Rosalyn Cooperman, associate professor of political science and co-author of “Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics,” was recognized as one of this year’s recipients of the American Political Science Association’s Jack Walker Award. This award honors a paper published within the last two years that contributes to the discipline’s understanding of political organizations and parties.
On Monday, June 25, Curtiss Grymala, University Webmaster at University of Mary Washington, presented at the regional HighEdWeb conference on the main campus of Syracuse University. Grymala presented a session called “The 10-Minute WordPress Shortcode,” in which he briefly explained how to create a new shortcode (a keyword entered into the WordPress editor that gets automatically replaced with content when the page is shown to visitors) and how to turn that shortcode into a widget.
Although the session was fairly technical and is usually presented to an audience that’s familiar with writing PHP code, the audience for this particular presentation consisted of social media managers, content managers, administrators, library employees, developers (coders), designers and more.
During the session, Grymala was accused of “melting a few brains,” but the overall feedback from the audience was very positive. The session was presented in a way that, although extremely technical, was basic enough to at least hold the attention of the majority of the audience.
After the presentation, members of the audience expressed an appreciation for the unintended lessons taught in the session, including a basic intro to some PHP coding standards and concepts, a basic introduction to the WordPress application programming interface (API), and even helping to demonstrate that, although WordPress is extremely simple for editors and content managers to use, harnessing the full flexibility and feature set of WordPress requires coders and developers that are familiar with the way the system works.
Grymala also presented the 10-Minute WordPress Shortcode session at the 2012 dotEduGuru Summit, and will be presenting it again at the regional HighEdWeb conference in Little Rock, AR in July. The slides from his presentation are available online.
Kevin Bartram, director of the UMW Philharmonic Orchestra, will be a featured guest on Classics Radio’s “Fine Arts This Week” to discuss the Philharmonic’s upcoming performances at the American Music Concert Series and the Independence Day Spectacular concert.
The interview will air Saturday, June 30 at 8 a.m. and Sunday, July 1 at 1 p.m. on WWED FM 89.5 Fredericksburg and WWEM FM 91.7 Lynchburg.
A concert by the UMW Faculty Brass Quintet, of which Bartram is a member, will be broadcast on Classics Radio on Friday, June 22 at 9 a.m., Saturday, June 23 at noon and 5 p.m. and Sunday, June 24 at noon. The quintet’s recent performance at Historic Market Square in Fredericksburg was captured by Classics Radio as the group performed music by contemporary American composers including George Gershwin, John Phillip Sousa and Leonard Bernstein. The ensemble features Bartram and UMW adjunct instructors Jim Ford and Gary Carper, along with musicians David Mersiovsky and Jeremy Cucco.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies, delivered the lecture “Virginia’s Candidate Selection Process: Examining Recent Primaries and Conventions” at the American Legion Boys’ State of Virginia in Lynchburg on Monday, June 18.
Sally Scott, director of disability resources, was an invited panelist on the topic of “The Future of Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities” at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 14.
The Joint Annual Meeting (JAM) Conference is held each year for principle investigators of grant projects within the NSF Division of Human Resource Development. Along with co-presenters Dr. Jane Theirfield-Brown of the University of Connecticut and Scott Lissner of Ohio State University, the panel provided commentary on emerging issues and recommendations for future research in the area of STEM education and postsecondary students with disabilities.
