A public lecture at the University of New England on Wednesday 11 November will examine - in entertaining fashion - “Theorems Beginning with P”.

Professor Michael Eastwood FAA, from the Australian National University, will present the lecture in UNE’s Lewis Lecture Theatre at 7.30 pm.

Professor Eastwood is a leading researcher in fields such as differential geometry. He will talk, in layman’s terms, about theorems by Pappus, Pascal, Poncelet and Penrose that all provide results in plane geometry.

“All are easy to state, but some are hard to prove,” Professor Eastwood says. “Pascal proved his when he was just 16 years old.

“I shall discuss these theorems and some others - including Desargues’ Theorem, Steiner’s Porism, and the Butterfly Theorem.”

The talk will consist mostly of pictures, and will, in Professor Eastwood’s words, give people an idea of “how mathematicians think”.

Professor Eastwood is one of several distinguished mathematicians who are visiting UNE to present keynote lectures at a Summer School on Integral Geometry from the 9^th to the 11^th of November. The others include Professor V. Palamodov from the University of Tel Aviv and Associate Professor David Paganin from Monash University.

The Consul-General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr Hans G. Gnodtke (pictured here), is visiting the University of New England today to discuss the benefits of academic links between Australia and Germany.

UNE’s Chancellor, Dr Richard Torbay, said UNE had much to gain from expanding its international links with Europe through the German Academic Exchange Service.

Mr Gnodtke’s visit coincides with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, 1989.

“It is a great honour to welcome the German Consul-General to the University, and to strengthen our international ties and explore collaborations with the European Community,” Dr Torbay said.

“Mr Gnodtke has a distinguished record of diplomatic service - particularly in the area of international relations, where his efforts in his role as the Commissioner for Dialogue with the Muslim World have won him appreciation,” he said.

To mark this historic anniversary, Mr Gnodtke is presenting the Armidale community with a special lecture titled “20 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Implications for Europe’s Political Landscape”.

In addition to the lecture, he is discussing with students the opportunities presented by academic exchanges with Germany.

The Head of UNE’s School of Law, Professor Juergen Brohmer, said that students from across Australia and New Zealand were involved in the German exchange, but that UNE had the largest contingent of students in the program. “This speaks volumes about UNE’s willingness to get engaged on the global stage,” Professor Brohmer said.

Dr Torbay commended Professor Brohmer for his efforts to expand the University’s international links. “Professor Brohmer’s initiative and his tireless work in promoting such international links will position UNE well to take advantage of further collaborative opportunities as they emerge,” Dr Torbay said.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Mr Gnodtke displayed here expands to include Ms Louisa Bock (left) and Dr Julia Petzl-Berney from UNE’s German discipline.

The man who is leading the development of new guidelines for the assessment of students at Australian universities will be talking to lecturers at the University of New England next week.

David Boud, Professor of Adult Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, will present a seminar and conduct an open forum at UNE on Tuesday 10 November as a guest of the University’s Teaching and Learning Centre.

Professor Boud is a Senior Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). As part of his ALTC Fellowship on “Assessment for learning in and beyond courses”, he has developed the Web site www.assessmentfutures.com. He is currently finalising the outcomes of this work in a report titled Assessment 2020: Propositions for standards-oriented assessment reform.

“‘Assessment Futures’ is based on the proposition that assessment in higher education has been so distorted by concerns about certification and justification that the core purposes at the heart of higher education - and, necessarily, assessment - have been obscured,” Professor Boud says. “Whatever else it does, assessment must support learning. More than this, it must support the processes of learning that students need beyond the point of graduation.

“Assessment must foster the kinds of attitudes and dispositions, as well as the knowledge and skills, learners need for the variety of tasks they will be confronted with throughout their lives. This means that our conception of assessment needs to move beyond that of testing what has been taught, or measuring learning outcomes, to encompass one that builds the capacity of students to be effective assessors for themselves and for others.”

