This session will give a basic understanding of WordPress as a content management platform, how to use it, set up your own blog or class website, and add content. We will also cover WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org as well as how to select a WordPress theme and set up and register a unique domain name. Attendees will have hands-on practice and plenty of opportunities to ask question about the new WordPress dashboard. At the end of this MAKE session, you too will be a blogger/web site creator!

Technical Requirements: Attendees should bring a laptop and come with an idea for a project to start building during this session. We will be working with the latest version of WordPress (4.0).

Christianity was destined to become a dominant religion, wasn’t it? Zoroastrianism is fated to disappear, isn’t it? As Religious Studies scholars, we know that a variety of factors influence the emergence and development of religious traditions. Yet, situated in the present, our students often think that the current states of religions were inevitable. They often have difficulty conceptualizing the inherent complexity within religious traditions. This coming spring, I intend to use interactive fictions to help my undergraduate students think about the emergence of Christianity and the various ways it would have been perceived by individuals in the ancient world. In this session, I propose that we experiment with this genre. Let’s make our own interactive fiction and consider the pedagogical possibilities and limitations that this genre has for the study of the history of religions. We will be using the program inklewriter (www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/) to construct our story, but the topic of our story and its overarching message will be up to the participants. We could write an interactive history about a religious event in the past, create a tutorial about how to perform a common research task, or construct a fictional account about something else entirely. The choice will be up to us. Come join me!