Stephen J. Anspacher, director of Distance Learning and Off Campus Programs, has been involved at Millersville and the entire PASSHE system in deciding the options available as the current PASSHE contract with Blackboard expires this summer.

Last year a committee made up primarily of PASSHE faculty members, including some from Millersville, put together a list of things they would like to see from a new system. After they decided what they would like to see, they submitted a Request For Proposals (RFP) to solicit possible vendors. Eight companies responded to the RFP, including Blackboard, and were evaluated by a team including Mr. Anspacher, faculty, and students from all of the PASSHE schools.

“We looked at the new version of Blackboard, a number of other options, including Desire2Learn which really turned out to be everybody’s first choice” Anspacher said. “It wasn’t even close.”

Almost all previous Blackboard courses have been migrated to the new Desire2Learn (D2L) system, and faculty have been given accounts to learn D2L. “Faculty teaching this summer having been working feverishly to make their courses fit in to the new environment,” Anspacher said.

D2L provides more tools and capabilities in addition to a friendlier user interface for both faculty and students. “The fundamental functions among all these programs are essentially the same,” Anspacher said. “It takes about a third of the number of clicks to get to anything [compared to Blackboard],” and also provides students a “locker” feature which will allow students to store files online.

Another neat feature of D2L is a “pager” function, which will allow students to see any classmates currently on the site and be able to chat with them.

Students will be getting accounts soon and will have an easy way to get help for any problems they run into. In addition to online orientation and tutorials available online, D2L will have a built-in help desk.

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Safety Day will be held Thursday April 8 in the Quad from 2:30-6 p.m. Kelly Mathiesen, Safety Committee chair, is excited to promote this event. “We are holding interactive events such as drunk goggle obstacle courses and condom races to get the students involved,” Mathiesen said.

In addition to these interactive events, other organizations will be promoting awareness with prizes and giveaways that remind students to be safe on campus.

Mathiesen said, “Students should come to this event because it’s a great opportunity to interact with different organizations while learning about safety.”

The Safety Committee works around the year to promote safety awareness. “The committee does this by addressing the concerns of students,” Mathiesen said. The committee also “works closely with the MUPD and Millersville Fire Department,” she said.

Mathiesen and the entire Safety Committee invites all students to come out and be informed about how to be safe on campus. More information can be found on the Facebook page for this event.

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At first, most students were understanding because of the weekend timing of the outage. As Monday rolled around, however, students began to become frustrated.

Sophomore Lauren Bollinger said, “I can see a day or half of a day, but to last all weekend and into the beginning of the week is frustrating and unnecessary.”

Director of Technical Support Services, Veronica Longenecker, explained that the issue was regarding a hardware failure.

Hardware failed, but the backup for the mail server did not operate as expected, “failover did not go as configured,” she said.

This outage required the vendor of the hardware, Sun Microsystems, to be contacted. However, the University’s contract with Sun only allows help Monday through Friday, according to Longenecker.

The student reaction to the issue was varied, from mild to hostile to comical.

As a reporter, I knew this would be a pressing issue if the outage continued and, as an experiment, created a group on Facebook titled “The Great Marauder Mail Outage of 2010.”

I knew that the Help Desk would be inundated with calls, and I wanted to see reactions directly, and possibility divert some of the calls from the Help Desk to the group’s wall.

“I don’t just use it for things related to school,” Bollinger said. “I use my Marauder Mail for everything.”

“Students have every right to feel frustrated about it and we totally understand their frustration,” Longenecker said. When I spoke with her Tuesday afternoon, the team in charge of fixing the issue had begun work on building a new server to use if the hardware issue of the old system had not been resolved. When asked if an outage nearing 96 hours is acceptable, she said, “Ideally, no.”

Information Technology has been very keen to make sure that no email is lost during the event, understanding that students not only have academic things to do but also are waiting for responses from internships and jobs. “We wanted to guarantee emails weren’t lost, which is why it has been taking longer [to restore service]”

Junior Ben McCue did not feel too affected by the outage. “Professors give me homework in class,” he said, “I only check my email once every few days.”

In speaking with Longenecker, I learned that IT was not expecting to still be using the current system, which is showing its age.

