That was a day!! My Kingdom of Atlantia hosted a HUGE Virtual University on February 13th!! Our Virtual Universities have grown so big that we have to have seven class sessions, not just six, to accommodate them all.
I taught "Your First SCA War" for the first time in 10 years. The 2011 version happened in person, of course, so I just brought to the classroom a large plastic bin full of things related to Pennsic: the program book, copies of the Pennsic Independent, event medallions, and other artifacts of "home." This time around, I figured that I could show some photos of Pennsic without worrying about whether the classroom was equipped with a digital projector for PowerPoint slides (which isn't a very medieval thing to do anyhow!).
Unfortunately, I spent so much time looking up my photos (not all of which are online or otherwise organized) that I didn't get to embed them in a PowerPoint presentation. No biggie, I thought, I would just share them straight on my screen. But Zoom didn't like what I was doing, and at some points I was just showing a blank screen. Oops! Twenty-first-century problems, indeed. So I just went back to teaching in front of the live camera. I think my 30 or so students were pretty well engaged anyway. I fell a bit behind in terms of time, but I made sure everyone got the handout (updated from the decade-old version) afterward.
In case you would like to see that handout, here it is (on Google Docs): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q-8ZzWjxbTP3vx5Ki7wt6MY-6w9RY38u/view. Comments and suggestions welcome -- I'm sure I'll teach it again one of these years.
Even though the SCA's ban on in-person events is scheduled to expire at the end of May, the June 12 session of the University of Atlantia will be held virtually -- and concurrently with the (also virtual) Known World Sciences Symposium, which originally was supposed to take place in one of the western Kingdoms.
