Stuart's Blog

Today's UA News has this article "UA Makes Top 20 List for Peace Corps."

The University of Arizona has earned top-20 status among large colleges and universities producing Peace Corps volunteers for the first time in three years. Peace Corps 2009 data indicates that 52 UA alumni are serving in countries that include Albania, Belize, Botswana, China, Guinea, Jordan, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, Paraguay, Peru, Senegal, Thailand and Ukraine.

A year or two ago Georgia Ehlers, who directs the UA's Peace Corps Fellows program, told me that she thought that the videos our Media Services team has created has had something to do with the UA's program being such as a success. Take a look at the Peace Corps Fellows playlist and notice how many views these videos have received. Pretty impressive!

Download the public and private spreadsheets.

Jackie Moxley from the Water Resources Research Center has submitted a number of videos to the UA's YouTube channel. In late January she sent over two more, including Arizona Project WET. On Feb. 5, Jackie emailed to say that WRRC received "very nice exposure on the Arizona Project WET video, selected as the video of the week on Brown & Caldwell's Arizona Water News!" Looking at the InSight analytics for Arizona Project WET I can see that of the 135 views the video has received, 78 came between Feb. 3 and Feb. 6, including 58 on the 6th.

Kirk Astroth in Cooperative Extension submitted Mr. Extreme's "The Extremely Extreme Desert" to our UA YouTube channel back in September 2009. Kirk is working a proposal or report and asked if I'd pull up the most recent analytics on the video for him.

Here is a snapshot of what YouTube's InSight analytics can provide. If you have videos on the UA's channel, you can request this as well.

"Views" shows how many times your video was viewed over a period of time

We can drill down to display how times your video was viewed by USA state or foreign countries

Discovery shows where people came from to view your video

We can drill down in Discovery to see what keywords visitors entered to find your video

Excellent points in the January 27, 2010, Faculty Focus summary of Dave Yearwood's recent webinar. Yearwood is an associate professor and chair of the Technology Department at the University of North Dakota. In "Using Screen Capture Software to Help Reclaim Class Time."

• Yearwood recommends screen capture because
• it supports diverse student learning styles
• supplements F2F instruction with brief podcasts and vodcasts that students can listen to and watch on their iPods or laptops before clas
• leads to more productive classes because students already have some familiarity with the content. Their questions are more insightful as they become engaged, active participants in their education.

From the webinar, Mary Bart summarized these important points in using screen capture software to help reclaim class time for more productive learning activities include:

• Create tutorials and step-by-step video demonstrations on how to use laboratory equipment or specific software programs; provide training on a range of topics; or offer explanations and clarifications on complex concepts, etc.
• Develop primer questions on course content for students to consider prior to coming to class.
• Provide student feedback on assignments by augmenting textual corrections with speech and drawings.
• Record chunked lectures, or break up longer lectures into smaller segments.

Let's look at who is doing instructional blogging Spring Semester. Sorry I can't link to them here. We need to keep them hidden from the @#$*()&$ spammers who now submit comments to entries that they find.

• Amy Fountain (Linguistics) is using a professor's blog for both her courses LING/AIS210 and INDV101 Language.
• Katie Hirschboeck has an on-going blog for her 600 level geography course called Global Change Toolkit. Her students post on topics that she assigns and she also post information pointing students in content they will find useful.
• The Honors College, thanks to Barbara Whittlesey, makes good use of instructional blogging. This semester they are added new students to their Civic Engagement and Reading Builds Community on-going blogs, and set up a new blog for students in HNRS295B, An Encounter with Poets and Their Poetry.
• English 408/508, ESL in Bilingual Education, has used a course blog for a number of years now. It's good to see how it is a formal part of the course and student contributions are part of their grade.
• Crescencio Lopez, who is teaching Spanish 333 this semester, uses a blog each semester/session that he teaches. He seems to teach fall, spring and summer session, btw. Crescencio posts an entry and the students must all respond using the comment form. Seems to work well for them.
• Jon Reinhardt is also returning to use a blog in his English/SLAT 596O course, Internet Technologies and Second/Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

Here are the spreadsheets from last week for the UA's iTunes U private and public sites.

BTW, checking the visitors stats we again topped 70K visitors. Over the previous week, we have 53,074 visitors to the UA's site coming in via the iTunes Store's iTunes U path and another 22,249 from our itunes.arizona.edu page.

I met recently with a UA prof who is exploring hosting an invited conference on cyberbullying. Probably because of that meeting and also because the topic was mentioned in a UA Life & Work Connections' In Just Five...Technology and Cyberbullying, I paid closer attention to a recent entry in Tomorrow's Professor Blog. The entry is "Mediating in the Academic Bully Culture: The Chair's Responsibility to Faculty and Graduate Students," by Barbara M. De Luca, associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, and Darla J. Twale, clinical professor in the Department of Counselor Education and Human Services, at the University of Dayton. De Luca and Twale are co-authors of the book Faculty Incivility.

