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Go to Course Information for Greek and Roman Myths

Dora Pozzi
University of Houston
Fall 1995
FIPSE Professor Survey: Perseus

1. Please reflect on how Perseus has affected your teaching. You may wish to consider how much time you have invested in bringing Perseus into your course(s), how it has changed what you do during class time, how it has changed the assignments you give, how it has affected the way you evaluate student performance, and other ways it contributes to the course(s) themselves (e.g., as a Greek language resource, as a visual or textual library, as a collection of tools, etc.)

I have used Perseus in three different ways: to learn, for class presentations, and for student research.

In the summer of 1992, before taking a group of students to Greece, I devoted many hours to Perseus, studying the sites and the visuals, and collecting information. It was time well spent, since it enhanced my experience as well as that of my students.

In the fall of 1995 I used the Perseus visuals for class presentations illustrating lectures given to a large Mythology class. This semester (spring of 1996) I am doing that in two Classics courses taught in English: a Survey of Greek Literature, and a new course with the title Gender and Race in Ancient Greek Myths.

2. Please reflect on how Perseus has affected student learning. You may wish to consider how students respond in class, how they do assignments and projects, and the quality of the products of learning they produce. As in the past, we are very interested in documenting cases of how Perseus has enabled a student(s) to do something interesting that would have been impossible or highly unlikely without Perseus (be sure to explain why you believe the result was interesting from a learning perspective).

At the University of Houston we have a diverse student body of heterogenous abilities. I find that they respond with enthusiasm to a lecture if they are encouraged to watch the visuals actively, interpreting the art, imagining the experiences that occurred in the spaces shown, and relating what they see to their readings.

. I have not had a chance yet to take full advantage of the Greek resources in Perseus with advanced students of the language. But in a third-year Greek course last fall I gave the students assignments relative to the prose we were reading (orators, mostly), which they were expected to write on the basis of information found in Perseus. This was successful, and I intend to repeat it.

In my Myth class I required Honors students and majors to submit a term paper based on Perseus. After some initial complaints about the bugs in Perseus 1.0 and the fact that we had only one CD in the lab, the students clearly enjoyed the experience. The quality of the papers they wrote varied considerably--as one would expect--but they all worked hard. They searched and collected primary materials, they considered independently the problems proposed and drew their own conclusions. In my view this is far more valuable than summarizing secondary bibliography or "downloading" prose from library shelves. A few of the papers were actually quite good. Without exception, student achievement was remarkably higher thanks to Perseus.

With Perseus 2.0 on the web and with students who are finally becoming more receptive to the use of computers, I hope soon to be able to make the use of Perseus a requirement for all the students in several courses. They will benefit not only from the abundance of available resources and tools, but even more, I think, from the experience of independently discovering knowledge rather than being its passive recipients.

3. Please reflect on Perseus as a technological change to your department and campus.

Fortunately the University of Houston is now actively funding the use of technology in the classroom (despite the generally grim financial situation--we are no exception). We have good staff support, a multimedia cart for class, one departmental lab for which we will probably purchase two copies of Perseus 2.0, and sufficient other labs on campus (one open 24 hours) where students may access it on the web. Perseus has not triggered this process, but I believe it encourages faculty in other fields of the humanities as well as administrators to see what can be done with a searchable collection of databases.

4. Please reflect on whether/how Perseus has affected your own scholarly research.

I can't specify how Perseus has affected my research, but Perseus as part of the academic revolution in communication and in the access to texts and graphics has been, of course, immensely stimulating. Having started many years ago, in Argentina, studying, teaching, and attempting to do research with minimal resources, I find Cyber-Classics exhilarating.

5. Please reflect on how your department has changed as a result of Perseus. You may wish to consider curriculum changes, personnel decisions, department dynamics, budget allocations, etc.

Ours is a small program, and if it has not visibly changed yet as a result of Perseus, I can foresee ways in which we will be able to take advantage of Perseus when we put our courses on a server. Curriculum expansion should follow naturally, even while new appointments are out of the question.

6. As Perseus is used to create new products and as parts of Perseus are augmented in other forms,Perseus may be considered a medium of publication. Have you used it this way? Will you? What would make it possible for you to do so?

I have not considered the potential of Perseus as a medium of publication. It is an intriguing idea.

7. Summarize your experience with Perseus this year. Also give the number of courses and semesters you have used Perseus in previous years.

I started using Perseus in one or two courses per semester in the Spring of 1994, and I intend to continue doing so, hopefully finding further applications in new courses that I would never attempt without it.