When the current UW-Stevens Point Science Building was built in 1963, there was little indication that not only would it be somewhat antiquated by 2015, but would require additions, renovations, and moves of departments, accompanied by unprecedented growth in the sciences. UW-Stevens Point has some of the highest enrollment science programs in the UW System, including more than 2,500 students majoring or minoring in biology and natural resources disciplines. With critical needs for classroom, laboratory and office space, the university has spent countless hours in the past five years working with the University of Wisconsin System and the State Division of Facilities Development (DFD) toward the design of a new, state-of-the-art science laboratory/classroom building. This building will become reality with successful construction bids in December 2015, with groundbreaking scheduled for the spring of 2016. Designed as a “science-on-display” facility, it will house the entire Department of Chemistry, and the molecular biology, human biology and botany sections of the Department of Biology. As an opportunity for recruiting new students into the sciences, and to complement its renown as a science-excellence campus, the new building will add 175,000 square feet of working space, be a central hub of activity for campus, and be home to more than 45 full-time faculty and staff. It will

house the department offices as well as the central offices of the Dean of Letters and Science. Plans include a central walk-through commons and a unique tropical conservatory to house plants to be used in instructional and research activities. The four-story, multifaceted building will also house classrooms, auditoriums and conference rooms for small group interactions, an outdoor amphitheater classroom, and a green roof commons funded by the Student Government Association. The building will become a showpiece for campus, allowing visitors to view students and faculty active in research and teaching with hands-on interactive displays for exploration of

the sciences. This building will keep UW-Stevens Point at the center of undergraduate science education in the state for many years to come. “This is more than just a new science building,” says College of Letters and Science Dean Chris Cirmo. “It is a statement of the confidence the system has in our offering top-tier undergraduate science programs for the state of Wisconsin, as we address specific growth needs in health care, medicine, molecular biology, biochemistry, plant sciences, and chemistry. Together with UW-Stevens Point’s partnership with the Community Medical Education Program of the Medical College of Wisconsin, our preparation of pre-professionals in medicine and health care will be second to none.”

A large statement of confidence

College of Letters and ScienceThe College-at-the-Core

New UW-Stevens Point Science Building scheduled to break ground in Spring 2016

Architects’ renderings of the planned new Science Building.

COLS Newsletter - Fall 2015

Newsletter editor: Scott Tappa n www.uwsp.edu/cols n twitter.com/UWSPcols n facebook.com/UWSPCOLS

When Dona Warren joined the Department of Philosophy at UW-Stevens Point in 1995, she was tapped to teach a critical thinking course. She was familiar with the topic from graduate school, but was unimpressed with the textbook she had used. When Warren sought guidance from her adviser, he grabbed a random sample textbook from his shelf and handed it over. “He said, ‘Here, try this one,’” Warren says. “I opened it and saw an argument map. I instantly knew what the map was, and that this is what I wanted to do.” Twenty years later Warren, now a professor of philosophy and assistant dean for curriculum and student affairs in the College of Letters and Science, is a full-fledged argument mapping evangelist, spreading the word about its benefits all over campus. Argument mapping is a way of graphically representing the logical structure of an argument, illustrating its conclusions, premises, subconclusions, inferential relationships and what ideas work to support each other. This differs from arguments presented in prose, which uses words like ‘therefore’ and ‘because’ but does not display those relationships in the way an argument map does. “What I’ve discovered is it’s often a challenge for the average reader to correctly identify the structure of an argument when presented in prose, even arguments of a relatively simple structure,” says Warren. “That can be devastating because if someone doesn’t understand how an argument works, it makes it almost impossible to evaluate that argument appropriately – what questions to ask, what to look for.” The importance of evaluating arguments or other units of reasoning is not limited to the classroom. Any communication designed to convince someone of something – letters to the editor, blogs, editorials, sales pitches – can be better understood using argument mapping. Argument mapping can be effectively taught, particularly when instructors are aware of challenges that learners routinely face. “The biggest struggle is correctly discerning

relationships between ideas,” says Warren. “It is awfully easy for individual students to get confused about which ideas support which, even when using ‘therefore’ and ‘because.’ When students flip inferential relationships they are misunderstanding the reasoning; if they are engaged in a larger conversation, that’s going to handicap them, which is why I think this needs to be explicitly taught.” During the summer Warren worked with

faculty from across campus on ways to incorporate argument mapping into classes. The group includes Vera Klekovkina of World Languages and Literatures, Director of General Education Nancy LoPatin-Lummis of History, Wade Mahon of English and Cade Spaulding of Communication. “Any discipline that requires students to grasp and present reasoning can use argument mapping,” says Warren. “That’s pretty much all disciplines.” Also during the summer the group met with Timo ter Berg, CEO of Critical Thinking Skills, who visited campus to discuss Rationale, an online application that enables users to structure their thinking and writing by creating argument maps and exporting them as text. Warren says several faculty members have made plans to incorporate Rationale into their teaching. Another resource for better understanding and using argument mapping is Warren’s new YouTube channel devoted to the subject. Viewable at www.youtube.com/channel/UC_37QhbKCrh-dzJBEfKWKVw, Warren’s channel is designed to serve as an introduction to argument mapping. Next up is a project that would encourage the use of argument mapping in select courses of the General Education Program. “I am elated about that,” she says. “I’m not unaware of the challenges of doing this. Part of it is the intellectual challenge – what’s the least students need to know that would still be useful to them while merging that with content in different fields? Then, how can faculty be supported for incorporating that into classrooms? This could be a unifying approach to critical thinking.”

