Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.
Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.
Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php
project: UT Canvas App Store UI Design
Client /Prof: LAITS
completion status: Started July 27th, 2018
staff guidance: Suloni, Marla, Chad, Andre, Chris
STA team members: na
description/plans: Create page mockups for a new App Store for Canvas apps developed by UT
To be completed: October 2018
(Look at that lockup! Nice!)
Photo IDs
Continuing to work on Vlabs, plus IDs, the updated Turkish language banner and my patch design:
Another week has passed, and I have done a lot of miscellaneous things… aka photo ID’s, meeting with Stacy for a new project (AIH), renaming photo ID submissions, and going in for a green screen photo shoot.
I just had 1 photo ID to do this week (so far):
One of the clients actually submitted the photos through her own BOX folder… So I had to convert the file names to our COLA naming convention and put them in our BOX folder.
For the AIH project, I’m working with Stacy to convert an old website into a newer, cleaner version:
<old>
<new>
And last but not LEAST, of course I worked on another U9_2 illustration. It is still in the works, but I’m hoping to finish it by the end of this week:
scene description: Oleg counting Russian money he finds in a box on a desk.
I think for the adjustment, I would have to zoom in a lot more to show the Russian money that Oleg is looking at. Waiting for Dr. Rice’s feedback!
Ooof, actually I lied about last but not least part (; Suloni asked me to go crazy on the STA patch design, soooooo here it is – a wild adjustment to my previous rainbow road design:
The vlabs have been coming along pretty nicely. So far, we have about 3 labs finished; everyone has been a tremendous help! There’s been a few instances of where images have annotations that aren’t actually part of the image (put in via flash), and other interactives with a lot of text where we’ve had to use our own judgement about what and where to put the text on the new website. Overall, it’s been going pretty smoothly though.
https://anthro-virtual-labs.development.la.utexas.edu/
I’m also going to be organizing putting the Cascade documentation into the actual cascade site. Right now, we are working on editing the document based on the packet of edits that Andre gave us earlier in the summer. Since, the packet is slightly dated (some parts hadn’t been documented yet when he reviewed it), we may have to consult him on several things during this part of the process. After we finish editing, I want to get Valerie and Emily to test the documentation. I’ll have to go over basic cascade with them beforehand too. Then finally, I’ll have everyone work on putting the tested steps into cascade. It’s been pretty busy for several STAs lately, so we might now be able to finish before the end of October.
I also got assigned to a coding/wordpress project for Stacy! Basically, this website is a UT history podcast site, and Stacy has been working on transferring the site content into a better site format using WordPress. We’re trying to get some functions such as a better/automated Speaker index and episode list index. My current assignment is to create fields for each Speaker, so that they can be indexed through the WordPress system and connected to their respective podcasts and categories. After I do this part, Stacy will have me do some basic php coding to add functionality to the site. I’ve pretty much never worked with web development before, so this is an exciting project!
