Faculty

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – There are worlds where dinosaurs can talk with tigers, and gravity is only a suggestion to those who fly from island to island. This is not a world of literature, but a virtual world, accessible to anyone with a computer.

One of the most successful virtual worlds, Second Life, recently announced a new interface that could offer a more user-friendly door into these computer-generated worlds. That development could mean more educators will be able to take advantage of the virtual world with much greater ease, said Sascha Vitzthum, Illinois Wesleyan University’s assistant professor of business administration.

“Right now in the virtual world, everything has to be done by key strokes – every gesture, every move,” said Vitzthum, who teaches a course on emerging technologies and working on creating the information systems concentration in business administration at Illinois Wesleyan. “Whether the virtual world becomes user-friendly enough to let people behave the way they want to behave will be the key, but I believe it is going to get there.”

According to Vitzthum, there are around 80 virtual worlds currently operating on the Internet, which allow participants to create an online version of themselves, known as avatars, and interact with one another in the computer-generated world. People from across the globe “meet” in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where they can talk, play, shop and learn.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Two Illinois Wesleyan University classes are taking advantage of a wealth of information from local sources in Bloomington, and returning the favor by providing new insights on the data – all part of a collaboration with the city the University calls home.

“I really wanted my students to get into the local community,” said Associate Professor of German and Eastern European Studies Sonja Fritzsche. In her German 488: Von Demokratie zur Diktatur (From Democracy to Dictatorship) class students are introduced to the concept of German immigration by translating old, German-language newspapers from the Bloomington-Normal area that are housed at the McLean County Museum of History’s archives.

For Associate Professor of Economics Diego Mendez-Carbajo, the idea of using real data from the City of Bloomington for his new class titled Economics 370: Time Series Analysis was more than a good way to study financial and economic variables.

“Quantitative analysis skills are one of the comparative advantages that business and economics majors bring to the job market,” said Mendez-Carbajo, who noted students who take the class should be able to look at a long series of observations and discern the patterns. “I wanted students to learn about the data-gathering process itself. At the very least I would like them to be the one person that steps forward when their future boss or supervisor asks ‘can anybody make sense of these numbers?’”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – This fall, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University plans to have students help research one of the biggest questions facing science today: What is dark energy?

According to Assistant Professor of Physics Thushara Perera, studies involving dark matter and dark energy are showing there is more that is unknown in the universe than known. “Everything we know about the universe is probably 5 percent of what is really out there,” he said. “Dark matter is maybe 25 percent, and the other 70 percent is probably dark energy.”

Highly sensitive cameras, filled with detectors, are set in dry places at high elevation in an attempt to reveal the nature of dark energy and the history of the universe. Perera has spent years working on such a camera, known as the Astronomical Thermal Emission Camera (AzTEC), which was mounted on a telescope in the mountains of Chile. “The data from AzTEC helps answer fundamental questions about early galaxies and how they formed.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – When it comes to discussing religion, the modern-day concept of “tolerance” as it is often employed, in fact, aggravates tensions, said Assistant Professor of Religion Robert Erlewine. His new book, Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Indiana University Press, 2010), looks for ways to challenge and thereby change the nature of discussions involving religion.

“I’ve been very dissatisfied with the direction the discussion of religion is going, as if religion is the cause or solution of all problems in the world,” said Erlewine, a scholar of philosophy of religion and modern Jewish thought at Illinois Wesleyan University, who said what is needed is a better understanding of how religious traditions actually work in order to facilitate discussions. “Really, the idea behind the book is ‘How can we get secularists and religious conservatives speaking to one another? Indeed, how can we get them speaking a common language?’”

Erlewine contends the current concept of religious tolerance creates unintended tensions in the modern world because it criticizes religiously committed people for considering their own particular traditions as true. Being committed to one’s tradition often involves the belief that it is the true religion, which inevitably means also believing that other religions are not also the true religion. However, “With the modern concept of tolerance, there is this insistence that all religions must recognize that other religions are their equals, and they have no special claim,” Erlewine said. “When in reality, part of the nature of monotheistic religions is to claim an elect status, so denying that creates barriers to dialogue with those who belong to these traditions. If you hold your own religion to be true, you hold others not to be true, or at least not as true.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Donna Hartweg, former director of the Illinois Wesleyan University School of Nursing and Caroline F. Rupert Professor of Nursing, will retire in December after 31 years at the University.

“This has been the most wonderful job in the world,” said Hartweg. “I have been able to stand up in front of high school students and talk about what a fantastic place Illinois Wesleyan is. Then I watched those students select IWU, mature and walk across that Commencement stage four years later, and know they are better prepared for the world.”

A graduate of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Hartweg began teaching at Illinois Wesleyan in 1978. Earning master’s degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Illinois State University, she was appointed acting director of the Illinois Wesleyan’s School of Nursing in 1990. She earned her doctorate from Wayne State University in Michigan in 1991, the same year she was named director of the IWU School of Nursing.

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