Roger Travis's Blog (10)

Salvete! I'm excited to update some information I posted a while back about the University of Connecticut's Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies program's online offerings.



This spring I'll be offering an online advanced Greek course, CAMS 3101 Topics in Advanced Greek, for three credits, on selections from Plato. The course will be offered in a game-based format, in which students will participate as senior operatives on a mission to infiltrate the Academy and discover the… Continue

I thought it might be of interest to some here that together with a wonderful team of like-minded classicists, educational psychologists, and a coder or two, we'll be launching what we believe is the first-ever practomimetic (game-based) introductory language course.



More at my blog, Living Epic, if your interest is piqued. We'd love to hear from you if you'd like to help iterate, as they say in the game… Continue

We're continuing to develop the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies program here at the University of Connecticut in order to make it possible to complete a degree online. One important step in that process is going to happen in Spring 2011, when I will offer UConn's first online Advanced Latin course. I'm hoping to get colleagues' help in figuring out what the best schedule is on which to offer the course: whether a regular spring semester course, a highly-compressed January or May… Continue

My current practomimetic (i.e. game) course in Horace's Roman odes, Satire 1.2, and Ovid's Amores and Ars Amatoria got a little mention on the Chronicle's "Wired Campus" blog.



I'm blowing my own cornu this way in order to make the even more shameless announcement that I've just finished putting together a… Continue

I'm doing some very early work on developing an online Latin 1 that uses the game-method I'm pioneering in Operation KTHMA, the role-playing Greek historians course. The central idea will be to use a role-playing game-story, with its established (and addictive) model of progression, as a metaphor for inherently engaging and interactive progress in the Latin skills of reading, writing, speaking, and… Continue

Apologies to anyone offended by cross-posting, but since I posted about this project earlier I want to let eClassics-folk know that the course began yesterday, and that I've managed a few updates thus far. This morning, I posted a few teasing details about our first session of playing Herodotus and Thucydides as a game; other information about the course/game can also be found on… Continue

Transformed by my contacts on the one hand with instructional designers and on the other with game designers, I'm on the verge of turning my upcoming course on Herodotus and Thucydides into a role-playing "game" (work on doing something similar with a Latin 1 course is also proceeding), wherein students play as students at a State U (similar to their own State U) who are asked to travel in time and space to ancient Athens and to save Western Civilization by interpreting Herodotus and Thucydides… Continue

I was at an incredible presentation at the Game Education Summit this morning, by a professor of religion. She's working on a game to teach the Tibetan Book of the Dead in Second Life. I hadn't known what was possible in Second Life, and now I'm wondering who's working on teaching classics there: I'd love to move towards some kind of collaboration on some immersive learning.

Over the past couple months, I've managed to convince several of my Connecticut latin-teaching colleagues to play "The Lord of the Rings Online" (LOTRO) with me, partly as an adjunct to the Living Epic and Gaming Homer courses I started teaching in January (cf. my blog, Living Epic and the Video Games and Human Values Initiative; UConn also did a fun little… Continue

Salvete! I'm so glad to be here! For the past few years I've been working at the strange interstices of classics and video games (see my blog for all the bizarre details). I've recently started, with scholars in several other disciplines, the Video Games and Human Values Initiative (see here).



In the immediate future--January, that is--I'll be leading an asynchronous online course, entitled "Living… Continue