Tela Latina: Teaching Latin on the Web in the 21st Century

The explosion of Latin pedagogy websites on the internet includes some dedicated to specific texts, some more general in approach. The quality and effectiveness of these materials varies widely. Effort has been unnecessarily duplicated. And these time-consuming projects are excluded from consideration in tenure and promotion reviews. Conversations are under way to create a joint APA/ACL task force to address these issues. The prospect is an exciting one. My purpose here is to provoke discussion that can help those putting that team together and to suggest some of the directions for the next generation of serious, peer-reviewed, and effective web-based tools to support teaching, learning, and research in Latin studies.

Let us imagine that a core group of dedicated, web-experienced classicists develops the mother of all Latin resources on the net. Imagine drills and exercises generated by the vocabulary bank of the student's choice. . The morphology and vocabulary drills ideally would be self-paced, self-correcting, self-grading, and offer the option of reporting results by email to a teacher. Different drills would be designed to appeal to different learning styles. A well-organized and comprehensive approach would promote the development of more and better Latin resources. A review of existing materials will allow gaps in under-addressed areas (e.g., intermediate Latin study and medieval Latin) to be identified and filled, and existing Latin pedagogy websites would be listed and linked once they received approval from the APA-sanctioned Latin website editorial board. Regulation of quality would be good for students and for teachers, who would be encouraged to submit their sites for review. If materials are flawed, a reader's report t will suggest areas of improvement and encourage resubmission once the faults are addressed. A peer-review board for websites would also provide necessary evidence of excellence for tenure review boards.

We imagine a site providing materials that would support all learners (including those working independently without a teacher), encourage teachers to find ways to add new materials, and offer guidance and credibility without strangling creativity or individualism. Our goal is to present the most complete, effective, and accurate web resources for the study of Latin.