This last Tuesday, The Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen began a new course on the Lord of the Rings books, hosted in LOTRO. He does the class Tuesday evenings in-game, with it being streamed to twitch and uploaded to youtube afterwards. I watched the first class this week and loved it, and thought it would be awesome if our kin (and any interested alliance members) could be a sponsor one week! Let me know what you think about this idea; I also highly recommend going back and watching the first class, which can be found on Signum U's Youtube channel.
Here is some more info about the class and what sponsoring kins have to do, found on the lotro forums.
Class Info:
An Open Course on the Lord of the Rings, hosted in LOTRO!
Hi All!
My name is Corey Olsen, known online as The Tolkien Professor. You might have heard of my podcast of that name, or maybe seen my Hobbit book, Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. I am also the President of Signum University, home of what might be the coolest Master's Degree program on earth (Exhibit A: http://signumuniversity.org/departme...lkien-studies/). For several years, I've been doing fun open courses and programs that everyone is invited to join in: the Mythgard Academy series (in-depth of discussions of books elected by my viewers), the Silmarillion Film Project (a detailed discussion for hardcore geeks of a totally theoretical TV adaptation of Tolkien's Silmarillion), and more recently my adventures in LOTRO streaming on Twitch (my weekly Gryfflet streams on Fridays at 1:00 PM EST on LOTROStream, as well as various streams on our own channel, www.Twitch.tv/signumu).
Anyway, this January, I am launching a major new program which I am really excited about. It is called Exploring the Lord of the Rings, and in it I plan to conduct a chapter-by-chapter detailed discussion of the Lord of the Rings. The discussions will take place on Tuesday evenings, 9:30 PM server time, starting on Tolkien's 125th birthday: January 3, 2017. In each session, I will spend an hour or so (okay, probably 90 minutes) discussing the book chapter and its themes, reading passages and doing some close reading so that we can really get into the story as it unfolds. I will broadcast the class sessions on the SignumU Twitch channel, and the discussion will be highly interactive; everyone attending will be able to participate in the discussion. I will also be in-game throughout the class. For the book-discussion portion of class, my character won't be doing much, though you are welcome to join me in our lecture hall (location TBA). For the last 30 minutes or so of the session, however, we will be taking a weekly field trip in game. We will go visit places in the game connected with the part of the text we were just discussing, and we will examine both the visual representation and the related quest and story lines. So in the end, we will be both studying the Lord of the Rings and also thinking about the adaptation of the story that the Turbine folks have done (which I think is brilliant).
So, if you've ever wanted to study the Lord of the Rings in depth and would be interested in joining me on this long and fun journey of lore, join me on twitch.tv/signumu at 9:30 PM EST on January 3. For those whose time zones make this inconvenient (my apologies to the good people of Europe!), recordings of the sessions will be posted promptly on the Signum YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUx...4uXhEfqgI6GtIg).
Oh, and one more thing! In order to give people across different servers an opportunity to participate (I've always played on Landroval, myself), I will be rotating the class sessions from one server to another. I'll publish the schedule soon. If you are in a kinship that might be interested in joining one of these class sessions as a kin event and coming along with me on that week's field trip, let me know (corey.olsen@signumu.org). I look forward to getting to meet lots of Tolkien fans across LOTRO's servers.
I am greatly looking forward to this new adventure!
- Corey Olsen
The Tolkien Professor
Signum University
www.signumuniversity.org
Sponsorship Info:
Calling All Kinships! You’re Invited to Sponsor a Class Session of “Exploring The Lord of the Rings”
The course “Exploring The Lord of the Rings,” taught by Signum University founder and president Corey Olsen (as Narnion the Gondorian Loremaster) takes place every Tuesday (well, most every Tuesday, depending on Corey’s business and family schedules) at 9:30 pm at the Lore Hall on the Scholars Stairs in Bree.
We will rotate servers each week based on interest and demand, and that’s where your kinship comes in.
You are invited to sponsor a class session on your server. What’s involved? Three things:
1. Your kin will assist Maevenn, Narnion’s ginger-haired hobbit sidekick (aka me), with logistics. This includes:
-- Stationing kinnies along both routes (from west and south gates) to guide people to the Lore Hall.
-- It also may involve circulating through the group to hand out food, drink and pipeweed (if available), and perhaps cheering at the right points in the lecture.
-- It will likely include helping me make sure everyone relocates to the in-game location of the week as quickly as possible.
2. Your kin leader or a designee will open each session and introduce Narnion. You are welcome to say a bit about your kin and your activities as part of your introduction.
3. After the class session is over, your kin members are invited into a special Discord channel with Corey for a live question and answer with him. Just you, your kinnies and Corey.
This is a first-come, first-served thing at this point, meaning that we will schedule the server locations for the classes in the order that requests to sponsor come in (except we want to avoid being on the same server too often).
If you are interested in sponsoring a class session or have questions about it, please email me at trish.lambert@signumu.org.
Short version of this entire post: There's an awesome new LOTR class hosted in-game, and our kin has an opportunity to be a part of it!