16th annual Showcase scheduled for April 14
UW-Madison’s Showcase, which highlights creative ideas, innovations, best practices and success stories from around campus, will return for its 16th year April 14 with poster presentations, breakout sessions and a lunchtime keynote presentation. The events will take place beginning at 8 a.m. in Varsity Hall of Union South.
Showcase is free, but registration is requested. Last year, more than 600 faculty and staff attended all or parts of Showcase to connect, converse and share insights with colleagues from every corner of campus.
Varsity Hall will host more than 70 posters demonstrating a wide range of improvements from 8 to 11 a.m. It’s a great opportunity to explore dozens of ideas that have been successfully implemented at UW–Madison and converse with the individuals who made them happen.
Connections made at Showcase often spur follow-up meetings where projects can be explored in greater depth and cross-campus collaborations are set in motion. People frequently remark that Showcase is their opportunity to meet UW colleagues and learn of projects they would never know about otherwise. Whether you can spend the full three hours or only 45 minutes, the poster session is well worth a visit. The Office of Quality Improvement maintains a list of this year’s posters and breakout sessions, along with posters and presentations from prior years, on its website.
Posters will cover many topics, including:
- “Advance Your Career” Web Portal
- The Tutor Training Certificate Program
- Implementing a targeted student recruitment plan
- Creating a professional development plan
- Bringing the Wisconsin Idea to Kenya: Students from multiple disciplines working together
- Designing and implementing a Customer Relationship Management System
- Understanding student data through visualizations
- Capturing and using data from customer phone calls
- Increasing user engagement with email marketing
During the poster session, attendees can attend one of four breakout sessions. About 45 minutes in length, they are held in separate rooms and feature panels of speakers. This year, the breakouts will focus on Leadership, Data Rich Story Telling, Educational Innovation A to Z, and Gaining Efficiencies through Collaboration. All sessions encourage audience Q & A and no advance sign-up is required to attend them. Two breakout sessions will be offered at 9 a.m. and two at 10 a.m.
This year’s lunchtime keynote speaker is Jordan Ellenberg, who holds both the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics chairs at UW–Madison. He also is the author of the 2014 New York Times bestseller “How Not to Be Wrong,” a book that was praised by a Washington Post review that said, “Part of the sheer intellectual joy of the book is watching the author leap nimbly from topic to topic, comparing slime molds to the Bush-Gore Florida vote, criminology to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
Ellenberg, whom Provost Sarah Mangelsdorf will introduce, has chosen “There is No Such Thing as Public Opinion” as his Showcase topic. He notes, “How does a democratic society decide what it ‘wants?’ Sometimes the American electorate is accused of being irrational; I’ll defend it against that charge, and explain some of the surprisingly complex mathematics behind collective decision making, in democracies, individual humans … and slime molds.”
Lunch will be served beginning at 11:15 a.m. in Varsity Hall 1 & 2 and will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
Showcase is sponsored jointly by the Office of Quality Improvement (OQI) and the Office of Human Resource Development (OHRD) and is open at no charge to all faculty, staff and students at UW–Madison.