items tagged with Augustana College

At the beginning the school year, in a chemistry class at St. Ambrose University, Professor Margaret Legg offered students the option to buy a less-expensive e-book instead of the usual physical textbook. No one opted for the digital version.

Kelsey Berg, a sophomore majoring in biology, said she had already bought the hardcover edition. Had the e-book been offered before she bought it, Berg said she still wouldn't have purchased it. "I don't like reading on a computer. It's hard to concentrate," she said, adding that it wasn't worth the cost, either, because one can't sell an e-book back.

Many college students are embracing digital and open-source textbooks, which are accessed through computers and digital readers such as Amazon's Kindle. For some, it provides a more convenient way to carry multiple textbooks. Beyond being easier on students' backs, e-books are also better for the environment, because no natural resources are used in the production or transportation of a physical book.

But the major selling point is a lower cost compared to new textbooks. Textbooks cost an average of $900 per semester, according to the federal Government Accountability Office. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has been advocating for reducing the prices of textbooks, which they say have risen faster than the rate of inflation in the past several years.

Although e-books are often 50 percent less expensive than unused print editions of textbooks, the cost evaluation isn't quite so clear-cut. In many cases, there's little or no cost savings to students in the long run.

And some people, like Berg, resist e-books for other reasons.

At last count, there were a whopping 46 area-theatre productions scheduled between September and December, and included among the titles are A Dog's Life, The Big Funk, Scrooge!, Don't Hug Me, and Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical. It's the season that my editor, Jeff, has been waiting for!

Students stepping into Longfellow Elementary in Rock Island this school year will notice physical changes: a new media center and library, a new cafeteria, and a renovation that has added four new classrooms. But a more important change will be the school's new formal partnership with Augustana College.

The relationship will bring a liberal-arts-based curriculum to Longfellow - a contrast to the No Child Left Behind-forced shift in primary education that emphasizes reading and math skills to the exclusion of other subjects. Though the content of the curriculum will still conform to district standards, the way that content is presented will change: The focus will move to collaboration among students, small-group and individualized instruction, interdisciplinary learning, thematic teaching that attempts to make the coursework relevant, and the fine arts.

A No Child Left Behind-influenced curriculum "doesn't have anything to do with creative problem-solving, imagination, collaboration - all of these skills we need to survive in the next millennium," said Pat Shea, an assistant professor of education at Augustana who was part of the planning team for Longfellow. "If we don't get those things taught, it doesn't matter how many facts we know. ... We are so off-target about what it means to be an educated person, and I think we as educators have the first line of responsibility to start speaking to that."

In the science-fiction drama Omniscience - currently playing at Augustana College - playwright Tim Carlson imagines a not-too-distant U.S. future in which several Midwestern states are under Asian control, violent militia activity is commonplace, behavior is governmentally regulated through mood-leveling drugs, and surveillance systems monitor our every move.

(The following is the sidebar to the feature story "Love Letters: Melissa McBain Pays Tribute to Her Mother in New Ground Theatre's Going Back Naked.")

In addition to playwriting and performing, Melissa McBain also teaches in Augustana College's theatre department, and currently serves as coordinator and producer for the Quad City Playwrights' Festival, an annual evening of short plays by local writers, directed and acted by Augustana students. (This year's festival will take place at Augustana's Wallenberg Hall on Sunday, May 10.)

Ralph Troll spent 40 years teaching biology at Augustana College, and he only told the story there twice.

The first time was in the late 1980s, when he was asked to speak to a German class, because he was from Germany.

"It was just kind of part of the story," he said last week.

And then in the 1990s, the college asked him to give a senior-recognition talk. "I'm a biologist," he said. "They didn't want to hear about anything like that.

"I decided: This is a good day to do this. ... That's really the first time I told the whole story."

In all, Troll - who is now 77 years old and an emeritus professor at Augustana - said that he's told about his family's experiences in Germany during World War II five times, which is five more times than his mother talked to her children about her stay in a concentration camp. He'll lecture twice next week, on Sunday at Davenport's Temple Emanuel and on Monday at Augustana College.
Read More About Finally Telling The Story: Former Augustana Professor Discusses The Holocaust...

Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, the Alan Ball comedy that opens the Riverbend Theatre Collective's 2009 season, takes place during a wedding reception, and the production is kind of like a wedding reception - or at least, the reception for a bride and groom you don't know all that well. It might begin awkwardly, but after a few drinks, dances, and interesting encounters with people you otherwise wouldn't have met, you discover that you're having an unexpectedly fantastic time, and when it's over, you may realize that you're not quite ready to leave.

"I think in this country, and particularly for those of us living on a huge river, we take water completely for granted," says Kathryn Allen, chief organizer for the Quad Cities' annual Environmental Film Festival. "We turn on the tap, and it's always there, and it's always drinkable. We don't think about it."

Yet when it came time to schedule features for this year's festival, Allen states that she and fellow event planners were hard-pressed to not think about it.

If you watch a lot of MTV, there's an excellent chance you've heard the music of Tim Mahoney, who will be performing at Augustana College on Friday, March 13.

He also has a video airing in Life Time Fitness locations in 18 states. And he has a partnership with Miller Genuine Draft.

That might sound like selling out, but the Minneapolis-based Mahoney said last week that it's simply a matter of survival for an independent musician.

"This is how you stay alive I think these days in the music business," he said. "It's that any-and-all-and-kind-of-outside-of-the-box theory. ... It takes so much more to get it to people."

The Quad Cities' spring theatre season will be bookended by Shakespeare, with the March 6 opening of Much Ado About Nothing, and Sophocles, with the May 28 debut of Oedipus Rex. But just because these plays are, respectively, more than 400 and 2,400 years old, it probably isn't wise to enter them expecting the expected. This Sophocles, after all, is subtitled The Audacity of Oed, and this Shakespeare is being staged by the Prenzie Players, so in both works, you may as well expect anything to happen; considering our lineup also features titles by Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, Euripides, and Mel Brooks, I'm thinking you can say the same for the theatre season as a whole.