I have the full schedule for the AboutSF's teaching workshop at Worldcon in Montréal. It's posted below. Please help spread the word. Admission is free for the workshop. Interested parties can sign up by emailing aboutsfworkshop@gmail.com. - Nate

AboutSF's Teaching Speculative Fiction: A Portable Workshop
Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Montréal, Québec
Thursday, August 6, 2009 at Worldcon - at the Palais des congrès de Montréal
Two Tracks of Programming - Presentations in English and French Running Concurrently

Schedule of English-Language Events (Francophone track listed below)

9:00 – 10:00 - Empower Your Students: Teach Them Science Fiction, Too – Keynote
Award-winning science fiction author and science educator, Julie E. Czerneda, begins the educator program with a frank discussion of how the creativity and reasoned speculation of science fiction are essential tools for scientific literacy and full citizenship in the future your students will inherit.

10:00 – 12:00 Science Fiction and Scientific Literacy – mini workshop
Assess scientific literacy (yours and your students) and learn how to put science fiction to work in your science classroom to develop key components in this hands-on workshop with Donna Young, Lead Educator for the NASA Chandra X-Ray Center EPO Office, and award-winning SF and astronomical illustrator, Jean-Pierre Normand. Materials for classroom use will be provided.

½ hour break to pick up lunch

• Les Jardins food court (level 7), with its variety of fast food selections (deli, salad bar, pizza, prepared dishes), offers fast and efficient service at affordable prices. An adjacent outdoor terrace is open during the summer.

12:30 – 13:30 Brown bag lunch
Join Julie Czerneda for a romp through SF films as she shows examples of “Science, Scientists, and Other Bizarre Notions.” Warning: there will be laughter as well as some surprises.

13:30 – 14:00 – Introducing AboutSF – Presentation
AboutSF provides the foundation for the Anticipation workshop. A special DVD/CD with over a hundred files goes home with workshop members as a resource. David-Glenn Anderson is the tour guide.

14:00 – 16:00 – Stretching the mind while thinking outside the box – mini workshops/presentations
Cathy Palmer-Lister, Lynn E Cohen-Koehler, Lindalee Stuckey, Maaja Wentz, Sharon Rawlins, Eric Choi, and Susan Fichtelberg explore reading, writing and everything else within a classroom. A question may be asked: You have read H. G. Wells Invisible Man. Would you like to be invisible? Why? Why not? A smorgasbord of books, movies, arts, social science and other subject will be covered.

16:00 – 17:00 – Final words -- Open discussion and evaluation
Graduates without Anticipation membership may purchase a $25 special membership to attend Anticipation. Tour the art show, browse the dealer’s room or attend after 5 pm programming.

Schedule of French-Language Events

L'enseignement et la science-fiction : un atelier exploratoire
Anticipation, le 67e congrès mondial de science-fiction, Montréal, Québec
le jeudi 6 août 2009 au Palais des congrès de Montréal


10h30 – 11h30 - La place de la science-fiction à l'école – Table ronde Georges Henri Cloutier, Julie Czerneda, Jean Pettigrew, Daniel Sernine
La SF mérite-t-elle une plus grande place à l'école au Québec? Dans quelle mesure pourrait-elle faciliter l'accès à la lecture pour les garçons, ou l'apprentissage des sciences? Est-il possible de l'enseigner dans le cadre des programmes actuels? Peut-elle enrichir l'enseignement d'autres sujets? Le projet "About SF" peut-il être transposé au Québec ou au Canada francophone? Ou le travail a-t-il déjà été fait?

11h30 – 12h - La science-fiction au secondaire – Présentation Éric Gauthier
Comment parle-t-on de la science-fiction au secondaire? Un auteur expérimenté explique comment on retient l'attention des écoliers du secondaire en les introduisant aux concepts fondamentaux du conte, de la narration et de la science-fiction.

pause d'une demi-heure pour aller chercher à manger

12h30 – 13h30 - Repas – Films (facultatifs; en anglais)
Dans l'autre salle, Julie Czerneda présente une série de films de SF afin d'illustrer la représentation de la science, des scientifiques et autres bizarreries incomprises de Hollywood.

