A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
ASPIRE Week will take place April 15 to 20.
Get excited because UMW SGA is excited to announce our second annual ASPIRE Week! ASPIRE week is a week to celebrate UMW community values spelled out in the letters ASPIRE! ASPIRE Week will be held April 15 to 20, so please mark the date in your calendars. We will see you then!
Created by StoryCorps, ‘One Small Step’ is an effort to remind the country of the humanity in all of us, even those with whom we disagree. The initiative brings strangers with different political views together to record a 50-minute conversation—not to debate politics, but to learn who we are as people.On Tuesday, March 12, you should have received an email invitation to participate in a short survey about your experiences and knowledge of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content, such as images, text, music, or speech, based on existing data. Some examples are applications like Chat GPT, Dall-E, Copilot, and Gemini.
Your participation in the survey is at the request of the AI Working Group, a cross-disciplinary team of faculty and staff who are exploring the opportunities and challenges of AI at UMW. It will take approximately 5 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous. Your responses will help us understand the current state and future directions of generative AI use in teaching, learning, and work at UMW.
We thank you for your time and input,
The AI Working Group
UMW Campus Community,
The Apogee project to upgrade the UMW MyResNet network is now complete as of Friday, March 1, ahead of schedule. Students in the residence halls need to create a login via the new portal to access the upgraded service. Single sign-on is available, so students can use their umw.edu NetID. In addition, the Apogee wireless network is available to residential students outside of the residence halls. Occasional re-authentication will be required using single sign-on.
For visitors to the residence halls, a guest portal is also available for temporary access up to six hours at a time. Residents should log-in using the new portal to access the faster internet speeds. Instructional posters will be available in each residence halls, and students learn more by reviewing this video of how to connect to the upgraded services.
The wireless network upgrade features faster internet speeds enhanced to 150/50 Mbps with up to 10 devices on the network simultaneously, an increase from prior networks. Residents have a user-based personal area network (PAN) and can connect wireless printers, gamer devices and IoT devices, and these devices should be able to see each other, just like a home network. Users also have an easy PSK (personal share key) for device onboarding.
As part of the service, Apogee continues to offer one click call/chat for student support and specialized gaming support. If you have any questions or issues with the ResNet by Apogee services, contact their 24/7/365 support center at 877-478-8808. They can help you add devices to your account (printers, phones, game consoles, etc.).
If you are experiencing any problems with Apogee Support not resolving your issues, please contact the UMW IT Help Desk to let us know.
Hall CheshireChief Information Officerhcheshir@umw.edu
Seacobeck Hall
At its 69th annual membership meeting on Saturday, March 9, the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation Inc. (HFFI) recognized people, businesses, and institutions that have made outstanding contributions to preserving the unique cultural heritage and historic built environment of the Fredericksburg area.
UMW’s Seacobeck renovation project picked up an award for recognizing the act of preservation through the rehabilitation of historically significant resources in Fredericksburg. Seacobeck received the E. Boyd Graves Preservation Award, named for one of HFFI’s founding members who played an instrumental role in protecting, preserving, and adaptively reusing some of Fredericksburg’s most recognizable historic landmarks
According to the HFFI press release:
In the UMW project, the university undertook a historically sensitive rehabilitation project to adaptively reuse the 1931 Seacobeck Hall designed by architect Charles Robinson. The project converted the former dining hall into a mix of “classrooms and lab space with the latest technologies, faculty offices, collaboration and group work rooms, student organization spaces, a large assembly space, a curriculum lab, and makerspace,” according to architects at the Richmond firm Hanbury. Members of Hanbury’s design team and the Whiting-Turner Contracting Company joined UMW Capital Outlay Director Gary Hobson in accepting HFFI’s E. Boyd Graves Preservation Award, presented by Professor Michael Spencer, author of UMW’s Campus Preservation Plan and acting Chair of the Department of Historic Preservation.
HFFI’s Board of Directors is pleased to honor these exceptional individuals and organizations for their unwavering commitment to preserving Fredericksburg’s rich history, architectural legacy, and cultural landscape. Their dedication serves as inspiration to us all, reminding us of the important ways that historic preservation nurtures our collective memory and challenges us to learn from the past.
For more information, visit the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation Inc. website.