Professor Boud’s seminar at UNE next Tuesday will explore how a more productive use of assessment could further the goals of higher education courses.

Both the seminar and the open forum will be in the Lewis Lecture Theatre. The seminar will run from 1 am till 12.30 pm, and the forum from 3 pm till 4 pm.

“The open forum is an opportunity to learn about Assessment 2020 and engage in further discussion and debate with Professor Boud about what changes in assessment might mean for UNE lecturers and their students,” said Dr Robyn Muldoon, Acting Director of the Teaching and Learning Centre.

“Professor Boud’s presentations will mark the launch of a new occasional series of seminars, workshops, and special interest group meetings on assessment being organised by the Teaching and Learning Centre,” Dr Muldoon said.

In a recently-published study, Hugh de Ferranti has interpreted the history and documented the demise of a centuries-old tradition of oral performance in Japan.

His book - The Last Biwa Singer - is not only a valedictory analysis of that tradition as personified by Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996), but also a celebration of the process of composition-in-performance itself. Within the book is an implicit plea for a greater understanding of such oral performance traditions, and thus their preservation not as cultural relics but as living forms of artistic expression.

Allan Marett, Professor of Ethnomusicology at Charles Darwin University and Emeritus Professor (Musicology) at the University of Sydney, officially launched The Last Biwa Singer at the University of New England, where Dr de Ferranti is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts. Professor Marett spoke about the pride he had felt, as the supervisor of Dr de Ferranti’s PhD thesis on the blind musicians of Japan’s Kyushu province, on reading the book. “It’s the culmination of a journey that Hugh and I started together,” he said.

“Yamashika was the last person to have earned his living in Japan as a blind musician performing a repertoire of tales, songs, and religious rites accompanying himself on the biwa (a four-stringed lute),” Dr de Ferranti said. “He became well known as ‘the last biwa hoshi‘, and was the subject of books, television programs, and a feature-length documentary film. An apparent living relic of a long-vanished Japan, Yamashika also appeared in The New York Times in his last years.”

Professor Marett praised Dr de Ferranti’s insights, gained through conversations with Yamashika and analysis of his repertoire, into the true nature of the biwa singer’s performances - insights that help to correct the official “nationalistic” view of such performances as idealised “cultural relics” of a literary and musical canon.

On the contrary, the picture of the biwa singer’s art that emerges from the book is one of dynamic oral composition - traditional tales virtually recreated in the course of each telling, according (among other things) to the singer’s prior knowledge of his audience and his interaction with them during the performance.

“It is through comparison of multiple performances of a tale that the question of composition-in-performance can be addressed,” Dr de Ferranti explains in the book. “What are the common elements in each performance, what differences are there, how do they occur, and why? In examining this problem one is not trying to establish any ’standard’ or definitive form of the piece, but to establish how different versions of the piece come about.”

“The unfolding of the tale anew in each performance gives it its power,” Professor Marett said, deploring the loss of that “power” with the demise of such performance traditions. “All extinctions - biological or cultural - impoverish us and threaten our survival as a species on this planet,” he concluded.

The Last Biwa Singer: A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance, is published by Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) as No. 143 in the Cornell East Asia Series.

Clicking on the image (a section of the book’s cover) displayed here reveals a photograph, taken at the UNE book launch, of Associate Professor Hugh de Ferranti (left) and Professor Allan Marett.

The UNE Residential System announced today that new catering options would be introduced at Austin, Mary White and Robb Colleges to address the growing need for flexible catering options suited to students’ budget and lifestyle, and meeting their dietary requirements.

This follows a review of students’ needs and catering offerings earlier in the year.

“It’s about choice,” said the Director of the Residential System, Barb Shaw. “Students were asking for more flexible meal plan options to suit changing study routines and lifestyles.

“We looked at solutions that would provide more choice for current and prospective students, while offering cost savings to suit particular needs and lifestyles.”

Residents of Austin College will have the choice of buying a package of 10, 15 or 21 meals a week. In addition, a coffee cart will be available in the Dining Hall, selling coffee and small items to all students living in the UNE Residential Colleges.