13h30 – 15h - La science-fiction au primaire – Présentation Philippe Collin, Michèle Laframboise
Comment parle-t-on de la science-fiction au primaire? Deux intervenants aguerris discutent de leurs méthodes pour présenter la science-fiction aux plus jeunes en fournissant quelques exemples.

15h – 16h - Les auteurs à l'école – Table ronde Jean-Pierre Guillet, Danielle Martinigol, Francine Pelletier
Comment les auteurs font-ils, en une heure, pour présenter à la fois la science-fiction et leurs ouvrages? La science-fiction est-elle bien accueillie à l'école?

16h – 17h – Conclusions -- Discussion générale et bilan

Les participants à l'atelier qui ne sont pas inscrits à Anticipation ont droit à un rabais de 25$ sur toute inscription (pour une journée, pour la fin de semaine ou pour les cinq jours). Visitez l'exposition de tableaux, magasinez dans la salle de ventes ou assistez aux tables rondes. Restez le jeudi ou passez toute la fin de semain.

Tags: worldcon science fiction teaching

During the first week of June, AboutSF moved to a new server in Lawrence, KS. Thanks to Ben Trafford for assisting in the database backup and to Eric Kerner for volunteering his new server and his programming expertise.

The site should look the same; it's just being brought to you from a new location.

More changes are coming. We don't have FTP service for the next week, so no updates will be made to the site for the time being. Until then, I'll post essential updates (about the Worldcon Teaching Portable Workshop, for example) to this LiveJournal page and elsewhere. - Nate from AboutSF

Anticipation, the 67th World SF Convention, has added a link to their site for AboutSF's Teaching Science Fiction: A Portable Workshop. There is still space available for the day-long teacher training on Thursday, August 6th.

Take a look at http://anticipationsf.ca/English/SFWorkshop.

- Nate from AboutSF

AboutSF is looking for volunteers who can help us transfer our existing PHP code into a Drupal format. Volunteers need to be familiar with FTP and able to read and edit HTML code. Knowledge of PHP and Drupal is a plus but not required.

We need this work done after our server conversion on June 30th. If you are qualified and available in early July, contact Nathaniel Williams, AboutSF Coordinator, at natew59@ku.edu. He will be contacting volunteers with more information during the first few days of July.

In the last two weeks, I've added a few new items to AboutSF.

1) There are three new sample SF courses under our Course Outlines page--a sample high school curriculum, a 19th-century science fiction class, and a sophomore-level college course.

2) We have a new Volunteers Needed page. If you'd like to help create content for AboutSF, visit the site. We've already filled one position. If you have a non-profit project directly related to science fiction and education, let us know. We may be able to post it on the site.

3) I've also added a Videos section to the site. This area contains all the SF educational videos and interviews (Isaac Asimov, Forrest Ackerman, et. al.) that we've posted on YouTube over the past year.

There's more to come, too. - Nate

In April, AboutSF welcomed Lisa Yaszek, President of Science Fiction Research Association, to our advisory board. We look forward to her input as AboutSF continues to promote SF in education. SFRA was one of AboutSF's three initial supporters, and we appreciate their continued support.

Lisa's new book, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction, comes highly recommended. For more info about it, see http://osupress.blogspot.com/2007/12/yaszek-galactic-suburbia.html.

AboutSF is sending out our fund-raising letters this week. These letters go out to our founding donors and partners. Now seemed a good time to mention some of our recent fund-raising activities on the blog.

We've once again been selected as the recipient of proceeds from the charity auction at ConQuesT in Kansas City on memorial weekend 2009. Thanks go out to our friends at ConQuesT. If you're in the KC area and love SF, don't miss this wonderful convention.

The novels course created by AboutSF volunteers for KU Continuing Education also resulted in some additional funds. The course-creation payment was donated to AboutSF.

Also, this week we heard back from the National Book Foundation "Innovations in Reading" Prize. Sadly, we were not one of the winners of their grant this year. There were over 100 applicants for roughly 5 spots. Still, it was worth the time to try. AboutSF especially thanks David Brin and Adam Frisch for their letters of support to the award committee.

