Wayne Drummond, dean of the College of Architecture, goes over a building plan with students Jessica Norton, left, and Rebecca Brummund during their Architecture 510 class. Drummond teaches the fifth-year studio class three days each week.

Drummond stresses collaboration as Architecture dean

By Kelly Bartling, University Communications

When Wayne Drummond arrived at his dean's office in Architecture Hall in August 2000, his objective was to enrich an already strong architecture program while expanding its influence through rapidly changing technology.

The strategies Drummond devised to carry out that goal are complex and multi-layered. After 15 months, the new dean talks easily about the changes, new initiatives and direction of Nebraska's College of Architecture.

"Where do I start?" Drummond quipped when asked for an update on his tenure as dean. "It's a very solid professional school in all the programs that we currently have, which includes Community and Regional Planning, Architecture and Interior Design. Our first goal is really to make sure we are strengthening and enriching those programs."

Since July 2000, Architecture has four of five new leaders in administration, a host for the new campuswide Media Center, stronger connections with the city of Lincoln and the Kiewit Center in Omaha, proposals for more distance and extended education, and enhanced technology for students and faculty.

"It's hard to pick a single major project to highlight because our overall theme is collaboration," he said. "That means we really are building bridges as fast as we can with others on and off campus."

"We want other people from other disciplines in this building. We want exchanges between our students and other students and exchanges between our faculty and other faculty. Effectively, we would also hope that in very short order our faculty will become an active and demonstrated leader in Web-based instruction in Nebraska."

Drummond's goals for distance education are a big part of the former University of Florida dean's focus. Partly driven by changing technology and partly in response to demand for more outreach, Architecture hopes to grow from eight online courses now to 35-40 courses over the next few years.

Drummond also hopes Architecture will be the first college at UNL to implement a student computer requirement, so every College of Architecture student will have required hardware and software.

"We actually approved the implementation of the computer policy this fall, but in fact we weren't ready," he said. "We'll be patient, but I think we will be ready to do this next fall. I would expect the university as a whole will follow. The truth is, students are coming out of high school extraordinarily well-wired. In architecture they need to be connected to their work with every other course they take on campus."

Drummond's administrative changes have reflected the initiatives. In the dean's office, the roles and responsibilities of the two associate deans were converted. Sharon Kuska is now associate dean of research, and N. Brito Mutunayagam is now serving as associate dean for extension and distance education. Sharon Gaber is chair of Community and Regional Planning and Mark Hoistad is the new chair of the department of architecture. Betsy Gabb continues as interior design program director.

A heightened research agenda, full-time faculty in Omaha, enriching connections with Nebraska's architectural, design and planning firms, alumni development and enhanced outreach are all part of the administrative agenda.

"When I came here, I presented the faculty a 10-year plan for discussion. I would think to really fully engage and accomplish these things we will be well on our way within five years, and see some of these goals solidly in place within the remainder of my administrative career. That means we need to work very hard to develop the resources to accomplish our goals."

Drummond and his extended family have settled in Crete after "coming full circle" back to the Midwest. His first academic position was with University of Kansas beginning in 1969. Raised in Baton Rouge, La., and educated at Louisiana State and Rice, he has worked in various colleges and universities and the private sector. He spent nine years as dean at Florida after three years as dean at Texas Tech.

Drummond said he also feels at home with his students while he continues to teach. In his first semester at the university, he taught his World Architecture Today course. This semester, it's a design studio. That keeps him connected with the changing needs of students and the diversity in the profession. He's enthusiastic about the future of the college.

"I think if there's a significant difference between where we are and where we are headed, it's the introduction of new technologies and communication," he said. "There is no criticism or anything lacking in what was going on, this is a very solid program, solid faculty, solid student body. These are just opportunities to take what was going on within the confines of Architecture Hall and sharing it with the rest of campus, the community, our state . . . and the world."

These diagrams show west-to-east cross sections of the Bartak Depression near Merna, Neb., and the meteor crater near Winslow, Ariz., to which it was compared by University of Nebraska researchers. In contrast to the Merna site, meteorite debris under and around the Winslow crater is substantial, indicated by the term "breccia," a mix of at least 80 percent rubble made up of angular fragments gravel-sized or larger. Both sections are the same scale with no vertical exaggeration. The dashed line beneath the Bartak Depression is its minimum depth (about 160 feet) as estimated by University of Kansas researchers. The dotted line on that drawing shows the depth of the formation caused by the meteorite that hit the Winslow site.

New research debunks Merna Crater

It was Nebraska wind, not space rock, that caused hole in ground

By Charlie Flowerday, Conservation and Survey Division

A nearly mile-wide depression in the middle of Nebraska, once heralded as the site of a large meteorite's impact, is really just another hole in the ground, University of Nebraska scientists say.

The Bartak Depression, named for the family on whose Custer County land it's located, was created thousands of years ago by wind, not a meteorite, the NU researchers announced last week.

The NU research counters the conclusions of University of Kansas researchers who said in 1992 that the depression, which they renamed the Merna Crater after the nearby town, likely was created by the explosion of a large meteorite with the force of several hydrogen bombs between 3,000 and 500 years ago. In the absence of any large meteorite fragments, the KU researchers' original theory, proposing a meteorite impact, was revised a few years later to include a meteor that exploded about three miles in the air above the site.

The KU team's conclusion caused a media stir and some skepticism among scientists at the time because it challenged existing timetables on meteorite impacts, including the likelihood of future impacts.

