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PREPARATION |
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| 1999 VROMA WORKSHOP |
In the initial grant proposal to the NEH for the VRoma Project, we wrote the following statement about the goal of the summer workshops: "These workshops will forge a community of scholar/teachers based on common goals and shared technological expertise that will give the project its initial impulse. . . . The workshops will provide, as it were, the will and the limbs of VRoma, animating it with their commitment to employ its technological wizardry in the service of humane learning and enabling it to reach a wide audience through practical applications in classrooms across the country." After two years of experience with VRoma, we believe this statement is more true than we knew at the time. Our hope is not only to help you acquire and develop various technological skills, to forge effective ways of using these skills in teaching classics, and to develop varied types of on-line teaching materials, but also and especially to create a community of VRomans that will give life to VRoma.
With that in mind, we would like to share with you some pointers that we hope will give you a clearer idea about the structure and content of the workshop and enable you to begin thinking about your role in it. We have put on the web a preliminary agenda so you can see how we have planned the day-to-day activities, though this schedule is still in the planning stages. The focus of this workshop will be on learning to use internet technology, particularly the resources of VRoma, to enrich the teaching of Latin and Classics and on developing teaching strategies and materials to use in your own courses. Click here to see a list of the workshop participants along with a brief description of their teaching projects; e-mail addresses are included in case you would like to contact each other. It is our hope that this workshop will contribute a rich variety of resources to the VRoma course materials repository, not only through your individual course-related projects, but also through our collaborative work and sharing of ideas during the workshop.
If you do not already have a login for the VRoma MOO, you will need a charactername and password, which can be obtained through this on-line form. We have prepared a list of on-line articles and web sites to get you started thinking about the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and classics. Feel free to read or skim whichever articles interest you and fit within your own time constraints; the purpose of these readings is to stimulate thinking and provide general background rather than to supply specific facts.
You will receive more information later about what kinds of personal supplies to pack, but it would be good to begin gathering materials now for your individual teaching projects. These materials may include copyright-free slides, photos, or drawings; books or articles not available in the Miami University library, where you will have full borrowing privileges; syllabi and various types of teaching materials, etc. Bring as much as you can on floppy disks, zip disks, or CD-ROMs to expedite matters. We will, however, have access to both a flatbed scanner and a slide scanner for digitizing texts and images. Also, if you know of other books or resources that you would like to use, let us know as soon as possible and we will try to make them available during the workshop.
We are looking forward with great anticipation to this workshop, and to meeting and working with all of you. Please do not hesitate to contact any of the workshop coordinators if you have any further questions: