Ontario high school students will have the chance to interact directly with one of Canada's most celebrated authors and learn more about slavery and an important chapter in Canadian social history, over the ORION network.

ORION and York University's Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) program are teaming up to co-host a live, interactive event featuring 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner Lawrence Hill, who will engage with students, both in person and online, on his latest award-winning novel, The Book of Negroes, scheduled for October 2, 2008.

The live reading and interactive session will be linked by videoconference over the ORION network to three Ontario schools, allowing students at those locations to interact and participate in the discussion in real time. Students in schools across Canada will also be able to tune in.

The event will take place at a school in York Region District School Board, linked by advanced videoconference to a school in the Algoma District School Board in Sault Ste. Marie and a third school in the Toronto District School Board. A live stream, hosted by York's ABEL team, will be accessible to other schools wanting to view the event.

Pre- and post-event activities - including a web blog where Hill will answer students' questions after the event - will be tied into the curriculum, providing a more enriched experience for the students. Signed copies of The Book of Negroes will be donated to each participating school's library.

"We're really pleased to be able to use the ORION technology to help facilitate this wonderful and innovative education experience," says ORION President and CEO, Phil Baker. "ORION is in place to help transform the way we teach and learn and this kind of project illustrates what can be done to support engaging and meaningful learning experiences," he says.

Lawrence Hill's latest novel, The Book of Negroes, became a number one national bestseller in Canada and won the overall Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. While in London, England recently to accept the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Hill had the chance to meet with Queen Elizabeth II for 15 minutes to chat about the novel.

"Most of the conversation had to do with the historical questions the book explores, and she was really quite struck (by the story)," said Hill.

The Book of Negroes tells the story of an 11-year-old girl who is abducted from her village in West Africa to be a slave in North Carolina. She is able to escape to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, only to still find slavery, segregation and abuse in Canada. The novel is inspired by the real Book of Negroes, an 18th-century document that recorded the names of black people who fled the United States for Nova Scotia.

For more information on Lawrence Hill and The Book of Negroes, visit www.lawrencehill.com.


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