The Michigan IT Symposium, taking place on November 25 and 26, brings together members of U-M’s IT community to create an opportunity to network, collaborate, and showcase how their work furthers the mission of the University of Michigan to provide world-class teaching, research, and patient care.
Highlighted below are the presentations and posters put together by LSA Technology Services staff members. Registration is still open to see these displays and presentations, among 21 other presentations and 46 additional posters.
ContaMiNot: Know Where To Throw!
by Chris Stockbridge (LSA Technology Services), and Chris Hedly (Department of Communications)
The ContaMiNot mobile app will assist the U-M community with sorting their waste into the correct bins, i.e., compost, recycling, or landfill. The app will also offer educational and gaming opportunities to make correct waste disposal a fun and rewarding experience. See our poster for a look at the technology behind the app, and an overview of our progress. With our proof of concept established, now our goals are to:
Prevent Contamination
Educate About Waste Disposal
Motivate People To Participate in Waste Disposal
Reduce U-M landfill waste by 40% by 2025
Keep our land and oceans cleaner
Help us combat climate change
High Performance Computing Training at Scale with ShellShare
by Charles Antonelli (LSA Technology Services)
HPC training requires use of the command line by the instructor to show command entry, execution, and results to participating students, who will then repeat these commands in their own terminal windows. Existing tools for sharing terminal windows are clumsy and usually require sending images of the commands over tools designed to show video, which pixelates the text and makes it difficult to read. Furthermore, as the lines are rendered as streams of pixels, the characters they represent cannot be copied and reused by the student.
Making Big Classes Seem Smaller with Personalized Learning Technology
by Elizabeth Fomin, Teri Horton, and Siba El Dalla (LSA Technology Services)
The LTC team at LSA collaborates with faculty to take advantage of new approaches to classroom design to support and facilitate active learning/team-based learning. This increases engagement between students and faculty, both physically and virtually, especially when we include the immersive technologies of VR/AR. Designing our classrooms for such activities and equipping them with appropriate technologies can create more engaging and personalized learning experiences for our students.
Spatial Data: Collecting Information in the Field with Survey123
by Caitlin Dickinson, Peter Knoop, and Abbey Roelofs (LSA Technology Services)
Survey123, a form-centric mobile data collection app, was used for a multi-year excavation and survey of the Olynthos archaeological site in Greece. As part of Esri's ArcGIS platform, Survey123 allows offline mobile data collection, easy syncing and backup to the cloud, and near real-time mapping for data quality checks. The LSA Technology Services GIS team helped the project team transition from writing on paper forms to Survey123 forms, which creates a seamless experience from data collection to mapping results in ArcGIS Online. This project, and lessons learned from it, serve as a model for how others can utilize Survey123 for both online and offline data collection.
Spatial Data: Creating a Web-based Narrative with StoryMaps
by Caitlin Dickinson, Peter Knoop, and Abbey Roelofs (LSA Technology Services)
ArcGIS StoryMaps are a powerful digital storytelling tool, combining maps, videos, audio, images, and narrative text in an interactive web experience. See how StoryMaps are being utilized across the campus community in teaching, as assignments, and for communicating research. The simple web-based StoryMap builder is accessible to users of all levels, requiring no coding to create professional-looking web applications.
Spatial Data: Customizing Online Maps with JavaScript
by Caitlin Dickinson, Peter Knoop, and Abbey Roelofs (LSA Technology Services)
ArcGIS Online makes it easy to create a web map that can be published as a standalone web app or embedded in a larger website, but they have a limited set of controls and display options. The ArcGIS API for JavaScript provides much more extensive tools to create maps, tailor their appearance, and implement custom actions and behaviors. The LSA Technology Services GIS team has worked with a number of researchers on campus to create highly customized websites involving map-based data to share their findings and involve a broader audience.
Virtual Exchange: Engaging the World from Your Classroom
by Todd L. Austin (LSA Technology Services) and Philomena Meechan (LSA Language Resource Center)
Not all students have the time or resources for study or travel abroad to gain experience engaging with people from other countries and cultures. To help address this, the Virtual Exchange Initiative assists faculty and staff in constructing courses that are co-taught with international partners through the use of videoconferencing, collaborative documents, and instant messaging. The Initiative welcomes participation interested faculty and AV/technical support staff who would like to create and support such courses in their units.
Automated Testing and Deployment of Infrastructure and Applications using Ansible and Molecule
by Jaime Magiera (LSA Technology Services) and Michael Shen (HITS Software Delivery)
Ansible is an open-source automation tool used across the university and worldwide for configuration management and automated application deployment. We can know the exact state of our infrastructure, how an application was installed, and can rapidly scale resources with minimal direct interaction.
We will share how Ansible has helped minimize the time and resources needed for post-build configuration and ongoing maintenance, and how common administrative tasks can be simplified.
In addition, we will take a deep dive into Molecule to show how it is being used to test configurations, deployments, and software lifecycle paths. We will describe our techniques for debugging and testing using Molecule, while sharing common challenges faced along the way.
AV Over IP: What to Think About for Your Network
by David Blair (LSA Technology Services), Chris Visel (Ross SCH IT), Joanna Kovacevich (School of Education), David Greenspan (University Library), Rob Levitt (HITS), Jeran Norman (CAEN), and Pradip Patel (ITS)
Audiovisual (AV) over Internet Protocol (IP) is the transmission of audio, video, and control signals, distributed in real time without latency, over a network cable infrastructure, i.e. WAN, LAN or the internet. In comparison to conventional analogue AV environments, AV over IP refers to the use of standard network equipment to switch and transmit video and audio signals.
In a panel discussion format, AV and IT professionals will share their experiences of installing AV equipment using AV over IP technology. The panel will share information on how they implemented the technology into their networks, things to look out for, things to consider and references for more information.
Building Block Practices for Business Relationship
by Nancy Herlocher (LSA Technology Services) and Keila Walton (IT Customer Advocacy Manager)
Explore and collaborate with others working to improve business relationships and coordinate best practices. We will cover: good conversations, trust, meeting people from their perspective, and good questions for better solutions. Each section will have an activity and a practice moment in groups of three with the roles: observer, relationship manager, and client.
Spatial Data: Getting Started with Online Mapping
by Caitlin Dickinson, Peter Knoop, and Abbey Roelofs (LSA Technology Services)
ArcGIS Online is a simple yet powerful interactive mapping tool to which everyone at the University of Michigan has access. ArcGIS Online can be used to visualize data, analyze spatial patterns, and present materials in a professional-looking app. In this hands-on workshop, learn how to use ArcGIS Online to easily turn a spreadsheet into a map, discover and add data to the map, customize the map's appearance, and publish the map for sharing, all on the web. We will also look at options for analyzing and presenting map data, as well as some of the tools and technologies available for collecting geographic datasets.
Supporting Digital Scholarship through Collaboration
by Joe Bauer (LSA Technology Services) and Anne Cong-Huyen (U-M Library)
Anne and Joe will describe the collaboration efforts on campus for supporting Digital Scholarship and will outline the opportunities for IT partners across campus to get involved. Digital Scholarship commonly involves research that creates or interacts with digital archives. A common challenge with a digital scholarship project is balancing the needs for innovation with the needs for long term preservation.
UDOIT as an Accessibility Teaching Tool
by Emily Ravenwood (LSA Technology Services)
This session will demonstrate the UDOIT accessibility checker for digital course materials in Canvas, with emphasis on the informational and teaching features of the tool. Possible approaches for introducing faculty to use of the tool will be suggested, and workflows for using the "fix-it" features demonstrated.
