We were pleased to have staff from LSA Technology Services present their work to the broader U-M community at the Michigan IT Symposium. This annual event helps create connections between community members, while highlighting the innovation and ingenuity occurring in technology across all of the U-M campuses.
Below are some highlights from LSA Technology Services at the 2018 IT Symposium.
Thinking with Maps: GIS Across the University
Peter Knoop, Research Support
The University of Michigan is a recognized leader in applying Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies across the organization to address a wide variety of teaching, research, and administrative needs. This session explored innovative and inspiring examples of GIS use drawn from all three campuses, and provided an overview of the wealth of GIS applications and services ready to empower you to leverage GIS in your own work, from mobile to desktop to web to enterprise.
UM-Turk: Leveraging Live, Online Data Explorations in Psychology Lecture Sections
Abbey Roelofs and Chris Stockbridge, Research Support
Abbey Roelofs is part of the Research Support Programming group in LSA Technology Services, which does custom software and hardware development for faculty and graduate students in LSA. Her presentation was about one of her programming projects this past semester, UM-Turk. Abbey worked with Chris Stockbridge to create this program for Prof. Julie Boland and Prof. Colleen Seifert in the Psychology Department, for use in their Psych 303 lectures. UM-Turk is a Google Chrome extension that provides an easy-to-use interface to quickly create, conduct, and monitor online surveys with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In addition to making it much easier to submit a task to Mechanical Turk, it also displays the survey completion status from the global worker pool in real time, gives easy access to visualize the resulting data in Qualtrics, and allows the instructor to move between presentation slides and active research during the course of a lecture. The project was funded by a NINI grant with the goal of increasing student engagement and demonstrating real-world methods of data collection in large lecture sections.
MPressive: Getting Help with the Push of a Button
Chris Stockbridge, Research Support
The MPressive project started at Hacks With Friends with the idea of using Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a way for users to request IT support. The system uses Amazon IoT buttons to submit help requests. They initiate a system that creates a ServiceNow ticket and sends a chat message to the appropriate group with the ticket information. The project team includes people from several different groups within ITS, in addition to Chris from LSA Technology Services. There is currently a pilot program in three conference rooms in Fleming, and the purpose of the poster session was largely to find units interested in deploying the buttons to a larger audience. Chris got a few promising leads at the IT Symposium and looks forward to rolling the MPressive system out in support of classrooms and events around campus in the near future.
A Database of Digital ToolsPressive: Getting Help with the Push of a Button
Anthony King, Learning Technologies and Consulting
This database is an effort to capture and disseminate the knowledge and experience of instructional technologists and instructional designers regarding the adoption and implementation of instructional technologies. Data captured includes technical data, such as the hardware required, licensing or subscriptions fees, and platform compatibility, as well as pedagogical data regarding support, instructor experiences, use case scenarios, and issues with rollout and scaling. This represents a collaboration with many IT units across campus, centered in the Teaching and Technology Collaborative and the Instructional Design SiG.
Your Better Foot Forward: CV/Portfolio Websites through LSA Web Services
Jeremiah Cook, Web Content Coordinator
More often than not, people form their first impressions of you based on your online presence. If your website looks like it was built in or hasn't been touched since the 90's, visitors will often conclude that your knowledge is also dated and rusty. Or worse yet, you don't have a website at all.
Properly representing yourself with a professional website lends credibility, enhances visibility in your field, and is extremely important to your career growth.
CV/Portfolio Websites available through LSA Web Services provide LSA faculty, staff, and graduate students a platform to improve the quality of their online presence, exhibit expertise, impress peers, and make new connections.
Policies Unpublicized: Protecting Content in LSA Gateway and Unit Portals in AEM
Jessica Wolking, Whitney Dye, and Jeremiah Cook, LSA Web Services
The LSA Gateway provides an "intranet" type resource to help simplify access to internal materials and assets all in one location. Creating the Gateway changed the way administrative policies and protocols are accessed across the college while simultaneously protecting content from public access.
Portals are unit-intranets where administrators are empowered to manage their permissions and internal content for their unit audiences.
