A classics professor says students in his Latin classes are usually lousy translators of Horace and Ovid—mainly because they don’t understand the cultural references in their poetry.
So now the professor, Roger Mr. Travis Jr., requires students to do weekly role-playing exercises online to put themselves in the shoes (or sandals) of the ancient Romans.
For Mr. Travis, an associate professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at the University of Connecticut, the experiment is part of a broader exploration of using games in the classroom, which he describes on his blog, Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World.
He has tried using virtual worlds in the past, where students can build avatars for their characters and move in video-game-like realms. But this semester he’s using Google Wave, and limiting interactions to text (and a few old maps he links to). Each week he creates a new discussion thread using the service, which lets multiple users collaborate on a shared online document. He begins with a fictional scenario related to the material students are learning. Then students, who have been assigned roles in advance, write how they would react to the situation.
Mr. Travis assigns what he calls Latinity Points to clever responses, and the role-playing exercise counts for about 20 percent of a student’s final grade in the course.
“You cannot undersand Latin without understanding Roman culture,” he said. “This is the best way I have ever found to actually get my students to pay attention to Roman culture.”
8 Responses to Classics Professor Requires Latin Students to Play Ancient Roman Roles Online
11186108 - March 4, 2010 at 9:27 pm
I hope you’ll cover the results at the end of the course.
arrive2__net - March 5, 2010 at 12:29 am
Looking at some of the reading requirements for the courses, the courses looks like an ultimate application of new media to supplant the “boring lecture”. The actual culture that existed, of course, was lived on a daily basis by people who could not escape back to “regular reality”. And in that way it makes the format look like it must be way off from learning a real culture. However, a course like this only has to compete with other courses, not with an actual ancient world, so this approach seems extraordinarily promising. Wow. Bernard SchusterArrive2.net
jffoster - March 5, 2010 at 8:55 am
Sounds interesting. One minor note. “You cannot undersand Latin without understanding Roman culture,” he said.”I suspect what the professor meant by “cannot understand Latin” was ‘Latin literature’. It is common among humanists to confuse a language with the literary works the cultures that used it produced in it. But sounds like a good class.
vsrake - March 5, 2010 at 11:16 am
What I think is interesting is that he isn’t using a high-end visually stimulating, graphics loaded game engine. He’s basically using text-based role-playing. This lowers the technology-bar considerably, thus making the idea much for feasible than most games-in-education schemes.
dbrzycki - March 5, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I’m very curious WHY he stopped using virtual worlds and moved to Google Wave.
cenerentola - March 6, 2010 at 10:01 am
It makes perfect sense to move education in the classics online. It’s happening in every other academic subject.I’m an old curmudgeon educated in the early seventies, but in elite private schools. We just did our work and handed it in. If the teacher wasn’t entertaining, tough luck. Work is work, fun is fun.I have years of experience teaching college. Each time I took a job, the student population became less educable, less honest, more alienating.Of course age had a lot to do with it–I like to teach people my own age.But in my last stint on campus, my class of freshman rhetoric students wanted to play Jeopardy with the curriculum material. I played my last arithmetic-bingo game in fourth grade.I got pretty discouraged, but still do what I can to contribute positively to improving our educational systems.I worked for a company that produced on-line materials for home-schooled students. Looking through the material provided by the expert providers, I found errors pointing to holes in their own educational backgrounds.They didn’t like me either. Who wants classicists around?Nonetheless I’ll persist. I always quote Nietzsche: Without an understanding of the present, who can understand the past?Without an understanding of the past, how can one understand the present?At this point I’m “working” on the future. So much will happen.I hope values will improve, in terms of my orientation toward that 3,000-year-old culture created by dead white men.Or in any event, I hope values improve. Western civilization has its high points.In other words, we shouldn’t have to put on clown suits and pass out multicolored bells and whistles in the process of educating future generations.
knmys - March 7, 2010 at 9:07 am
“I’m an old curmudgeon educated in the early seventies, but in elite private schools.”"Each time I took a job, the student population became less educable, less honest, more alienating.”"Each time I took a job, the student population became less educable, less honest, more alienating.”"Each time I took a job, the student population became less educable, less honest, more alienating.”…sounds like you’re one of the stuffy old professors none of the kids like to take. Why not try making learning a little more fun? Oh that’s right, you had to suffer through it in your elite private schools./unimpressed.
knmys - March 7, 2010 at 9:08 am
P.S., the last two quotes were supposed to be:”Of course age had a lot to do with it–I like to teach people my own age.”"we shouldn’t have to put on clown suits and pass out multicolored bells and whistles in the process of educating future generations.”Technology failed me, maybe I should go back to using dusty tomes and a feather and inkwell.