Dr. Deleasa Randall-Griffiths has been busy listening to and telling stories this October. The first weekend of the month she attended the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN where she enjoyed listening to some of the top-rated storytellers from around the world. This year marked the 20th anniversary of her first attendance in Jonesborough. Later in the month she attended a workshop at Akron City Hospital presented by The Palette of Faith and the Summit 2010 Quality of Life Project titled “Honoring the Stories: Enriching Meaning at the End of Life.” The workshop focused on finding meaning in the end of life journey by harnessing the power of storytelling and listening as tools for grief and healing. Dr. Randall-Griffiths also spent her fall break telling folktales to over 80 fourth-graders at Hillsdale Elementary School. And, for the third year in a row she was the featured storyteller telling ghost stories for Ashland’s downtown Costume Capers event. While she loves October and all the storytelling events it brings, Deleasa wants to remind everyone that “Any day is a good day to tell a story!”
Dr. Theodore A. Avtgis has been doing a bit of traveling. He presented a paper titled "Assessing the Effects of Affirming Communication Education on Surgical Residents"at the joint conference of the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare and the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare held in Chicago, Ill. The paper traces an ongoing longitudinal effort targeted at assessing surgical resident communication competency with both patients and members of the surgical team. The results of this study aretargeted at documenting compliance for ACGME core communication competencies required of all medical residents in the United States. The abstract for this paper was published in the journal Medical Encounter. Avtgis believes that the contribution that communication scholars have a lot to offer the medical community and believes that "the possibilities for communication in the everyday practice of medicine are limitless should we choose to realize them." He also traveled to the University of Findlay to the Ohio Communication Association annual meeting where he participated in a panel of journal editors on how to get published in communication peer-reviewed journals. This panel was targeted at giving younger scholars advice on how to navigate the world of academic publishing. He is the Editor-in Chief of the journal Communication Research Reports. Avtgis was also elected to serve on the Executive Council of the Ohio Communication Association.Dr. Ric Jensen wrote several articles related to sports media that recently appeared in The Encyclopedia of Sports Management and Marketing, which was published in September 2011 by Sage Press.
The articles Jensen wrote describe such issues as the ways in which national and sport-specific sports festivals are promoted and marketed; the need for sports organizations to market their teams to specific segments of fans; the growing strategic role of websites and new media by sports organizations; and the diverse ways that sports-related organizations market themselves to other businesses and trade associations.The Encyclopedia was edited by Linda Swayne of and Mark Dodds of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Mark Dodds of the State University of New York at Cortland. The web address for the encyclopedia is http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book230738?siteId=sage-us&prodTypes=any&q=encyclopedia+of+sports+management+and+marketing&fs=1
