November 2007 Archives

A November 20th article in the Chronicle of Higher Education announced "a cooperative effort to develop free, open-source software to make it easier for professors around the world to podcast their lectures." In Jeffrey R. Young's "Colleges Collaborate on Software to Help Capture and Archive Recordings of Lectures" we learned about OpenCast, a project led by UC-Berkeley. In a nutshell, "OpenCast aims to streamline the process of recording lectures and allow course audio and PowerPoint slides to be recorded and unloaded automatically." Follow the link to the OpenCast homepage and read over "What is the OpenCast System?" You can also scroll down to see the list of participating institutions.

Here in the LTC, we've had demos of a few proprietary $olution$. We're also planning to test out Podcast Producer, a feature in Leopard that Apple describes as "a complete, end-to-end solution for encoding, publishing, and distributing high-quality podcasts." OSCR has installed Leopard server.

Aaron Barlow is an assistant professor of English at NYC's College of Technology. Barlow has had two books published this year about blogs. The Rise of the Blogosphere published in March 2007 according to Amazon and Blogging America: The New Public Sphere due tomorrow, November 30th. I've not seen either but will order them from the UA Bookstore today or tomorrow. Descriptions from Amazon follow.

It's been a busy few days for populating our UA on iTunes U. As usual, LTC's media services folks are cranking out a lot of the content.

Visit What's New on UA on iTunes U -- November 2007 for more on what has been added the past few weeks. Totally new this month are Career Services, Linguistics Lectures, and two new sections for the College of Law.

(Follow the links to open the respective iTunes U pages)

Topping the list of new additions is President Shelton's State of the University Address that you will find available in Wildcatcasts.

Career Services has two series, Quiz Mz. Liz and This Week @ Career Services

The Department of Linguistics' Linguistics Lectures brings a series of lectures about the study of language and linguistics, in which a variety of internationally known scholars are invited to participate.

College of Law's three sections are its Lecture Series, which has seven new tracks from its October 26th Program on Economics, Law, and the Environment Symposium; Court Visits at Arizona Law featuring visits from the Arizona Court of Appeals, the Arizona Supreme Court, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals; and guest lectures for the Law Criminal Justice & Security Program. I will add two more tracks for the LCJ&SP series next week.

The newest addition to UA on iTunes U is the UA Department of Linguistics, featuring Linguistics Lectures. Follow this link to the Linguistics Lectures main page on iTunes U.

Description: The Department of Linguistics offers a series of lectures about the study of language and linguistics, in which a variety of internationally known scholars are invited to participate. These talks, which are open to the entire university community, feature in-depth discussion and state-of-the-art analysis of various topics in linguistics - including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, language endangerment and preservation, language acquisition, and more.

The podcast that I created for my IRLS571 class pulls together ten minutes about the Web 2.0 Summit that was held in San Francisco in October. Ten minutes on a three-day event can't even get you in the ballpark in terms of content. However, one thing worth sharing that I gathered from reading a few blogs reporting on Summit, is that semantic apps are much closer and there a few developers showing alpha and beta versions.

The podcast [download the podcast] was assembled in GarageBand so I have included images and some of the images also include links to the semantic apps developers' websites. It's a .m4a format meaning you should watch/listen using iTunes. Send me an email or comment to this blog entry is you have more about Summit and semantic apps to share.

BTW, if you want to check out the tracks for my IRLS571 class, follow this link to open the main page in iTunes U.

One of the podcasts that I subscribe to is TED Talks "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers." I encourage you to subscribe to them as well. I'm sure that you will see topics and speakers who you will want to watch. I have a couple that I'm using with my fall Intro to IT class.

So, why write an entry about it today? There is a TED Talk up now by Larry Lessig. Lessig is founder of Creative Commons and many educators and librarians have heard him speak at a professional conference. I had that good fortune several years ago at a Computer Technology conference. In addition to his impressive content, I was struck by his use of Powerpoint. Joseph Boudreaux, Interface/Interactions Designer in the LTC, and I were walking over to pick up a cup of coffee one morning last week and Joseph was talking about the marvelous way that Lessig uses PPT. It's certainly unlike how the rest of us use it.

Which brings me to say that you can see what Jospeh and I are talking about by watching Lessig's TED Talk. Follow this link to watch it. Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law FYI, it's 19 minutes long and was given in March 2007.

If you do any web design or development you may know of this product. Aptana Studio version 1.0 was just released with a $99 professional version and a free community edition with "where all core features and capabilities are developed." It is cross-platform and The community edition includes: "CSS Preview, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Formatting, Code drag and drop, visual ScriptDoc Explorer, Enhanced Dynamic Help System, and Tons of User Interface Polish."
The professional edition includes: "JSON Editor, Internet Explorer Debugging, Remote Project Creation, FTPS and SFTP Support, Reporting Engine."

