All Stories

Photos by Shawn McAfee of UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies

by Grace Lim
COLS Special Reports

 Combing the Beaches

To the casual eye, Linsi Whitman is wading in thigh-deep waters at Sunset Beach in Sturgeon Bay.  But what the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh student is actually doing is playing detective.
This past summer, Whitman and three other students combed 34 beaches in Door and Kewaunee counties to uncover what may be lurking in the waters.

Whitman is not at all squeamish about what she may find. “I really like bacteria,” says Whitman, who is majoring in medical technology. “I like learning what is the cause of the bacteria, why is it in the water, why it’s higher in certain beaches than others.”

Playing Detective: Linsi Whitman collects water samples at a beach in Sturgeon Bay.

The Sturgeon Bay site is one of five laboratories in which UW Oshkosh students are hired as interns to collect and analyze water quality in 10 counties. The findings are then reported to county health officials and the Environmental Protection Agency. This beach monitoring program is part of a large Environmental Microbiology Collaboration, headed by Drs. Colleen McDermott and Greg Kleinheinz of UW Oshkosh. Both have been long-time faculty members in the Department of Biology and Microbiology and are associate deans in the College of Letters and Science.

Students hired to sample the beach water are required to get their hands dirty, or in this case, dirty and wet. “We are growing our own crop of scientists here,” McDermott says. “ My goal for them is to have them have a great research experience.”

What the students do on the beaches and in the labs have great ramifications, McDermott says. “It’s not play data, it’s real data that’s going to affect citizens around Wisconsin,” she says, adding, “they are going to be the ones who are saying the beach is open or closed. It’s real-life work that has importance.”

The hands-on experience gives students  a fresh perspective in their studies, Kleinheinz says. “They get laboratory experience. They get field experience. They get to figure out and develop critical thinking skills because things are never cut and dried like they are in a textbook,” he says. “There is no substitute for actual real-world experience no matter how many labs or lectures you have in an academic setting.”

Testing the Waters Video

In this video, Dr. Greg Kleinheinz and Dr. Colleen McDermott and their students talk about lessons learned in the beach monitoring program. This video is produced by COLS Special Reports editor Grace Lim and directed by Wayne Abler/UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies.

Faculty:

• Dr. Heike C. Alberts, Department of Geography and Urban Planning

• Dr. Monika Hohbein-Deegen, Department of Foreign Languages

• Dr. Michelle Mouton, Department of History

• Dr. Tracy Slagter, Department of Political Science

Description:

Monday, November 9, 2009, is the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that changed history. Many of our students were not even born when the Wall fell, and yet they have grown up in a world that was shaped by the political, social, geographic, and cultural significance of that event. To commemorate this important day in history, several members of the UW Oshkosh faculty have organized a series of presentations and exhibitions to explore the impact of the Wall and new world order that was ushered in when it fell. The day's events combines background information about the Berlin Wall and the global implications of its fall in 1989 with first hand accounts of people who lived in Germany during this time. The day will end with the screening of a compelling German movie about dangerous attempts to escape from East to West Berlin.

 VIDEOS:

The following videos are also available for download to your iPod through UW Oshkosh iTunesU (requires iTunes).

Several UW Oshkosh students participated in the European Odyssey, which included a trip to the Berlin Wall. Here is what they have to say about their experience.

Questions and Answers found here

ARTICLE:

Nov. 9, 2009, Berlin Wall and Beyond Talks

Life on Both Sides of the Wall (Berlin 1945-1989)

The Fall of the Berlin Wall Worldwide Implications

The Dean's Symposium:
Children of the Great Divide - Cold War Policy in Berlin, 1945 to 1955

(Coming soon.)

photo illustration by Shawn McAfee/Learning Technologies

By Katie Holliday
COLS Special Reports Intern

 Go Grand

As part of a class project, two groups of journalism students at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh were given a real-life client – The Grand Opera House. Their task? Figure out how to attract college students to the restored Victorian theater, which has been an arts and entertainment hub in downtown Oshkosh since the late nineteenth century.

