Sourec: Psookim.com
The Center for Educational Technology has launched a website, Psookim.com, which aims to rally Jews from different traditions around the Bible by encouraging them to add their own commentary in music, video, text and art to the wisdom of famous biblical commentators on a web site that presents the Bible on a platform built for users of social networking media.
The project revolves around a full version of the Torah in both Hebrew and English. Each verse is linked to the work of traditional and modern biblical commentators, and encourages users to link applicable works of art and music to the scripture and create their own multimedia commentary and interpretations.
The Human Bible Project is aimed mainly at English speakers who can view the Bible, its traditional commentaries and rich multimedia commentaries provided by visitors to the site.
The project leaders are investing great efforts to integrate it with Facebook, the largest social network on the Internet, allowing members to add their Bible commentaries and carry on discussions with other members of the community through their own Facebook accounts. About half of Psookim.com's traffic comes from Facebook and half from outside. The project also encourages users to link their blogs to the site to allow for extending the social discourse on the Bible to the blogosphere.
The project is now encouraging users to choose one Biblical verse with which they identify and read it in an online video that is linked directly to the text, creating a feeling of identity with a chosen part of the Bible.
The preliminary stage of the project was supported by the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life.