Dr. Jennifer Frick-Ruppert has been selected to head Brevard College’s newly restructured Appalachian Center for Environmental Education (ACEE). Frick-Ruppert, an associate professor of ecology and environmental studies, was named executive director of the ACEE which will serve as the campus umbrella entity for the Pisgah Forest Institute (PFI) and other environmental programs.

Frick-Ruppert joined Brevard’s faculty in 1997 where she has instructed courses in natural history and field biology, biodiversity, aquatic ecosystems, as well as a new interdisciplinary course entitled “environmental perspectives.”  In 2004, she was the Brevard College recipient of the prestigious United Methodist Church Award for Exemplary Teaching.  She frequently provides popular public lectures on the environment as well as the ecology of the Appalachians.  She is recognized for writing a column entitled, “Appalachian Almanac,” for the Transylvania Times and has recently written a book under the same title on the natural history of the Appalachians. 

PFI is gearing up for the first of its six summer workshops, Earth and Environmental Science for Elementary School Teachers, which begins June 18^th. Over 110 educators are currently registered for the six workshops. The topics of the other workshops include medicinal, poisonous, and invasive plant species of Western North Carolina, recycling and composting in the classroom, Sustainability, Elements of Nature, and Earth and Environmental Science for Middle and High School Teachers. A few slots are still open in some of these workshops, but some are full. To register or receive information on the workshops, visit the PFI website www.brevard.edu/pfi

All the Institute's 2006 summer employees, Executive Director Jennifer Frick - Ruppert, Acting Operations Coordinator Jessica Sharp, Program Assistants Jayne Hall, David Funderburk, and Aaron Motley, and Senior Advisor Bob Sweeney, successfully completed the Red Cross CPR Recertification Course. That training better prepared the staff to handle emergencies that could arise during the workshops or elsewhere in the community.

On 5 June the Brevard City Counsel recognized USDA Forest Service employee Cindy Carpenter for being named the 2005 Nature Interpreter of the Year for the entire USA. Ms. Carpenter, who works out of the Cradle of Forestry, has ably led classroom discussion and field exercises in numerous PFI workshops. Congratulations, Cindy!

PFI's website is located at www.brevard.edu/pfi.

KceeI is certainly in full swing this week with the start of our first week-long course, Watershed Explorers (June 18 – 23). The course began on a Sunday with registration and check-in at 3:00pm. Following registration, Howard Jennings, Director of KceeI, talked about the history of Keystone College and the Environment as well as the history of KceeI. A pre-assessment was administered and the group was off on a scavenger hunt of Keystone College’s interpretive trails led by Tim Eichner, Director of the Water Resource Center. This always proves to be a popular activity among the teachers.

It was now time for the opening evening banquet of the course. Keystone College’s food service, Sodexho, prepared and served a wonderful menu. It was truly a first class meal. Filmmaker and creative director for WVIA, Greg Matkosky, delivered the keynote address. Greg has a BA in broadcast journalism from Penn State University and an MFA in cinematography from the American Film Institute. He has been working in TV and Film his whole career and has a very impressive resume to prove it.

In 1998, Greg co-founded the production company United Studios of America. Among the USA productions he wrote, co-produced and directed are the historical documentary Stories from the Mines (2001), an Emmy-nominated nationally broadcast feature-length PBS drama about the epic turn-of-the-century human rights struggle of immigrant coal miners, and An Empty Place at the Table

(2003), the 2004 New York International Film and Video Festival winner for Best Social Documentary narrated by Susan Sarandon, about an art exhibit memorializing women and children murdered in acts of domestic violence.

Most recently, Greg photographed, wrote, directed and co-produced the Telly Silver Award winning feature length environmental documentary Looking to the River, which explores the contemporary issues affecting the Chesapeake Bay and the history and heritage of it’s principal tributary, the Susquehanna River, the longest river on America’s eastern seaboard.

Greg briefly introduced the film before showing it to the group and finished with a question and answer period. The teachers were greatly impressed with this film as well as Greg’s passion and professionalism in promoting it. A special thanks to Greg Matkosky as well as WVIA for providing DVD copies of Looking to the River for each participant.

KceeI is very happy to have Tanya Bruce with us this week. Tanya is the new Grants Administrator for the Education and Research Consortium of the Western Carolinas Inc. She is staying on-campus and participating in the course this week. KceeI welcomes her.

Stay tuned to the next newsletter for more about the Watershed Explorers course.

Just a reminder…

• To view the continuous water quality monitoring sites , click on the following link: http://www.waterontheweb.org/data/index.html
• If you would like to view the Northeast, check out the live “Streaming Camera” at www.atlas.keystone.edu/video.htm
• KceeI’s brochure may be viewed at its website in a printable Adobe PDF form at http://www.kceei.keystone.edu/Documents/2006/brochure.pdf

KceeI’s website is located at www.KceeI.keystone.edu.

Pacific Forest Institute

For updated information on the Pacific Forest Institute, please visit our website at:

http://www.jessup.edu/academics/pacificforestinstitute.