Mapping a course for better critical thinking

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Dona Warren

From the desk of COLS Dean Chris CirmoAs we follow the constant drone of budget reduction realities in the UW System, new demands upon our time, more students with fewer resources, tuition freezes, and with a general feeling that public education is under increasing attack … how do we respond? There are those who yearn for the “academy of old” where we planned our courses and schedules around instructor time, offered only traditional lecture-based formats. There are those who feel the entire enterprise is flawed and non-responsive to present “needs of our economy” and want to see all courses offered online or at night, full competency credits for career experience, and a withdrawal from the time-honored traditions of academic freedom, acquisition of tenure, etc. In reality, we find ourselves at a tipping point in the history of the public academy. Our response to “what we should be” must be strategic, decisive, and organic, or we will find ourselves being “out-sourced” to corporate or private interest education. It is important that we remind ourselves of our mission, and just how an education centered on ethical thinking and career-building (not just job-ready skillsets) is increasingly important as we try to balance access to higher education (equity) with excellence and return-on-investment (value). I, for one, am a product of the access our country affords through public education. I am proud of being the dean of a college that forms the fundamental core of what is known as a liberal arts and sciences education. If we do not address a rapidly diversifying student demography, use and master new pedagogic technologies, and require more accountability of ourselves, it will mean nothing to say we are still the best deal in town.

Use of unmanned aerial vehicles – known commonly as drones – has increased dramatically in recent years. The Federal Aviation Administration projects that by the end of the decade tens of thousands of drones could be in use nationwide in a variety of applications. Drones’ use in law enforcement was the topic of research conducted this summer by John Blakeman, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Department of Political Science. Blakeman authored “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Police Procedures,” a chapter in a new book, Privacy in the Digital Age: 21st Century Challenges to the Fourth Amendment. The book is edited by Nancy S. Lind, a 1980 UW-Stevens Point alumna and professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. “Nancy was putting together a collection of research articles on privacy and the Constitution, and with the Fourth Amendment, which limits the power of the government to search your premises, drones naturally fall into that,” Blakeman says. “The government uses drones for a variety of reasons. It’s easy to see how law enforcement agencies could say, ‘Hey, we can collect evidence by flying over a person’s house. Maybe we don’t need a search warrant after all.’ So that piqued my interest.” Cutting-edge technology has always piqued the interest of law enforcement agencies. “If you go back 30 or 40 years, they experimented with using helicopters or fixed wing aircraft to search property for people illegally growing marijuana or other drugs, or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will use them to search for moonshine,” Blakeman says. “The Supreme

Court addressed that and under certain circumstances law enforcement can use manned aircraft without a search warrant to search for illegal contraband. Then law enforcement started using heat signature guns to search for people who grow marijuana indoors, which the Supreme Court said you could not do under most circumstances.” By taking the human element out of the equation, drones are generally used for situations that have been described as the “three Ds” – dull, dirty or dangerous missions. That changes the scope of the laws for drones as they pertain to the Fourth Amendment. “It turns out the law is very unsettled, unclear,” Blakeman says. “I think the U.S. Supreme Court is waiting for a big drone Fourth Amendment case to come up so it can be settled – at least temporarily.” And when it does, how does Blakeman expect the Court to rule? “I really have no idea,” he says. “I think the court would be more inclined to require a search warrant, partly because a drone is not a manned aircraft. When you inject the human element into it there’s time for judgment and reflection right there as you’re flying an aircraft. With a drone the operator is miles away.” Blakeman has not yet introduced the drone conversation into Fourth Amendment classroom discussions. After all, there is no shortage of material when the topic is technology and privacy. “Students are very aware of the Fourth Amendment. This generation takes privacy issues very, very seriously,” he says. “I grew up with TV shows in the ‘70s where the Fourth Amendment was nonexistent. Starsky and Hutch did whatever they wanted to!”

Blakeman examines drones and Fourth Amendment

Mapping a course for better critical thinking

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The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution and a tobacco-free campus.

UW-Stevens Point has partnered with UW-Extension and five System peers to offer an online master’s degree in the growing field of data science. The Master of Science in Data Science program is intended for students with a bachelor’s degree in math, statistics, analytics, computer science or marketing.

Kristina Rykova of Russia and Remoun Shenouda of Egypt have been awarded Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program grants to serve as teaching assistants in Russian and Arabic and take courses at UW-Stevens Point for academic year 2015-16.

English alumnus and author Patrick Rothfuss has signed a deal with Lionsgate to adapt his best-selling series,

The Kingkiller Chronicle, to movies, television series and video games. Rothfuss was honored with the College of Letters and Science Distinguished Alumnus Award during Homecoming weekend.

The Wisconsin Waterways mobile app, a joint production of the Department of Computing and New Media

Technologies and the GIS Center, became the first student-developed app to surpass 500 downloads.

Cornerstone Press has announced its 2015 title: “Stay!” by D.K. Wells, about the horrors of war and the ones left behind.

Math and Parent Partners, led by Andrea Knapp of the departments of Mathematical Sciences in conjunction with Continuing Education, has expanded to Marshfield, Antigo and Wausau. The math department has also begun offering free tutoring to area junior high and high school students.

English and Spanish alumna Margaret Domka was the only American selected to officiate at the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

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Community Lecture Series ● December 8, 6:30 p.m. — The Roots of the Real Christmas Tree, Neil Prendergast (History)

● February 9, 6:30 p.m. — Creation of Community at Tomahawk’s Harley Davidson Fall Ride, Lisa Theo (Geography/Geology)

● March 8, 6:30 p.m. — Why the World Loves Soccer But Americans Hate it, Tobias Barske (World Languages and Literatures)

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