May 2008 Archives

As I type this entry, the 3rd most downloaded track within the entire iTunes U is the one minute eight second video "Phoenix Entry, Descent and Landing Teaser Trailer." In the words of Mel Allen, How about that!

On May 13th, I set up our itunes.arizona.edu page with Google Analytics. I've got a lot left to learn about using Google Analytics but took a look this afternoon to see what has been happening since the 13th.

Here's a map that Google Analytics creates showing the locations of cities in the USA that were tracked coming to this page.

for the period of May 13 - May 28

• 106 visits via 39 U.S. cities
• visits from 17 different states in the U.S.
• 90 different visitors making 117 visits from 10 different countries
• Countries: Brazil, Australia, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Italy, Canada, and Switzerland

Okay, spot quiz. If we are only getting a little over 100 visitors from our itunes.arizona.edu page, then how are the thousands of other visitors to our site accessing the UA on iTunes U?

I brought my Amazon Kindle in today for a sort of show & tell for anyone interested. Several interested colleagues asked about the wireless access. The Kindle uses EVDO cell phone networks "at no charge to the user to download books and other content automatically." I have to believe there is a charge for this built in to the initial cost of the device or your subscriptions. An entry in The Amazon Kindle blog, informs us that "you aren't dependent on wifi hotspots and have access wherever Sprint's EVDO coverge is available." See the WhisperNet Coverage Map. This just means be sure to download the books you want before you go to Greer and don't expect to get any of your subscriptions after you leave Globe.

Just read an article appearing today in Campus Technology: Frankenstein in the University," by Luke Fernandez. I recommend it to just about everyone working at a college or university, whether involved with ed tech or teaching freshman comp.

At the heart of the piece is how Fernandez addresses the idea that teaching is being driven by technology and that new media - such as podcasts, IM and videos - have an impact on college students developing strong writing skills. One result may be that "less-literate people" are less likely or less able to discern alternative views on a given subject. Fernandez touches other topics: faculty who are reluctant or unwilling to use ed tech resources, how universities become "captives" to certain vendor technologies, and how we should respond to situations where we find ourselves "victims" of a particular vendor. It is well worth reading.

Last summer when I taught IRLS573 IT in Libraries, I had the students listen to the audio of a Science Friday episode, called Digital Libraries, from May 2007. The topic involved a discussion of three different e-books projects: Michael S. Hart's Project Guttenburg, Brewster Kahle for the Internet Archive, and Stanford's Michael Keller who spoke about Google's e-books project.

I was reminded of it today was I listened to TWIT 144: The FBI vs. The Internet in which host Leo Laporte and panelists listened to Brewster Kahle discussing his experience dealing with a National Security Letter from the FBI "asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site." Kahle's part of TWIT 144 is about 30 minutes long and you can easily listen to it while working on other things.

Here are three articles about it. Any one of these provides a good review. 1) Zdnet's "Brewster Kahle offers a cookbook for fighting security letters" 2) Wired's "FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses" 3) EFF's "FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional National Security Letter After ACLU and EFF Challenge"

There continues to be a number of book digitization projects outside of libraries and archives. After reportedly digitizing 750,000 book and indexing 80M journal articles I read today that MS is bowing out. See "Microsoft Shuttering Book Digitization Efforts"

This morning's iTunes U's mainpage began featuring a link to the UA's Phoenix Mars Mission podcast series. When you go to the mainpage, there are selected sites featured atop the page that rotate. The above screenshot captured Phoenix. It seems to come up with the first three before the next line skates on to replace it.

download the spreadsheet.

Congratulations to everyone working on the mission. Enormously exciting and just amazing how JPL could engineer the lander to touch down safely.

