E-Learn 2008 was held in Las Vegas, NV, the week of November 17th. It is billed as a "World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education" and the sponsoring organization is Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. The organizers reported that this conference had a record attendance of 1,100 more than 200 more than ever before. Download my report (RTF)
November 2008 Archives
Download last week's spreadsheets for the UA's iTunes U Public Site and Private Site stats.
I haven't taught Intro to IT since fall of '07, but the last few years I did teach it I had a mobile technologies module. In mobile technologies students learned about PDAs, wireless techs, cell phones slash smart phones, etc. I loved to talk about "convergence." But the last year I could see that we had really reached it. I may not have anything but the minimalist cell phone that came with my Spring contract, but certainly would like an iPhone or Crackberry or Nokia smartphone. Touch screen, internet access, mp3 and mp4 players, video camera capabilites, ... the stuff I dream about.
So with that whiny preface, here's an article in today's Wired "Five Gadgets That Were Killed by the Cellphone" that gives a little obit on The PDA, The Camera, The UMPC, The Phone, The MP3 Player. I love the comment someone made that points out how when we are not limited by the technology, we can be limited by other factors. "Personally, I keep my landline around because I can't get DSL without it. I'd be perfectly happy to get rid of it, yet I pay an extra $30 a month (including fees and taxes) for services I don't want and can't get rid of from the local monopolist."
Here are the spreadsheets for last week's iTunes U usage. Download the public stats and the private stats.
Looking for something different? Check out Through Our Parents' Eyes newest site, The Hellbox. The Hellbox was the Tucson Press Club's annual publication accompanying its Gridiron Show. The Hellbox is quite a time piece - our first issue is from 1960 and our last is 1994.
Casey Ontiveros created the site. Let him know what you think. Read the info on the homepage to learn a little about the Tucson Press Club, its Gridiron Show and how we acquired these annuals.
The Physics Dept. has held a Colloquium for a number of years. Fortunately, Larry Hoffman in the Physics Dept. has been capturing the lectures on video and creating DVDs of the lectures. Larry passed DVDs of 2007 and 2008 on to me and I've been reviewing them with the goal of hosting them in iTunes U. What I've been doing is noting where to edit out extraneous video from the beginnings and the end of each video, writing each of the speakers requesting permission, and following up by attaching the UA's release form to email. So far, we have received 17 positive responses and only 3 negatives. The next step is for Heather to convert the DVDs to MPEG 4 video, edit the parts noted, add an intro and the UA logo to each frame to brand the videos. This content certainly adds to the UA's iTunes U Science section and makes excellent content easily accessible to students and researchers.
Last night MT version 4.2 was installed. We expect to see improvement on the system side of things and little on the public side. All looks good at this point.
The Texas A&M Aggies have just launched a site that enables/empowers students to post their own videos about what being an Aggie is all about. The site us part of an overall marketing campaign called "Do You Wonder?" Some of these student videos are already on YouTube and others apparently are made specifically for Do You Wonder?
I read about DoYouWonder? in Campus Technology's "Texas A&M Video Campaign Shows New Face of Marketing," 10/29/2008 by Linda L. Briggs. It is just such a great idea - get students to sell the university to other students. They may not be 2nd or 4th in the current BCS poll, but they could be #1 in how to recruit students.