Articles on the team's findings ran in national science magazines such as National Geographic, Earth and Discover and in a number of newspapers. Entrepreneurial residents embraced the depression's newfound fame as a potential tourism boon with a community festival known as Merna Crater Days.

"This thing hit the news because it pointed to higher rates of meteor bombardment just as people were becoming concerned about the risk of a large meteor that could hit the Earth some day, but probably a long ways down the road," said Jim Swinehart, one of three NU Conservation and Survey Division researchers who set out in 1998 to study the site further.

That NU research, which included drilling test holes in and next to the depression, found that the "crater" had the same origin as similar, though less impressive, depressions in the region: relentless winds that scoured out hollows during very dry periods thousands of years ago.

"We didn't want folks to start thinking like Chicken Little and say the sky is falling," Swinehart said. "Part of the reason for the original investigation was to bring tourist dollars to the area, but it's based on poor science."

The NU team reported its findings this week at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, the same organization that initially heard the KU team's conclusions nine years ago. Swinehart was joined by NU researchers Mark Kuzila, lead author of the study, director of CSD and its head soil scientist; and geologist Joe Mason.

"This is the kind of thing that makes scientists either salivate or froth at the mouth," said Swinehart of the meteorite theory. "But it just isn't so."

The KU researchers' findings were based on relatively shallow drilling that turned up microscopic metal-rich fragments and glass shards they said were unusual for the region and pointed to a meteorite origin.

The NU team's more extensive drilling, 200 to 400 feet deep, however, failed to turn up the debris around the rim of the crater or the dramatic deformation and compression of underlying sediments that a meteorite would have caused.

"The first most obvious discrepancy was that there were not relatively large pieces of glassy debris in the area," Swinehart said. "These would be many tens of feet thick around the crater. You can imagine. You blow it all up and it falls to the ground."

Instead, the NU team found, the Bartak Depression has more in common with a similar, previously studied depression near Ong, about 120 miles southeast of Merna, than with the most recent, large impact crater in the United States, the 50,000-year-old Meteor Crater near Winslow, Ariz., also nearly a mile in diameter.

Both the Ong and Merna sites reflect an ancient landscape formed more than 25,000 years ago in wind-blown silt called loess that is covered in more recent loess.

The NU researchers also had an explanation for the presence of magnetic minerals and glass shards that their colleagues at KU attributed to a meteorite. Such material is common in and under the landscape of central and western Nebraska, likely having been reworked by wind and water after having blown in from ancient volcanoes thousands of miles away, Swinehart said.

"You give me a loess sample from central Nebraska, and I guarantee you I'll find a few percent to 15 percent glass shards," he said.

The meteorite theory also seemed highly unlikely to Bill Shoemaker, a meteor expert with the U.S. Geological Survey who had said in Discover magazine in 1993 that the odds were 10 to 1 against the Bartak Depression being caused by a meteorite.

For every genuine meteorite impact site, Shoemaker said, there are thousands of depressions that have some crater-like features but were not created by meteorites.

The Conservation and Survey Division is part of NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Program strives to aid science teaching

By Charlie Flowerday, Conservation and Survey Division

Learning science shouldn't be drudgery for students, especially at the elementary and secondary levels. Hands-on experiences can enliven learning and even balance the drudgery of rote memorization.

While there will always be a certain amount of memorization involved in science education, there is a growing realization among scientists and teachers that the most important thing for students to take out of a science classroom is that science is a way of doing things - not an immutable body of knowledge.

One of the many ways that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is addressing that issue is through the 8-year-old Nebraska Earth Science Education Network, a joint program of the university's Conser-vation and Survey Division and School of Natural Resource Sciences aimed at improving science education by connecting K-12 educators with university resources.

Supported by a $70,000 National Science Foundation grant and in cooperation with the UNL Teachers College, NESEN brought science education students and secondary-level educators together with university researchers last summer to form a single team investigating questions in the field. Over a four-week period, the participants collaborated on educational approaches that integrated the research into K-12 teaching.

Teams formed to examine climate change; nitrogen cycling in prairie landscapes; windbreaks; groundwater-surface water dynamics and water quality; fertilizer management for the environment; the diet and environment of a prehistoric culture of Chilean Indians called the Chinchorro; agricultural uses of remote sensing; use of rubidium as a corn rootworm tracer; and invertebrates as indicators of water quality.

"The idea was to integrate science teachers into the research experience of scientists here at the university," said Dave Gosselin, director of NESEN and a UNL geologist. "Our ultimate goal is to achieve beneficial changes in science education."

The teacher training was aimed at practicing "inquiry-based" or problem-solving methods of science education. Such an approach attempts to replicate what scientists do as they analyze a specific real-world issue, investigate it and evaluate the results. The research teams focused on bringing these lessons into the classroom through several collaborative workshops.

"Actually, through NESEN, we've been doing this for about three years. We're ahead of the nation in living up to these new national standards," said Ron Bonnstetter, UNL professor of education and co-leader of the project. "The researchers Dave brought together were really the believers and the shakers. A scientist's enthusiasm for his or her own field is simply contagious."

Gosselin said he and Bonnstetter are now working together to institutionalize the success of the project by making research an integral part of the science education curriculum in Teachers College.

"We want to incorporate research experience into secondary science education classes," he said. "Ron is requiring his students to get involved in research projects and I'm working to facilitate that with scientists who are interested in getting involved."

Members of the team gave a presentation on NESEN at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this week.