The computing stakeholders meeting and roundtable hosted by ERC Broadband on June 6, 2006 was a good opportunity for community members to learn more about the ERC’s computing infrastructure and discuss ongoing and upcoming technological needs. Current components of the high performance computing center include 50 CPUs, 23 TB of storage, a fully encrypted disaster recovery solution, a secure co-location facility and the fiber optic network.  

The meeting was attended by personnel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL), the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI), Buncombe County, City of Asheville, Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College, Furman University, UNC-Asheville, Western Carolina University, Baron Advanced Meteorological Services (BAMS), Education and Research Services (ERS).

Each organization discussed current and upcoming projects as well as computing needs. As a result, the group had the opportunity to realize the synergies of computing-based projects that were underway and planned, thus providing opportunities for collaboration. The discussion also afforded the group an opportunity to discuss combining requirements to share the costs of the infrastructure across multiple projects, making it less expensive for a single project. In particular, one of the shared needs that was identified is storage. For a number of the stakeholders’ projects, storage needs are coming to the forefront of the requirements. In fact, this holds true for the entire region for project growth. For this reason, ERC Broadband will continue looking for funding sources to purchase more storage and other infrastructure.

The meeting and resulting discussions clearly demonstrated the need for a robust center to meet the area’s technological growth in both the public and private sectors. ERC Broadband is pleased to play a vital role in the economic development of the western Carolinas

ERC Broadband’s website is located at: www.ercbroadband.org.

DePaul University

DePaul and Courtney Vaccaro from Best Practice High School participated in the Ninth Annual Collaboratory Project Symposium on Northwestern University's Evanston campus. The presentation was on visual literacy using resources from the Library of Congress. The presentation was well received and DePaul had several follow-up requests for presentations at two universities, University of Illinois at Chicago and Chicago State. Also, several contacts were made from local schools. The session at University of Illinois at Chicago will be with their TITUS Summer Institute. Sixty participants will attend the plenary session. There will be two hands-on sessions in the afternoon. The request from Chicago State is to present at a history class during the 2006-07 school year.

DePaul finished several workshop sessions at the end May. Although teachers were very busy with the end of the school year tasks, they still made time to attend the last workshop sessions.

DePaul is ready for the teacher education faculty summer session. Each faculty member participating in the summer session will be provided a laptop once all the deliverables are produced.

DePaul’s AAM program Website is located at: http://aam.depaul.edu/.

Governors State University

After 65 hours of training last month, the professors at GSU who participated in the Elite Level Training reconvened to present their projects. One assessment method used during this session is known as “Critical Friends.” Each participant is given a form and assigned two colleagues to constructively evaluate their peers. Participants find that the comments from the instructors, along with those of their colleagues, offer them valuable insights into how they can improve their projects.

The participants in this group were primarily from outside the College of Education. There was some trepidation on the part of the instructors about moving outside their level dealing with teachers and College of Education faculty. The end results could not have been more satisfying. Either the level of instruction has improved over time or this was just a phenomenal group. Highlights of some of the projects produced are offered below as a sample. The title of one project, Ecofeminist Literature, is enough to indicate the high caliber of the projects that were posted online.

Ecofeminist Literature: Ecofeminist literature exposes structures of power, domination, and exploitation, and makes readers more aware of the interconnectedness of life. Once readers begin to see the importance of taking personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions, they are inspired to create a better life for themselves and their future. This project offers students an Ecofeminist lens through which to view, explore, and expand their own lives and world through literature, focusing primarily on five contemporary novels.

Copyright Issues in Performance Technology: Performance technologists often create new works to enhance employees' performances to optimal levels. At times (depending on their contracts with their clients), they may own the rights to their creations and at other times, the copyrights belong to others. The benefits of learning about copyright laws are to keep you out legal harm and out of court. Many instructional designers are under a false belief that they can incorporate images, audios and the like into their presentations without permission. This assumption is incorrect.

Literary Backdrops: Exploring the American Milieu between 1865 and 1945: The compilation of primary photos, news articles, and original documents from the different literary periods serve as a mosaic of people, places and events relative to the literature we are reading. The goal, when teaching a survey course, is that students will recognize and appreciate the text as an expression of its cultural context and will explore internal literary themes against their external historical backdrops. However, it is not only the predominant people and events that are explored, but the lesser known characters and circumstances that make up our American literary backdrop. Students will research the underlying themes found in the assigned literature such as Willa Cather's Neighbor Rosicky and the immigrant farmer.

The Development of Psychoanalytic Theory in Historical and Cultural Context: This project will engage students in a discovery of the early life of Sigmund Freud and his later professional life. By linking to the Library of Congress and other online sources, we will explore Freud's personal and professional development. We will generate questions and hypothesize about the influence of culture and historical events on Freud's life and theory. This site is designed to be a supplemental resource for counselors, psychologists, social workers, or any individual who is interested in human behavior and motivation. It is the hope that the questions proposed here will stimulate interest in the development of all counseling theories and that the visitors to this site will be encouraged to think of how their own life experiences have influenced their own beliefs about behavior and motivation.

