For Release: Immediate July 24, 2000
Contact: Michael Hemmesch
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National Technology Teaching Award Named after Late CSB/SJU Professor
St. Joseph, Minn. - Rita Knuesel, dean of the college at the College of Saint Benedict, recently represented the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, by presenting the first annual Tom Creed Compassionate Pioneer Award to Patrick Wiseman, professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law. The award is named in honor of the late Tom Creed, CSB/SJU professor of psychology, who passed away in 1999. The TLT Group, in collaboration with one of its founding sponsors, Blackboard, Inc., will sponsor the annual award.
The award, which was presented at the TLT Group's Summer Institute 2000 in Phoenix, will continue to be presented to an individual who exhibits those teaching traits that were so important to Creed and his teaching. The award will be given to an individual who has pioneered the use of technology in a way that has enhanced teaching and, more importantly, student learning. It is an award that will recognize that technology can be used to enhance the learning community and the subject about which the community is learning. It will also recognize the type of individual who not only is a pioneer in the area, but who also is dedicated to encouraging others as they develop their own enhancements for teaching and learning. The selection committee consists of individuals from CSB/SJU and the TLT Group's senior associate leadership group. Dean Knuesel and the Rev. Bruce Wollmering OSB, CSB/SJU associate professor of psychology, represented CSB/SJU on the selection committee.
The TLT group is the teaching, learning and technology affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education. Blackboard, Inc. is the only software company to provide Universal Learning Solutions, a road map for educators to host everything from single course web sites to an entire online campus.
Creed was instrumental in bringing about a paradigmatic shift in classroom pedagogy at CSB/SJU. Creed joined the psychology faculty in the Fall of 1977 and regularly taught Principles of Learning and Behavior, Introductory Psychology, and the Psychology Senior Seminar with his ever popular "Popular Delusions" course.
Creed was diagnosed with colon and liver cancer on Monday, Feb. 15, 1999, and died on Monday, March 8, 1999, three weeks to the day after being diagnosed. Creed chose to keep teaching until a week before his death, saying: " It's because this is what I truly love to do." Days before he died, Creed was delighted to learn from Dean Knuesel, that the Bush Foundation had funded a $450,000 grant proposal he and others had written for the Extending the Classroom Walls project. As a result of this grant, CSB/SJU has launched four learning communities. They include The Healthy Learning Community and The Gender Learning Community at CSB/SJU, as well as the Biology of the Southeast at Highlands Biological Station, North Carolina, and the Internship Learning Community in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.
Saint John's University for men and the College of Saint Benedict for women are partners in liberal arts education, providing students the opportunity to benefit from the distinctions of not one, but two nationally recognized Catholic, residential, undergraduate institutions. Together CSB and SJU challenge students to live balanced lives of learning, work, leadership and service in a changing world.
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