The first group, taught by Dr. Sara Steffes Hansen, took the Research and Strategic Communication class in fall 2009. In this class, they conducted research on who exactly is coming to the Grand. Through focus groups and online surveys, the students learned that the Grand’s primary audience skewed to a crowd either younger or older than the college-age group.

Students in the second group took Strategic Campaigns in Advertising, which was taught by journalism adjunct instructor Dana Baumgart in spring 2010. These students took the first group’s findings and used them to generate advertising and marketing methods that would draw an audience like themselves – college students.

In the end, they produced a marketing plan for the Grand Opera House that included the use of social media like Facebook and Twitter and a new slogan for The Grand Opera House – “Go Grand.”

Market Research

The journey from research to final presentation to clients was long but worthwhile, students say. 

Prior to this assignment, senior Dan Mast realized he had little knowledge about the 180-year-old building. “I thought it was actually at a different location,” he says. (For the record, the Grand is at 100 High Ave. in downtown Oshkosh, Wisconsin.) 

To learn more about their client, the students in the research and communication class used methods employed by professional advertising companies. Through SurveyMonkey, a website that allows users to create personalized surveys, the students received input from respondents of all ages about the Grand Opera House. In addition, the students also conducted a focus group of college students that gave them some insight into what their peers think of The Grand and its patrons.

“We mainly focused on college students who hadn’t been to the Grand or had only been [there] a few times,” said senior Hilary Simon, who was in both classes.

With the help of the young marketers, the Grand Opera House hopes that more of the UW Oshkosh community will explore what the theater had to offer.

The Grand Opera House closed its doors in 2009 for renovations with the intention of revitalizing the venue for the Sept. 16, 2010 re-opening. The repairs to began in mid-October of 2009, primarily to the theater’s 100-plus-year-old ceiling. While renovations and repairs are being made to the building itself, Grand officials felt it was a good time to refresh the venue’s presence in Oshkosh with new marketing and branding ideas.

“One of the issues we always have…is attracting younger audiences,” said Jeff Potts, development and community relations manager at the Grand. “Being able to work with the students to develop a marketing and branding campaign really gives us some great insight into why they would come and maybe why they’re not coming.”

 Page: 1 2 3 | Next

By Grace Lim
COLS Special Reports

All the World's a Stage

In a rapidly evolving world where entertainment can be found on a cell phone screen, Richard Kalinoski still sees the stage as a significant and viable medium. “If students learn that the theatre offers a level of intimacy not applicable to film and TV—the power of immediacy—they can sometimes begin to appreciate the mystery and charm of the theatre,” says Kalinoski, an award-winning playwright and associate professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Award-winning playwright and UW Oshkosh professor Richard Kalinoski.

Kalinoski, who has taught at UW Oshkosh since 1998, juggles teaching, directing and writing with great aplomb. This spring, he directed “Collected Stories,” a play by Donald Margulies that is about a complicated relationship between a professor and her student.

Kalinoski’s latest play, “My Soldiers,” is featured in the May/June 2010 issue of American Theatre magazine. The play, which is about a female U.S. Army medic, back from deployment to Iraq, will have its world professional premiere at the Detroit Repertory Theatre on June 3. Only 15 months earlier, Kalinoski held a My Soldiers reading at the UW Oshkosh with a cast of students, alumni, faculty and professionals. (The reading was directed by Mark Hallen, Eastern University (Pa.), Director of Theatre.)

Kalinoski has won numerous awards including the Osborn – Best New Play in America by an Emerging Playwright - awarded by the American Theatre Critics Association in 1996, and, in 2001, five Ace Awards, including Best Play, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His “Beast on the Moon,” a play about two Armenian genocide refugees, captured the 2001 Best Play from the Repertory prize at the Moliere Awards in Paris.

His works have been translated into 17 languages and have been produced in venues all over the world, such as Athens, Brussels, London, Moscow, New York (off-Broadway), Prague, Sao Paolo, and Toronto.

