Foundation News —Chip Edelsberg

Foundation News
—Chip Edelsberg, Executive Director

October 2009

As the Jim Joseph Foundation gains experience in grant making, we frequently encounter the need to deepen our understanding of the effects technology has on Jewish teaching and learning. That we all live in a time of astounding technological innovations is unquestionable. What is at issue is how JJF can most effectively fund new forms of Jewish education that capitalize on novel uses of technology.

The internet is perhaps the most visible of an impressive array of modern technologies. Case Western Reserve University Vice President of Information Technology, Lev Gonick, asserts that "the Internet knows no boundaries; [it] honors no hierarchy or authority." Gonick adds that the Internet’s "inter-active communications protocol" represents "an entirely new and radical way for massive numbers of humans to interact and communicate with each other, whether conducting business, industry, governing, or organizing our communal activities."

JJF currently funds myriad initiatives which actively use technology as a way to get things done. Building databases and establishing contact management systems, video conferencing and online learning via webinars, creating and sustaining social networks – these are among a variety of technological tools and platforms that are instrumental to the work of JJF’s grantees.

One particular initiative that The Foundation funds – the Bar Ilan University (BIU) Jim Joseph Fellows Program – will teach a group of diverse educators how to optimize communities of practice and its associated technologies. The purpose of this effort is to accelerate the creation of more accessible, robust, far-reaching Jewish education.

The fourteen BIU Jim Joseph Fellows (see their profiles) will gather for their initial face-to-face forum this month in Los Angeles. The session will focus in part on the nature of community, and in particular on the complex interaction of identity development and Jewish community (see forum agenda). Fellows will also explore the expanding world of web-based products available for social networking and communities of practice.

My sense is that foundations face the dilemma of either romanticizing technology and its power on the one hand, or severely underestimating its potential on the other. In funding the BIU-JJF Fellows initiative, JJF assumes that successful, technologically-driven on-line CoPs "enable like-minded people to share knowledge, experiences, and caring in more impactful ways and work together to contribute, learn, and reciprocate in building common human destinies moving forward" (Gonick).

The explosion of technology and its utilities combined with the ubiquity of social networks poses unprecedented opportunity for the diffusion of Jewish learning. JJF’s growing awareness that considerable Jewish education is already occurring in this space presages The Foundation’s continued involvement in this distinctively 21st century form of learning.

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