Lector Gugeliense

In finding a Latin title for my post, I was reminded of how the Latin words for "read" and "choice" can look so similar. A "lector" is a reader, as in the English word for someone who reads at a church service, but a "lectus" is something chosen, like our word election.
This goes straight to the heart of using a Google Reader; it's a new tool for making choices about what to read on the web.

Just wanted take a moment to share how setting up a Google Reader was fun if only because I somehow managed to out-tech a very tech savvy friend of mine. We had a good laugh about how the reader of dead languages learned a new web tool before the software engineer had even heard of it.

What the Google Reader did was create a page where the blogs, columnists, and websites I follow are all updated in one place. Instead of me going out into the web, the web comes to me. It's a little overwhelming and easy to be inundated. However, I think if I carefully sort through my RSS subscriptions, keep them well pruned, I'll find that it's a useful tool for staying current in the field.

Reading about RSS feeds in Will Richardson's "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms," he gave instructions for how to subscribe to certain topics in current events using the advanced news search option at Google news.

Now, Latin isn't a subject that we often associate with current events. However, many people come to learn the Latin language because they are fascinated by Roman material culture, by ancient archaeology. Archaeological finds do appear in the news. Usually I find these articles by dumb luck or because friends found them by dumb luck and knew to pass them along. Now with a news subscription on my Google reader for ancient Roman archaeology, I'm reading fascinating articles about very recent discoveries.




And they aren't trivial discoveries either. Here's an article from MSNBC about a Carthaginian warship discovered on the Mediterranean sea floor. This is a vessel sailed over 2000 years ago and sunk in combat in the final battle of the First Punic war, a conflict that dramatically shaped Western history. We could all be speaking languages derived from Carthaginian right now if things had turned the other way.
For all students of history, both young and old, sometimes the physical evidence draws us in and provides a sense of awe that written accounts do not. I know I could use an archaeology feed like this to really reach some of my students who aren't connecting with the history and the culture through texts. In fact, there's no reason they can't subscribe to a relevant RSS on their own and teach me a thing or two. There's great potential for rich, student directed learning using a Google reader.