Student email was expected to be outsourced to another company, such as Google (Google Apps) or Microsoft (Live Mail), but delays in bidding for the State System has caused a potential switch to be delayed as well. “Proposals from companies are due in the beginning of February,” Longenecker said.

As far as students who use external services such as Gmail to retrieve email goes, Longenecker said that while IT does not encourage it, they don’t block it.

“We don’t recommend it because it’s hard to support so many different services, but we don’t block it.”

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David’s mother had graduated from Millersville as a teacher around 1930 and moved to East Africa where Shenk was born and taught by her for 10 years.

As an author, Shenk has written several books on religion and specifically the relationship between the Christian and Muslim faiths. His latest book is titled “A Muslim and a Christian in Dialogue,” in which he has a conversation with a Muslim leader across seven topics.

The majority of his talk was centered around his visits to Iran and meetings with Shiite clerics about the relationship between Christians in America and Muslims in Iran.

He has been a speaker at four conference-like meetings among leaders in each religion, where hot topics in differences between the religions and issues of the world have been addressed. Shenk said these talks were of “high academic caliber” and agreed with a Muslim organizer of a speech that described them as “a profound encounter.”

Shenk also said, “I was of the greatest admiration for the Shiite clerics who had invited me to speak.”

As a Christian, Shenk was an outsider at many of these Muslim talks, yet he was greatly welcomed by the Shiite clerics. Following one of his discussions, he heard comments from many clerics who were stunned to hear that an American Christian was such a person of peace. The Muslim clerics were surprised to hear this because in their eyes, these two things did not mix which is something Shenk found troubling.

Other than these talks, he has also been witness to events such as an exchange program, where the women scholars of each faith were guests at the other’s University in order to gain a more worldly view of their faith, and to give students of the opposite religious study a chance to interact deeply with someone of different faith.

Another opportunity Shenk has had was to be a part of a conversation with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After a meeting in which Shenk followed Ahmadinejad’s talk, he spoke with the president briefly and was invited to a session that included leaders of many Christian backgrounds to discuss their concerns with Ahmadinejad. These dialogues have since expanded to four such talks that have been held in both the U.S. and Iran.

Following his talk, Shenk opened the floor for questions, and answered concerns regarding such things as the treatment of women in Iran and some of his personal thoughts about why his efforts are important.

Jim McLaughlan, a sophomore Secondary Education Social Studies major, was at the talk partly for extra credit for a psychology class and partly because of his interest in American and Iranian diplomatic relations. McLaughlan said, “There were parts that I had a different view but I respect [Shenk] overall.”

Robah Hess, a Senior International Studies major, attended for extra credit and for his own personal interests. Hess had a very unique perspective of the talk because he had grown up in the middle east and had just finished reading one of Shenk’s books. Hess said “I learned a lot about this open dialogue that has been going on and I am in agreement about the need for peace.”

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One part of this process, which was changed last year, was that the allocations committee did not meet with the organizations. Former Student Senate Treasurer Joe Benyish said, “More organizations apply each year as they change from temporary to permanent status.”

Last year, there was about $1.8 million to distribute between all of the organizations. However, the largest fixed amount (around 37%) is taken for Intercollegiate Athletics, which includes sports teams such as Football, Soccer, Basketball and others. This money helps to pay for many aspects of Athletics, such as equipment and travel costs.

The second largest amount ($243,997.34) went to University Activities Board (UAB), which funds concerts, comedians, quad events and more. The funding for UAB also fully funds the Ville After Dark program, and covers things like movies, midnight breakfast and other late night activities.

A line chart showing the distribution of the top twenty allocation recipients. DJ RAMSAY/SNAPPER

Student Memorial Center Operations gets the third largest amount ($164,105.85), which covers for some of the services in SMC, such as some fitness center costs and technical operations. Benyish explained that this amount is higher than previous years because organizations will be paying less for technical operations expenses.

We have included as many organizations that we could fit in this week’s publication. To see the full list, please see the chart below.

Should you have any questions, comments or concerns, you can contact Student Senate Treasurer Joe Muller at jwmuller@marauder.millersville.edu.

2009-2010 Approved Student Senate Allocations

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The news industry is changing. There are no longer writers, editors or photographers. In today’s media, there are only journalists. And for far too long, The Snapper has been behind in the industry.

