The Project Group – a subgroup of Instructional Technology – plans, manages, implements, supports, and consults on a wide variety of software solutions and information technology projects. Our primary mission is in support of faculty in their academic work (both research and teaching), but our work frequently bears on the administrative realm as well. We work with established technologies and explore new ones. Our projects range from collaboration with individual faculty to development of campus-wide programs. We offer assistance to individuals and departments in researching software as a solution and we also do custom programming when there is a need but no available market solution.
Completed and on-going projects:
- Unbound: Williams Digital Collections – our digital repository is a place to store, organize, present and disseminate the products of the intellectual life of the College, and to preserve the history of the institution
- Data Collection Systems – a number of systems for which we automatically collect, store and publish data. The active data collection systems are: HMF weather, Shepherds Well Wind Station, Morley PV (photovoltaic), Library Offsite PV, Building Energy Use, All-Campus Energy Use, ’66 Center PV, ’66 Center Building Camera, and ’66 Center Water.
- Digital Field Notebooks – virtual botanical field notebooks
- Equipment Reservations – a system for scheduling equipment reservations that enables dependencies to exist between parts and systems that require certain parts
- Glow LMS – we support Glow with custom applications that integrate via LTI
- Signup Sheets – provides signup sheets (with notifications) for labs, office hours, study sessions, etc.
- Course Mail – enables sending email via GAE using Glow LMS rosters
- Presenter View – enables full screen sharing for lecture presentation
- People Learning Mode – offers a visual Face Book tool to learn students names
- Dashboard – provides 24/7/365 monitoring of critical systems that support data exchange between Williams College and Instructure Canvas
- Custom Glow Theme (UI)
- Russian Sisters – collaborated with a faculty member to create input tools and finely detailed data visualization using charts, graphs and statistics for a century of monastic data transcribed from Cyrillic ledgers
- Virtualization: Docker and Vagrant – Docker and Vagrant offer the ability to run software on your laptop using a virtual server. For example, we enabled the Art Department to demo the Getty Scholars Workspace using Docker installed on a portable WindowsToGo thumbdrive. Docker and Vagrant are quick, creative solutions that facilitates testing a product locally on a virtual machine without requiring a full server installation.
- WCMA – collaborated with curators and CS department on exhibition gallery projects
- Accession Number Exhibit kiosk – collaborated with the CS department to enable guests to curate selected images from an iPad and instantly display them on any number of display monitors mounted in an exhibition gallery
- Kidspace: Artistic Curiosity kiosk – built web application for curators using Opera to enable users to photograph and view results of various emotional states
- Older projects include:
- HMF Vegetation Survey – data management and web site
- GeoShear – a Java program to simulate and explore deformation of stone cross sections and the SeaFloor Spreading Simulator downloadable program to simulate and explore magnetic striping on the sea floor
Unless otherwise noted, these projects are released under the Williams College Software License, Version 1
.