Hyper text

Just another thought on hyper text and way in which we both learn and process information. As a classical language learner and ancient historian, the site PERSEUS PROJECT (tufts) has been an amazing resource. For those of you who have not interact with this site, The Perseus Project is a digital library project of Tufts University that assembles digital collections of humanities resources. In addition to having some of this foreign language texts firsthand, the site also provides access to commentary, online grammars/dictionaries, notes and in some cases multiple english translation. It also has an interesting search where you can create vocabulary lists based upon percentages of frequency in text. But, by far, it's star feature is that each word in the text is hyperlinked to an online dictionary that no only defines the word and gives the form you would look up in the dictionary, but also tells you the case, gender, and number (noun) and/or voice, mood, tense, person (verb). I can't tell you how much of a crutch this site has become to langauge learners of classical languages. For the first two years of language learning, you learn from a mix of texts that aren't found on this website and you learn how to think critically and how to figure out the correct form to look up in the dictionary. Furthermore, the site allows users to vote on which parseing they agree with--so assume you agree with the majority of thinkers--the thought process is entirely taken out the translation and the language learning. In the next two years of language learning, the learning material are actual texts available on the sites. As more and more students use this site, teachers should introduce proper use in their classes. Students are truly doing themself a disservice in relying on this site to do the parsing/thinking for them. You can ruin you language learning foundation exponentially faster than the time it took you to lay it. A great tool in terms of technology and hypertexting but at what price?