The GSU staff is gearing up to teach the summer workshop series. Preparing binders and adapting the wonderful materials that Ed Shearin and AnneMarie Walter (from the AAM program at Mars Hill College) provided when they taught at GSU last summer have kept the staff busy. And, as always, the software moved to a new version, so that means rewriting the directions and capturing a whole new set of screen shots. Get the popcorn out next month – there should be a set of 25 first-run releases of new digital stories to watch!

The GSU staff had to deal with one really tough decision in late May, that being the task of deciding who would be accepted from the pool of 125 applicants for the Elite Level Training for the 2007 school year. It is so hard to disappoint 75 of these very interested, highly motivated teachers while at the same time making 50 teachers very happy. Note, that in the past, the trainings have been limited to 20 teachers. In order to accommodate a few more teachers and touch all 21 districts partnering with GSU, the sections were raised to 25 participants per section.

Governors State’s AAM program Website is located at: http://aam.govst.edu/.

Loyola University

Loyola University – and indeed the entire AAM program – will be saddened to lose the services of AAM Director Dr. Joy Rogers, who retires at the end of June. In addition to serving four years as Associate Dean of Education, Joy has been a member of the Loyola faculty since 1972. She has led the AAM program since 2003. During Joy’s tenure as AAM Director, the Loyola AAM program trained nearly 250 teachers and faculty members. The entire AAM program wishes Joy well on her well-deserved retirement!

Assuming the role of AAM Program Co-Directors will be Dr. Marcus Hughes and Michelle Fry. Both Marcus and Michelle have been part of the AAM program for the past several years.

Loyola’s AAM Website is located at: http://www.luc.edu/schools/education/aam/index.shtml.

Illinois State University

The ISU-AAM team is in full swing with its summer institutes. The program has offered four, four-day institutes as well as an online option for our professional development program. The online option has attracted teachers and media specialists from a large geographic area of Illinois.

The highlight of our first summer institute was two participants from Thailand. The Thai librarians visiting Illinois State University’s Milner Library choose to spend time learning more about the LOC and its digital primary resources.

Staff are currently preparing for a presentation to a course offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of their ALA-accredited master of science degree entitled, “Information Books and Resources for Youth.” The presentation will be conducted via the Internet from the Champaign campus.

ISU’s AAM program Website is located at: http://www.mlb.ilstu.edu/aam.

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

The SIUC Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) cohort began their summer studies the second week of June.  Seventeen pre-service teachers are enrolled in EDUC 550: An Adventure of the American Mind.  Course topics include an Introduction to American Memory and the Library of Congress, using primary sources in teaching, searching and downloading primary source materials from American Memory, copyright issues, and downloading and using images from American Memory.  This cohort will collaborate with a 2006 in-service cohort on activities based on primary source materials that have been identified and downloaded from LOC.  Collaborative activities will include work with incorporating materials adapted from the Learning Page for use during the MAT students teaching semester and in the in-service teacher classrooms. 

SIUC AAM has recruited 22 in-service teachers for enrollment in the three-hour graduate level course, EDUC 550: An Adventure of the American Mind.  Emphasis in the course is on using primary sources in teaching, searching and downloading primary source materials from American Memory, and downloading and using images from American Memory.  In-service teachers are expected to develop detailed lesson plans which address Illinois Learning Standards and that incorporate primary source material they have identified from the Library. 

SIUC AAM staff continue providing classroom guest lectures regarding LOC digital primary source materials.  Staff have also been involved in presentations for undergraduate education majors including activities using the materials available through the Learning Page.

AAM Director Jerry Hostetler will present” Digitized Primary Sources at the Library of Congress” for 75-100 in-service teachers expected to attend a Teachers’ Academy of Life-Long Learning (T.A.L.L.) workshop in June.

SIU-C’s AAM program Website is located at: http://aam.siu.edu/.

Quincy University

Quincy University began its AAM workshops in May with a Faculty Institute. Another institute for QU faculty was held June 5th to 9th. These institutes gave an overview of materials available on the Library's Web site and emphasize the use of digitized primary sources.

The faculty were fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience video conference sessions with personnel at the Library. Video conferencing sessions on searching the LOC and the use of primary sources were a special treat for all participants. Two additional days were spent searching the treasures in American Memory and other various parts of the Library's offerings. All through the institute, and primarily on the last day, emphasis was placed on the wealth of teaching materials created on the site and the use of embedded links for teaching, such as "Collection Connections." The faculty will now create projects based on these materials.

Soon additional workshops will be held for K-12 faculty in Adams and Pike counties. In the fall, it is projected, sessions for teaching future teachers to use the Library's digitized primary sources will be woven into courses for teacher candidates.

Quincy’s AAM program Website is located at:

http://www.aamprogram.org/introduction/aam_partners_detail.aspx?id=29.