Trevor Murphy

A tale of 101 digital stories

Digital storytelling at Williams has become a standard part of how ITech introduces the use of video to faculty, staff, and students. From 2002 to the present, Williams College has invited Joe Lambert and others from the Center for Digital Storytelling [1] at least once a year to conduct three-day workshops for eight to twelve faculty and staff on digital storytelling. Participants create a three to five minute video from still images, audio narratives, music, and sometimes video. Though learning the technology necessary to create and edit the final videos is definitely part of the workshop, a greater emphasis is placed on the art of storytelling and script writing. The culminating event of the workshop is the movie showing at the end of the three days. The Office for Information Technology at Williams College has in turn used the Center for Digital Storytelling model of teaching digital storytelling to train students how to work with audio/video hardware; collect high quality audio, video, and still images; work with video editing and project management; and get to know each other in a new way. This paper covers the process of teaching digital storytelling and examines the outcomes from providing this training to the faculty, staff, and students of Williams College through interviews with past workshop participants.

Multiple solutions for digitizing equations for students

It can be challenging for faculty in the sciences to share mathematics with students. Photocopying hand written notes, or using the overhead projectors can be limiting when students are outside of class and need access to materials. Adapting equations so they can be posted online or in a content management system, published, added to Microsoft PowerPoint or and Adobe InDesign poster, or to be sent as an email attachment can seem laborious and complicated.In this paper the author surveys software and hardware options for presenting mathematics in a variety of media types. Some of these options include Equation Editor, Math Type, LaTeX, Adobe InDesign, MathML, and the HP Digital Sender 9200c, and a couple of other solutions that fit a variety of purposes.With appropriate choices of technology, equations can be made available in a readable and accessible format.

Read, write, and present for ACM SIGUCCS conferences

The Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in University and College Computing Services (ACM SIGUCCS) is made up of professionals who support and manage of information technology services at higher education institutions. SIGUCCS sponsors an annual conference that is drawn together by volunteers. The conference program takes the form of paper authors presenting their findings in 30 minute talks, as part of a panel, or in a poster session. Papers are presented on a variety of tracks such as management, technology, customer support, documentation and training, or instructional technology. The track titles can change over time. Attending and contributing to the SIGUCCS conference program is an opportunity for professional development. This paper seeks to demystify the process of contributing to the SIGUCCS conference program as a reader, author, and presenter and thus make the opportunity to obtain professional development through contributing to the SIGUCCS conference program easier.

Teaching, Learning, and Classroom Design

Our schools have a variety of classroom environments from the large lecture halls, to teaching labs with a computer for every student, to rooms with movable flat tables set in a circle. Many of our classrooms are equipped with data projection and podiums. Faculty often have favorite classrooms and try to book those rooms for their classes every year. Classrooms might be assigned by class size, but there are other factors about classrooms that either match or clash with teaching styles of our faculty. In this paper we intend to explore how the classroom environment affects teaching and learning, and how classrooms can be designed to facilitate engagement and active learning at Williams College and Lewis and Clark College. We will also discuss the challenges in pursuing the creation of flexible learning spaces.

Choosing a Classroom Polling Vendor

Classroom polling at Williams College is infrequent and sporadic occurring in classes only when they are most pedagogically appropriate for the content. Some courses use classroom polling once a semester. Other courses use classroom polling often, but the data is not used in grading or stored for future analysis. Flexibility and portability make classroom polling an easy tool to apply when the anonymous collection of class input serves a teaching purpose. Recently, classroom polling vendors have moved to a subscription model where classroom polling users have cloud accounts that require monthly fees. This new subscription model does not match with the use of classroom polling at Williams College. Students do not purchase accounts with monthly fees to participate in classroom polling that may or may not be used in classes. This paper follows Williams College as it creates and follows a new process for finding the right classroom polling vendor for its campus.

Instructional Technology Communication and Outreach

Instructional designers and technologists use a variety of means for communicating with faculty. There are IT Newsletters, brown bag lunches, visiting speakers, listening tours, department meetings, lightning talks, email blasts, one-on-one meetings, hallway conversations, and the list goes on. The authors from Lyndon College and Williams College consider and compare the various paths available for communicating with faculty about technology projects and opportunities at small institutions. Best practices of the various outreach efforts will be shared.

Needs Analysis for Instructional Technology Projects

Instructional media production in the higher education environment is often rushed. Faculty propose instructional technology solutions to help deliver content to students or to teach in novel ways, and instructional technologists may create media or systems to meet the faculty members specifications. Often this process does not fully consider the needs of the students who ultimately use the finished product. Instructional tools and media can be enhanced by including a needs analysis process before the development process begins. The role of needs analysis process is to use information gathered from the intended users of the product to inform the products design and implementation. The authors will share examples of how needs analysis is conducted at their institutions (Williams College and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), how needs analysis has shaped the products they create for instruction, and how not including a needs analysis can result in a less effective finished product.

A video support model for liberal arts colleges

Supporting video in the liberal arts college context is a broad topic including training and instruction, production, event support, simulcasting, film festivals, college courses on video, media lab support, internships for students, software and hardware access, and loaner pools of equipment. Williams College has been working to develop a support model to handle the wide ranging video support needs of the college. The evolving model makes use of existing course support programs, a well defined training path for student employees, and project based initiatives. Developing our understanding of video production, support and training, has increased our capacity at Williams College to support video based scholarship on campus.

Instructional technology outreach and metrics: building a bridge

At Williams College, self-selected faculty take full advantage of the Instructional Technology (ITech) training, resources, and services while other faculty remain under-informed and underserved. The mission of ITech is to provide leadership, encouragement, and support for faculty utilizing technology to achieve academic objectives; create and maintain environments for media development, presentation, and the exploration of new technologies; and to evaluate emerging instructional technologies and facilitate their implementation. Incidental statistics relating to resource use are collected and reported. However, there is no system of metrics directly tied to the ITech mission. This situation does not seem to be unique to Williams College. Discussions at a National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education sponsored conference on Instructional Technology in 2008 revealed that Instructional Technologists at many institutions were grappling with the same issue [1]. How do you set meaningful goals for measuring leadership, encouragement, and support of faculty without a system for measuring efforts in these areas? What would such a system look like? The author collected six years of data on his own interactions with faculty at Williams College as a way to measure his own progress toward meeting the duties and responsibilities of a Williams College Instructional Technology Specialist. This paper explores the process of developing a system of metrics tied to faculty outreach and the resulting challenges and rewards that come from implementing such a system.

Specialized computer labs: care and feeding

This paper is a brief overview of some of the challenges and successes related to the support of a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Windows lab and a music technology Mac OS lab at Williams College. Specialized computer labs can present some surprising issues that set them apart from general academic computer labs. The GIS lab and music technology labs at Williams have provided many examples of such challenges, including: Finding academic pricing for non-academic software. Creating secure lab spaces. Handling unusual license management, including dongles and hasps, as well as software management schemes that involve locking software to a specific computer. Working around security issues with products that assume that all users have full administrative access to the lab computers. Solving peripheral software and hardware interface challenges. Training users and creating effective documentation. Troubleshooting non-standard hardware and software-intensive lab stations. Creating and deploying an image for a specialty lab.The authors share their experience supporting these labs and confronting some of these issues at Williams College.