News

Faculty/Staff Appreciation Days at University Store

The University Store is celebrating annual Faculty/Staff Appreciation Days on Thursday and Friday, Dec. 6-7, with a 20 percent discount on all non-computer related merchandise.

Store director Ken Kahler and his staff want to thank all those in the community for their support throughout the year and hope that campus employees will stop by.
 

Wind Ensemble performs Dec. 7

The Wind Ensemble will perform in concert on Friday, Dec. 7 at 8 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall under the direction of James Patrick Miller.

The program will include Evan Hause's Concerto for Trumpet and Wind Ensemble, the world premiere of Music professor Jeffrey W. Holmes' Continuum for Trumpet, Trombone & Wind Ensemble, Paul Hindemith's March from Symphonic Metamorphosis, Gordon Jacob's Old Wine in New Bottles and Einojuhani Rautavaara's Solitamessu (Soldier’s Mass).

The faculty soloists will be Eric Berlin (right) on trumpet and Greg Spiridopoulos on trombone.

Tickets are $3

State education secretary visits University Without Walls

Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville visited the University Without Walls Nov. 20 to see first-hand how innovations in technology and online learning are opening doors for adult students living and working in the Commonwealth.
 
Reville's visit was part of his statewide tour aimed at gathering information on best practices in educational technology in K-12 and higher education settings.

During the visit, Reville met with UWW director Ingrid Bracey, who described the program’s model.
 
Kyle Stephanie Kraus, instructional designer and trainer with CPE E-learning, provided an

Back up SPARK course materials by Dec. 21

SPARK, one of the learning management systems (LMS) for on-campus courses at UMass Amherst, is going away at the end of the fall 2012 semester. Academic Computing recommends that SPARK course materials be backed up by Friday, Dec. 21.

Blackboard Vista, the software behind SPARK, is no longer supported by its vendor, Blackboard Inc. After the campus’s license expires on Dec. 29, files and data stored on SPARK will no longer be accessible.

Users have several options available for backing up SPARK course materials:

Manually Download Files from Spark to Your Computer

Use SPARK's File Manager to

Hatch to lead Blended Learning Faculty Forum

Heath Hatch, senior lecturer in Physics, will lead a discussion on "The Best of Two Worlds: Blended Course Design and Implementation" on Thursday, Nov. 29 from 1-2 p.m. in the Teaching Commons on the 26th floor of the Du Bois Library.

The space has been reserved until 3 p.m. for attendees who want to continue the discussion.

The Faculty Forum is a series of faculty-led discussions on the challenges, rewards and opportunities of teaching with technology, sponsored by the Office of Information Technologies, the Libraries and the Center for Teaching and Faculty Development.

Researchers use biomarkers from prehistoric human feces to track settlement and agriculture

For researchers who study Earth’s past environment, disentangling the effects of climate change from those related to human activities is a major challenge, but now campus geoscientists have used a biomarker from human feces in a completely new way to establish the first human presence, the arrival of grazing animals and human population dynamics in a landscape.
 
Doctoral student Robert D’Anjou and his advisor Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center, with colleagues Nick Balascio and David Finkelstein, describe their findings in the current online edition of

Roche selected for Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute

B.J. Roche, senior lecturer in Journalism, has been selected as one of 12 fellows to the 2013 Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute held at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

The weeklong institute, which is held in January, is designed to help journalism educators build their programs' curriculum in entrepreneurial journalism.

Kinesiology graduate students receive awards at regional meeting

Two Kinesiology graduate students received presentation awards at the New England American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) Conference held Nov. 8-9 at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence.
 
Thomas Longyear (left) received the Outstanding Masters’ Student Presentation Award for his presentation titled “The Molecular Mechanism of Fatigue: Examining the Role of H+, Pi, and Ca2+.” Jeffer Sasaki received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Presentation Award for his presentation on “Validation of the Fitbit Wireless Activity Tracker® for the Prediction of Energy Expenditure.”
 
The

Young chairs panel on Jewish culture in New York City

Distinguished University Professor James Young, of English and Judaic Studies, will chair a roundtable discussion on “What is Jewish Culture?” on Nov. 28 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
 
The panelists will be novelist Amos Oz, architect Daniel Libeskind and historians Fania Oz-Sulzberger and Deborah Dash Moore.
 
The event is part of the launch of The Pozen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: An Anthology in Ten Volumes, of which Young is the editor-in-chief. The publisher is Yale University Press.
 
On Oct.

Syracuse scientist speaks on specification, patterning of spinal cord neurons

Katharine Lewis, associate professor of biology at Syracuse University, will speak about specification and patterning of spinal cord neurons at a Neuroscience and Behavior colloquium on Wednesday, Dec. 5 at 4 p.m. in 222 Morrill Science Center II.

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