Hands-On Workshops in Digital and Social Media (3/6)

Wish you could jump into the digital conversation by actually using digital and social media? You can.

JustPublics@365 is offering free workshops for academics on Wednesday, March 6th, from 10am to 1pm at The Graduate Center, CUNY. These Graduate Center Ph.D. students will be offering workshops to help faculty and graduate students improve their digital skills.

Each workshop runs 45 minutes and they are BYOD (bring your own device, or computer).  FREE and open to anyone (photo ID required to enter building).

An Introduction to WordPress for Scholarly Web Presence (10am, Room 9204)
Twitter 101, the Basics (10am, Room 9205)
Refining the Look of Your WordPress Site: Learning CSS (10am, Room 9206)
Twitter for Academic Research (11am, Room 9204)
How to Install R Data Analysis Software on Your Own Laptop for Free & Why (11am, Room 9205)
Writing a Professional CV Online (11am, Room 9206)
Flickr for Academic Research (12pm, Room 9204)
Getting the Most out of the WordPress Dashboard: Custom Menus and Plug-ins (12.15pm, Room 9205)

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10am
An Introduction to WordPress for Scholarly Web Presence (Room 9204)
For researchers, it is becoming more and more important to get our work to the public through digital means. One key medium is a scholarly website that includes your work and research interests. This workshop will cover the basics of how to set up and add content to a WordPress site through the OpenCUNY.org system.

Fiona Lee (@fionally) is a Ph.D Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests are in Southeast Asian literature and culture, postcolonial theory, race and gender studies, and digital pedagogy. She is currently a Dissertation Fellow at The Graduate Center’s Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change and an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY.

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10am
Twitter 101, the Basics (Room 9205)

Get ready to learn all the amazing things you can do with 140 characters. This workshop will introduce you to the practicalities of microblogging (Twitter) and provide you with the familiarity and core knowledge you need to tweet like a pro.  Don’t have a Twitter account set up? No problem—we’ll also provide a hands-on opportunity for participants to create and start using Twitter as part of their digital presence/ personal learning network.  So, bring your questions, and laptop or smartphone!

Wilneida Negrón (@wilneidanegron) is a political science comparativist and technology strategist with over ten years of experience in the nonprofit and public sector.  Her work explores the intersection between technology, governance, democracy, and social justice. Her dissertation takes a look at the relationship between macro-social features of political systems and the political use and effects of digital media in emerging democracies in East Asia and Latin America. She is the author of The Non-Profit Guide to Internet Marketing, a toolkit to help nonprofits launch low-cost but high-impact search engine and social media optimization strategies and works with national and international groups on social justice and program development projects. She is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin and holds a Masters in Public Administration. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Wilneida can be found at wilneida.com.

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10am
Refining the Look of Your WordPress Site: Learning CSS (Room 9206)

WordPress can be used as a blogging engine or a content management system to set up complex and powerful websites without having to fuss about what happens under the hood. But when working with WordPress sites, there inevitably comes a time when you will want things to look and act differently than they do out-of-the-box. This workshop will introduce you to simple but powerful tools that you can use to tweak your site short of having to host your own server or write your own theme files. You will learn about cascading style sheets (CSS), a powerful W3 standard that allows you to define your own styles, and ways to integrate custom CSS on an existing WordPress site.

John Boy (@jboy) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology Graduate Center, CUNY. As instructional technology fellow in the Macaulay Honors College, he works with faculty to integrate innovative forms for teaching and learning into the undergraduate curriculum. John is also a contributing editor to The Immanent Frame, an award-winning blog on religion, secularism, and the public sphere.

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11am
Twitter for Academic Research (Room 9204)

This is a hands-on workshop for academics interested in learning to use Twitter. We will cover the mechanics of using the platform (what does @ mean? What is an RT? How about # or “hashtags”) and explore how 140 characters can (or cannot) foster meaningful dialogue. However, emphasis in this workshop will be placed on using Twitter to find a community of interlocutors (scholars, journalists, activists), developing your own voice through writing, and developing ongoing, public conversations that can prompt not only new connections, but allow us to share our research with a wider audience.

Karen Gregory (@claudiakincaid) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the  Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaualay Honors College, as well as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Labor Studies at Queens College. Karen is currently finishing her dissertation entitled “Enchanted Entrepreneurs: The Labor of Psychics in New York City. Her dissertation explores the intersection of contemporary spirituality, labor, and social media. She is probably Tweeting right now.

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11am
How to Install R Data Analysis Software on Your Own Laptop for Free & Why (Room 9205)

A necessary component of much of academic work is data analysis. Data analysis software is often expensive and difficult to manage. Data from one program is often not sharable to colleagues that work at other universities who have not licensed the proprietary software that you have chosen to work with. This workshop will teach you how to download and install R, which can be complicated and unclear. R can perform any statistical analysis required and read file formats from all other programs. R is free.

Evan Misshula (@emisshula) is a PhD student in Criminal Justice. His work focuses on establishing causality with observational data. He has published work on the impact of incarceration on HIV transmission, the structure of methamphetamine markets in New York City, and social position and the risk for suicide. His work has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Cyberchallenge, The CUNY Advanced Research Collaborative and the Steve and Elly Hammerman Foundation.

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11am
Writing a Professional CV Online (Room 9206)
How do I write a professional CV? And how can I get out what I do to the world? In this workshop you’ll be walked through how to create a professional CV and share it online in a WordPress page.

Kiersten Greene (@kag823) is a PhD candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests lie at the intersection of policy, practice, literacy, and technology in the K-12 public school classroom, and her dissertation thematically analyzes public, anonymous blogs written by public school teachers about their daily experiences. She is an active participant on the OpenCUNY Academic Medium, and recently co-founded the CUNY Internet Research Team. When she is not teaching, researching, or writing, you can find her knitting or blogging about being gluten-free.

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12pm
Flickr for Academic Research (Room 9204)

How can you use Flickr to organize for research? How can you share your work and feel confident about sharing our ideas but not having them stolen from them? In this workshop, we’ll explore how to instantly upload photos

Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land (@bronwyn_dl) is a PhD student in Sociology and Criminology at the Graduate Center CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY. Her work focuses on studies of race, criminalization, and social control in Western Canada. Her current work is on the dynamics of settler colonialism in the history of left wing social reform movements and present-day New Democratic Party (NDP) criminal justice policy. She has been a regular contributor to Canadian Dimension Magazine and an organizer with Copwatch. Bronwyn holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Toronto and a BA in International Development Studies and Economics from McGill University. Bronwyn can be found at opencuny.org/bronwyndl.

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12.15pm
Getting the Most out of the WordPress Dashboard: Custom Menus and Plug-ins (Room 9205)

One of the most useful features of the WordPress dashboard is the Custom Menus option, a tool that enables users to display, in addition to traditional page tabs, categories and drop-down menus for sub-categories. Another useful Dashboard feature is the Plug-in feature; users can extend the functionality of WordPress by installing plug-ins that are easily integrated into Widgets. This workshop will (1) explore the options available in Custom Menus, (2) introduce some basic plug-ins, and (3) demonstrate how plug-ins are integrated into widgetized areas.

Laura Kane (@Laurockane) is a third year doctoral student in Philosophy and a Digital Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. Laura is also a student in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, where she has learned to develop digital solutions for challenges faced by educators. She currently teaches at Hunter College, and is an At-Large Representative in the Doctoral Students’ Council.

1 thought on “Hands-On Workshops in Digital and Social Media (3/6)

  1. Pingback: JustPublics@365 Workshops on Social Media Tomorrow! : CUNY GC Earth and Environmental Sciences

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