NSF Grant Awarded to Project Headed by Spalding

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – A team led by Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Physics Gabe Spalding has been awarded a grant of more than $451,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

Spalding is the principal investigator on a project aimed toward improving laboratory instruction in physics for undergraduate college students in the United States. The NSF grant begins by funding a conference on laboratory instruction slated for 2012, and, separately, an immersive training program for faculty and staff to develop contemporary instructional laboratories. Spalding said these efforts will provide instructors with a focused, hand-on approach to guiding students through the laboratory. “We’re really talking about a revolution in the way physics is taught,” he said, noting the program will “promote significant updates in the experiments and techniques taught, as well as inclusion of contemporary concepts.”

The initiatives in the grant, titled “Improving ‘Beyond First Year’ Physics Laboratory Instruction,” are in response to a recent national survey of laboratory instructors spearheaded by Spalding’s team and working with The Ames Library. The study indicated curricular development is vital for success in the instructional laboratory. “We found many needs,” said Spalding. “This award really recognizes the value of our initial efforts at addressing some of those needs over the past few years, and gives us the means to make a significant difference at the national level.”

ITS Helps Campus Navigate Technology

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – While in the process of adding a few finishing touches to the grade-determining final project that has taken all semester to complete, suddenly the laptop screen goes black and the computer refuses to start.

For many college students, this nightmare scenario rings a bell familiar enough to evoke waves of paralyzing terror and accompanying nausea.

In situations where computers seem to become the enemy, Illinois Wesleyan University’s Information Technology Services (ITS) staff members are on-hand to remind the campus community it’s possible to “become friends with technology,” said ITS Coordinator Lisa Caughron. “We’re very empathetic to crises such as these, so we already have strategies in place to deal with them. Computer problems can be frustrating; as much as it’s possible to do so, we try to plan for those situations.”

At Illinois Wesleyan, ITS works toward its mission to “create a culture of life-long learning” and “provide the best information resources possible” by working as partners with the campus community. “Once upon a time, ITS was just come in and ask questions,” said Caughron. “But we’ve started focusing on the big picture, on showing you technology is not something that has to impinge on your lifestyle. We want people to understand that technology can be a tool that really enhances your life.”

The ITS Help Desk staff provides service to the campus community in the form of guidance, resources and advice, and the Service and Repair staff provides diagnostics and personal computer repairs at no charge for Illinois Wesleyan students, staff, faculty and retirees. Services are available via telephone at (309) 556-3900, email at it@iwu.edu, online at both the ITS website and blog and in person at the HelpDesk center at the ITS House, located across from Shaw Hall at 1311 N. Park St.

SALSA Students Running Marathon to Benefit Charity

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Five Illinois Wesleyan students will run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon on Sunday, October 9 in order to raise money for the charity Casa de los Angeles.

Janette Abbasi and David Dimas of Chicago, Melissa Ramirez of Los Angeles, Vanessa Rodriguez of Round Lake Beach, Ill. and Jairo Rosales of Melrose Park, Ill., all class of 2014, are members of Illinois Wesleyan’s Spanish and Latino Student Association (SALSA), a campus organization dedicated to promoting and celebrating Latin American culture, heritage and diversity. The students chose to run with Casa de los Angeles, a daycare, community center, transitional housing and medical clinic program in the city of San Miguel de Allende, because of its specific focus on the Latino community.

According to Kevin O’Donnell, coordinator for the Marathon’s Team Casa, Casa de los Angeles is one of only two or three Marathon charities working in Mexico. “Many of our volunteers are college students who come to Mexico for a winter, spring or summer break and take advantage of the experience as a language or cultural immersion,” he said. “I think one of the great benefits students glean from involvement with Casa particularly is insight into a meaningful response to poverty.”

Nelson Wins Starkey Award for Service

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University’s Grounds Crew Manager Eric Nelson was named the winner of the University’s Max. L. Starkey Service Award at the Fall Breakfast in the Young Main Lounge of Memorial Center on Friday.

