Jody L. Liller is the UA's Campus Rec Public Relations and Information Coordinator. She's been taking advantage of the talented students we find here at the UA to create some excellent videos for the Campus Recreation iTunes U podcast and for the UA's YouTube channel.
Campus Rec's latest video is terrific and IMO it is perfect for its target audience. It's called Don't Beat Yourself Up: You'll Fit Right In at The Rec Center. Take a look - it's 41 seconds.
Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens was indicted today. Here's a copy/paste from an AP story.
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator and a figure in Alaska politics since before statehood, was indicted Tuesday on seven counts of failing to disclose thousands of dollars in services he received from a company that helped renovate his home. The first sitting U.S. senator to face federal indictment since 1993, Stevens has been dogged by a federal investigation into his home renovation project and his dealings with wealthy oil contractors.
I will always appreciate his hysterical explanation of how the Internet works when speaking at Net Neutrality hearings. Listen to it as MP3 audio. It's about 2 1/2 minutes long and well worth your time.
Congratulations go out to Gregory Anderson, SSA, Sr. in OSCR, who is our Podcast Producer guru. Gregory was dealing with a challenging problem - automatically posting tracks to iTunesU from Podcast Producer workflows. Yesterday he discovered Mac OS X 10.5.4: Cannot post podcasts to iTunes U in an Apple Support resource for Mac "OS X 10.5, Mac OS X Server 10.5" that solved the problem. I think he had previously contacted Apple tech support about this but hadn't found anyone who knew this solution. He also shared his find on the Apple support forums for iTunes U administrators.
So, what does this mean to you, to me, to faculty on campus. A key aspect of Podcast Producer's routines goes like this. Professor Snarf is in the ILC teaching a gen ed class to 223 students. Prof. Snarf has been set up in Podcast Producer so that he starts a recording process for a class lecture and when the class/recording is over, the audio is sent to the server, processed and with Gregory's fix, it is automatically passed along to his course podcast in iTunes U.
Here's an example. The Linguistics Department's Dr. Amy Fountain has been recording guest speakers the past year and uploading the audio to iTunes U. Linguistics has quite the robust podcast series going with over 30 tracks. Gregory can set Podcast Producer up to manage these lectures and, we think, significantly streamline the process.
During fall semester we'll be piloting Podcast Producer. I am optimistic that this resource will pave the way to a great increase in the number of faculty and departments who participate in iTunes U.
While driving in this morning I heard a report on NPR that Cuil has launched. I remember looking at it in beta some months back. Pronounced "cool" and developed by former Google employees, Cuil proports to have "created the world's biggest index, and we've also developed useful features to help you search. They're simple to use and help you explore the variety and complexity of the Web." Worth checking out.
download the spreadsheet.
Download the spreadsheet for July 13-19, 2008.
I noticed last week that there is a "Science & Religion" section featured on the main iTunes U page. The College of Science's Evolution Lecture Series is one of the six prominently featured podcasts. This week, Michael Worobey's lecture "Disease Evolution: The Example of HIV" was downloaded 73 times. The next closest, one of the Phoenix Mars mission videos, was at 27. You can see how being featured by iTunes U can draw a lot of attention to one's content.
In this week's This Week in Tech podcast there was mention that according to a University of Texas report, the average commuter spends 530 hours a year in the car. I've been looking for a reference to this one and haven't found it yet. If anyone reading this does find it, please pass it along to me. That aside, this is a really good stat for driving home, pardon the pun, the mobile computing point that we all could be listening and learning more while in the car.
For anyone who works with faculty and/or finds keeping up the wealth of resources we have at our fingertips/keyboards, take a look at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know About... series. Each 7 Things a two page PDF that explains What it is, how it works, where it is going and Why it matters to teaching and learning, as well as, tips on engaging instructors.
The most recent is on Second Life. Other 7 Things topics include Ning, Lulu, Flickr, and Google Aps. Well worth checking out.
download the spreadsheet for July 6-12, 2008.
Linda L Briggs, "Preserving History in Multimedia: An Interview with Stanford's Michael Keller," Campus Technology, 7/9/2008.
Keller, who is university librarian and director of academic information resources at Stanford, is interviewed in this short article about "a worldwide effort to digitally preserve vast amounts of material from history, both aging paper documents and very recent digital content." If you would like an overview, more like sound bites to complex questions, take a look.
He was asked if "part of it is a format problem. Is part of the problem that any media simply fades over time?" and gave a for instance explaining how with mag tape, if "you leave them alone and you don't rewind the tapes once a year or so, eventually, the magnetic carrier and the physical carrier separate. When that happens, you may not be able to play [the tape] at all, or, if you do run it through the readers, you may discover that it's the last time you can read them."
Back around 2001, when working on some of the 7" and 11" tapes from 1970s and 1980s contained in the Tucson Meet Yourself festival collection, we encountered this very problem. These tapes hadn't been spooled for decades, much less once or twice a year. Fortunately for us, we had Lee Furr on campus in the College of Fine Arts. Lee was a semi-retired audio engineer and, anecdotally, Buck Owens' sound guy. It was my understanding that Lee donated the equipment from his Tucson business to the UA and was working part-time in the Treistman Center. Lee contacted someone he knew who had worked for at 3M who explained how to deal with "sticky shed syndrome" the very condition Keller alludes to. Solely due to Lee's expertise and diligence, those TMY tapes were successfully spooled, digitized and are available to the public in the Music of the Southwest website. In Googling "sticky shed syndrome" I saw an article that reminded me that the tapes first needed to be "baked." I had to buy Lee a fruit hydrocollator. He put the tapes in the hydrocollator overnight to "bake" them and could then run them through a soft spooler. It was very interesting to observe all of this.
Podcasting has been in practice for a few years now. Ruth Reynard's June 2008 Viewpoint article in Campus Technology, "Podcasting in Instruction: Moving Beyond the Obvious," reviews how podcasting can engage students in personal authorship and knowledge building. In her conclusion, she identifies three challenges to educators to take podcasting beyond its obvious uses:
From what we've learned about today's digital natives, putting podcasting in their hands as part of their learning experience seems like a good idea to me.
The most recent spreadsheet for our iTunes U site is available for download. Seems we had somewhere around 60,000 visitors the past week. Downloads are getting back to normal, however. New content from the UA's Phoenix Mars Mission podcast has slowed, although Phoenix is still by far the leading download site. Download the report
Download the usage report forJune 22-28, 2008 Check out the number of visitors. It was around 65,000!