There is a good review in a blog I follow called HTML Primer.

Each week I receive a spreadsheet from Apple that details usage information for the UA's iTunes U site. If you want to take a look at the most recent information, download the spreadsheet and read the two pages I put together from the Administrator's guide explaining what the categories that Apple tracks mean.

Here's a brief look from the report received today for the week of October 21-October 28. BTW, the Apple contact for iTunes says that the date of the report, in this case October 28th, indicates the week ending October 28th.

The Summary sheet gives an overview of the past four weeks. For example,
DownloadTracks 10/28:638 10/21:451 10/14:893 10/07:1024

iTunes tracked 6,838 users that logged in during this week to our site during this week. (week ending October 21st was 6,723) iTunes U does not use cookies, so each time a user visits, it is considered a new visit. I interpret this as a count to how many times anyone went to our main page or directly to one of the individual pages within the site.

There were a total of 638 tracks downloads during this week. The Tracks spreadsheet page lists each track that was downloaded and how many times an individual track was downloaded. For Apple, tracks includes each time a track (AKA podcast episode) was downloaded either as part of a podcast subscription or singly off that track's main page. BTW, I have the impression Apple has a corporate strategy that decrements the use of the word podcast in favor of the word track. Maybe Blackboard has filed a patent for the word podcast? ;>)

I'm still pretty foggy on how browse stats are collected. According to the Admin guide, the "browse sheet lists all the iTunes U pages users viewed that week." If this week's report indicates a total of 37 browses to a dozen different pages, where did the rest of those 6,838 visitors go? If you can clear this up for me, please email me at stuartg@email.arizona.edu. Maybe it's one of those things I'm looking to closely at to make sense of?

What else? Keeping getting the word out!

This week Jim Austin sent out a 3D Memo and news release to update the campus about UA on iTunes U. Always a good idea to keep drawing attention to it. The 3D went out on Tuesday and resulted in new contacts. It shows that you have keep promoting and marketing these services.

So, here's a look at what's happening with UA on iTunes U this week.

The UA Bookstore hosts numerous events throughout the semester. For example, this week the Bookstore has a cycling themed event with a local author, some guest speakers from Sabino Cycling and they are capping it off by giving away two Trek Beach Cruisers. Another Bookstore event is a Palestinian author talking about her book and a Day of the Dead celebration honoring Professor Lanin Gyurko (Spanish & Portuguese Dept) with Mariachi Mixteca, a Day of the Dead Altar, and speacial breads provided by La Estrella Bakery. I'll be meeting tomorrow with a Bookstore staff member about getting a podcast series going that captures these sorts of events -- I think it will have broad interest.

Jim got an email from someone in the Critical Response and Emergency Systems Training (CREST) program. CREST doctors provide emergency preparedness training to doctors, nurses, EMTs and other health professionals. In addition to in-person training, CREST has videos of the doctors' lectures on a variety of preparedness topics. One of CREST's videos, a bioethics video called "The Most Difficult Healthcare Decisions: Resource Allocation in Crises," has received a great deal of interest both in and outside of the medical community and the program they would like it in iTunes U. iTunes U is a natural step for programs like CREST. There's an opportunity to leverage an existing investment in creating instructional and informational videos. They just need to be encoded for iTunes (easy for me to say) and uploaded to iTunes U.

Unveiled in October, iTunes U's Beyond Campus features educational materials from sources other than colleges and universities. As of November 1st, Beyond Campus includes Smithsonian Global Sound, KQED, Little Kids Rock, American Public Media, the Museum of Modern Art, and Oyez - Supreme Court Media.

I have been poking around and am truly impressed by the content. For example, I went into Oyez - Supreme Court Media and downloaded "Bush v. Gore (Oral Argument), Part 1 of 4." The Oyez Project took the audio, added images to it and embedded links within the images.

This is done using Apple's GarageBand, an application that comes bundled on Macs in the iLife Suite. I've been using it with most of the podcasts for my classes the past couple years. You can pause the track, click the embedded link, and your browser is fired up and retrieves that webpage. Talk about "adding value."

I also went into American Public Media and explored the History section. There are over 100 tracks for the subjects: "Religious Roots of American Democracy," "The President Calling," "History: Days of Infamy, Daily Life," "Civil Rights: Voices of a Movement," and three others. If you drill deeper, you find audio/video and downloadable transcripts (PDFs). Some resources include suggestions for discussion points to support classroom use of the programs. By the way, if you're a fan of Garrison Keilor, his "The Writer's Almanac" is included.

Go to iTunes U and scroll down past the list of Universities. You'll see Beyond Campus just below the last university (today that is Yale).