In a Q & A with COLS Special Reports producer Grace Lim, Kalinoski shares his goals as a professor and as a playwright.

1. What attracted you to the world of playwriting and directing? How old were you when you realized that you wanted to be the person behind the words or the one who drives the actors to create magic on stage?
When I was an undergraduate at U W Whitewater I had a chance to study theatre at Oxford University in England for a summer between my sophomore and junior years. While at Oxford I participated in a tiny production of King Lear (I “played” Edgar). I learned that I was not an actor even while I became fascinated with the mystery of presenting a play. I had a hunch that I might write a play and when I returned to my home campus I wrote an emotional mess called “Naked on the Subway” (note the lurid title). I had written and produced my first full-length play at the age of 20.  I produced the play myself and together with friends it was presented in the basement of a high dormitory.  The play sold out its entire run. Two years later I was accepted into the graduate playwriting program at Carnegie-Mellon University (then called Carnegie-Tech).

2. What made you decide that you wanted to teach young playwrights?
I suspect that I was influenced by my playwriting professor at Carnegie-Mellon. He was a bad teacher but a smart man. I thought I could do it (teach) better than I had been taught. The art of playwriting can’t be taught. The craft of playwriting can be.  I began teaching playwriting in workshops after my first play was published in 1990. I like to share what I have learned about playwriting with my students but I also learn more about the discipline each time I teach it.

3. What are your goals in your teaching?
The single most important goal (among many) is to help my students understand that they are writing for what Thornton Wilder called the “group mind”.  Students are asked to write for live audiences but also for live artists—the artists involved in producing a play. Of these the actors are the most important. Actors carry playwrights on their backs.

4.What preconceived ideas about playwriting or directing do your students have?
The most common preconceived idea is that plays can unfold anywhere, can be set anywhere—as in cinema.  PLACE is absolutely essential to the fashioning of a play. Students struggle to understand how a single place (a garden, a deck, a kitchen) will become a kind of character in a play—more profoundly (usually) than the many places used for a film.  Plays don’t “travel” particularly well…films do.

5. In a world where people can find entertainment on screens as small as their cellphones, how do you convince young people that the stage is still a viable medium?
I force my students to attend the theatre often. Many of my students reluctantly admit that they have not attended the theatre. Few have seen a professional production of a play—fewer still have seen a play in New York. If students learn that the theatre offers a level of intimacy not applicable to film and TV—the power of immediacy—they can sometimes begin to appreciate the mystery and charm of the theatre. I don’t lie to my students—theatre can be very good at boring audiences (it usually doesn’t have good explosions). Once in a while audiences (here and elsewhere) can be so transported by a play that the feeling of having attended remains for days or even weeks. I want my students to have that kind of experience. My impression is that many academics dismiss theatre as not being intellectual enough or not being contemplative enough. Vital, visceral theatre should be emotionally compelling and intellectually satisfying simultaneously.

6. What do you want your students to walk away with after their years here at UW Oshkosh?
I teach more than playwriting, of course. I want my students to come away from here with high artistic standards—and to use those standards to inform their lives.

VIDEO:

In an interview with COLS Special Reports producer Grace Lim, UW Oshkosh theatre professor Richard Kalinoski talks about his goals as a teacher and as a playwright. Kalinoski's latest play "My Soldiers" will have its world professional premiere at the Detroit Repertory Theatre on June 3, 2010.

Next: On Balancing Life and Work

About Dr. Lori Carrell

Dr. Lori Carrell’s commitment to inspire positive transformation has fueled more than twenty-five years of teaching, speaking and communication consulting. Her listeners have included business professionals, students in kindergarten through college, prisoners, educators, military personnel, preachers, parishioners, Eskimos and now, colleagues in the UW Oshkosh teaching community.    

Her formal education in Speech Communication (Ph.D., University of Denver), Counseling Psychology (M.A., University of Alaska-Anchorage), and Communication Education, Theatre, and Psychology (B.A., Anderson University) is balanced by diverse life experiences. That rich foundation of living includes culture shock as a teacher in an Eskimo village, performances on camera and on stage, research of public speaking in churches across the country, and the daily intensity of parenthood. 

