A while back I got a note asking me to check out a new educational portal for students and teachers called Simply Charly. I finally had a chance to review this promising site, designed to complement what educators do in teaching students about literature and arts by stimulating their curiosity and creativity (and help them find research material) with a layman’s intro to each figure and subject, linking with the latest in multimedia interfaces (podcasts, videos, etc.), fishing up current news articles on the web that mention the subject/figure, short analysis of writing and a list of works, links to more information, and a discussion forum.
As the site explains:
“From the main site, you can click through to sites devoted to the great historical figures of art, architecture, science, music, literature, philosophy, politics, and economics. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Sigmund Freud, from Albert Einstein to Franz Kafka, will be thoroughly covered. … You don’t need to know physics or advanced math to explore SIMPLY EINSTEIN or SIMPLY GODEL, and you don’t have to be an English major to click on SIMPLY HEMINGWAY. Important concepts are introduced in terms everyone can understand, and the work of the individual is always placed in context, from Hemingway’s involvement in the Lost Generation group of writers to the state of physics when Einstein wrote his famous early papers.”
More portals will come online frequently (like Dickinson and Joyce coming soon), founder Charles Carlini assures me. For now there are: Chaplin, Dali, Le Corbusier, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Stravinsky, Yeats, Picasso, Hemingway, Godel, Hitchcock, and of course The Bard.
Check them out, and the vibrant caricatures here. I think many students and educators will find this a fun, helpful resources for themselves and students.
Literary Lotus 