Students report that this mode of presentation is superior to slides, links text and pictures in meaningful ways, and because it is available in campus computer labs, provides them an easy way to review the information at their own pace.
In a recent interview Dr. Papillon stated:
The main reason I got involved in it in the first place is the ability through the Perseus database of bringing a lot of stuff together that's easily accessible. Students are able to make more connections between things because it's all together, and through the HyperCard technology they can shift from a text to a map to a picture of a vase to a picture of a coin and go to a textbook, and those kinds of things. The humanities course that I teach is a survey of the Greek world. We talk about literature, about philosophy, about architecture, geography, whatever, and it's very difficult to get them to think about all of those things as unified concepts. Perseus allows them to set a picture of the pot and a chunk of the poem next to each other and look at how they're organized, and say, "oh, these go together" because otherwise they'd have to have their text of Homer, their text of the history of the eighth century B.C. and a volume of pictures of pots, and two of those volumes would be in Newman and one would be in Cowgill, so physically it would be harder for them to make those connections.Perseus really helps bring them together and makes it easier for them to sort of look around and see that maybe these kinds of things are happening in different kinds of fields in a given century. So that, I think, has been a really helpful thing.
For additional information on this innovation, contact:
terry.papillon@vt.edu