Please contribute Thoughts on Using a Blog for RCIA

We would love to hear back from you about the idea of using this blog to have discussions online and to share reflections on our experience. Similarly, we are interested in seeing who responds and finding out how easy you find the process of reading and posting comments. Please take a moment to read a bit about the initial concept of this blog and then post a comment by clicking on the link shown at the bottom of this post or section. (See previous post below if you are confused as to what a blog is)

As you can see below this blog has already served as a way to make our Catholic Reading List more accessible. But originally, Phil envisioned the blog as being a way to give others an insight into the experience of being involved in RCIA at St.Matthews. This thought came as a result of discussions about making a pamphlet for placement at the back of the Church. His original idea was to have the Blog referenced as a single line in the pamphlet as a place where those interested can look into the matter more closely and find as much information as we members of the RCIA program choose to post. This can include testimonials, reflections, pictures... whatever.

Another use of the blog can easily be to have facilitated discussions in which one person would start a topic by posting it on the blog. This can include links to documents online, reflections, suggested reading for weekly sessions or anything you can put in print and images. Others could then respond to the topic either by making more posts or, usually better for keeping things navigable, by posting comments on the original topic.
Some important aspects of the blog that are worth knowing:

• We can define who reads the blog, who posts to the blog and who posts comments
• We can probably make the blog also send automatic emails to those wanting the information but not likely to use the blog
• Each of us can also have the blog notify us when there is a new post, a new comment or both.
• Each of us can also utilize a tool known as a blog reader that will summarize what's new that we haven't read yet on the blog.

Of the four bullets above, the first is definitely the most important since the privacy we build into the blog will definitely affect the nature of what we are willing to put on the blog. Note also that we can make a public and a private version of the blog without much trouble.