The Starkey Award, established in 2001, is presented to a member of the University staff nominated by his or her peers for extraordinary service to the University. The award is named in honor of the late Max Starkey, a 1957 Illinois Wesleyan graduate who was University comptroller from 1957 to 1996.

President Richard F. Wilson announced Nelson as the winner, calling the award “well-deserved.” He added that staff members like Nelson “make IWU such a thriving institution.”

Nelson has served the University since 1981, and manages six crew members who care for the award-winning IWU campus. The campus has been honored with beautification awards from the City of Bloomington, including a 2008 award for grounds around The Ames Library. Nelson called the award an honor. “It’s great to be recognized by the city, and know we have a team that gets the job done,” he said at the time. “I am very blessed to work with a staff which is very talented.”

Triplets Turn Titan: DeSalvos Begin College Journey Together

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – When Meagan DeSalvo ’15 fell in love with Illinois Wesleyan University on a campus tour during high school, she had no idea her brothers Matt and Don, ’15, would follow suit.

Call it serendipity: On August 22, all three DeSalvo siblings will begin their college careers at Illinois Wesleyan—an outcome they attribute almost entirely to coincidence.

“It took my brothers a long time to even consider IWU,” said Meagan, who applied to two other universities but had “no intention” of attending any school other than Illinois Wesleyan. “I made my decision by myself, without anyone else’s influence. We never really thought we would end up at the same school; it just kind of happened.”

Don, who during his college search focused on schools that could provide him with a quality education and place him well in the job market, shares the sentiment. Although he admits Meagan originally introduced him to Illinois Wesleyan, Don’s “final decision came down to the fact that I could envision myself at IWU,” he said. “I felt like it was where I belonged as well as where I could get the best education. I am still surprised we all ended up going to the same school, because we definitely didn’t choose to go to college together.”

Matt also applied to a few other liberal arts colleges besides Illinois Wesleyan, but was ultimately attracted to the family-like campus community as well as the warm welcome he received from members of the IWU cross country team. “At first I looked at bigger schools, but later in my search I became more interested in smaller schools that offered individual attention from professors,” he said.

Class of 2015 Urged to Find ‘Sense of Adventure’

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The 2015 class of Illinois Wesleyan University received words of advice on finding their voice, and preparing themselves for the years ahead on Tuesday (Aug. 16) at the annual New Student Convocation in Westbrook Auditorium.

“The diversity of your backgrounds, interest, talents and ideas will add enormously to the vitality of our campus community and will enrich the broader community in which you will live,” said University President Richard F. Wilson welcoming the students, and bidding them to “bear forth the University’s hopes” for the future.

Keynote speaker, Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Political Science William Munro, encouraged students to embrace a love of learning as a way of life. “You stand on the cusp of a new phase in your lives,” he said.

As winner of the Kemp Foundation Award – the University’s highest teaching honor – Munro received the privilege of addressing the New Student Convocation. Munro presented the students with a challenge – to step beyond the fears they might have of people’s perceptions, and delve into the questions of the world around them.

Tiede Appointed to AAUP Committees

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Joerg Tiede, Illinois Wesleyan professor of computer science and president of the University’ American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter, has been named to three AAUP national committees.

According to AAUP, the organization’s mission is to advance academic freedom and share governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.

Cary Nelson, president of the national chapter of AAUP, has appointed Tiede to two committees: the committee on membership and the committee on college and university governance, each for the term of three years.

Tiede said the committee on governance “promotes meaningful faculty participation in institutional governance through the development of policy statements and reports related to shared governance and application of those principles to particular situations that are brought to its attention. The staff is authorized to receive, on behalf of the committee, complaints of departures from these standards and, where appropriate, to undertake formal investigations. Such cases may lead to a recommendation from the committee to the association’s national council and annual meeting that an institution be sanctioned for ‘substantial noncompliance with standards of academic governance.’”

Daniels ’13 Learns to Adjust After Earthquake Abroad

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – “Experience an earthquake” was not on the list of things Joe Daniels ’13 was looking forward to when he planned to spend spring semester of his sophomore year in Christchurch, New Zealand.

But as many members of the Illinois Wesleyan community know, studying abroad can be full of surprises.

