Innovations from the 2021 Michigan IT Symposium
Innovations from the 2021 Michigan IT Symposium
Learn about the exciting ideas and innovative solutions LSA Technology Services presented at this year's Michigan IT Symposium.
We were pleased to have staff from LSA Technology Services present their work to the broader U-M community at the 2021 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. This year's co-chairs were Dave Perhne of our own Operational Effectiveness team alongside Mandie Chapman from ITS.
Below are some highlights from LSA Technology Services at the Symposium.
This poster gave an overview of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can be integrated with Survey123 to detect objects in an image and auto-populate survey responses. Survey123 is a mobile survey application used by researchers at U-M to collect information such as artifacts in archæological field sites, balloon debris for a citizen science project, and pollinator presence in our campus gardens. This new Survey123 capability can streamline data collection by minimizing user input, as well as power citizen-science projects where users may not be fully familiar with the detected objects.
For years, LSA has had a Loan program where students, faculty, and staff can check out technology for short-term use, including laptops and MacBooks, iPads and tablets, cameras, webcams, microphones, and more. The last two years have been a time of rapid (and sometimes unexpected!) growth and change, from opening a new location (and one more on the way in winter 2022), consolidating Loan services across Technology Services, expanding our holdings about 25% over the course of the pandemic, and reviewing/altering policies and processes in the short and long term. As more classes integrate increasing amounts of technology into their curricula, our services offer access to equipment otherwise unavailable to parts of the U-M community and provide all of our patrons with technological options for their classes, work, special events, and personal projects.
The LSA Technology Services Research Software Programming group provides custom programming work for researchers in the College of LSA. This service aims to be a stable source of software development expertise and project knowledge that does not turn over with lab staff. The team has developed numerous desktop, web, and mobile applications, supporting projects as varied as tracking monkey behavior, training mice to recognize patterns, building robots, and analyzing circadian rhythms. The presentation focused on demonstrations of projects we've developed and how they've helped advance LSA research. We showed some of the possibilities that custom software can open up for faculty and researchers when performing investigative and research activities.
The experience of learning and teaching during lockdown was the grand ed-tech experiment no one asked for. In the wake of it, we have learned about some things we were already doing right (strengthening wireless networks on campus and the laptop program) and some things that will need to be addressed for the future. In particular, lockdown highlighted the students who would find traditional online learning out of easy reach due to hardware, software, or infrastructure issues they experience from home. Awareness of such issues is critical as we consider how U-M might expand its online and hybrid learning footprint.
Academic units have unique needs to support their missions. Dearborn is a regional campus with a different curriculum, student population, and strategic plan. Dentistry is a microcosm of the University that includes providing patient care and housing a public museum. LSA is the largest and most diverse college on the Ann Arbor campus. Ross is a professional business school that functions more like a corporation. The diversity of needs and technologies are what makes U-M leaders and best. As a panel they discussed:
This poster discussed using technology to deliver instruction in multiple formats including tools used for group work, scheduling Zoom meetings and office hours, lecture capture, and digital assessment tools. Our aim is to help faculty build a community and fulfill learning objectives in a constantly changing environment.
Omeka S is a web publishing platform designed for creating digital collections and online exhibits. It has been hosted by LSA Technology Services since 2019 as a pilot and became a full service in August of 2021. The service is built upon an OpenShift container hosting solution that uses GitLab for version control and deployment. Omeka S is currently used in several digital humanities projects across campus.
Their presentation focused on "Below the Line: The Feuilleton & Modern Jewish Cultures"-a collaborative project in Judaic Studies that aims to foster research into the feuilleton, a popular form of writing in newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We believe that our experiences with adapting Omeka S for this project would be useful for other research teams consideringOmeka as a platform for their projects.
"Below the Line" was originally conceived as a series of international conferences and workshops. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a dramatic shift for this NEH-funded project, and its focus became creating an online collection in Omeka S. An international team of scholars was engaged in the selection, translation, and study of 20+ original feuilletons. They produced media files and metadata to be collected, stored in a database, and displayed on a searchable, open-access website. The website team faced significant organizational and technical challenges. On a short timescale, we were able to create a workflow for collecting the data, successfully customize Omeka S for specific project needs, and launch their website.
IT teams may recognize this story: We have web applications supporting business proesses. They are aging, quirky, built on different technologies, hard to update, and brittle when processes or personnel change. Demand is high for more, but we are out of capacity. Remote staff means that coordinating work and workflows within teams is only going to become more important. Yet many processes have similar needs: web forms and file uploads, parallel and serial approvals, rules-based automations, email nudging, dashboards, state management, structured data output, integrations with university- and unit-level services, and so on.
A generalized workflow solution is not a new idea, and we have spent time and money chasing this dream with various products. In recent years, home-grown Google AppScripts are a frequent choice for whipping together rkflows, yet those solutions have almost all the drawbacks above. Nobody is satisfied.
But it's 2021, and — maybe — both the marketplace and our users have matured to where a workflow-focused product or SaaS can actually provide what we've all been wantig: solutions that solve problems and are sustainably supportable. From AirTable to Zoho, the SaaS marketplace is flooded with products that claim to solve all your problems forever. This talk discussed the market, our solution requirements, fit-gap evaluaions of selected tools, and possible paths forward. Low-code or "walk-up-and-use'"solutions will play a role, but so will more advanced tools for IT.
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