September 2008 Archives

Thanks to Kathy Spicer who left a printout of the 9/23 Inside Higher Ed (IHE) news piece, "I'll Take My Lecture to Go, Please." It also showed up in today's Campus Technology (CT)Research section as "Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional?." Here's a blurb from the Inside Higher Ed article:

The study, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's E-Business Institute, tackles the much-discussed question of students' preferences for traditional versus online learning with unusual rigor. Based on a survey of more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the university, the study had a response rate of over 25 percent. Almost half of the undergraduates -- 47 percent -- had taken a class with lectures available for online viewing.

The good news part of the study for us is "When asked why they prefer courses that offer streaming lectures online, most students cited making up for missed classes, convenience, improving retention of materials covered, improving test scores, and help with material review prior to class." (CT) Interestingly, "Over 60 percent of respondents said they would pay for lecture capture capabilities, and of those, 69 percent said they would be willing to pay on a "course-by-course" basis rather than bundled fees." (IHE)

We've had mroe and more vendors approach us about the products they sell that can do this. LTC used to do this in selected ILC classrooms using Virage, but our license was never updated (funding issue) and it was discontinued before Fall semester 2007. We should have the capability to do video capture using Podcast Producer. This would require equipping classrooms with video cameras, but appears to be a much less expensive way to go.

Garry Forger posted to the LTC webboard about GAUDI, Google Audio Indexing. Google describes GAUDI as "a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken." Follow the above link to read more on the FAQ page.

At this polnt, Google hopes to make GAUDI "available to a wide audience, we hope to both offer a useful service and learn what our users think of this new technology." When you go to GAUDI you see that it searching on political content. For the example below, I have a screenshot showing a search that I made on Delaware. I selected one of the entries from the column on the left, "Joe Biden speaks to National Guard" which displays the video to the right. What GAUDI does next is highlight a clip where the word appears. Also, in the play bar are yellow markers that note where in the audio the word appears, or should say is heard.

Georgia Ehlers, who directs the UA's Peace Corps Fellows program for the Graduate College (among other things) wrote on Friday that she has been asked to speak on our You Tube and other social networking efforts this week at the Peace Corps Fellows Coordinator's meeting. Georgia noted that for our seven posted videos have had over 5000 views. I emailed Georgia some YouTube Insight screenshots and explanations of what they mean for Beau and Brooke's videos.

It leads me to note that if you have videos on the UA's YouTube channel, feel free to contact me about getting you Insight stats. Insight is the name of the analytics that YouTube provides to each of our videos. Not all of it is useful (or of any use for that matter) I find most useful the ability to see what search terms someone entered to retrieve a given video. Next to that, the anecdotal information we get showing which U.S. states and which foreign countries viewers were located in when viewing the video is interesting and in some circumstances potentially useful. Click the following image to retrieve a version that is 1016 pixels wide.

Download the Public use spreadsheetand the Private side spreadsheet

Louise passed a copy of an interesting paper on to me this weekend from the Center for Digital Education, July 2008.

A Connected Life: A look at mobile strategies for schools, colleges, and universities. (You need to fill out a short online form to download a PDF copy.) The "paper examines the evolving landscape of mobility with particular attention to the intersection with learning and education." I think parts provide us with a guide to helping other digital immigrants understand the impact of this intersection.

Download use stats on iTunes U for the past week.

iTunes U public stats

private site stats

An article in yesterday's Podcasting News gives us some useful data in promoting and calling for participation in UA's iTunes U and YouTube channel. "75 Percent Of Americans Watching Online Video," (Sept.10, 2008, by James Lewin) summarizes data reported by Internet analyst comScore [see Press Release: YouTube Draws 5 Billion U.S. Online Video Views in July 2008]

Now that the credits are duly attributed, here's some of that interesting data. Note that this is for July 2008, not for the past year! The comScore Video Metrix service reports that Americans viewed more than 11.4 billion videos for a total duration of 558 million hours during July 2008 and that YouTube.com accounted for more than 98 percent of the 5 billion videos on Google-owned sites. Lewin included these bullets in his Podcasting News piece.

