Speaker: Rebecca Darling

Rebecca Darling has worked with the Library and Technology groups at Wellesley College since 1999. In March 2011, she became the Assistant Director of Instructional Technology at Wellesley College. She led the campus migration to the Sakai LMS 2009-2011, and oversaw the Kaltura implementation in Fall 2011. Rebecca leads the Instructional Technology team and coordinates support across campus. Officially the Instructional Technology Humanities Subject Specialist, Rebecca teaches classes, plans assignments, and offers student support across disciplines. She’s spoken at the Sakai User Group NERCOMP SIG October 2010 and at the NERCOMP Annual Conference in 2013.


Speaker: Christian deTorres

Christian deTorres has designed and built online courses, in-person training, Mars exploration presentations, wiki workflows, Braille-friendly UI, and online communities over the past decade. In that time, he’s supported users and clients ranging from the blind and brain-damaged at Children’s Hospital to rocket scientists at MIT. For Christian, it’s all about listening to clients, identifying their need, and providing the best possible tools for their success.

Speaker: Kevin Finefrock

Kevin Finefrock graduated from Connecticut College with a B.A. in History and Government in 2007 and received his M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut in 2011. He also holds a certificate from Connecticut College’s Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy and has worked for a variety of museums across New England, including the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, Mystic Seaport, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Family Roots: The Free and Enslaved Black Communities of Central Connecticut, 1750-1850," examines the boundaries of "family" in early New England through an analysis of race and labor relations, household formation, and conceptions of the bonds of kinship. His scholarly interests focus on the intersections between histories of the family, race, and memory in the British and French Atlantic Worlds.


Speaker: Alan Girelli

Alan Girelli earned his Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric, Graduate Studies in English, UMass Amherst, focusing on electronic rhetorics and networked communication systems. Girelli directs the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning (CIEE), housed with the College of Advancing and Professional Studies (CAPS) at the UMass Boston. (See http://www.umb.edu/academics/caps/centers/ciee for details.) Girelli has been involved with UMass Boston distance education programming since 1996 (before the advent of online education), and has taught online, on-ground, and blended writing and design courses at UMass Boston, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and ITT Technologies at both the undergraduate and graduate level.


Speaker: Kevin Harris

Kevin Harris serves as the Lead Software Engineer for the ODAI project. He has a strong background in statistical data collection, data analysis, data integration and data reporting. He has held positions as a data analyst, marketing analyst and business development analyst. He holds degree in Economics from St. Olaf College where he studied Finance, concentration on Statistical Analysis. Kevin applies principles of business intelligence to his current work on the ODAI learning analytics initiative.


Speaker: Brandon Hawk

Brandon is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. His fields of expertise are Old and Middle English, digital humanities, the Bible as/in literature, translation, and history of the book. He is currently writing a dissertation titled "Apocryphal Narratives in Old English Sermon Collections." In addition, he is also working on a digital project, “Studying Judith in Anglo-Saxon England,” exploring the texts that Anglo-Saxons read and wrote about the biblical book of Judith, as well as the relationships between them; more may be read at the project blog: http://studyingjudith.wordpress.com.


Speaker: Michael Howser

Michael Howser serves as the Connecticut State Data Center Director, GIS Librarian, Digital Repository Program Coordinator, and the Digital Scholarship and Data Curation Team Leader at the University of Connecticut Libraries. Within these roles, Michael is coordinates the development of the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA), a collaborative cultural heritage digital archive for Connecticut, provides GIS and mapping support, and directs and manages the operations of the Connecticut State Data Center/MAGIC to provide data assistance, data sets, and data services with a focus on GIS, mapping, and Census datasets. With a passion for increasing access to data in the broadest sense (ex. Maps, Photographs, Datasets, and Documents), Michael collaborates with researchers, organizations, agencies, groups, and the public to expand upon data sources available digitally at UConn and for the citizens of Connecticut. With collaboration and innovation being at the core of Michael’s passion, he leads the Digital Scholarship and Data Curation Team at the University of Connecticut Libraries which integrates the CTDA, Connecticut State Data Center/MAGIC, Digital Capture, and Scholars’ Collaborative to increase access to materials through collaborations while also developing services and instructional offerings which integrate content with digital scholarship tools, methods, and research.


Speaker: Mary Mahoney

Mary Mahoney graduated from Trinity College with a B.A. in History and English in 2009 and received her M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut in 2012. She has worked at a variety of archival institutions in the region, including the Hartford History Center and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Her doctoral dissertation will examine the use of books as medicine in the Anglophone world from 1850-1950. Her scholarly interests focus on the intersections between histories of reading, medicine, and the self.


Speaker: Roger Travis

Roger Travis is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for scholarly activities like monthly symposia and “playversations.” He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic about the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game, and is a founder and contributor of the collaborative blog Play the Past. Roger also works on developing and studying a form of game-based learning, practomimetic learning, in which learners play the curriculum as an RPG wrapped in an ARG.