That is all about to change. By the end of this year, The Snapper will be one of the leading college media outlets in Pennsylvania. Below are some of the changes that are planned for this year that will make The Snapper one of the best.

For many years, the paper was published weekly. Back then, this worked pretty well; we reported events from the past week and gave insight into upcoming events. But that is not enough now, our generation does not want to read history, we want to see it reported live. For us, this means crunching our entire week-long publishing cycle into minutes so that when news breaks, we will be there with the facts.

However, in order to better bring you the news, we will be cutting down the amount of issues we publish in print this semester. We will still be bringing you at least ten issues this semester; six of these issues will be online and in print, while four will have all of their content completely online.

This plan brings us better in line with many newspapers that have been shifting more and more efforts to their online editions.

In the coming weeks, we will start to deploy new features, online and off, that will begin a new chapter in the history of this 84th year of publishing.

We will deploy a behind-the-scenes blog to give you insight, and for you to give us feedback. For the first time in… well, forever (as far as my knowledge extends), The Snapper has a real web staff. No longer is it just one person in charge of the website. As we expand our website, many of our writers and editors will become more active with it, and we hope you will too.

We will help new and existing organizations grow by giving them ways to advertise at a more affordable price than our current rates, whether it be advertising an upcoming event or just trying to engage more students to join their organization.

For local businesses, we will be adding more creative and effect ways to advertise to students, including expanded website options that will come to life this October.
We also plan to be a lot more receptive than in the past. If you have comments, suggestions or criticisms, let us have it. You can leave feedback on our website, email myself at (editor@thesnapper.com or stop by our office at SMC Rm. 19.

Want to be a part of The Snapper? You can always join us by submitting an application online or in person at our office. We are looking for great writers, editors, photographers and web staff.

Thank you and have a great semester.

-Joe Moore, Editor-In-Chief

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This summer, I spent my time doing my dream job. I got to combine two of my favorite things, all while getting paid.

I was the weather forecaster for one of the top drum and bugle corps in the country.

As a meteorology major just having finished my sophomore year, I did not have a ton of experience.

For those unaware, the majority of meteorology course require an in-depth knowledge of Calculus and Physics.

This means that after my sophomore year, I only had a small amount of formal education in forecasting.

I did, however, have two years experience as a student forecaster on the campus weather service.

As far as the drum corps part goes… well, I had just been a big fan. I marched drums all my High School years, and was able to march in the band here at Millersville my freshman year. However, I was just a fan before this summer.

My dream job had been forecasting for a drum corps. Drum corps’ spend most of their days rehearsing and nights competing, and I knew from marching band how important of a role the weather plays in any outdoor activity.

I wanted to do this because of three main goals: to experience forecasting on a daily basis, to experience forecasting for different cities all over the country, and to gain experience forecasting and “nowcasting” for people that really depend on it.

Early in the spring semester last year, I decided, just for the heck of it, to submit my internship idea to The Cadets, a drum corps based in Allentown, PA.

I just gave an outline of my ideas and goals and sent away. A few days later, I got a response asking me to come in for an interview. I made the drive up to Allentown and got the internship.

One thing to note: I decided not to go through the internship office to get credit. Partially because I did not want the extra work on the already time-pressed people that I would be working for, partially because I did not want the formality of having to write a paper and partially because I did not want to pay for credits I honestly did not need.

I do not mean to knock our fantastic internship office here, but it just was not the right option for me.

Getting back to my story, in mid-June I left my family and was on the road for about six weeks.

I slept and worked out of cave carved into a box truck with my laptop and Verizon wireless broadband card gave forecasts every night and on-demand, and had an amazing time.

When it comes time to start figuring out your summer (which you can never start too early!), go for what you want.

Do not just be satisfied with the internships that get sent out over your department’s listserv.

Go out there and get it!  If what you want to do does not exist, make it up!  As corny as it sounds, “Seize the Opportunity” and make your dream job or internship happen.

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The plot of Knowing revolves around a series of numbers that appear on a piece of paper dug up from a time capsule.

John Koestler, played by Cage, is a single father who lost his wife from a tragic accident.

