Category: Professional Notes

Margaret A. Mi, professor in the College of Business’ Department of Management and Marketing, has received the O’Hara Leadership Award from the Direct Marketing Association of Washington’s (DMAW) Education Foundation. She was chosen for the recognition from a field of marketing faculty from Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The award was presented at the association’s annual gala in December at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. The organization is the largest regional direct marketing association in the United States, according to its website. Its members include end-users, vendors, suppliers, agencies and educators in the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas and central Virginia.

The award states that Mi has actively participated in the DMAW Educational Foundation’s Professors’ institute for more than twelve years. Mi created an e-commerce course, funded by a grant she received from the foundation, that was the first advertising-related course offered at UMW. She developed a prototype course for adoption by other colleges. For years, Mi drove a van of students to the foundation’s University Day.  Due to her encouragement, one of her students sought and received a scholarship from the foundation, which helped the student earn a master’s in marketing communications, leading the student to a job in direct marketing and to a Ph.D. program in order to teach direct marketing.

In addition, Mi presented a workshop on sports marketing at the American Institute of Higher Education’s fifth international conference recently in Orlando, Fla. Mi was one of two submissions selected to present workshops.  The workshop was an application exercise for educators interested in teaching a sports marketing course. Participants emulated a sports team, completing project components required of Mi’s UMW marketing students.  These components included developing and implementing marketing strategy and plan for a new team.  Teams used research data for Nashville, Tenn., which has no major league baseball team. Data included city demographics, transportation infrastructure, per capita income, venue (new or current), and parking possibilities.  Teams selected players and coaches and listed their salaries.  In addition, teams created team names, logos, colors, mascots, licensed and branded merchandise, ticket and merchandise pricing, special promotions with charities, sponsorships, venue-naming rights, public relations, and electronic media use.

David Cain, distinguished professor of religion, presented a paper, “‘The Gleam of an Indication’—Adventures of the Text,” served as a commentator and addressed a “Pastor’s Workshop” on Kierkegaard’s relation to ministry at the sixth International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., in June. He set up a Kierkegaard photographic exhibit for the Søren Kierkegaard Society during the American Academy of Religion’s 100th annual meeting in Atlanta in October. Cain’s essay “Why Kierkegaard Still Matters” was published in Why Kierkegaard Matters: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert L. Perkins, and the essay “ ‘But What Have You Done Here!’:  Kierkegaard’s Interesting Loss of the Interesting” was published in the International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View.

Debra L. Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave an invited presentation on community service-learning in statistics at the eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in July.  Her presentation, “Combining On- and Off-Campus Service-Learning in a Statistics Methods Course,” described how students in MATH 210 Statistical Methods provide statistical consulting for students enrolled in Biology Professor Kathy Loesser-Casey’s BIOL 385 Human Physiology.  ICOTS is held every four years and is organized by the International Association for Statistical Education.  According to the conference website, the main purpose of ICOTS is to “give statistics educators and professionals around the world the opportunity to exchange information, ideas and experiences, to present recent innovation and research in the field of statistics education, and to expand their range of collaborators.”

Jeffrey McClurken, associate professor and chair of history and American studies, co-organized, with the Fredericksburg Area Museum and the National Park Service, and moderated a speakers’ forum on secession—the local kickoff event of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. About 600 people attended the November event, which was combined with a tour of historic Brompton’s grounds:  http://www.famcc.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&view=details&id=77:years-of-anguish-lecture-series

McClurken co-organized the Archiving Social Media workshop held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in October.  A number of UMW faculty and staff participated. Read about the workshop at http://archivingsocialmedia.org.

McClurken gave the keynote address, “Teaching and Learning with Student-Generated, Online, Creative and Public New Media,” at James Madison University’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference in October. Visit http://sites.jmu.edu/tlt2010/conference-schedule/keynote-speech/

McClurken continues to write for the ProfHacker column in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Check out his posts at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/author/jmcclurken.

McClurken and Tim O’Donnell, associate professor of communication, used TED talks in their freshman seminar in fall 2009, and the magazine FAST COMPANY took note in the recent article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/how-ted-became-the-new-harvard.html?page=0,2

Larry Lehman, professor of mathematics, published the article “Recursive Sequences and Polynomial Congruences” in Involve, a journal dedicated to faculty-student research papers in mathematics.  The article was co-written with Christopher Triola ’09 and is based on an undergraduate research project performed during the 2007 Summer Science Institute at Mary Washington.