (he updates it regularly but he is using it more as a website than a blog); Stephen Lingwood blogs at Reignite; Andrew Brown blogs at Caute, and Yvonne Aburrow blogs at dance of the elements. If there are any other British or Irish Unitarian bloggers out there, let us know and we'll add your blog to the sidebar.
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Gadgets for your website

By: Yewtree —
Belief-O-Matic
Many Unitarian websites link to the Belief-O-Matic questionnaire. This is a questionnaire which asks about your views on life, ethics, spirituality, religion, the divine, and so on, and works out what religion you are by comparing you to other people who have answered the questionnaire in the past. One example of a church with a link to the questionnaire is Rosslyn Hill Chapel in London; another is Bristol Unitarians.

Photo-sharing
Another useful gadget is the Flickr badge, which enables you to display photos uploaded to Flickr (a photo sharing website). Of course you will need some digital photos and a Flickr account first. Once you have joined Flickr, be sure to join the UK Unitarians group and add your photos to the group pool. You can also use photos from Flickr for your website, as long as they are shared via Creative Commons.

Interactive maps
The Unitarians in the UK & Ireland website has a map of all the Unitarian congregations in the UK, and you can zoom in to a region and see all the chapels in that area. You can also embed a chunk of Google map in your website to show where your chapel or church is. See the Bristol Unitarians 'how to find us' page for an example, and Google Help for instructions.

Who has visited
The best tool to use to find out how many people have visited your site is Google Analytics. This is not a web counter, it is a proper statistical application which is very easy to use and produces maps and graphs of your visitors. Don't use web counters - these are notoriously inaccurate, and make your site look amateur.

Another tool that is quite nice is the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget. This shows when registered MyBlogLog users have visited your blog or wiki. I wouldn't recommend having a guestbook as these are highly vulnerable to spam.

Video
Youtube Videos - Some congregations have created videos and slideshows that have now been put onto Youtube. You can embed video in your own website.

Creative collaboration
Another option is to have a wiki where people can post church-related discussions, activities such as engagement groups, coffee rotas etc. Cambridge Memorial Unitarian Church has a wiki (NB this is not intended to replace their main church website).

Some churches (such as Bristol Unitarians) use a blog as a "poor person's content management system"; others use Google Sites (such as New Unity). This enables multiple contributors to the website, and doesn't necessarily mean that editors need to know HTML, though it does mean they need to be confident with online editing tools (which are usually WYSIWYG).
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Introduction and welcome

By: Yewtree —
The Communications Commission met yesterday and decided to have a blog to share good practice and useful resources. Blogging is a great way of communicating and sharing ideas, and we want to encourage more Unitarians to start blogging. Blogging is a way of sharing ideas and thoughts, poetry, sermons, and conversation.

There are many people out there who may well be Unitarians without knowing it - in other words, they already share our outlook on life, the universe and everything, and may be looking for a community to share their spiritual life with, but have never heard of Unitarianism.
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