August 2008 Archives

As I've written before, iTunes U's main page regularly features topical sections and pulls different podcasts from the thousands and thousands submitted by the member institutions (like us!) Today I noticed that section called Highlights and on includes Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit's Faculty Fellows presentation "From Artificial Intelligence to Cognitive Computing: Can We Build Very Smart Systems?" Dr. Rozenblit's talk was given during Fall Semester 2005 and is one of 22 talks included in the Faculty Fellows Speaker Series.

Last summer I was talking with Steve Wilson, Apple iTunes U Producer, and he said, "can you believe I get paid to do this." It has be hard to keep on task when you're going through all the fabulous content on iTunes U.

I sent the following to the UA's Journalism department and to the student newspaper's editor. Seems like there must be more students who will be interested in particpating so I'm writing an entry. Pass this information on to anyone you think might be interested. BTW, if you're at the UA, alert others to OSCR's Gear to Go.

I've started getting back into Ning, social networking software that I think has enormous uses for education. I used to teach - preach might be a better way of putting it - about convergence in Intro to IT. The idea that five years ago we separate devices for cell phones, digital camera, dig audio players, Web, and video but now we can get them all on one device. Well, Ning brings convergence to social networking. In one place you can host videos, photos, discussions forums, and events.

I've been creating one for Wayne's GRAD697b class, Teaching with Technology. The class gets to social software in about 5 weeks so for now I've set up the site, started a couple discussion threads and uploaded a couple videos. Interestingly, James Morrison, editor-in-chief of the online journal Innovate, sent an email inviting past authors to check out the recently created Innovate-Ideagora Ning site. In a nutshell, the idea is to "enhance professional communication about using IT tools in education."

This term, ideagora, was new to me so I Goolged it and found "Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in a February 15, 2007, BusinessWeek special report. (uh oh, I'm behind the times) Tapscott and Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of their book Wikinomics. (That's better. At least know of the book.)

Just going to Ning's homepage now I can see how it is the 2008 extension of usenet newsgroups. The homepage tends to feature different Ning social networks and you can easily see how these virtual birds-of-a-feather are drawn different topics. Say, here's one for me! Social Cigar "The ultimate social network for cigar aficionados and cigar enthusiasts. Featuring cigar reviews, cigar ratings, forum, photos, video, live chat, groups, and a lot of other cigar related content." There will be 2133 members in just a minute.

Download last week's iTunes U private stats or the public stats

If you click the subscribe button to set up a podcast in iTunes U, you do not get the title of the podcast but rather what one other iTunes U administrator called "Ugly URLs." I noticed this on Wed and checked the iTunes U Site Admins discussion forum to see if anyone else had reported it. There was an entry on Tuesday the 19th that included

For example, one of our podcast series should be showing up as T4: Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology. Instead, when you subscribe, what you get is http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/nau.edu.1622217296.0162...

When there was nothing added to it by Thursday I appended my on "me too!" Today, someone at Apple wrote:

Thanks for reporting this. This does indeed appear to be an issue. If you go into "Edit Track Preferences" and set the default location for track downloads to "Individual playlist per course" you will be able to work around the issue. We've noted the issue and will get to work on a fix.

A colleague sent a link to an entry in Kyle James' blog about Rachel Rueben's report "The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education." [get the PDF] This is an interesting report and I recommend it to anyone how to market a program, college or university, recruit students, and reach alumni. Here is my summary.

In July 2008, Rueben posted a survey to several listservs and received 175 responses. After removing duplicates she wound up with 148 unique schools from which to draw data. The breakdown was overwhelmingly US (94.3%). Of those 148 institutions, 54% reported having an official Facebook page, 22% an official MySpace page. This tends to confirm what I've heard of late, that higher ed prefers Facebook to MySpace. 

More stats: just over half these 148 colleges and universities have an official presence on YouTube and 60% have some form of blogs on their site. 17% reported using del.icio.us. (p. 6)

Being involved in the UA's YouTube channel, echo her observation that a big reason to have an official YouTube channel is the cost savings it represents. "Universities have been making videos for 20+ years to aid in recruitment." YouTube is a platform to distribute them for free and save on the costs associated with burning CD/DVDs, packing and mailing them. (p.4) 

In terms of how the 148 are using YouTube, she wrote that use by these 148 colleges and universities "seems to be used primarily for recruitment purposes (30%) with some using it to share videos with current students and alumni. Most report spending 1-4 hours a week adding videos to their channel." (p. 7)

Her survey looks have solicited open ended "concerns" and the main concerns reported were: 1) loss of control, 2) time commitment, 3) information overload, and 4) anyone can create an "official" account for your university.

She concludes with her own "recommendations & considerations" (p. 11) emphasizing how social media offers ways to reach alumni and to recruit students. I'd be glad to talk with anyone interested in exploring the possibilities. One idea off the top of head is to have a UA site in Flickr and engage students to submit pictures of student life, the campus and the area. Students come up with great ideas on their own and maybe we need to be looking for more opportunities to tap into that creative resevoir.

Scott Cason, the UA's Director of Marketing in Enrollment Management, sent over two videos that his office produced. One is a two and half minute trailer of a 17 minute video. These are really slick and highlight student life at the UA in a way that I don't think any previous videos have realized. Watch the trailer below and try to make time to watch the full version of Arizona Days Arizona Nights. Arizona Days Arizona Nights is the video that you'll want to share with family members of prospective students. Here's the trailer.

UA's External Relations has produced a new video feature the UA that we are using for the "featured video" on our UA YouTube channel. I think it is outstanding. Check it out here, or go to our YouTube channel. BTW, this is the kind of video you see at halftime during PAC 10 football games.

Download this week's spreadsheet

Somebody's probably posted about this (sorry if I missed it) but I just discovered Flock, the social web browser. Follow that link to take a look and download a copy. It is promoted as "a web browser that specializes in providing social networking and other Web 2.0 features built into its interface. The browser is built on Mozilla's Firefox codebase." Looks really interesting and worth checking out.

download the spreadsheet for August 3-9, 2008

It's Monday so we have a new spreadsheet showing our usage stats. download the spreadsheet

During this past week, there were 1,377 downloads for Will Holst's "Phoenix Mars Mission Student Profile: Stephanie Barnes." This probably means that there are about that many subscribers to the Phoenix Mars Mission's podcast series on iTunes U. I'd say that's pretty darn good.