Associate Professors of Communication, Dr. Adria Goldman and Dr. Elizabeth Johnson-Young, and Assistant Professor of Communication, Dr. Emily Crosby, presented at the Eastern Communication Association’s Annual Conference in Cambridge, MA. Their panel, titled “Social Media and the Changing Current of Health Messaging and Debates,” focused on research surrounding discussions of health, particularly related to diet and weight, in social media outlets. Joined by colleagues from Bunker Hill Community College and Norfolk State University, the panelists each took different topics and methodologies to explore this important area of research.
Dr. Johnson-Young’s presentation, “Sugar, Snacks, and Weight: An Examination of Posts and Parent Reactions to the Challenges of Nutritional Health Norms on the Growing Intuitive Eaters Instagram” discussed a qualitative content analysis of a popular instagram influencer’s posts and user comments. The research is rooted both health behavior theory and non-evaluative and trust-based communication around food and nutrition. Preliminary findings show a variety of themes regarding reactions to the influencer’s, Dr. Taylor Arnold, posts from anger and resistance to relief and excitement.
Dr. Goldman’s research presentation, titled “#SocialSupport: Examining the Informative and Emotional Functions of Bariatric Surgery Support Groups on Facebook” investigates the social support functions of bariatric surgery support groups. Taking a qualitative thematic analysis, this research investigates the instrumental and emotional functions identified in social support research, applying these to the specific support needs demonstrated in the literature and in the groups for bariatric surgery.
Dr. Crosby’s presentation, titled “The Digital Cult of Thinness: Critically Engaging Ozempic “Success Stories” on Social Media,” investigates the discourse surrounding Ozempic in social media platforms. Employing feminist rhetorical criticism informed by visual rhetoric scholarship, Dr. Crosby analyzes posts and commentary to identify themes and conventions that emerge from Ozempic weight loss “success stories” on social media. The aim of this research is to contribute to communication scholarship by defining a digital Cult of Thinness based on current social media conventions that promote injectable weight loss drugs for women.
James Farmer Multicultural Center Assistant Director Chris Williams
James Farmer Multicultural Center Assistant Director Chris Williams received praise in a recent issue of Leisure Group Travel. The article, titled “Fredericksburg’s Civil Rights Trail: A Story of People,” says that enough cannot be said about the partnership between the City of Fredericksburg and the University of Mary Washington. The authors of the trail’s narrative are Victoria Matthews (City of Fredericksburg Economic Development and Tourism) and Chris Williams (University of Mary Washington’s James Farmer Multicultural Center). The University Geography Department and Historic Preservation Department students and faculty made significant contributions developing the story maps, collecting oral histories and archival information. Read more.
Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Communication and Digital Studies Anand Rao
Professor of Communication Anand Rao co-presented a webinar about AI for Small Businesses on April 3, 2024. My co-presenter was Steve Gladis and the webinar was hosted by the George Mason Enterprise Center. The title was “Level 2: Building Chatbots for Small Business.” The webinar is part of a series offered by Rao and Gladis. The third webinar will be hosted in May by the Mason Enterprise Center.
Jason Robinson, Professor of Digital Art and Filmmaking
Light House Studio will hold its second annual Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival on April 6 at the Vinegar Hill Theatre. The festival was co-founded by Rachel Lane, Jason Robinson and Anna Hogg. Lane is the program director at Light House Studio, Robinson teaches digital art and filmmaking at the University of Mary Washington and Hogg teaches studio art foundations and cinematography at UVA. Read more.
Eric G Lorentzen, Professor of English
Eric G Lorentzen, Professor of English, published “A Wisdom of the Head and a Wisdom of the Heart: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture” in the recent “Dickens and His Publics” special issue of Dickens Quarterly. The article examines the two sections of the Fall 2022 course that Lorentzen taught for the first time at UMW, English 251TT: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture, and the cultural studies methodologies that allowed his classes to connect with the ongoing influence that the author has in the twenty-first century, particularly with regard to social justice. Lorentzen argues that only by recognizing that Dickens’s novels not only teach us a great deal about Victorian England, but also about our lives in the here and now, can we remain vibrantly one of Dickens’s “publics.” We must transcend the usual “wisdom of the head,” the traditional academic study of his novels, and connect with the “wisdom of the heart” as well, the meaningful student-centered ways that his texts resonate in actual everyday lives – pedagogical advice that Dickens himself famously proffered in Hard Times. Lorentzen is preparing to teach the course for the second time, with two sections once again being offered for Fall 2024.