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As a former Clinton cabinet member, Dr. Donna Shalala is no stranger to formal events. When she was inaugurated as president at the University of Miami, she could have insisted on a black-tie, invitation-only affair. Instead, a brief ceremony was followed by a street festival with thousands attending. "The goal of the day, in the president's words, was to have fun," says Paula Musto, event co-chair and vice president for university relations. The president and inaugural participants were escorted to the festival by stilt walkers, acrobats, clowns, and jugglers while the university's marching band played junkanoo style. In keeping with Shalala's inauguration theme, "Miami Is the World," the festival appealed to South Florida's multi-ethnic population with foods ranging from Cuban and Lebanese cuisine to hamburgers and pizza. The event coincided with UM's 75th anniversary and showcased the newly-redesigned UM Ibis logo. Dr. Shalala hung out with students, faculty, and such visitors as Gov. Jeb Bush, Dawn Lewis of "A Different World," and former UM Heisman Trophy winner Gino Torretta, as well as Shalala's 90-year-old mom, Edna. SRR
Contact Musto at 305-284-5505.
Best
Anti-Tobacco Campaign
No butts about it, Pasco-Hernando Community College is
serious about helping students stop using cigarettes. The amount of smoking
by college students is alarming, says Bob Bade, coordinator of student
services. To extinguish the problem once and for all, the college offered a
15-week smoking cessation clinic that uses a cognitive, behavioral approach
to quitting. It also hosted a Wellness Day in October featuring local health
agencies and fitness games such as an alpine run, a jousting area, and an
obstacle course. This spring, PHCC held Blizzard for Bucks, a game-show
style event with trivia questions about smoking and tobacco. Winners got the
chance to grab up to $250 in a glass booth filled with whirling dollar
bills. Last September, participants in the Butt Clean-Up began a study of
the changes in student smoking habits by tallying the number of butts and
their campus locations. The volunteers will repeat the analysis in April and
make recommendations to college officials about smoking areas to help
enforce the federal Clean Air Act. TB
Best Live Webcast
Ever wish you could watch a master artist at work? Florida
State University writing students had that chance this fall, along with
an audience of millions worldwide, when creative writing professor Robert
Olen Butler hosted "Inside Creative Writing," a live broadcast shown over
the internet and satellite television via DISHNetwork. "Virtually all other
major art forms are such that anyone wishing to learn the art form who
attaches herself to a mentor can actually watch that mentor in the act of
creation," Butler says. "Writers have never been able to actually see in its
full moment-to-moment particularity what it is that their mentors actually
do, until now." The live webcast covered the writing of the short story
"This Is Earl Sandt" from the inception of the idea to the final product,
keystroke by keystroke, as the camera showed Butler's computer monitor and
his microphone recorded him thinking out loud. He wound up each two-hour
segment with a 30-minute question and answer time as viewers e-mailed
questions in from around the world.
Butler, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, says he'd had the idea of doing a live writing broadcast for several years, but the technology has only recently become available. "We were rolling the dice down to the last minute," says Frank Murphy, president of University Communications Group. "It was right down to the wire before we got [the webcast] to work." Butler agrees that the project was a difficult one to put together. "The credit goes to FSU for supporting something so unconventional and expensive," he says.
So what's next for the pioneering professor? A colleague in psychology wants to measure brainwaves during the creative process, so Butler may do it again, only this time wearing electrodes. SRR
Visit www.fsu.edu/butler to see the archived program.
Best Children's Choir
Stetson University's Dr. Ann Small would like to teach
the world to sing. So in 1985, she founded the Stetson University Community
School of the Arts Children's Choir. Her goal for the program was simple: "I
wanted to make an exceptional choral experience available to any child who
wants to be a part of this, regardless of race or gender." Maybe not just
any child, since the choir is audition-only, but the 140 members drawn from
the community certainly have had an exceptional experience lately. It's
business as usual with practice and school for the young singers, but the
choir is more than just a place to sing. "There's a lot of mentoring going
on between the big and little kids, and the music education students at
Stetson are there to help and guide as well," Small says.
The choir was recently invited to be the Young Artists in Residence for the Choral Music Experience Institute in St. Andrews, Scotland. For 10 days, the students were part of the master classes as the conductors learned to conduct, and then, they did a concert at the Church of the Holy Trinity in St. Andrews.
Back home in Deland, the choir is currently preparing for its March concert in Charlotte, NC for the American Choral Directors Association.With all their travels, it's a small world after all. SRR
Contact Claudia Gatewood, director of Stetson's Community School of the Arts at 386-822-8962.
Best "Home" Improvement
RV repair technicians across the U.S. look to Lake City
Community College for training and certification. The college delivers
the training program, the only one of its kind, via a live broadcast to 37
out-of-state and 27 in-state dealerships that can train as many of their
service technicians as they wish. Currently, more than 500 technicians get
training. Master-certified technician Steve Roddy teaches the class, and
students can fax in questions for a live answer during the broadcast. More
than 92 percent of the participants pass the certification tests at the end
of the 60-hour course, and they can continue on with advanced classes.
The one thing the program can't accommodate is walk-in customers with sick RV's. "When we do publicity, people call and volunteer their RV's," says Judy Wilson, administrative assistant to Jim Carr, the director of training. " They tell us this and that is broken, and we have to tell them the program doesn't work that way." SRR
Contact Jim Carr at 386-754-4285.
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