Tuesday, February 15, 2011

What about a site that indexes free language-study resources on the Internet?


One of the problems of blogs and sites like Facebook is that they are like unindexed newspapers--in other words they are oriented to the present, and as the present morphs into the past, their content gets lost to people reading them.

I have seen here a lot of references on Facebook to free language-learning resources on the web. Some of them are quite good like the following link I gave on Facebook to a site containing texts for people learning Italian: http://www.scudit.net/mdindicelivello.htm

I am wondering if a website could be established that would organize and store these references. Such a site, like the two sites for “Interlingua multilingue,” should cost no money to set up and maintain.

There should be on such a site an alphabetical list of languages that people could easily click on, which should probably include a category referring to materials for multiple languages, such as the Romance and Slavic families, as well as one for miscellaneous groups of languages.

Also, people adding references to such sites should be able to make brief comments detailing their contents and evaluating them--especially for ease of accessibility. Many of them are badly organized and present potential users with electronic and other barriers, such as forcing them to register before accessing their contents.

(I find such barriers very annoying, and that is why I publish "Interlingua multilingue" in the format of an easily accessible blog.)

It would be nice if anyone could easily log in and add new links to sites dedicated to these different kinds of teaching materials.

I am not sure that it would be a good idea to give a password to the site to everyone because someone with malevolent intentions could possibly go in and screw the site up.

I myself don’t know where we could establish such a site, and I don’t have the technical skills to organize it myself. I am hoping, however, that some language freak with the needed technical skills will have the time and inclination to set up such a site so that it could be maintained with minimal demands on his or her time and effort.

It would be really nice someone else saw the value of such a site and set one up.

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