An anonymous quote states that music is what feelings sound like. If that is the case, music is proud and amazing! It encompasses the culmination of campus-wide efforts focusing on bringing entertainment to USI in a unique sense.

On Tuesday, April 21, Plain White T’s sang their hearts out to a crowd of 1,000-plus. Following performances by Single File and Danger Radio, they engaged the crowd with hit songs like “Hey There Delilah” and “1234.” The Physical Activities Center was home to this magical night. It was a proud moment for me as the advisor of the Activities Programming Board and the concert was amazing, to say the least!

This event is the largest that the Activities Programming Board has planned in my less than two years at USI. We jumped in head first and took a risk with nothing but excitement and high expectations. A group of 25 APB members worked tirelessly throughout the planning process, and on the big day they really shined. APB members began their shifts at 8 a.m. on Tuesday and didn’t go home until 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning. We were determined to provide nothing but the best for our students!

The concert began at 8 p.m. with an introduction from Atom and Shawnda of Hot 96 kicking off the show. The crowd gathered against the barricades to see what the buzz was all about. The first band, Single File, took the stage nervously. Their management mentioned that USI was a large venue for the group. Fortunately, nerves did not get in the way. They engaged the audience and groups of all ages clapped, jumped around, and managed to sing along to songs that seemed so new.

Danger Radio soon followed and numerous USI students were shocked at the quality of their performance. Several have asked about their return to our campus. It’s a great feeling when positive feedback is the result of going outside of the box with entertainment.

Our icing on the cake was the Plain White T’s. They entertained us with their “Three Part Harmony” show, singing different variations of popular songs. The lead singer, Tom Higgenson, jumped from the stage, interacting with students as they sang in the microphone together. The screams and cheers were almost deafening as several of the event staff stood in PAC 200 watching the show.

The night came to a close with one final song from Plain White T’s. Weeks of hard work ended on a chord from lead guitarist, Tim Lopez. That moment was bittersweet. We ended the show successfully, but the show came to an end. The night seemed to fly by, but what matters most is that the audience was pleased.

I know that this event is the result of collaborative campus efforts; from the USI Bookstore volunteering to sell tickets to Administrative Staff taking time to review contracts. Without the support of campus officials and genuine student interest it would have never been the success that it was. So, from the bottom of the Activities Programming Board’s heart, we thank you, USI!

We hope to see you at more events soon, but what matters most is that the beat goes on.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: KATHY S. JONES, program advisor for Student Activities

As chair of the Faculty Senate, I want to invite all faculty to the next two Faculty Senate meetings.

A regular meeting of the Faculty Senate will be held at 3 p.m. Friday, April 17, in Room 2027 of the Health Professions Center. The Faculty Senate Spring All-Faculty meeting will be held at 3 p.m. Monday, April 20, in Mitchell Auditorium in the Health Professions Center.

The Faculty Senate wants to share with you! I have been involved in much discussion regarding shared governance at this University and I have realized that many faculty do not realize that what we say and do makes a difference.

Here are some examples of what has occurred in previous academic years when a faculty member or faculty organization initiated changes to the way things are done at USI:

• The fee waiver increased from 50 percent to 75 percent for spouses and dependents of eligible employees. This originated from the Faculty Senate Economic Benefits Committee.

• The Faculty Senate recommended the need for equity increases for associate professors. Also, the Faculty Senate developed a consistent set of peer institutions to which USI can compare itself. These peer institutions are public institutions with similar Carnegie classification.

• There has been increased support for scholarship across all levels of faculty. This occurred through faculty discussions with the provost identifying resources. Examples are the Center for Academic Excellence, an increased number of sabbaticals, and additional funding.

• The tenure and promotion process has been aligned and the effective date of tenure has been moved up.

• The student evaluation of teaching forms changed from Purdue to current form. Via ad-hoc committee and faculty surveys, faculty gave input on what students are capable of evaluating.

These are just a few of the examples of shared governance that I have compiled. I hope to see you on Monday so that we can discuss more of our accomplishments.

POST CONTRIBUTED BY: LESA CAGLE, assistant professor of nutrition and chair of the Faculty Senate.

As May is fast approaching many in the university are thinking thoughts of summer vacations. Members of the myUSI support team, on the other hand, are looking forward to launching their new myUSI site on May 11.

In 2008, USI won over one million dollars in grants from the Campus EAI Consortium to replace the current myUSI portal. Since that time, our team has been hard at work implementing the new myUSI site. We’ve installed server hardware and software. We’ve crafted software links from the portal to Banner Self Service and to the new Blackboard and we’ve written still more software to tie it all together in the background. Throw in getting up to speed on various technologies, testing, and documentation and it’s been a big project. You can see why we’re excited to be approaching the finish the line of this implementation phase and the starting line of working with the system in the wild.

