January workshop series

This January, the Dean of Faculty’s office is teaming up with OIT, the Library and the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations to offer a series of workshops on a variety of tools and resources that you may not have had a chance to use yet.   The workshops will run on Tuesday mornings during WinterStudy from 10-1:00.   We’ll provide lunch for each workshop, so we ask you to RSVP for any of the workshops that you’d like to attend here.
The first workshop is the grant-writing workshop, which we ran for the first time last year.  The other three workshops are new, and topics have been chosen based on the kinds of questions that OIT/library staff have gotten from faculty and/or with an eye towards highlighting some things that faculty may not be aware of.  We’ll try to do a few things in each of these workshops: hear from faculty who are already using some of these tools in interesting ways, do some hands-on training with some of the tools for those of you who are unfamiliar with them, and gather your input for ideas that you’d like to try out that might serve as the basis for future workshops.  Because we’re going to do some hands-on work in most of these workshops, we’d like to try to keep each workshop small.  If demand is high, we’ll try to find a time to run the sessions again.

We’ve grouped the tools and resources into a few broad categories as follows:
January 5, 10:00-1:00, Faculty House:  Grant-writing
Jennifer Hermanski from the Office of Corporate and Foundations relations and the Dean of Faculty’s office will give an overview of funding opportunities both on and off-campus, and the resources we have to help you find appropriate funding agencies, as well as help you with your grant writing and management.  We’ll hear from colleagues who’ve been successful at obtaining external funding, as well as others who’ve served as grant reviewers on what makes for a compelling proposal.  We’ll have a chance to review some sample proposals as well.
January 1210:00-1:00, Sawyer 269:  Collaboration in teaching and research.
We’ll hear from colleagues including Katie Kent and David Morris on the use of a few different tools that can facilitate collaborative work. OIT and library staff will provide an introduction to sharing citation libraries, get an introduction to some Google apps resources (for sharing files, datasets, parallel editing of documents), learn about some ways that Glow can facilitate collaborative work in courses, and learn a bit about remote and mobile access to Williams resources (for sabbatical years for instance).
January 1910:00-1:00, Sawyer 328:  How to work with data, how to present data. 
This is your chance to learn some of those basic spreadsheet skills you’ve always wanted to!  We’ll provide some sample data sets and show you some things that you can do: how to make some basic graphs/plots (grade distributions in courses for instance), how to perform some basic manipulations on data (how to calculate semester totals, how to sort data), and how to apply some of these tools to different kinds of datasets.  We’ll hear from Leslie Brown and Bill Wagner on some of the ways that they’ve made use of these tools.  We’ll also hear from Matt Carter on some things to keep in mind when presenting data visually.
January 2610:00-1:00, CET 276: Non-traditional media in teaching and research.  
We’ll hear from colleagues including Steve Levin, Anjuli Kolb, and Keith McPartland, and Kathryn Ringer-Hilfinger on some of the ways that they’ve gotten creative with non-traditional media in their courses.  We’ll hear about ways to design assignments to elicit video as responses, get an introduction to the new lightboard technology that OIT has been working on bringing on-line, and hear about some ways to use social media in classes.
Again, please RSVP for any workshops you’d like to attend here.  If demand is higher than we can manage, we’ll try to find another time to run the workshops.  If you have ideas for other topics that you’d like to see covered, there’s space to indicate that in the RSVP form, or you can send me your suggestions directly.