The focus of the entry is on faculty incivility within a department, as well as faculty incivility to students by communications technologies such as email and IM. The authors clearly point to the department chair's responsibility to take steps when they observe or learn about this behavior. They provide examples of indicators of cyberbullying in the academy. Providing an environment where victims feel comfortable enough to share what has happened is the first step toward minimizing bullying behavior. Further, they state the need for formal policies against bullying, including the actions to be taken to eliminate the behavior. The policy must also include a process by which the bullied can seek help without fear of retribution by the bully. Finally these policies and processes must be discussed publicly, part of an orientation for new faculty and grad students.

I hope that higher education will take cyberbullying far more seriously so that faculty who confuse academic freedom with bad and inappropriate behavior are held accountable. Maybe this is something the faculty senate should take the lead in moving forward.

I read a short piece in Engadget in late December talking about Ray Kurzweil's Blio. What it reported was a new e-book format that promised to "deliver true-to-life color reproductions." While touted for PC notebooks, it will have apps for the iPod Touch, iPhone. This was a week or so before the big consumer electronics show in Vegas so we all waited to hear more. On January 8th, CNET published "Building a Better e-Reader with Blio," and posted a short interview with Kurzweil that includes a good visual of e-books on Blio. While the demo features a children's book we also learn of Blio's potential text books. Check out the CNET article and watch their YouTube video. [give it 5-10 seconds to load]

I've not reported on the number of visitors we get to our public site for a while and decided to check and let you know. Last week's stats indicate that, for our public site, we had 55,635 visitors coming in through the iTunes Store and another 22,444 times that access was via our UA webpage.

Download the public and/or private site spreadsheets.

With YouTube's newest interface we are only able to feature a dozen of our playlists. As I write this entry, we have nearly 30 different playlists in our channel. I've compiled this to have one place where visitors can review all of UA's YouTube playlists. The links next to the thumbnail images take you to the playlist in the UA's channel.

Academic Programs
Description: For high school and undergraduate students to learn more about the University of Arizona's academic programs. See why you want to be a Wildcat!

Adaptive Athletics
Description: At the University of Arizona, disabled athletes have the opportunity to compete in a variety of sports, including Wheelchair Track, Quad Rugby, Tennis, Men's & Women's Wheelchair Basketball, and Goalball, a sport for the blind and visually impaired. Each athlete in our Adaptive Athletics Program is expected to meet high academic standards and represent his/her school and community with pride and professionalism. In return, they are able to compete nationwide and internationally in their respective sports against world-class athletes, and have access to training, practice facilities, and staff here at the University of Arizona campus.

Arizona Health Sciences Center
Description: The Arizona Health Sciences Center (AHSC) at The University of Arizona is a network of health-related organizations and activities unique in the state and region. Arizona's only academic health sciences center, AHSC is based on the campus of The University of Arizona in Tucson and maintains a growing presence on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus in downtown Phoenix. From these vantage points, AHSC reaches across the state of Arizona and well beyond its borders to provide health-care education, research, patient care and service for Arizonans and their neighbors today and for the future.

Award Winning Faculty
Description: Regents' Professor is an honor awarded only to full professors. No more than 3 percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty members may hold the rank at any given time. University Distinguished Professors honors faculty who have made outstanding contributions to undergraduate education at the University of Arizona.

Award Winning Researchers
Description: Innovation Day at The University of Arizona celebrates technology development and commercialization by highlighting the research achievements of students, staff and faculty. The Technology Innovation Awards recognize University of Arizona researchers for achievements in translating original ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace. The University of Arizona Office of Economic Development (OED) is the focal point for strategic and policy development initiatives related to economic development. Its activities promote local, state and regional economic development, support technology development and commercialization, and facilitate the creation of international economic partnerships.

Campus Lectures
Description: A selection of lectures given by UA faculty and invited speakers on a wide range of topics. These lectures have been selected because high school and undergraduate students may find them useful when researching topics and assignments.

"There's no doubt that text message donations coupled with the word-of-mouth buzz provided by Twitter and Facebook are proving a powerful combination in the Haiti relief efforts, not to mention the vital role of those services in bringing us first-hand reports in real-time."

Pete Cashmore, Special to CNN, came to this conclusion in today's "Haiti quake relief: How technology helps." I'm sure you've seen the Text "Haiti" to 90999 crawl on TV news networks. The article tells how effective texting and people, such as celebrities with big followings, who have tweeted about donating to Haiti relief efforts have been the past couple days.

I'd read another article today that explained that banks made $250M last year with the amount they skim off the top of web-based charitable donations.

Timely short piece from Faculty Focus today, the first day of classes at the UA. "Making the Most of the First Day of Class" offers answers to three questions. Mary C. Clement, an associate professor of education at Berry College, shares her thoughts on the importance of establishing expectations for a semester of learning.

1. What should an instructor try to accomplish during the first day of class?
2. What effect can a good first day have on the rest of the semester?
3. Some instructors do not use all of the time available for the first day of class. Do you recommend taking the full class period for the first meeting? Why or why not?

Download last week's spreadsheets for the UA's iTunes U.

public and private sites.