She is the author of  The Great American Sermon Survey (2000) and numerous communication education research articles. 

As a former Endowment for Excellence Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Dr. Carrell currently teaches in the Department of Communication and also serves as Director of the Center for Scholarly Teaching. 

In an interview with Grace Lim (audio only),  Dr. Carrell discusses the power of transformative teaching and how her own lights-on teaching moment challenged her to do better for herself and her students.

Audio Podcast:

(requires iTunes).

Links:

Article:

A Scholarly Teaching Adventure

• Dr. Lori Carrell's Web site
• Center for Scholarly Teaching
• The Provost's Teaching and Learning Summit '09 Transformative Teaching: Challenges and Choices
• Center for Scholarly Teaching announces fall 2009 programming
• Editor's Notes The SOTL Story

Time for Change: The time tracker for diabetics is invented by Mary Anne DeZur, Office Manager of Facilities Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. (photo by Shawn McAfee of UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies.)

by Noell Dickmann
Student multimedia reporter

When Mary Anne Dezur’s son Lou was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she had little knowledge about the lifelong chronic disease that affects children and young adults. To regulate his sugar levels, Lou, then 14, had to be given insulin shots three times a day, every day. Like any good parent, DeZur, who is the Office Manager of Facilities Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, worried about her son's health.

In 2008 Lou started using an insulin pump, which works by delivering insulin to the body through a small tube that feeds into a needle placed under the skin. The insulin pump requires Lou to change where the needle is placed in his body every three days to prevent infection and calluses. With Lou living the busy life of a teenager, the family struggled to remember when to change the site. As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of all invention,” and their frustration led the mother-son duo to invent a timer to keep track of the days when the infusion site needs to be changed. The device, as named by Lou, is called Time For Change.

DeZur felt that Time for Change could help other families with diabetics and others who need to take medication on a schedule. She entered the invention in Walmart’s “Get On The Shelf” contest in hopes of getting it to market. The contest consists of voting for a product over a series of rounds. The winner will have their product sold in Walmart stores all over the country, and the runners-up will sell their products on the Walmart website. Time For Change is competing against 4,000 contestants.

The first round of voting is from March 7-April 3, 2012. Ten winners of the round will then proceed to the final round of voting from April 11-24, 2012.

“This is so incredibly important to me, not only to make my son’s life a little easier, but also to bring this invention to other diabetics,” says DeZur, who added that if Time For Change goes to market, she and Lou, who is now 21, will donate a portion of the sales to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

To support Time For Change, please visit http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/3623/TIME-FOR-CHANGE or to access the Facebook fan page, visit www.facebook.com/JustLikeLou.

  Photo composite by Shawn McAfee/UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies

by Bradley Beck 

Student Multimedia Reporter

 YOUNG FILMMAKERS

Trent Hilborn (l) and Mark Mazur (r) look over the script during filming of their new short film CYCLE. Photo by Tah Hoffmann.

UW Oshkosh student filmmakers Trent Hilborn and Mark Mazur are no strangers to world of film making. Between them, they have worked on more than 60 films, three of which they co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced.

On April 7, they will host the premiere of their latest collaboration, CYCLE, at UW Oshkosh's Reeve Memorial Union Theatre.

In CYCLE, Hilborn and Mazur tell a story of a scientist, trapped in perpetual grief, who is pushed  to the edge by his eternal need for redemption. Abandoning moral uncertainty, the scientist attempts to be the first to create life without reproduction.

Award Winners

Hilborn and Mazur achieved significant achievement for their previous short film SURFACE that looked at the world without an ozone layer.  After its release, the film won “Best Student Film: Gold Level,” at the Oregon Film Awards.  SURFACE was also featured as on official selection of nine other film festivals.

Trent Hilborn and Mark Mazur on the Cycle set. Photo by Tah Hoffman.