Mary White College residents will have the choice of buying a package of 14 or 19 meals a week, including brunch at weekends.

Robb College will offer packages of 14 or 21 meals a week, including breakfast throughout the week.

Catering Manager Christiaan Naine said that Alliance Catering was offering students a choice of healthy, fresh food, and was catering for special (e.g. gluten-free) diets  and ensuring that all meat is halal certified.

He said that Alliance Catering was planning to introduce a program of “themed” cuisine next year, with menus periodically featuring a range of national foods (e.g. Indian, Mexican, Mediterranean).

The university campus was abuzz last week with the filming of the new UNE television commercial (TVC). The commercial is part of UNE’s new creative campaign, which is being developed by Brand and Advertising agency “LOUD”. Producers from Plump Films arrived on Tuesday to begin casting and scout for filming locations, undeterred by the wet weather. At the casting in Madgwick Hall, a contingent of staff and excited college students strutted their stuff in front of the camera (many for the first time!) with enthusiasm and energy.

Wednesday saw the rest of the production crew arrive from Sydney and Brisbane to finalise locations and casting. The northern courtyard of the School of Rural Medicine got the tick of approval as one of the main locations, with its architecture and bright colours jumping out at the director. MPA and creative staff watched the weather intensely overnight, but luckily woke up to a rain-free early morning on Thursday. Two local people involved with TAFE’s Film and Television School joined the production crew for the shoot, along with a cast of 18 staff and students.

The Director, Gary Cunliffe and Producer, Glen Streten, from “Plump Films” were full of praise for UNE, commenting on the beautiful campus environment and the enthusiasm of students and staff. The crew were also impressed by the staff-to-student ratio, reflecting that it was a very different situation to metropolitan universities.

The campaign messaging of the TVC is based on exhaustive research MPA has undertaken over the last 2 years, and both complements and enhances the brand messaging being launched as part of the new logo campaign on 9 November. Alongside the TVC, new advertising, brand and student recruitment materials are being developed as part of the overall campaign.

There were many warm wishes for Professor Alan Pettigrew yesterday when the staff of the University of New England said farewell to him and his wife Ann on his retirement from the position of Vice-Chancellor.

“We’ve had a wonderful time here and we’ll miss the place,” Professor Pettigrew said during the farewell function on the lawns of “Booloominbah”.

After the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Graham Webb, had thanked him, on behalf of the University, for all his achievements as Vice-Chancellor, Professor Pettigrew said that those initiatives had been successful “only because other people wanted to move forward”. He encouraged the staff to build on what they had achieved together, saying: “I think we’ve sown the seeds of a strong future for the University.”

Among those achievements, Professor Webb mentioned the creation of a new senior management team for the University, the establishment of UNE’s School of Rural Medicine within the Joint Medical Program, the charting of a new strategic direction for the University through wide consultation with the staff, a process of academic renewal that has allowed for the creation of important new courses, and the restructuring of the Faculties in a way that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration. Professor Pettigrew was Vice-Chancellor of UNE for almost four years.

Professor Webb said that Professor Pettigrew had maintained “equanimity, generosity - and even humour” through difficult as well as through good times, and that in this he had been “an incredible role model”.

Professor Webb paid tribute to the dedicated support of Mrs Ann Pettigrew for her husband and the University, and her committed involvement - alongside Professor Pettigrew himself - in the life of the wider Armidale community. Mrs Pettigrew, too, was warmly farewelled by individual members of staff.

Among the many parting gifts that Professor Pettigrew and Mrs Pettigrew have received is a framed photograph - presented to them during yesterday’s function - of “Trevenna”, the Vice-Chancellor’s residence at UNE.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Professor Alan Pettigrew displayed here was taken at a farewell dinner for him at UNE during the week.

The Chancellor of the University of New England (UNE), Dr Richard Torbay, announced that UNE had appointed Professor James Barber as its Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer following a special meeting of UNE Council. Professor Barber is expected to commence the position in February 2010.

