Here is the introduction to my D.Min. dissertation proposal. Now that I am finally actually doing something about it I want to share it with my readers. Let me know your feedback. Now you all can help me with my dissertation

(Please note that this section is designed to describe why this study is needed. I don’t want to be overly negative, but to give a balanced description of some of the tensions and challenges faced in ministry in a bilingual immigrant church.)

It’s not easy living in the gap. The children of immigrants find themselves torn between two cultures. They want to honor the hopes and aspirations of their parents, but at the same time they long for acceptance in the only country that they have ever known. They live out one identity at school and with their friends but put on a different one at home. Meanwhile their parents are concerned about the influence of American culture on their children and worry that they will abandon their native language and ethnic heritage.

These two forces often collide at church. The immigrant generation, after living in an English speaking, culturally American world all week long, look forward to experiencing a taste of their home language and culture at church. But for their children it is a very different experience. On Sundays they feel yanked backwards into a culture that they have worked hard to move beyond during the week so that they can fit in with their friends. Of course it is never that simple, because they often value many aspects of their parents’ culture. But the tension is there.

I have experienced this challenge first hand over the past twelve years at a bilingual Chinese church in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I serve as the English Pastor. Like most ethnic immigrant churches, Chinese churches in North America struggle to find effective ways to reach the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation. Those serving in other Asian immigrant churches have reported similar challenges.

The phenomenon of immigrants moving to a new country and founding a church is nothing new. The challenges currently facing Chinese churches are similar to those faced by other immigrant churches in the past. I will draw on the experiences of those groups to discover principles that contemporary immigrant churches can apply in their ministry.

After a break for the holidays and the beginning of the year activities I need to get working on my dissertation again. I want to have a good method for taking notes so that they are easy to reference while I am writing. But I have been frustrated by the lack of good software for academic writing.

Maybe the problem is that not many academic types are geeks, but it shouldn’t be this difficult. With my background in computer programming I can envision the ideal software for dissertation writing because I know what is possible. It would have the following characteristics:
Read the rest»»

There is a new set of tools being developed to enhance Firefox for use in academic research. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and how useful it will actually be.

I want to provide a few links to help people using MS Word for academic writing to learn how to take advantage of the tools that the program offers. In addition to the basics, there are a few more “advanced” features that you really should learn how to use in order to use Word to write a dissertation or thesis. (If you need help with the basics, there is a good collection of tutorials here.)

1. Styles

I would never attempt to write anything more than a few pages long in Word without using Styles. You can apply formatting commands directly to your text, but for a document of any length that is not the way to do it. I use Styles for nearly everything that I write in Word beyond the simplest one page letter. Once you understand the power of styles you will use them as well.

Here is a tutorial on Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word
Styles are stored in Templates. For more detail on creating Templates go here.

2. Outlining

Outlining allows you to create multi-level outlines in your document. The Outline View shows you just the outline with as much detail as you choose. It is easy to move around whole sections or to promote/demote sections to a different outline level.

To use outlining you need to apply the built-in styles Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on to the different outline levels. Once you have done this you can also have Word generate a Table of Contents for your document.

Here is a simple introduction to outlining.
Here are more detailed instructions on using outlining in Word.
More detailed instructions on creating a Table of Contents.

3. Taming Word

Sometimes MS Word tries to do too much for you. Some of the automatic formatting options can drive you crazy when they do things that you do not want them to. Here are some tips to tame Word.

• One essential tip is to make sure that you go to Tools:Templates and AddIns and make sure that Automatically update document styles” is unchecked. This will save you endless headaches and confusion.
• If you have problems with the way that Word is automatically applying formatting as you type You should also go to Tools | AutoCorrect Options, and find the “Autoformat as you type” and “Autoformat” tabs. De-select any of the options that might be causing you trouble.
• When you are using styles, set up your own style sheet instead of putting everything in the default style sheet called normal.dot. The default style sheet is attached to every document you create, and any changes there will affect all your documents. Instead, create a new style sheet with a name like thesis.dot.
• If you have problems with styles or formatting, select the troublesome text and hit shift-F1. This will show you all the styles and formatting that are applied to the selected text.

This is not a tutorial on using MS Word. I have only shared a few key tips and given you links to some reasonably useful tutorials. I hope that this is helpful to you. I may update this post from time to time as I come across more information that seems helpful.

With this post I have added a new category: Dissertation. This will be the place for posts related to work on my D.Min. dissertation (more about that later).

The past few days I have been trying to come to a decision about the method I will use to manage citations and bibliographic information from my research. The programs that are used for this are usually called Bibliographic Software. These programs generally do some or all of the following:

• use a database to keep track of referenced works which will eventually appear in the bibliography
• generate properly formatted footnotes according to MLA, Chicago, etc.
• when the paper is finished, generate a properly formatted bibliography
• some also provide a way to take notes (quotations) from resources, and a way to organize and search them

Those are the basic functions. Some programs also include a word processor. Others are integrated with MS Word, and will insert a footnote with a single mouse click.

Here are the criteria that I decided to look for in a program for my use:

• generate properly formatted footnotes directly into MS Word
• support for a variety of styles (MLA, etc.), and ability to define custom styles (for all those journal articles I hope to write some day )
• when the paper is finished, automatically scan through and correct footnote references to the proper form for first references and subsequent references to a source (this is a very cool feature found in some of these programs)
• provide a way to take notes, and link the notes to the source so that when I paste in the note the footnote automatically appears
• cost no more than $100 (some of these programs cost $400 or more!)

It’s difficult to find a program that meets all of my criteria, but some are pretty close.
Here are the main contenders so far:

1. Scholar’s Aid — A very capable program, with a free version that is useful. Unlike most, this program has an integrated note manager. The only missing feature is the ability to adjust the footnotes at the end. The web site has a note saying that this will be added in the next version. I sent them an email asking when that might be available, but as of yet I have not received a reply.
2. Biblioscape – The Standard edition looks good, but there is not a demo that I can download and test. They do have a free version, but does not seem to adjust the footnotes as the Standard version apparently does.
3. Bibliographix – This one also looks interesteing. It inserts footnotes in a temporary format, which allows it to come back and update them to final form when the paper is finished. There is a free basic version which is actually quite powerful. There is a module to manage ideas, which could be used to record quotations, but it doesn’t seem to provide the one click functionality that Scholar’s Aid does for inserting quotations with a footnote. It does provide the update footnotes feature, but I had a lot of trouble trying to get it to work properly.

I will add to this post as I continue to work on this. . .

Added 10-13-05
Here is a good overview of this type of software and what it can do.
I have downloaded a trial version of Endnote, a popular bibliographic program. The academic version is about $100 on line. So far I really like it.