March 2008 Archives

Scott Fiddelke from External Relations sent over the six videos that are part of the Thanks to the UA campaign to add to the UA's YouTube channel. If you visit the UA channel, you'll see them in the videos window on the main page and you'll also find them in a playlist called, aptly, Thanks to the UA.

The theme of the campaign goes:

• "thanks to the UA" we have Ansel Adams collection at CCP
• "thanks to the UA" we have artificial hearts
• "thanks to the UA" we have lunar landings
• "thanks to the UA" we have Pima Cotton, a better kind of cotton for clothing
• "thanks to the UA" we have the mirror lab making the largest telescopes in the world
• "thanks to the UA" we have tree-ring research and the ability to conduct better research global warming and water supply.

Here are the first full week's stats with our "public features" interface. You'll recall last weeks' spreadsheets were corrupted. I sent them to the Apple contact sub'ing for our regular rep. Our regular rep, Miguel, was on vacation. I never heard back. So, here's is the most recent data: download spreadsheet

The first thing that I see is 99 downloads for Ellen Lupton's Art & Identity lecture. Last week, this lecture was featured by Apple on the iTunes U main page. Having content featured by Apple on the main page is a sure way to attract visitors. You can see our Top 5 Downloads on our UA iTunes U main page. First, of course, is Ellen Lupton's D.I.Y: Design It Yourself, then one of Jim Collins lectures, the Architecture Lecture Series track I added last week - Desert Architecture, and Eller's video about the MBA program - Not Business As Usual. The Eller video is an "overview of the Eller Executive MBA program focused on ROI: return on investment." On the spreadsheet it shows 9 downloads which ranks far behind many other tracks for 3/23-3/29. This should mean that a lot of visitors downloaded it yesterday, 3/30. We can check next week's spreadsheet to compare.

Here's something I find interesting -- the number of times the videos up on our UA YouTube channel are viewed. Go to our UA channel on YouTube and in the window displaying thumbnails to the videos, select Most Viewed. This will arrange our (currently) 74 videos in order of the most viewed.

The one with Angelina Cabrera and Antoine Cason has been viewed over 1,700 times. This is the 30 second clip that was up as our main page for only a couple weeks so it's not incrementing whenever someone hits the homepage. Are those pro football coaches searching on Antonine? Two of the most viewed are lectures from COS' Evolution series from 2006. Gary Seitzer's Homonymous Confusion of Planes, 2007 has been viewed a lot more than other videos from the UAMA series.

When I upload a video to YouTube I first have to complete a template that includes a title, a description and keywords. If you're not aware of this, people most likely are finding these videos by searching within YouTube on particular keywords rather than coming to our UA YouTube main page and selecting from the videos window. There's no demographic breakdown on who is viewing these videos. Suffice it to say that it is good to see our videos getting so many hits.

If you're waiting for this week's stats - me too. The spreadsheet came attached to email around 15:00 but won't open in Excel. I checked the forums to see if anyone had a similar experience. If I don't get one that works by tomorrow morning, I'll email our iTunes U contact.

We have a number of videos in the works that will go up on iTunes U and/or YouTube. Media Services, where the real work on getting our content together happens, is working on the following.

• Innovation Day 2008: The 5th annual Innovation Day at The UA takes place Tuesday, March 25, 2008. Tony Gallego has been working for weeks on the videos for this year's Technology Innovation Awards (winners of the 2008 Technology Innovation Awards will be announced at Innovation Day). We'll be adding those videos as well as the 2007 videos to both iTunes U and the UA's YouTube channel.
• Kathy Hall from CREST dropped off Spanish language versions of CREST's Hardest Decisions videos.
• There are several more of Eller's Distinguished Speaker Series videos to encode for iTunes and YouTube and at least one more "academic programs" video. They were originally encoded for QT streaming so each needs to be re-encoded.
• There are two more Peace Corps videos to finish. LuisCarlos, the video editor, would like to get more photos from the Peace Corps volunteers to enhance the videos. It would be great if we can get a few more of these before the semester is over.
• There are 5-6 more videos that Tony shot at the Undergraduate Research Forum. With his time so heavily committed to the Innovation Day videos, he's not been free to get to these but should be able to soon.
• On April 1st, no fooling, we will shoot video of a UA alumni talking about her experience in the COS undergraduate research program. This will be a great addition to the YouTube channel.
• Veronica is over at BIO5 today, capturing three of the presentations given at the UA/ASU Symposium. We'll add these to iTunes U and plan to add many more over the coming year.
• Maya shot video of a public lecture sponsored by Near Eastern Studies. Dr. Mohamed Maamouri, Associate Director of the International Literacy Institute (ILI) at the Graduate School of Education/University of Pennsylvania, gave a talk on "Language and Education in the Arab Region." I'm looking forward to hearing this one - Maya said it was very interesting.
• Chris Foree has videos from an HR speaker event that we plan to add to iTunes U Your UA section.
• Heather met recently with Bruce Smith, director of African American Student Affairs, about shooting video of AASA students.