Check this out. This afternoon on the LPL Phoenix website is this image captured by a "telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25." (LPL is the UA's Department of Planetary Sciences
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory)

The full story: "Camera On Mars Orbiter Snaps Phoenix During Landing"

My friend Hank shared these links for Live Briefings and replays on NASA TV: MS Media Player | Real Player
| Quicktime

Oh, and we now have 30 videos and 1 audio track on the Phoenix Mars mission iTunes U site. Miguel Young at Apple wrote that he trying to get the site some additional exposure. I keep checking iTunes U's main page - nothing yet - maybe tomorrow. I think the UA mission video specialists will be adding more as they are able to make it available.

I got a Kindle this week. The Kindle is "Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device." I've been really interested in electronic text readers for a few years and had hopes for Sony's reader. But that took forever to reach the marketplace and just seemed to be something with a lot of questions around it. Plus, I'm still cautious about Sony after they put that spyware onto their music CDs.

I rather like the Kindle so far. I bought/downloaded a mystery and find reading it fairly natural. There's a little bit of "getting used to." However, I was reading it on my patio in broad daylight and it was perfect. There are some interesting wireless functions too that I'll probably get to later in the summer.

As I type this entry, the Phoenix Mars mission landing is 3 days, 7 hours, 56 minutes and 33 seconds away. For many of the people working on the project it's been in the works 4-5 years. The UA is hosting a number of events this weekend. Here are some links to UA News articles and the mission's website.

• Mission homepage
• LPL's Landing Celebration
• Mars University

New! from UA News: Phoenix Spacecraft is Healthy and this audio podcast Interview with former NASA astronaut Frank Borman

We've featured the Phoenix Mars Mission in the UA's iTunes U's Featured Programs window. Today I added a number of those videos to the UA's YouTube channel and created a playlist for Phoenix Mars Mission. Also this morning, I uploaded the last of LPL's evening lecture series events for spring semester, Prof. Alfred McEwen's April 22nd talk "New Vistas of the Moon and Mars." You can download this video from the LPL Evening Lecture series on iTunes U. I added this podcast series to Featured Programs yesterday.

In addition the UA's activities, websites, and videos, check out the many videos that NASA has uploaded about the mission on YouTube - search Phoenix + Mars.

download the spreadsheet.

Short post about an entry I just wrote on the Through Our Parents' Eyes blog. Really interesting to see what the group Vanishing Tucson is doing.

Announced today on both Google's blog and YouTube's blog is: "Today we've added some new features to Insight. One is a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience."

I've been looking at the data for about a dozen of the UA's videos and can report that more times than not, "no viewing data is available for this video." When there is data, it's been 100% for a particular demographic. For instance, Scott Well's Race Track Organization Structure has been viewed 32 times since it was added on May 8th. Here is a screen shot of when the Demographics tab is selected for this video. Note that it shows 100% Female.

According to the YouTube blog entry, the data tells us that 100% of the viewers were female in the age range of 0-18. This is determined by YouTube tracking the personal information attached to the individual(s) viewing the vdieo. When you create your own page you enter personal information. I haven't been able to tell how many viewers this data is said to represent. Maybe there was one person who fit that criteria and YouTube could not track the rest of the views. I'm hoping that this feature is just too new to provide useful. Time will tell.

I try to keep up on collecting data for my annual report as the year goes along so that I don't go nuts when it's due in June. Today I did another count of what we have on iTunes U. As of today, Tuesday, May 13, 2008, we have a total of 552 tracks in our iTunes U. Of that 552, 284 are video tracks and 268 are audio tracks.

Following is a breakdown.

The May 9th Campus Technology includes "Best Practices in Emergency Communications" by Doug Gale. I think it's important for all of us working at colleges and universities to be aware of what constitute best practices in responding to these tragic situations and recommend this article. Here's a copy/paste that explains how the best practices were determined.

