Winter Working Connections Registration is Open Now

The National Convergence Technology Center (CTC) is pleased to announce that registration is open now for Winter Working Connections, but seats are already filling up fast. Working Connections events offer cutting-edge, cost-effective professional development opportunities to current community college IT faculty that is typically only available through expensive commercial training. The goal is for attendees to add this new content into their home programs as soon as possible, either as a new course or as a supplement to an existing course.

Regular readers know that the North Texas edition of Summer Working Connections was held at Richland College in Dallas way back in 2002. The topics that year were iPv6, social media, and virtualization. Ann Beheler was a part of that event and she’s led the way for every Working Connections in the region ever since. It wasn’t until 2010 that a shorter companion Working Connections event was added. While Summer Working Connections typically runs five days, this new December edition was scheduled to run for only three days. That first Winter Working Connections welcomed 34 attendees with last year’s 2020 event breaking attendance records with 87 attendees. The eleven Winter Working Connections events have to date attracted over 500 enrollments across over 20 different IT topics.

This year we’re featuring four tracks across a variety of schedules.

Two tracks are running three days – Monday, December 13 through Wednesday, December 15.

• “Introduction to Alteryx Designer and SparkED” will introduce attendees to Designer, the flagship product in the Alteryx analytics process automation platform. This low-code/no-code solution allows users across all industries and departments to produce transformational insights from their data with an easy to use drag and drop interface. Attendees will learn how to build workflows in Designer to automate processes and perform advanced analytics.

• “Introduction to Bitcoins, Blockchains, Ethereum and Smart Contracts” will focus on the origins of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and its evolution over the past decade, the rise of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Blockchain, the proliferation of Smart Contracts using Solidity, and the emergence of DApps that use Blockchain for a variety of applications. Learners will discuss “use cases” and details of three DApps.

One track is running four days – Monday, December 13 through Thursday, December 16 plus an additional day on Friday, January 21.

• “Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification” will cover a variety of topics, including how to manage Azure subscriptions, secure identities, administer the infrastructure, configure virtual networking, connect Azure and on-premises sites, and manage network traffic. This track will help attendees prepare for the Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate AZ-104 certification.

One track is running five days on Fridays – December 3, 10, and 17 and then also January 7 and 14.

• “AWS Academy Cloud Architecting” covers the fundamentals of building IT infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. This will include learning how to optimize the use of the AWS Cloud by understanding AWS services and how these services fit into cloud-based solutions. The track will also recommend various design patterns to help attendees think through the process of architecting optimal IT solutions on AWS.

Current community college and high school IT faculty can learn more about this event and register here.