Worlds Enough
The WWW is an almost ideal medium for instant access to educational materials around the world. A very good example of how the Web can be used in teaching and scholarship is The World Lecture Hall. It provides links to pages created by educators who are using the Web to deliver class materials. Richard Mendez, an administrator in the computation center at the University of Texas at Austin, set up this web service as a guide to classes that use the Web. Visitors can find materials for courses in more than 70 disciplines. Each of the disciplines is linked to a subdirectory listing courses taught in the respective field. Choosing a course you may access syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, exams and links to related materials. If further expanded, "The World Lecture Hall" will become an even more useful resource for educators. One of the best educational websites around--and one that could serve as a model for anyone who tries to collect material on a complex topic--is Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World. "Diotima" has been designed by Suzanne Bonefas and Ross Scaife with two kinds of users in mind: it provides a resource for anyone interested in patterns of gender around the ancient Mediterranean and a forum for collaboration among instructors who teach courses about women and gender in the ancient world. "Diotima" includes course materials, the beginnings of a systematic bibliography, and links to many online articles, book reviews, images and the Perseus Project. The "Courses" section makes available various materials created by instructors for their courses, e.g. syllabi, outlines of texts, study guides, question sets, paper topics, and ideas for student collaborative projects. "Essays" provides hypertextual links to essays, lectures, and journal articles stored at various locations around the world. Users may also access an anthology of newly-translated primary sources (e.g. selections from Herodotos and Ovid). The translation editor for Diotima's anthology, Diane Arnson Svarlien, has recently completed and made available her own fresh translation of Semonides 7. With so many admirable qualities, "Diotima" would nevertheless benefit from yet a further level of hyperlinks. Connections between the essays and original texts could further heighten the interactivity of this site. "Diotima" is seeking to develop a greater network of collaborators with special expertise in particular areas. They would be able to share their own materials and make the contents of the collection more accessible to others by contributing brief bibliographic essays on particular areas of study. "Diotima" is also interested in receiving works-in-progress that could be posted for feedback and discussion, and in the development of a new online refereed journal. |