The Learning Commons hosts a variety of workshops and programs designed to support and inspire you on your learning, research, and creative journeys. Led by Learning Commons’ partners, sessions are scheduled throughout the semester. See below for our current offerings. If you’d like to suggest a workshop topic that’s not listed here, please send a note to: learningcommons@miami.edu.
Fall 2018
Camner Center for Academic Resources Workshop: Learning and Memory
Wednesday, September 5, 2 p.m.
Learning Commons Flexible Program Space – Richter Library 1st Floor
The Camner Center workshops are designed to instruct students on specific academic skills and strategies to enhance the academic performance.
Cleaning Data with OpenRefine
Date: Monday, September 10, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop introduces participants to techniques for cleaning and transforming data with OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel. Sometimes datasets are created by multiple individuals, and/or created without a clear set of guidelines. The resulting datasets may be difficult to analyze because they lack standardization (i.e., New York City may be listed as “NYC,” “New York, NY”, “New York City”, and “New York City, NY”). In this workshop, participants will learn how to quickly and efficiently find standardization issues and other errors, and how to correct them in bulk, as well as how to enhance existing datasets by adding new metadata fields.
The Data Management Challenge: Wrangling Data in the Research Environment
Date: Friday, September 14, 10-11:30 a.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This is an introduction to topics in research data management designed to foster skills and encourage data management best practices for efficiency, compliance and security in the research environment. This is a discipline agnostic seminar. Specific learning goals include the identification of best practices for: file naming conventions, file system organization, data security, data privacy, backup strategies, data sharing, data documentation, and data publication. These topics introduce practical behaviors to ease the digital research process.
Intro to SPSS
Date: Monday, September 17, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop is the first of two workshops focused on SPSS, a statistical analysis software package provided to students, staff and faculty by University of Miami Information Technology. The workshop is designed for introductory SPSS users. It provides an introduction to the SPSS software program, including its software environment, importing data, descriptive statistics, transforming variables, selecting and splitting data, and data visualization.
Intermediate SPSS
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop is the second of two workshops focused on SPSS, a statistical analysis software package provided to students, staff and faculty by University of Miami Information Technology. It is designed for intermediate SPSS users. It covers common statistical methods in SPSS such as means comparisons, ANOVA, linear regression, and logistic regression models.
TextMining with AntConc
Date: Monday, September 24, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This workshop introduces participants to basic skills associated with text mining (aka distant reading) using AntConc (free, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux). Basic skills and tasks include configuring the tool and text, using the Concordance, Key Word in Context (KWiC), and Collocate analysis methods. We will also discuss the process of finding or creating representative corpora and developing appropriate research questions for text mining projects. This work shop can be taught with a range of available text materials including literature, film reviews, and news stories.
Data Management and Research Design
Date: September 28, 10-11:30 a.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This is the first in a series of short seminars that explore topics in research data management (see intro above and other DM seminars in this list). This is a discipline agnostic seminar. Specific learning goals include to: Understand federal policy context for data management and sharing, explain the data lifecycle, critically evaluate existing Data Management Plans (DMPs), and be able to identify key elements in a DMP. As a product of the seminar/workshop attendees will outline a data management plan (DMP) for their research.
Camner Center for Academic Resources Workshop: Study Strategies
Thursday, October 4, 1 p.m.
Learning Commons Flexible Program Space – Richter Library 1st Floor
The Camner Center workshops are designed to instruct students on specific academic skills and strategies to enhance the academic performance.
Utilizing GIS Data Workshop Series: ESRI Insights
Date: Friday, October 5, 2-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop will introduce you to ESRI’s Insights product, an online data analytics workbench. You will obtain an Insights license through and ArcGIS Online account and learn how to use tools to create and share maps, charts, graphs, and tables created from large data sets.
File Formats and System Organization for Research
Date: Friday, October 12, 10-11:30 a.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This is the second in a series of short seminars that explore topics in research data management (see intro above and other DM seminars in this list). This is a discipline agnostic seminar. Specific learning goals include to: Understand file format choices and their implications for data sharing, data publication, and data re-use, identify best practices for file system organization, and identify best practices for file naming conventions. As a product of the seminar/workshop attendees will select file formats, choose a file naming convention, and design a file system architecture for their research.
Utilizing GIS Data Series: Creating raster Digital Elevation Models from LIDAR data using ArcGIS Pro
Date: Friday, October 12, 2-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
In this workshop participants will learn how to import LIDAR data into ArcGIS Pro, and how to interact with the point cloud in order to generate a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) in Raster format. Participants will learn how to create DEM derived products like slope and aspect maps, hillshades, contours, and others. Additional raster functions and tools will also be introduced to conduct other spatial analysis operations.