I thought I’d take everyone on a tour of some of the features of our new charge and show you some of the features that we’re excited about.

Email Addresses

With the move to a new myUSI site comes a new email server. This change gave us an opportunity to implement a new email address structure for our users. Addresses will no longer end in @usieagles.org, but will instead end in @mail.usi.edu. Usernames will stay the same across the change, so that johndoe@usieagles.org will become johndoe@mail.usi.edu. Any mail that is sent to the old @usieagles.org addresses after May 11 will automatically be forwarded to the the new @mail.usi.edu addresses.

This change should make it simpler for those with only a myUSI email address to take advantage of educational discounts which had previously required .edu email address for eligibility.

Email Preview

The previous myUSI site only offered a simple preview of the five newest messages in your inbox. It also included links to open those messages, open your mail, compose messages, and check your address book. Generally, it only allowed you the ability to check if new mail was available. Everything else required launching the email application. Here’s a screenshot of the old email preview:

The new preview is deceptively simple looking at first as it just shows the number of unread messages in your mailbox.

However, when you click on the INBOX link, you get  a list of messages currently in your email account.

This simple email client allows you to read any message in any folder in your account. You can also reply to, compose and manage messages without leaving this channel.

You can think of this simplified email client as a place to  dash off a quick message or quickly check up on what’s going on in your mail account.

Full Email Client

On the other hand, if you want more fine grained control over your email and better integration with calendars and instant messaging (IM), you can use the full email client called myUSI Mail. The myUSI Mail client can be accessed by clicking its icon in the Dashboard channel in the new myUSI.

Full Email Client Interface

The full myUSI Mail client is a rich Internet application that behaves more like a desktop program similar to Outlook mail or Thunderbird mail than the previous myUSI email system.

For instance, you can drag messages between folders. Here, I’m dragging a message about a recent auction to an appropriate folder.

It offers many of the features you’d expect in a typical email program, plus the ability to do more advanced messaging tasks like converting a message into a calendar event or task. Here I am creating a calendar event from the auction message that I moved earlier.

Instant Messaging

MyUSI Mail has a built in instant messaging (IM) client. Like any desktop IM program, it will let you know when your friends are online and available to chat (if they’ve authorized you, of course). You can also arrange your contacts, or buddies, into groups that you define.

Your buddy list allows you to easily see which of your friends or colleagues is online and alert notices will float up from the lower right as they come and go.

You simply double click on a buddy that is available in order to start chatting in a separate window.

Calendaring

The last features that I’d like to preview have to do with the calendaring services integrated into the myUSI Mail client. Calendaring has taken a major leap forward with this iteration of the myUSI system. In the day or week view, you just need to click and drag between the times of the event in order to create it. You can also drag events to different times, days, weeks, and months.

You can also create multiple calendars for various contexts. Perhaps creating one for your office hours, one for your class schedule, in addition to maintaining your default calendar. You can then view them as combined or individual calendars and assign different colors for each calendar to help them stand out when in a combined view.

You can also combine the ability to create multiple calendars with the new ability to give permission to others to view, update or busy search any of the calendars that you have created or own. This opens up a lot of possibilities regarding collaboration with fellow students, co-workers, colleagues and groups.

Plus many many more…

These are just a few of the new features available in the new myUSI portal. In the coming weeks and months we’ll be producing guides and screencasts showcasing features and offering tips and tricks to get the most out of the software. We’ll also pass along finds from our users as well.

Getting Ready

Your initial password for the new myUSI system will be your original six digit PIN number after the May 11 changeover. If you haven’t ever changed your password, you should be able to login with your current username and your PIN number. If have changed your password or aren’t sure what your PIN is, you can find it by logging into the current myUSI before May 11th and following the instructions outlined in this screencast or this written guide.

To stay up to date on how to be prepared for the changeover, you should regularly check our myUSI Transition page at http://www.usi.edu/newportal.

There we go into a lot of detail about exactly what is going to happen during the transition. We cover how mail will be handled before and after the change and we talk about other implications and preparations you should make in order to be ready for the changeover.Also individual posts about the myUSI transition can be found in the myUSI Transition section of the myUSI Frequently Asked Questions Site.

If you are use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to this section’s feed by pointing your RSS reader at http://media.myusi.org/myusifaq/section/myusi-transition/feed/.

The myUSI support team is also experimenting with using Twitter as a means of keeping our users informed about system availability and previewing information about the myUSI site. You can follow us as http://twitter.com/myusi.