Supported by funding from the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Domestic Preparedness to the State of Florida, the University of Central Florida prepared a report on Emergency Communications Systems that provides a comprehensive discussion of the requirements for emergency communications and available solutions. They identify the three requirements for an alert system as:

1. Alert as many people and as quickly as possible in a normal condition
2. Alert as many people and as quickly as possible without power and phone service
3. Constantly deliver alerts to specific groups of people in different locations

Here are some other points made in the article that I found important. These bullets are just some of the key points and as you read it, you will undoubtedly find others. Feel free to comment on this entry.

• 50% of students and faculty would not immediately pick up a ringing phone and thus limiting the effectiveness of reverse 911 strategies.
• there is no single alert system that meets the all the needs of a single campus, let alone the needs of diverse campuses.
• alarm siren systems should only be used for emergencies and should only be tested once a semester.
• cell phones and wireless-capable laptops can be disruptive in a classroom environment, and many instructors ask that they not be turned off during class. Therefore a back-channel system like a siren is needed
• One problem generic to all voluntary systems is participation

download spreadsheet

On Friday, I had the opportunity to join a dozen other UA staff in Cupertino for the UA's Apple Executive Briefing. Cupertino is the location of Apple's corporate headquarters and referred to as the Silicon Valley Campus. The first thing that I'll say is that our Apple hosts were all extremely friendly and professional.

Apple HQ has six main buildings and the main street is Infinite Loop, which (of course) has a Wikipedia entry.

The UA contingent consisted of: Steve McCarthy, VP External Relations; Paul Allvin, Assoc. VP for Communications; Kate Jensen, Asst. VP Marketing/External Relations; Scott Cason, Marketing Director, Enrollment Management ; Melissa Vito, VP Student Affairs; Magan Alfred, Program Coordinator, Education and Outreach, Dean of Students Office; Sarah Beaudry, Communications Director, Alumni Association; Scott Fiddelke, webmaster, External Relations; Johnny Cruz, Jeff Harrison, & Pila Martinez, UA News; George Humphrey, Asst. VP, AHSC Public Affairs.

So what did we learn during our briefing?

At some point early Sunday morning, I woke up and read for while. Still wasn't sleepy so I put on the TV. It came on a station showing a movie version of the Reno 911 cops. I've not seen the movie and for some reason they were in Florida and two of them were on a beach by a gigantic beached whale. After calling in their colleagues and being unable to budge the whale, they blew it up. So what you ask? They clearly ripped off the most famous video downloaded of the pre-highspeed internet days, The Exploding Whale. I remember downloading this video, probably at 9600 bps. Check it out.

Today is Cinco de Mayo. Watch Big Jim Griffith's Arizona Illustrated segment explaining the southern Arizona tradition with Cinco de Mayo [MP4 video] About two minutes into the video, Jim explains the corrido about the defeat of Maximilian and his empress, Carlota. Jim tells us how Carlota stayed in Europe and went mad. Another part of the story with a southern Arizona tradition - and a Learning Technologies tradition - is this. Carlota was traveling around Europe trying to raise money in support of Maximilian. The story goes that when she appeared before Pope Pius IX, instead of giving her funds the Pope gave her an ivory crucifix.

Guess where that crucifix is today. It is in the Baptistry at St. Philip's In The Hills church and our website featuring the church's extraordinary art collection. See Carlota's Cross. [only accessible through WebAuth. ]

download spreadsheet

Reports, podcasts, summaries and opinions are hitting the 'Net this week as the follow-up to last week's Web 2.0 Expo. LTS' own Casey Ontivares was there and will be giving his report at a future staff meeting. For now, here's some pointers to content about/from Web 2.0 Expo.

What is Web 2.0 Expo
Web 2.0 Expo is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. Web 2.0 Expo features the most innovative and successful Internet industry figures and companies providing attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web 2.0 world to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities. Web 2.0 Expo is co-produced by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb.

blip.tv's is hosting videos of ~30 Web2Expo's keynotes. Among these is one that Casey recommends: "Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs." I'm watching it now. Lyon's is right. Steve Balmer does have a strong resemblance to Uncle Fester!