Friday, Oct. 22, 2010
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Mr. Diversity T.J. Pratt crowned Mr. USU 2010 By CATHERINE MEIDELL news editor
When the judge announced TJ Pratt’s name as this year’s winner in the 2010 Mr. USU competition, Pratt sank to his knees and tears streamed down his face. Pratt, a sophomore in music education, said he already started to become emotional when he won a handful of other awards including the formal-wear, and people’s choice awards. When his name was announced, the crowd stood up and cheered and he came back onstage trying to hide wet eyes, he said. Before the Mr. USU title was announced, Pratt said “butterflies were speed-racTJ PRATT WINS Mr. USU Wednesday night. Pratt also won People’s choice and the Formal Wear award. CATHERINE URIE photo ing” in his stomach. He said when he looks back at his time ership with the other guys,” men come together in agreePratt, referred to as Mr. in the Kent Concert Hall, at USU, he said this moment Pratt said. ment. We all came together in Diversity, along with nine Wednesday. will be dear to him. “There is just something the spirit of joy, laughter and other contestants, competed Each USU college was repre“I will remember the broth- powerful that happens when unity, and I will miss that.” in front of a large audience sented with a contestant and
one contestant represented USU’s Greek community. The group of nominated contestants started the show by performing a choreographed dance to a Disney song from Aladdin titled “One Jump Ahead.” Everything was Aladdin-themed down to the Jafar costume worn by Keenan Nuehring, ASUSU administrative assistant and one of the hosts of the event. “When we were all trying to learn this Aladdin dance we grew closer together as brothers in those moments,” Pratt said. Multiple awards were given along with the Mr. USU title. A panel of six judges including Joyce Albrecht, USU President Stan Albrecht’s wife, and ASUSU President Tyler Tolson scored the contestants in each category from 1 to 10 and added their scores to determine the winner. However,
- See Mr. USU page 4
Professor creatively reaches out to educate
By ARIANNA REES staff writer
With a few camera shots, the people of the Samburu tribe in North Central Kenya are shaping the way their people learn about and view conservation, partially due to the efforts of Adam Beh, a visiting assistant professor at Utah State University. A semi-nomadic people, the Samburu mainly inhabit a large area that is home to several wildlife parks, including the National Samburu Reserve, which is home to giraffes, hundreds of bird species, zebra, lions, and other African animals and plants. Despite such proximity to the parks and their wildlife, however, Beh, who studies human dimensions of natural resources, noted a disconnect between the people and the reserves nearby them. Beh’s advisor, Brett Bruyere, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, said the Samburu tribe has a low literacy rate and consists of a population that doesn’t have much opportunity for formal education or to develop good learning habits, and their knowledge of park activity and conservation is minimal. He said, “The teaching approach hasn’t been effective. They haven’t asked, ‘What is the learning scope? What do people already know about conservation in their area?’” Informally titled the “Samburu Photovoice Project,” Beh’s plan was designed to educate and inform tribal peoples of the environmental needs in their communities by putting the research in their hands in a participatory way.
“We gave cameras to park rangers, school teachers, and other citizens in the community and asked what changes they would like to see in conservation,” he said. “The study was done by them.” Conducted for six months in 2009, the project consisted of distributing cameras to six different groups, traveling back and forth to locate them, organizing times and places to discuss the photographs taken by them, and asking questions about what they learned through photographing their lives and environment. “I was also doing interviews to get a sense of how the community views the parks, whether they see the social benefits, environmental benefits, or if they just see the impact that tourism has,” Beh said. Beh, who began working in Kenya in 2004 under the direction of the US Forest Service and African Wildlife Foundation, said having that trust established with the people played a major role in getting the project moving. “They’re putting themselves out there. They had to know that I’m not going to abuse their work in any way,” he said. His work had three main focuses in an effort to inform the Samburu people. First, he wanted to focus on the re-evaluation of the conservation curriculum in Samburu schools, teaching kids about their parks and environmental topics, such as deforestation. His second focus was to teach scientific concepts to park rangers to give them the ability to connect to the community and relay information about the
- See WILDLIFE, page 4
COMMUNITY SCOUT WITH ORPHANED Grevy’s zebras. Adam Beh aims to educate about the environment through pictures. photo courtesy JOSEPH LETOLE
Movement seeks to make research easier By ROB JEPSON staff writer
USU has recently signed an agreement with the Hathi Trust group, a digital library who, according to their website, “will develop and refine the services needed to search and use a large digital collection, and realize collectively our greatest potential as a library community.“ Hathi Trust, a self-described “bold idea with big plans” was founded by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation with the stated goal of establishing a repository for universities to archive and share their digitized collections. As a new member of the Hathi Trust group, USU will soon have access to the digitized library of Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Ohio State, and over 30 other universities throughout the U.S. In return, these universities will be able to access books published by the USU Press. Betty Rozum, associate dean for technical services said, “This is a wonderful step for Utah State. It will help students further
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their research and help shape the future of scholarly communication.” She said USU’s membership will also allow the university to participate in the governance of the group, ensuring long-term access to information which could otherwise be lost. The Hathi Trust group is one of many organizations that adheres to the philosophy “Open Access.” Though not an official organization, the open access movement has succeeded in drawing many groups to its cause, such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Open access, said the USU Library’s Head of Collections Heather Leary, is “an alternative to for-profit publishing which provides a different model for disseminating scholarly publications.” She said that the method helps more people have access to research information. The Budapest Open Access Initiative said, “By ‘open access’ we mean it’s free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles ... .”
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“There is also a human interest component,” said Jennifer Duncan, the library’s head of collections. “After students leave the university, they will no longer have access to our subscribed journals. If your child has been diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia, for example, you don’t want to pay $30 to read ever article about that condition. If research is openly available, tax payers can get access to that research for free.” This week, SPARC is organizing a worldwide “Open Access Week” to spread awareness of the open access movement. USU is participating in the event. Brit Fagerhein, Coordinator of Regional Campuses and Distance Education Library Services, said, “We have two stated goals: educate researchers about their rights as authors and make faculty and students aware of the movement.” According to SPARC’s website, thousands of students and faculty from nearly 90 countries around the world are participating in the Open Access Week. – robjepson@live.com
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