Intro to R/R Studio
Date: Monday, October 22, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop is the first of two workshops focused on R/R Studio, a popular open source statistical analysis software package available free to students, faculty and staff. The workshop is designed for introductory R and R Studio users. It provides an introduction to the R software program, including its programming language, software environment, importing data, descriptive statistics, transforming variables, selecting and splitting data, exploratory tests, and visualization.
Intermediate R/R Studio
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop is the second of two workshops focused on R/R Studio, a popular open source statistical analysis software package available free to students, faculty and staff. The workshop is designed for intermediate R and R Studio users. It covers common statistical methods in R such as means comparisons, ANOVA, linear regression, and visualization.
Utilizing GIS Data Series: Introduction to R for visualizing and managing geospatial data
Date: Friday, October 26, 2-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop will present tools to import, visualize and analyze geospatial data in R/R Studio.
Participants will learn how to import a shapefile, how to join attribute information from csv tables and how to select spatial data, among other tasks like creating simple thematic maps with titles and legends, creating basic interactive maps, and performing selected spatial analysis operations. It is recommended for participants to have a basic knowledge of R/R Studio. If you are new to R/R Studio, you can take the Introduction to R workshop.
Data Visualization with Tableau
Date: Monday, October 29, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop provides and introduction to Tableau, the popular data visualization software package.
Writing Center Workshop: Structuring an Argument for Different Disciplines
Date: Tuesday, October 30, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
Learn simple steps for developing a convincing argument.
Research Data Description and Documentation
Date: Friday, November 2, 10-11:30 a.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This is the third in a series of short seminars that explore topics in research data management (see intro above and other DM seminars in this list). This is a discipline agnostic seminar. Specific learning goals include to: Identify disciplinary metadata standards (if they exist), describe discipline agnostic metadata standards, and understand how metadata facilitates discovery, sharing and access to data resources. As a product of the seminar/workshop attendees will create metadata for a selected subset of the data from their research.
Intro SAS
Date: Monday, November 5, 3-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
This workshop provides an introduction to the SAS software program, statistical analysis software package provided to students, staff and faculty by University of Miami Information Technology. The workshop covers the SAS programming language, software environment, importing data, descriptive statistics, transforming variables, selecting and splitting data, exploratory tests, and visualization.
Writing Center Workshop: Revision as Innovation
Date: Wednesday, November 7, 12-1 p.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
If innovation means “to renew, [to] change,” or to improve, why not approach our own revisions the same way? In this workshop, we will practice strategies to reduce wordiness in favor of lean and clear writing.
Camner Center for Academic Resources Workshop: Test-Taking Strategies
Wednesday, November 7, 2 p.m.
Learning Commons Flexible Program Space – Richter Library 1st Floor
The Camner Center workshops are designed to instruct students on specific academic skills and strategies to enhance the academic performance.
Writing Center Workshop: Writing the Literature Review
Date: Thursday, November 8, 12-1 p.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This workshop covers the basics of constructing a literature review for research papers.
Utilizing GIS Data Workshop Series: Distribution Analysis with Population Data
Date: Friday, November 9, 2-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
World population has surpassed 7 billion people. Where do they all live? You are a researcher looking for current population distribution trends in the world at the country and lower levels. You want to find concentrations of urban and rural populations as these are two common types of population distributions. Finally, you want to look more closely at a specific part of the world to see how population dynamics affect public health. This workshop will help you develop techniques for pursuing each of these research questions.
Research Data Publication: Repositories and Sharing
Date: Friday, November 16, 10-11:30 a.m.
Place: Flexible Program Space, Learning Commons
This is the fourth in a series of short seminars that explore topics in research data management (see intro above and other DM seminars in this list). This is a discipline agnostic seminar. Specific learning goals include to: Identify discipline specific repositories, unders tand data ownership in the context of research institutions, be able to decode repository requirements to publish data, and create correct citations for referencing data in publications. As a product of the seminar/workshop attendees will create a deposit package from a selected subset of the data from their research for publication in a data repository.
Utilizing GIS Data Workshop Series: Developing Conservation Strategies for Florida’s Forests
Date: Friday, November 30, 2-4:30 p.m.
Place: Digital Scholars’ Lab, Learning Commons
You are an intern with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and have been tasked with developing strategies for conserving Florida’s forests. You want to analyze the different types of forests in Florida, determine which parts are in most need of conservation, and develop strategies that promote conservation. This workshop will show you how to acquire forest and associated data from the Internet, examine changes in this type of land cover, and utilize a variety of GIS tools to develop conservation strategies on for the terrestrial and marine parts of its ecosystem.