SURFACE also caught the attention of Academy Award Winning Filmmaker Michael Moore.  Moore personally selected the film to screen at his 2010 Traverse City Film Festival. The trip to Traverse City served as inspiration for the duo. “When Mark and I were driving to Traverse City, we brainstormed for 4 or 5 hours before we finally found the key element of the story. Then we expanded it from there," Hilborn said. The film-making duo also enlisted the help of music professor Andre Gaskins, a professional cellist and the Director of Orchestral Activities and Cello at UW Oshkosh.

FILM AND MUSIC

Gaskins composed and performed original music in the 20-minute film, which stars UW Oshkosh students Matthew Scales, Jessica Westlund and Gaskins' 7-year-old son, Alden.

"Having worked and collaborated extensively with Mark and Trent as the composer for this film, I would like to emphasize how talented I believe these students are and how exciting it is to know that this is their second film to premiere on campus, prior to their upcoming graduation in May," Gaskins says.

Mazur is equally laudatory of Gaskin's work on the film. "Going in we knew that Andre would be able to make a solid score that can add to the story Trent and I were trying to tell, but he absolutely knocked it out of the park," Mazur says. "He took the film to a whole new level. After watching Cycle with Andre's music, it just brings life to the film, and I couldn't imagine the movie without it."

Mark Mazur and Trent Hilborn. Photo by Shawn McAfee/UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies.

Cycle marks the second time that Gaskins, Hilborn and Mazur joined efforts on a project. The first was Airboat Rescue 1: When the Ice Breaks, a short documentary by journalism instructor Grace Lim. That film was shot and edited by Hilborn and Mazur and scored by Gaskins., who also performed on the soundtrack.

WORKING AS A TEAM

CYCLE is the third short film from team Mazur and Hilborn, who describe their relationship as symbiotic, a lot of give and take. Mazur said their creative process allows them to “weed out a lot of bad ideas and come out with a much better final product.”  Their collaborative effort, along with a few dozen student crew members and local actors, help tell the tale of a disturbed brilliant scientist.

Hilborn says the process of getting a film from idea to premiere can be a long and arduous one. However, the one of the payoffs come when the audience sees  his and Mazur's vision on the big screen.

 “I want the audience to be able to see the film as enjoyable and entertaining," Hilborn says. "But I also want them to dissect the film afterward to see all of the elements and themes that we interspersed throughout the narrative.”

 For more information of CYCLE, visit www.cyclethefilm.com

 

VIDEO

In this short video interview, Trent Hilborn and Mark Mazur, co-directors of the short film Cycle, talk about the collaboration process in making films. The interview was conducted by Bradley Beck and Grace Lim. The B-roll of the Cycle film shoot was provided by Hilborn and Mazur.

Faculty:

Grace Lim, lecturer, journalism

Class:

Writing for the Media

Description:

While the Iraq War is being fought halfway around the world, the students in Grace Lim's Spring 2009 Writing for the Media class found relevancy right here on campus. They found students and alumni who have already seen the war firsthand in the Middle East or are awaiting the order to serve abroad. In one semester, these student journalists produced the War: Through Their Eyes multimedia project, which included an 80-page full-color book, a series of podcasts and a photo exhibit. War: Through Their Eyes gave 16 University of Wisconsin Oshkosh student soldiers and Marines a forum to tell the world why they enlisted during a time of war, what they did and what they felt at the front lines. The project garnered state and national attention and culminated with a May 15, 2009 exhibit opening, which showcased the photographs taken by UW Oshkosh student photographer Amber Patrick, the podcasts, the articles and the videos. The exhibit runs through September 2009 at Steinhilber Gallery's site in the second floor of Reeve Union.

The following videos are also available for download to your iPod through UW Oshkosh iTunesU (requires iTunes).

Video:

On Sept. 18, highlights of the War: Through Their Eyes student journalism project were exhibited at the 2009 WACADA Conference. The exhibit included 15 photographs and a video about the making of the project. About 200 people attended the Going Global: Advising Our Diverse Students conference, which was held at the Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wis.

Watch what Angela Victor, WACADA conference planning committee member and UW Oshkosh Academic Advisor,  had to say about the exhibit.