- Nate

Our first enrollee has completed the online course on the Science Fiction Novel. The online course was designed last semester by AboutSF volunteer Thomas Seay and is hosted by University of Kansas Continuing Education. The course can be taken for graduate credit as ENGL 690: Studies in Science Fiction Novels. It's part of AboutSF's mission to created new opportunities for SF education. For more information, visit http://www.continuinged.ku.edu/is/list_online.shtml.

We had a busy 2008 at AboutSF. Before 2009 gets too far along, I want to report our accomplishments from the last 12 months. During our third year of operation in behalf of science fiction, we accomplished several important tasks.

•Organized and presented a day of teacher training, Teaching Science Fiction: A Portable Workshop, at the SFRA/Campbell Conference and the World Science Fiction Convention (for more, see below).
•Added a new online course specifically focused on science-fiction novels through KU's Continuing Education program. KUCE reports that our two online classes have comparable enrollment levels to other continuing education English classes. In fact, we're developing a similar number of attendees to KU's on-campus summer SF Institute.
•Edited and posted four new videos to our YouTube educational series, two about science-fiction films featuring Forrest Ackerman, and two on science fiction's value, including highlights from the 2005 Campbell Conference.
•Added the Heinlein Prize Trust to our roster of supporters. We have assisted their endeavor to promote Heinlein's work and commercial space travel by hosting World Space Week's "Have Spacesuit-Will Travel" teaching kit on our online Lessons Library and by including several donated Accelerated Reader tests for Heinlein juveniles to our teaching workshop packet.
•Posted new additions to our website, including new scholarly essays, an enhanced section on "Science Fiction for Physics Students," and new reader's guides from recent Tor Books releases, like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.
•Received our largest donation of SF books and magazines and sent them to several of the libraries who had signed up to receive books.
•Secured a new, temporary office on the KU campus during Wescoe Hall construction.

The year 2008 brought several unique opportunities and challenges. The two Portable Workshops provided over 30 educators with a day of training and a CD-ROM packet of sample syllabi, video clips, sample handouts, Heinlein AR tests, and course proposal materials. Presenters James Van Pelt and Mary Rose-Shaffer provided case studies in SF in the classroom; Lindalee Stuckey, Bonnie Kunzel, Diana Tixier Herald, and Susan Fichtelberg offered text recommendations for a variety of age groups. As I’ve collected and analyzed the feedback forms, it's clear that the attendees left feeling confident about integrating SF into their classrooms.

On the Internet front, AboutSF.com received over 400,000 hits during 2008. We also received a generous year of free web development and hosting from Ben Trafford and the staff at nSightful. We're grateful for their help and will now continue retooling the site in-house with our KU staff. Meanwhile, two of our videos on YouTube have exceeded 10,000 hits. Two volunteers, Sean McConville and Tim Maroney, logged over 24 hours of raw video footage from the Campbell Conference and KU interviews to help edit and create these condensed video projects.

What’s ahead?
In the last eight weeks, we've written new grants and helped several volunteers successfully propose the Portable Workshop at Balticon and Worldcon in 2009 (more coming soon). Implementing two workshops in '08 has made it easier for us to confidently provide materials to individuals willing to donate the time to running the workshop.

Additional goals:
•Adding new online resources, including recently donated lesson plans on Philip K. Dick, early SF, and college-level SF courses.
•Creating a larger video project featuring the Campbell Conference raw footage--a "Best of 2005" film demonstrating how SF writers use science fact.
•Condensing key sections of the Portable Workshop for use in shorter, targeted presentations, such as teacher in-service days.
•Proposing the Portable Workshop at this year's Worldcon in Montreal.

As always, we welcome input--particularly from teachers, scholars, publishers, authors, and SF fans. Contact info@aboutsf.com directly with additional suggestions for areas you'd like to see developed.

SFWA President Russell Davis has accepted an invitation to join AboutSF's Advisory Board. Please join me in welcoming Russell to AboutSF. SFWA's support helped get AboutSF established, and we look forward to further collaboration and input from Russell and SFWA.