Welcome to Techademia, a site where the Academic Computing Consultants at Vassar College write about technology and teaching.
This blog will be about our teaching and your teaching. We envision this site as a place where we hope to do a little teaching, about things that may be too new or obscure to have caught your notice. At the same time, these writings will focus on teaching at the college level, while highlighting ways in which technology can enhance— or even revolutionize— that teaching.
Every faculty member that I’ve met at Vassar is wholly committed to his or her teaching. Many tell me that they’re really interested in one technology or another that might help their students to understand their course materials better. But they’re also really, really busy and can rarely find the time to take workshops or tinker around with new devices or programs.
We hope that his blog will provide a way for you to fit a little bit of this learning into your busy schedule. We aim to generate new postings each week, on various topics related to teaching with technology. Those topics will range from descriptions of very specific gadgets to discussions of pedagogical approaches. Some will be specific to Vassar, while others will be more generic.
The primary contributors will be the four members of Vassar’s Academic Computing Services (ACS) group. (If you’d like to know more about us, see the authors’ profiles, at the top of the page.) We may have occasional guest contributors as well, and we invite anyone in the Vassar community to comment on what they read.
Looking forward to some interesting discussions,
Steve
Introduction to QGIS 
Intro to the Vassar College Libraries Digital Library: Research and Classroom Use
Planning to record voice or music and you have never done it before? Interested in podcasting? Perhaps you have an interview you need to edit and share? We’ll review free and cross-platform tools and review resources for audio production. We’ll conclude by visiting the audio nook and the studio in the basement of Chicago Hall. Led by Baynard Bailey of Academic Computing Services.
Omeka is a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections that allows users to publish and exhibit scholarly collections and cultural heritage objects. The Vassar College Digital Scholarship Services Collaboration (DiSSCo) provides a web hosting resource called vassarspaces.net. This service, a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) product, provides the flexibility for anyone in our academic community to build websites on a variety of platforms, including Omeka. Led by Nicole Scalessa of Digital Scholarship and Technology Services.
Scalar is an open source, web-based publishing software from the University of Southern California’s Alliance for Networking Visual Culture that allows you to create networked, multi-media online publications.This workshop will begin with the basics of installation along with creating accounts, projects, and content path. It will also cover the management and inclusion of media, such as images and video. Led by Nicole Scalessa of Digital Scholarship and Technology Services. 
Tired of naming files final_draft_v12_comments_corrected_v10.docx? Git is a commonly used version control system that solves this exact problem and is especially helpful when collaborating with others. GitHub is one of the most popular home for Git-based projects on the internet. This workshop will introduce you to Git and GitHub. You will practice making commits, pushing, and pulling, but alone and in collaboration with others. 
R is a statistical programming environment commonly used in academia for creating data visualizations and doing statistical analyses in a more regimented manner. This workshop provides a basic overview of using R and RStudio (a common interactive development environment) for statistical analysis (please note that this workshop does not cover statistical concepts).
Need a website? We will review the options you have available to you as a member of the Vassar Community. We’ll also cover our new resource : vassarspaces.net – where we empower users to become sys admins and install their own apps (WordPress, Scalar, Omeka and more!). Led by Baynard Bailey of Academic Computing Services and Nicole Scalessa of Digital Scholarship and Technology Services. 
Need a poster for an academic conference? Want to print a giant poster for your event? Come to this hands-on workshop, learn basic design and how to use Illustrator, Powerpoint or Google Slides to make a poster. Led by Baynard Bailey of Academic Computing Services. Please rsvp to babailey@vassar.edu (suggested but not required).