Professor Barber (pictured here) is currently Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, one of Australia’s largest universities. RMIT is also one of Australia’s most respected ‘dual sector’ universities. He is a Company Director on a number of national bodies, including Open Universities Australia (Australia’s leading provider of fee-paying online degree programs), Jesuit Social Services Australia and Graduate Careers Australia.

Professor Barber is a distinguished academic. After completing his PhD in experimental psychology, his research shifted into the applied fields of drug addiction and child welfare. His research record includes minimal interventions in the secondary prevention of drug addiction, and evidence based social policy and child welfare.

He is a winner of North America’s Pro Humanitate Medal for his research in child welfare and a winner of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from Flinders University. Prior to moving to university senior executive positions in the higher education sector, Professor Barber’s roles included that of Reader and then Professor of Social Work (La Trobe University and the University of Tasmania), Professor of Social Administration (Flinders University) and Dean of Single Department Faculties (University of Toronto).

Professor Barber has significant international education experience, most significantly taking on the additional role of interim President of RMIT International University of Vietnam. He has worked in regional universities and has a commitment to their important contribution in providing access to education, and also in driving economic prosperity and enhancing the morale, culture and identity of their regions.

The Chancellor welcomed the appointment of Professor Barber. “The search for an outstanding candidate for Vice-Chancellor involved an exhaustive recruitment process that yielded extremely high quality candidates”, Dr Torbay said.

“Professor Barber was the preferred choice of our Selection Committee, and I am very pleased that the University has made this appointment. His experience and credentials are precisely what this University needs at this time. I have great confidence that he will provide astute leadership and direction - not just to the staff, students and management at UNE, but to the New England community more broadly.”

Professor Barber said that he looked forward to his appointment. “I have been impressed by the enthusiasm and vitality of this University during my brief visits. I look forward to meeting staff and students early in the new academic year, and with the community in the region and beyond. My wife Mary and I welcome the opportunity to be associated with UNE.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Professor Barber displayed here is courtesy of RMIT.

For media enquiries, contact Michael Kauter, UNE Media Adviser, 02 6773 3872 or 0429360498.

Six Bhutanese Members of Parliament visited the University of New England last Friday in recognition of the Bhutanese Government’s long and productive relationship with UNE.

The delegation, led by the Speaker of the National Assembly of Bhutan, Mr Jigme Tshultim, included three other members of the National Assembly as well as the Speaker of the National Council (the Bhutanese House of Review) and one other member of the National Council. They discussed future developments in the Bhutan/UNE relationship with the Vice-Chancellor of UNE, Professor Alan Pettigrew, and their UNE host, Associate Professor Tom Maxwell, and met Bhutanese students over lunch.

“We have had a long relationship with this university,” Mr Tshultim said, “and we are looking forward to continuing cooperation.” That cooperation, he said, would see an increasing number of Bhutanese students studying at UNE.

He went on to point out that many important positions in the Bhutanese Government and civil service are already occupied by UNE graduates. These include Lyonpho Zangley Dukpa (Minister of Health), Dasho T. S. Powdyel (Minister of Education), Mr Tshering Tenzin (another member of the National Assembly), and Dr Jagar Dorji (a member of the Upper House). Dasho Pema Thinley, Vice-Chancellor of the Royal University of Bhutan, holds a First-Class Master’s degree from UNE and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Education degree in 2004.

Professor Pettigrew said that the University’s mutually rewarding relationship with Bhutan was, among other things, an example of the contribution that UNE - Australia’s oldest regional university - could make in countries facing the challenges of regional development.

About 40 Bhutanese people have gained postgraduate qualifications from UNE since the relationship began in the early 1990s, and more than 130 teachers at rural and remote schools in Bhutan have been trained in the UNE School of Education’s Bhutanese Multigrade Attachment Program, which ended in 2008.