Apple migrated us to the public features interface last night and it looks great! Check it via the iTunes Store or go to our newly revised webpage. Kudos to Maritza for revising this page and the related pages and to Casey Boettcher for getting the code set up to make it work. As noted before, hats off to Casey Ontiveros for all his work on the images.

If you stop at the iTunes U main store, you'll see that Ellen Lupton, one of our featured lectures is included in Apple's new feature, Art & Design. This increases visits to our site because when someone clicks on Ellen Lupton's image, it brings that person into our UA on iTunes U site where they are more likely to notice and follow the breadcrumbs leading to our Arts section and/or main section.

Just spoke to Steve Wilson, Apple's iTunes U Producer. Steve will be bring the new interface - public features - up tonight. So come Tuesday morning, our new, attractive UA iTunes U will be out there for the world.

March 9 - 15th use stats.

On related news, the new interface - Apple calls it public features - will be installed on iTunes U overnight.

Learning Technologies will have a new webpage in place when the interface change is made. We will be using a more standard UA image provided to us by External Relations with the public features interface and with our revised webpage. I will also be working this week on a new, more standard UA interface for our Learning Technologies podcasting website.

Two articles in the print version of the Daily Star caught my eye this morning. The first article is "New method promises to unclog the Internet," tells us Yale researchers, Verizon (as ISP) and Pando Networks, Inc., believe that a use of P2P hosted by an ISP can reduce the time it takes to download a file by up to 60%. They call it P4P and it needs to be hosted by an ISP. The closing paragraph seems promising, if one can trust ISPs to do the right thing:

Pasko and a Pando executive co-chair a 50-member corporate and academic working group studying the technology with members including AT&T Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and BitTorrent Inc. Members described as "observers" include Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications.

Just back from Fotomat

Ken Wall is one of Learning Technologies senior programmers. Ken often alerts the rest of us about interesting news articles and blog entries. He just posted about "Universities With the Best Free Online Courses" and there's a link to a related resource on college-based free learning: "Discover the .EDU Underground" in lifehacker.com.

Now, noting these resources leads me to mention the Open Courseware Consortium, which many of you reading this already know about. I've heard about it but haven't jumped in to learn more until now. Subtitle: Universities working together to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware. From the about page: "An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses." MIT, USC, Berkeley, UC-Irvine, and Notre Dame are five on the member list for the U.S.

Here's the most recent spreadsheet. 1,381 downloads the past week.

Just read this article in the current The Atlantic, “The Connection Has Been Reset” by James Fallow. It was interesting to read how China's government maintains its Great Firewall (GFW) to keep some things from its citizenry. With the summer Olympics in China at a time that the U.S. general election will only be months away I think we'll be hearing lots of rhetoric about China and censorship. This article is a good look at what is really happening. Worth reading and it has a nice layman's explanation about how China controls its 'Net traffic.

I mentioned before that back on Feb. 20th, Tony shot video of about ten presenters at the 21st Undergraduate Research Forum. Yesterday, Tony got the first five processed and I've added them to a new playlist on the UA's YouTube channel. I really enjoyed seeing these students describe their research projects on the 20th and again on the video. Tony, of course, did a great job editing the video and it is one more reason for these students to feel proud of what they've accomplished.

Check it out on the UA's YouTube channel playlist: Honors College Undergraduate Research Forum.

Last month we added three videos to a new site on iTunes U, ArizonaNativeNet. If you're not yet familiar with ArizonaNativeNet, here's a description from its homepage.

ArizonaNativeNet is a virtual university outreach and distance learning telecommunications center devoted to the higher educational needs of Native Nations in Arizona, the United States and the world through the utilization of the worldwide web and the knowledge-based and technical resources and expertise of the University of Arizona.

Last fall, Learning Technologies captured video of a RTIP guest speaker Joe Harper, President and GM of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, and added it as a podcast track in Wildcatcasts. Tuesday morning I met with Denise Pharris, the marketing and graphic design specialist for the College of Ag & Life Sciences' Race Track Industry Program (RTIP). BTW, if you're not familiar with RTIP, here's a synopsis from its website.

The Race Track Industry Program (RTIP) at the University of Arizona is the only program of its kind. We offer two paths based on student interest. The Business Path prepares students for employment in the areas of race track management, regulation and pari-mutuel racing organizations. The Equine Management Path prepares students for employment in areas dealing with racing and breeding animals.

Over 11,600 visitors the past week and we did this without performance enhancing drugs! Looking over the clubhouse leaders this morning, I noticed that the Linguistics Lecture series again is up at the top of the "most downloads" list. Since these stats are strictly for the most recent seven day period reported, it has me wondering if instructors in Linguistics are assigning these lectures to coursework. If not, our Linguistics Lectures series has a following around the 'Net who are tuning in. Kudos to Linguistics. I also noticed a number of Leila Hudson's lectures downloaded this past week. I bet she gave an exam last week.

Download the spreadsheet