The Drake SJMC is hosting a series of one-day workshops featuring SJMC professors and professors from Drake’s computer science department.
May 16: SJMC Refresh
Our SJMC Refresh on May 16 includes Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication professors presenting classes on these topics:
- Tools for Debunking Misinformation – Amy McCoy
- Video Editing Fundamentals – Lakshmi Tirumala
- Authenticity, Credibility, and Building Connections on Social Media – Ryan Stoldt
- How to Build Your Personal Brand – Chris Snider
- Create your own GPTs – Chris Porter (Artificial Intelligence Professor)
May 28: Integrating Large Language Models into Your Applications
This hands-on workshop for developers will introduce how to build language-aware applications in Python. Led by Drake Professor and AI expert Eric Manley, we’ll cover:
- Open source language models and tools
- GPT-based chat bot assistants with the OpenAI API
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for feeding the right information and data to your language models
May 29: Social Media Strategy
Professor Chris Snider will lead this one-day, hands-on Social Media Strategy workshop to help you make sense of all the recent changes in the world of social media. You’ll build a strategy you can use for your brand moving forward.
Here’s what you will learn:
- Current trends and changes in social media
- The nine-step process to building a social media strategy
- How to create content that wins on networks that award original, creative content
- What is short-form video and how should you use it
- Audits, ads, analytics and algorithms
May 30: Data Visualization Workshop
Bring your own data to this Data Visualization Workshop and learn strategies on how to make visualizing your data have a greater impact. Led by Drake Professor and data visualization expert, Tim Urness, you will gain information through a series of presentations, large and small group exercises, and facilitated discission. Topics include:
- Leveraging human perception to make visualization more effective
- Storytelling with data
- Dashboards
- Effective use of color, charts, and graphs
June 7: Intro to Generative AI
This one-day Generative AI Workshop is taught by Chris Porter from Drake’s artificial intelligence department and Chris Snider from the SJMC. Attendees will learn about current generative AI tools and gain ideas of how those tools can be used in their professional lives. We’ll also discuss how they should not be used, terms of service and ethical issues related to AI tools. This event is open to the general public. Sign up here.