Abraham Deng is a UA master's degree student who is also a "Lost Boy of Sudan." UA News produced a video about him and how he is raising money to help build schools in Sudan. Check it out on YouTube.
January 2009 Archives
An old favorite of mine is one you've probably heard before and even used before: May you live in interesting times. I looked it up on Wikipedia last week because I was using it in a presentation and found that is really the first of three curses of increasing severity, the other two being May you come to the attention of those in authority and May you find what you are looking for. Check out the Wikipedia article to learn about the curses uses and how they've been popularized.
Over the past few days I uploaded three more videos to the Physics Colloquium Series.
- Dr. Ken Schafer, Louisiana State University, presented "Attosecond Science" on Dec. 5, 2008. Dr. Schafer is a theoretical AMO physicist who specializes in strong field physics. An attosecond is 1/1000 of a femtosecond, and attosecond sources are the shortest light pulses ever made. Lecture presented Dec. 15, 2008.
- Dr. Dan Hooper, Fermilab, presented "Direct and Indirect Searches for Particle Dark Matter (The discovery era begins)" on September 12, 2008. Dr. Hooper is a scientist with Fermilab's Particle Astrophysics Center.
- Dr. Michael Brown, Professor of Chemistry Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Professor at the UA. His lecture, "Dynamics of Membrane Proteins Studied by Solid-State NMR Relaxation," was presented October 3, 2008.
Here's another good use of our YouTube channel. Among the cuts in the State's proposed budget cuts is the Poison Center. Karin Lorentzen, Assistant Director of Communications at the UA College of Pharmacy, was emailed on Friday afternoon about adding video of an Access Tucson interview discussing the Center. Vicki Evans interviewed Jude McNally for Access Tucson. McNally is Managing Director of the Arizona Poison & Drug Information Center. Also participating was Liz Barta, Poison Education Prevention Specialist. The interview also served as an opportunity to publicize the Alliance to Save the Poison Information Center blog.
Download last week's Private site stats and/or the Public site stats.
This morning I met with Sue Kroeger, Director of the UA's Disability Resource Center, and Carol Funckes, DRC's Associate Director. The meeting was a follow-up to Carol's message to the campus community about the new service DRC was providing for adding captions to videos. Over years we've wanted to do much much more with adding captions to our videos but the costs were prohibitive. Heather liked the voice-to-text capabilities in more recent version of Virage, a product we bought around ten years that synchronizes the indexing and encoding of streamable media and content, and are woefully many versions behind. Unfortunately, a proposal to fund the requisite upgrade and licensing was not approved. And vendors who do captioning charge $15 a finished minute. The videos we've added captions to in the past have been enormously labor-intensive and time-consuming and required working from a transcript.
DRC has contracted with Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) whereby we can send videos and expect only a 3-day turnaround time for videos without transcripts. If we have transcripts, it may only take a couple hours. This is impressive and a tremendous service to the campus community. At this time, DRC is putting an implementation plan together. I'm going to be looking at the most viewed videos that we have on the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U. DRC will be meeting with other units on campus that create videos: Arizona Public Media and UA News to name two big-time providers.
Most recently, LTC's Media Services added captions to the UA's Arizona Days Arizona Nights marketing video. Here's a screenshot but follow this link to view the video with captions embedded in it.
A quick count of the Universities & Colleges on iTunes U comes to 150. In addition there are !45 "Beyond Campus" sites, such as American Public Media, Edutopia, & the UA Holocaust Museum. And, eleven are in the K-12 section
The most recent to join iTunes U are: American University, Banff Centre, Carnegie Institution for Science, Central Michigan University, College Of Charleston, Columbia University, Cornell University, Covenant Theological Seminary, Crown College, Emory University, Harvard Extension School, Higher Education Channel Television, Indiana University, KTWU Channel 11 - Kansas Public Television, Liberty University, Marshall Foundation, Missouri State University, Monterey Institute of International Studies, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Northern Virginia Community College, Pepperdine University, Rappahannock Community College, Southern Institute of Technology, South Plains College, Southwestern College, Tennessee State Department of Education, University of British Columbia, University of Central Missouri, University of Lethbridge. University of Western Ontario, Walker Art Center.
Download the public site spreadsheet or the private site spreadsheet.
It was good being off for nearly two weeks. Over the break I made a lot of progress in learning how to rip a DVD and end up with a MPEG4 file to use in iTunes U podcasts. It took a lot of trial and error and involved: using HandBreak to convert the DVD to an AVI file that I could open in QuickTime Pro and export to a QT movie. Then I opened the QT movie in iMovie. Because I had to select particular sections of those videos and delete other parts, it was a tedious process. But once I found where iMovie placed the final version I could open that movie in QT and export it to MPEG4 with H.264 compression.
What I've been able to add are six video tracks to Through Our Parents' Eyes podcast in iTunes U. Pima Community College is capturing lectures given as part of its Community Education Lecture Series and send me DVDs. As a result, we have added some excellent content to Through Our Parents' Eyes. There are videos from January 2008's Promise of Gold Mountain lectures about the experiences of three Chinese American families in Tucson in the video section of our own Promise of Gold Mountain website and also digital story version in the Digital Stories section. The LTC's media services unit converted those and I constructed the digital stories from audio extracted from the videos and keyed that edited audio to pictures from the PowerPoint presentations.
Here are the new tracks added to Through Our Parents' Eyes on iTunes U.
- Buck Ryberg of the Desert Sons performing Cool Water and Man Walks Among Us
- Bill Kalt and Richard Dick's histories of the railroad in Tucson
- Diana Hadley's lecture on 300 years of ranching in Southern Arizona
- Casey Dennis lecture about the Riggs family and its involvement in cattle Ranching in Southern Arizona
Using HandBrake I ripped a DVD from Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs of eleven videos from GIDP's open forum with Provost Hay and added those to the GIDP iTunes U site.
Almost forgot that I also got an email from David Salafsky in Campus Health Service with a dozen new SexTalk MP3 audio files. I brought each into GarageBand, added the branding image and metadata, and uploaded each to the Campus Health Service SexTalk iTunes U site.
I was interested in seeing the iTunes U public report for last week, since it was a week that a lot of people are off from work at educational institutions and there are no classes in session. Would that time off spark an increase or decrease in visits among our invisible users? What's your guess? The answer is a decrease. As noted previously, we have been averaging about 70,000 visitors a week to our public iTunes U site. Last week we had approximately 55,000. College of Medicine's Surgery Grand Rounds "Where Do I Begin?" had 65 downloads - I'm going to check that one out. It's not the most recent uploaded and was recorded in July 2008. It may a video that is recommended to in-coming med-students which would account for the interest. I don't see it featured on the main iTunes U Health and Medicine section, but maybe it was up last week and since removed.
- Download the public site spreadsheet
- Download the private site spreadsheet