A professor at MIT, Koestler initially disregards the series of numbers as simply random, until he takes a closer look.

The film packs as many genres as possible into this action flick, including Sci-Fi, Adventure, Mystery and Thriller.

The action sequences were a bit too long for my taste, and some of the more graphic scenes seemed to last just seconds too long than seem necessary.

As the movie progresses the plot begins to become more and more unbelievable, but it is a work of science fiction, and definitely pushes the boundaries of our imagination.

I do not want to give away too much of this film because I believe that the less you know going in, the more you will enjoy it.

I had only seen the trailer and read a synopsis before seeing it and thoroughly enjoyed the far-fetched tale.

The ending is a bit strange and will leave some readers scratching their heads, but as a work of fiction, this movie excels.

If you are thinking of waiting for the movie to come out on DVD,

I highly suggest you see this work in theaters. The special effects and action sequences are worth the price of a movie ticket.

My rating: B+

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While many students may be crying about the fact that we do not have wireless access in residence halls, I think it’s much better for the rest of us.

Now, I am not an expert when it comes to technology like wireless routers, but I am nowhere near a novice. I know that having wireless in the dorms would make for headaches all around.

Just imagine what access would be like on the first day of class in a freshman hall. Students would be notified that the dorms have wireless access, so they would think, “Hey, I am not going to spend extra money on a cable when I can just get wireless!”

The problem is that most wireless routers cannot handle too much traffic; over 20 users on a single router would make things pretty slow.

In a normal work environment, or in a classroom, wireless access usually is not slow because chances are there are only around 10 or so users connected, with most users simply checking email, writing a paper, doing research, etc.

Compare this to a dorm where many people stream movies, spend hours on YouTube and download music.

One of the questions in the survey asked students whether or not they would be willing to pay a $45 fee for wireless access.

Wireless access would be very costly to add to most dorms because numerous routers would need to be installed thanks to the cinderblock walls found in most dorms.

While I would like wireless, it is really not that necessary. What reasons are there for wireless access?

So you can sit in the hall and watch YouTube with your friends. You can sit on your bed without having that pesky Ethernet wire tangled around your room.

Our Information Technology department does an excellent job, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction among students.

They work hard to give us a free, 24/7 help desk, and a very reliable network.

Adding wireless in our dorms would be more of a headache than it is worth. I know that wireless will eventually happen, but now is not the time.

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Q: Where did you attend school?
A: Undergrad: Moore College of Art, Phila. Pa.
Graduate: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
I also took courses at Paris American Academy in the summer and Salzburg Summer Academy.

Q: What is the most important part about teaching art to your students?
A: That they gain an appreciation for the art that is the most difficult to understand and give it a chance.  I am interested in providing them with new experiences and opening their minds to THINK in ways that they have not previously.  I want them hopefully, to see the world in a slightly different and new way.  And that art can change, influence and enhance their lives in positive ways.

Q: Name two artists you admire and why?
A: Gustav Klimt – His ability to draw and his marvelous color and inventiveness.
Henri Matisse – His work has always just brought me sheer joy

Q: Do I have to limit this to two?
A: Xenia Hausner – I studied with her in Austria and I love her gutseyness and use of color.
Peirrre Bonnard – His color and application of paint.

Q: What inspires you the most for your own works?
A: People, animals and other artists (past or present)

Q: What is your favorite medium of art to teach?
A: Drawing, painting: watercolor, acrylic or oil.

Q: How do you think you got to where you are today?
A: By being compelled to do what I do…and making sure I had the education to pursue my goals and the determination to get there.  And I am still not there – I am constantly revising my teaching, every semester – how can I make this course better.  In my own work always setting higher goals for myself in my painting.

Q: What is a subject that interests you that students would be surprised to know about?
A: Scuba diving, animal rights, the environment and politics, but they may know this!

Q: Professors tend to say they learn from students just as students learn from them. What is something you learned from your art students?
A: Recently a student asked me a question that really made ME question the validity or importance of what I was insisting was important.  I spent several days discussing it with other artist friends and getting a variety of opinions.  I have also had students do independent research on something we discussed in class and give me more information. I always appreciate that and am thrilled that they care enough to bother to do that.

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