Hopefully “Live Streaming” and “New Horizons” in the title of today’s post made you sit up and take notice!

Live Streaming.  New Horizons.  Resplendent, both, with possibilities!  So here’s the scoop.

I’m headed off to the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) “2014 VCCS New Horizons Conference” being held this week at historic Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center (Roanoke, Virginia.)

On Friday, April 11, 9AM, I’ll join Charlie Evans (Professor of History, NVCC) and Patrick Reed (Associate Professor of History, NVCC) for a panel presentation titled “Achieving Teaching Excellence through the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professor’s Program.”  (The three of us were Chancellor’s Professors for 2012-2014.)

In our session we will share what we did for our respective projects and how the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professor’s Program has helped us achieve teaching excellence.

If you want to join the three of us “live,” you can. VCCS New Horizons 2014 is Live Streaming! This year, ten sessions are being broadcast live.

So, just do it!  Join us this Friday, April 11, 9AM!

Let me share with you the exciting work that the three of us have been doing!

In recent years, Professor Evans has been struck by a paradox.  Students enter his history classroom armed with powerful smart phones that they use to connect to one another and to a digital world filled with data. However, when he hands them a textbook, also filled with data, they hardly ever bother to read it.  There is another aspect to this paradox of the connected but unconnected student.  Few students, despite successful completion of their history classes, really understand the significance of the historical past.  Professor Evans is addressing these two paradoxes by researching the use of digital “tools” in his history classes.  Students will be able to use these tools via their smart phones, Ipads, laptops or computers to access digital historical materials and to facilitate interactive collaboration.

Professor Reed has been collecting and cataloging video clips from the popular culture that make reference to American historical topics. He has compiled these clips into brief video montages and inserted them into PowerPoint slides, in part to provide comic relief and keep students in large lecture classes awake and engaged. Most of Professor Reed’s compilations, however, do complement the day’s topics by modeling both good and bad history. The videos are also intended to tap into students’ background knowledge, exploit their visual learning abilities, and encourage them to become more discriminating consumers of both historical and popular sources.

And, as you—my faithful blog followers—know, I have been working on a remarkable collection of Colonial American essays, songs, poems, and advertisements that were published pseudonymously under the name of “The Humourist” in The South Carolina Gazette.  They have been hailed as some of the best essays from America’s Colonial period, yet, until my work, they remained unedited, unavailable, and the author remained unknown. As you know, I have edited the essays; I have succeeded in identifying the pseudonymous author:  he’s Alexander Gordon (Clerk of His Majesty’s Council); and I am in the final stages of developing a critical, annotated edition of the essays. I have shared my work with students, faculty, and the world at large via this blog—”live,” from start to finish.

Again, join us this Friday, April 11, 9AM.