The project reached an audience beyond campus grounds. Three students wrote articles that were published on ABCNews.com and Oshkosh Northwestern devoted a Sunday frontpage to the War: Through their Eyes project.

ABC War Stories (PDF)

Northwestern Article (PDF)

Related Links:

• War: Through Their Eyes site
• War: Through Their Eyes - The Podcasts on iTunesU
• Media Coverage on the War: Through Their Eyes project

Contact:

Grace Lim

Earth Day 2010: Dr. Jim Feldman stands next to the pile of campus trash, which he and his students will sort to see what could have been recycled, composted or reused.

Talking Trash with
Dr. Jim Feldman

Dr. Jim Feldman is an assistant professor of Environmental Students and History and the acting director of the Environmental Studies program at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. In Spring 2010, Feldman taught a Special Topics: Campus Sustainability course in which his students conducted an audit of the  university's solid waste stream. In this Q & A with COLS Special  Reports Producer Grace Lim, Feldman shares what he and his students have learned from studying trash.

1. First of all, what attracted you to the field of  environmental studies? Were you the kid always going after people who litter?

Environmental Studies allowed me to combine two long-standing interests—nature and social action. I’ve always enjoyed being outside. When I was a child, I attended a summer camp in northern Wisconsin, and returned to that camp to lead wilderness canoeing and hiking trips for many years as a young adult. Those were some of the most formative experiences of my life, and I knew that I wanted a career that would let me continue to think about—and be in—nature. At the same time, I always knew that I wanted to try to make a difference in the world. I get to do that in two ways—by teaching about subjects that I care about, and also through my research on wilderness and national park service policy. 

2. The phrase "going green" is such a catch phase these days. How do you get people to even care anymore?
You get people to care by getting them to realize that this stuff affects them personally. The food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the trash that we throw away—all of these things affect us at a personal level. When people start to pay attention to things at a personal level—to realize their own connections to the world around them—then they start to care. And then they start to take action.

3. Also the word "sustainability" is thrown about. What exactly is sustainability?
Sustainability can mean a whole lot of things. For most people, it means “being green” or caring about nature. But I think it means a whole lot more than that. At a minimum, it means recognizing the interconnections between our environmental, social, and economic systems. And I think that for a university sustainability means something in particular. You don’t go to college to learn prescriptive behaviors like “you should recycle more” or “you should buy organic food.” Sustainability needs to mean something more than this. To be sustainable, we need to learn to act in ways that are not just environmentally responsible, but also in ways that make our communities socially just and economically secure. In a university context—in a classroom—sustainability is a framework for the analysis of the complicated social, economic, and environmental problems that we face. Sustainability can provide a way to understand these problems, and respond effectively to them.

Page 1 2  | Next

In the Bag

Will Anderson, 27, sports the uniform of most third-year nursing students—hospital scrubs. He carries with him a sand-colored military issued backpack crammed with back-breaking textbooks. When other students grumble about lugging the bulky textbooks from class to class, Anderson smiles quietly. He knows how good he has it now, because not so long ago, he patrolled the Afghan desert lugging loads of combat gear on his back.

I weighed everything on me once. I’m not a very big guy. If I was out on the ground with my large bag in the truck it would be somewhere around 100 or 110 pounds, which literally doubled my weight.

In the bag, I’d have my vest, my eye protection, my weapon or two—my 9mm and my M16. All of that with the body armor was about 60 pounds. I carried one pack of medical supplies that usually stayed in our truck. I carried things like multiple liters of fluid in case someone was bleeding out, extra tourniquets, a hand suction device, different breathing apparatuses, and various drugs.

To read the entire story, please download this PDF.

War: Through Their Eyes, Vol. 2, Warriors & Nurses, a student/faculty multimedia project that focuses on the veterans in the College of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Warriors & Nurses are the stories of the students and alumni who have seen war in the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts in the Middle East, and yet have found their way into a field of healing.

To read the entire 80-page book, please download this PDF. Warning, this is a large file.