• Americans spent a total of 558 million hours watching online video during the month
• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer)
• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

Should this mean anything to us at the UA? Glad you asked, because it seems to me that this data tells us that the audience that we are trying to reach is going to find us on YouTube. UA programs, departments and colleges certainly can take greater advantage of our YouTube channel to reach high school and undergraduate students, their parents, and Arizona residents.

Mike Bruck found this TED Talk "Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind" and posted an alert to our webboard. Stoll seems to still be against computers in the classroom, a theme he beat to death in his 1996 book Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Can't say I was a fan of that book. But, I continue to look back on his first book, 1989's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage as a great read.

A comment on the TED Talks webpage hosting the video includes this description of Stoll: "That was like watching Robin Williams looking for a punchline in the works of Sir Isaac Newton." I saw him speak at an ALA conference many years ago and his "wildly energetic" TED Talk performance is calm compared to what I saw 10-12 years ago. All that said, it's an interesting 18 minutes and worth watching.

You might have noticed that today was an Apple "announcements" day. It's the kind that has the bloggers posting paragraph by paragraph on their blogs observations on Steve Job's health and the new stuff. Today, Apple apparently didn't rock the world but something that we've been tracking for a couple years now is iTunes becoming more accessible for visually impaired persons. Apple announced that iTunes version 8 (current version on a PC is 7.7.1.11) that:

Using iTunes 8 with a screen reader such as VoiceOver on Mac OS X, or GW Micro WIndow-Eyes 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista, blind and visually impaired students, faculty, and staff can browse, search, buy, download and play content from iTunes U and many areas of the iTunes Store. In addition, the new iPod nano (4th generation) features spoken menus, so it can be used to navigate and play tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store and iTunes U just by listening.

We also hope to find that the new version fixed what broke in the last version that enables converting to MP3 a WAV file from a SanDisk.

Follow-up from my previous post: Tommy Bruce video on iTunes U had two downloads last week, which confirms for me that the big push is on YouTube and about making it appear among YouTube's featured sites. Here are the public stats for last week.

download the public spreadsheet | download the private speadsheet

Arizona Student Unions is a YouTube channel that Office Automation Specialist (gotta love those UA HR job titles) Stephanie Cunningham has developed. Stephanie is producing the video and managing the YouTube channel. She's also uploading videos to Becoming a Wildcat on the UA's iTunes U site.

Yesterday around 5 p.m. - time is of interest as you'll see - Magan Alfred, Assistant Director for Marketing & Communications at the UA's Student Affairs, emailed that ASUA's Tommy Bruce video has gone viral. Magan wrote: "As of this moment, it's received 6,752 hits." Roughly 19 hours later it is up to 8,029. It's so big it's gotten the attention of a blogger. Is this due to its popularity among UA students, Tommy Bruce's Internet cult following, or could it be part of a UA student initiative to push it's numbers up on YouTube. YouTube features videos that it has tracked as the most viewed. BTW, it's not getting that much attention on iTunes U. It only had one download according to the stats for August 24 -30. I'll check on Monday to see if that's changed this week.

I've embedded the code below but you should really watch it on YouTube and help push those stats up!

We've all received the 419 scam. You know the one. Just send $10,000 dollars to process the $1M of unclaimed money or gold that the scammer cannot access directly, blah blah blah. Well I just listened to an NPR story about a scam-baiter who tricked a couple of these guys into performing Monty Python's Dead Parrot skit and he put the video on YouTube. See and listen to 'Scam-Baiters' Turn Tables on Would-Be Cons and here's the YouTube video. (the link on NPR isn't working but I found this one) Check it out before it is removed "due to terms of use violation."

I just watched this video. My initial reaction is Wow! See what you think. Also, here's more about it from Mozilla Labs.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I'd read a blurb some months ago about how Abilene Christian University has developed a new learning environment called Connected around the iPhone. There's two videos on YouTube running around 9 minutes that will give you a good idea of what it's all about. "Connected" Part 1: Social Uses and
"Connected" Part 2: Academic Uses.

Public site BTW, I wrote last week that Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit's Faculty Fellows lecture was included on Apple's iTunes U main page in a highlights feature. His lecture was downloaded 13 times but what I am also noticing is that eight other Faculty Fellows lectures were also downloaded, and more times than Rozenblit's. It tells me that visitors followed the breadcrumbs back to see what else was available in the Faculty Fellows series.

Private Site