There are currently five undergraduate students from Bhutan at UNE, majoring in subjects including physics and mathematics. There are four postgraduate students, three of whom are completing PhDs in the School of Education via mixed mode.

Mr Tshultim said UNE’s School of Education had provided particularly valuable training for Bhutanese teachers by giving them experience in rural schools.

Dr Maxwell said that, since the relationship began, at least 17 UNE staff members had worked in Bhutan. “Several consultancies and development projects with Bhutan’s Ministry of Education and the Royal University of Bhutan have taken place,” he said, “and more than a dozen scholarly papers in collaboration with Bhutanese academics have been published.”

He added that, while most Bhutanese graduates from UNE had been students in the School of Education, recent graduates had included several students from the School of Environmental and Rural Studies.

During their six-day program in Australia, the Bhutanese parliamentary delegation visited the Australian Parliament and met the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President of the Senate, and members of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. The delegation also visited Charles Sturt University.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Mr Jigme Tshultim and Professor Alan Pettigrew displayed here expands to include the other members of the delegation and Associate Professor Tom Maxwell (far left).

Professor William (Ned) Friedman flew all the way to Armidale, NSW, from Boulder in the United States for two days of fieldwork in pursuit of a species of plant unique to north-eastern NSW.

“There aren’t many places in the world I’d go for only two days,” he said. “But I’d come here for just one day.”

Ned Friedman is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A leading authority on plant morphology and embryology, he has a particular interest in the evolution of flowering plants. And the plant he flew to Armidale to see - a direct descendant of an ancient lineage of flowering plants - could reveal some vital secrets of that evolutionary process.

Before coming to Australia, Professor Friedman had examined records of the plant - Trimenia moorei (a bitter vine) - sent to him from the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium at the University of New England and available through Australia’s Virtual Herbarium, but he had never seen a living specimen. The species - the only Australian member of the family Trimeniaceae - is a woody vine or liana that climbs to a height of 10 metres.

Professor Friedman’s host at UNE was the Director of the Beadle Herbarium, Associate Professor Jeremy Bruhl, and it was Dr Bruhl and the Herbarium’s Curator, Ian Telford, who took him to see the vine in its forest habitat. “They led me directly to the plants,” he said. “It’s been amazing; everything’s happened spectacularly.”

Dr Bruhl - accompanied by Tilly Eldridge, a young English botanist from the University of Manchester who is visiting UNE for three months - had undertaken a reconnaissance trip to the New England escarpment to ensure that the plants were in flower and with young fruit. The two days of fieldwork by the four botanists took them to the Cunnawarra, New England, and Gibraltar Range National Parks, and then back to UNE Botany for the preparation of samples for transport to the United States.

“Darwin called the origin of flowering plants ‘an abominable mystery’,” Professor Friedman said. “In a fraction of the time that it’s taken for the conifers, for example, to reach their modest level of diversity, flowering plants have taken over the world. What led to this explosion of biodiversity?”

This is the question that he’s hoping a study of Trimenia moorei (pictured here) will help to answer.

His particular interest is the evolution of endosperm - the tissue that nourishes the embryo in the seeds of flowering plants, and that nourishes humankind in the form of flour (wheat endosperm) and related foods. “Flowering plants provide between two-thirds and three-quarters of our caloric intake worldwide,” he said.  “In fact, without endosperm we humans wouldn’t have evolved.”

A deeper understanding of the evolution of endosperm could have major implications for both plant breeding and human nutrition.

Professor Friedman hopes to return to New England before the end of the year to observe, in a later stage of development, the plants he saw flowering in spring. He has a double incentive for the return visit, as UNE is hosting, over the first few days of December, the annual conference of the Australian Systematic Botany Society - “a tremendous opportunity,” he said, “for me to interact with the plant evolutionary biology community in Australia.”

Clicking on the Trimenia moorei image displayed here reveals a photograph of (from left) Ian Telford, Tilly Eldridge, Associate Professor Jeremy Bruhl, and Professor Ned Friedman.