“It was going to be a whole different experience,” said the Brookfield, Ill. native, who arrived in Christchurch on February 10 to study through the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES) at the University of Canterbury. “The earthquake pretty much changed everything for me.”

On February 22 at 12:51 p.m., Daniels was packing up after class in a second-floor lecture hall in the University’s forestry building. “The room just started to shake all of a sudden,” he said. “It started as a little shudder, then quickly escalated into something that moved the room what seemed meters side to side and up and down, all pretty violently. It was honestly probably one of the strangest things I’ve ever felt—like one of those 3-D movie rides where the seats move with the movie, mixed with bad airplane turbulence.”

Daniels was experiencing a 6.3-magnitude earthquake centered only 9 kilometers from the city, which between destructive aftershocks and the damage caused by the quake itself killed nearly 200 people, according to stuff.co.nz. “I can’t recall how it sounded,” said Daniels, noting the city center is still cordoned off nearly six months later. “But a friend in the same room said you could hear the building groan with the shaking.”

Student’s Foreclosure Study Leads to Collaboration with Town of Normal

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Since 2006, there have been nearly a thousand foreclosures in McLean County.

A new study by Illinois Wesleyan University student Jake Mann and Associate Professor of Economics Diego Mendez-Carbajo is helping government officials understand more about the impact of those foreclosures.

Mendez-Carbajo and Mann, a senior economics major from Jacksonville, Ill., spent three months compiling data from the county recorder’s office on foreclosures and lis pendens – pending foreclosures in the court system that result after an owner is delinquent on mortgage payments for 90 days. Mann said he hopes the study will “provide a deeper understanding of complexities of the local housing market.”

The information is being utilized by the Town of Normal, which will use the data to generate a report on area trends in foreclosures. “We have been aware of foreclosures on a national level, but have not had the staff or the time to invest in a study on the local level,” said Geoff Fruin, assistant city manager for the Town of Normal. “This will give us a better understanding of how housing market has changed over the past few years.” The results of the collaborative effort are expected in September.

For the study, Mann collected data from more than 2,000 local families and individuals who have gone through the foreclosure system over the past five years. Fruin is working with Mendez-Carbajo and Mann to plug the data into software to examine foreclosures throughout the county. “They did the hard part by gathering the raw data,” said Fruin. “With our tools, we can use that data to see how foreclosures are spatially moving across the county.”

Mendez-Carbajo is pleased Normal officials will use the information to track the geographical trends of foreclosures. “People are aware of foreclosures in the county, but this can provide them a more comprehensive look at the data, and may help them develop a plan of action,” he said.

Mann’s data gathering began as part of Mendez-Carbajo’s Time Series Analysis class, which teaches students to look for trends in data. “We study anything from unemployment rates to crime statistics to health department scores for restaurants,” said Mendez-Carbajo. “The key is to engage students with data in a meaningful way.”

After taking a spring class, which focused on the real estate market, Mann continued his work with Mendez-Carbajo through an independent study funded by a grant from IWU’s Action Research Center (ARC). “Through the grants, ARC has found a new way to be a resource for the campus and the community,” said ARC Program Coordinator Deborah Halperin. “The city, the town and the county, as well as local banks and the revitalization project on the west side of Bloomington, all have an interest in Jake’s research.”

Acclaimed Scholar to Speak at President’s Convocation

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University will welcome acclaimed scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah as the speaker for the 2011 President’s Convocation to be held on Aug. 31 at 7 p.m. in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall (1210 N. Park St., Bloomington). The first campus-wide event of the new semester, the convocation is free and open to the public.

Named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010, Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has published widely on the topics of ethics, African and black cultural studies, racial identity, political theory and philosophy of the mind. He is currently the president of PEN American Center, the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization.

The author of celebrated books, Appiah’s works include In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1993), which won the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Herskovitz Award of the African Studies Association; Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton University Press, 1997); Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2007), which was featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine; and Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press, 2010). His newest book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.) is due to be published this fall. Appiah has edited nearly two dozen books and contributed works to publications such as the Journal of Social Philosophy, the New York Review of Books and Global Agenda.

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