SJMC hosting workshops on social media, generative AI and data visualization

Wednesday, May 1st, 2024

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.