February 2009 Archives

I attended EDUCAUSE's Southwest Regional Conference (SWRC) February 24 - 26, 2009 in San Antonio. I think I heard that there were 330 registered. I like this regional conferences over EDUCAUSE annual because it is far smaller and seems more focused on sharing ideas and experiences with IT projects that appeal to me. This regional used to be called EduTEX and developed for higher ed schools in Texas. Over the years it attempted to gain greater participation from throughout the southwest. In practice, participation is drawn from many states - this year's regional had representation from 25 states, although I'd say the greatest number come from Texas.

This year's conference theme was Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone, and examined "solutions and strategies for meeting the broad range of technology needs that define the higher education experience. The increasing importance of demonstrating IT's value and the ubiquitous nature of technology as a resource require IT professionals to juggle many different perspectives." I also presented about the UA's YouTube channel. What follows is a look at some of the presentations that I attended. Presenters are asked to submit their Powerpoints to the Educause website. I've linked to the few that are currently available in my entry. You should check there for others of interest over the coming week. And, if you have any questions I might help answer, feel free to ask.

The main conference opened with "Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone." Alan Levine, Vice President, NMC Community & CTO, The New Media Consortium (NMC), and Susan M. Zvacek, Director, Instructional Dev & Support, University of Kansas, role-played three scenarios designed to open discussion on the sorts of everyday challenges people in IT face. They developed scripts that they hoped would entertain us and open the way for sharing ideas. Act I "Us vs. the IT Guys" opened the how to balance the security and centralization needs that IT staff see as crucial with others on campus who want what the want and want it now. Act II "My ___ Doesn't Get it" involved an administrator who didn't appreciate or support breaking out of the traditional classroom and into a learning environment that recognized that it is students who are driving this change, not technology. Act III "It's All IT isn't It?" was a typical us versus them theme. The speakers placed their scripts online and hope to continue the discussion at bit.ly/whereisthebalance. If you visit this second site, you can complete a short survey and contribute your own stories. (Educause Connect podcast added 030409)

Lunch at the EDUCAUSE SW regional yesterday was designed to have us sitting at tables with particular themes. I sat at "Innovation (or Lack Thereof) Keeps Me Up at Night!" I would have selected a different one, to be honest, but I was late to lunch and dropped in on the first available seat I spotted. Conversation was interesting, not surprisingly. One of the CIOs at the table mentioned that he is looking at different ways to provide e-books/e-texts to students as a way to off-set the enormous expenses associated with textbooks.

This morning I read another review of Kindle2. I'd missed that one of the new components is text-to-speech. The article described a read aloud feature using a computerized male or female voice and said Kindle2 can read whatever books or documents are stored on the device. That leads me to think that units like the UA's Disability Resource Center could explore providing these to blind and visually impaired students. Suppose their English class is reading Madam Bovary. They could load the Kindle edition on the Kindle2 and use it as an audio book.

Here are the spreadsheets from Apple for the past week. Download the and/or the private site stats.

The spreadsheets for last week came this morning. Apple must have observed President's Day. Download the stats for the public site or the private site.

A Look At This Week's Stats

The public stats are interesting. It tells me that people are finding the Physics Colloquium series and starting subscriptions. The way I can tell this is that the last one I uploaded at the end of last week was Dr. Berndt Mueller's (Duke) "Why is Quark-Gluon Plasma A Perfect Liquid?" and it's been downloaded 25 times. Dr. Douglas Natelson's (Rice) "Single-Molecule Electronic Properties" was downloaded 21 times. Dr. Elliott Cheu's (UA) September lecture here at the UA that followed the first test of the Hadron Collider, "From the Big Bang to Dark Matter: Turning on the Large Hadron Collider" received another 17 downloads. This one has been downloaded regularly each week. If you look at the top 5 download list on our iTunes U mainpage, you see Dr. Cheu's in top five just about each day. I had uploaded Mueller's, Natelson's and Dr. James Brooks' (FSU) "Fields Available at the Intergalactic Magnetic Lab" the end of last week. His received 17 downloads.

The week before, CALA Lecture Series: Margaret Griffin's "Hidden Agenda(s)," received 231 downloads and another dozen this past week. That also indicates a big following for the CALA Lecture Series.

As usual, the Linguistics Lecture Series was heavily downloaded relative to our entire site. Eleven of the top 25 downloads are from that series. Kudos to Amy Fountain in Linguistics for faithfully recording these lectures and uploading them to iTunes U. The presence of these lectures obviously has a huge following within the Linguistics field.

ASU has had a video on YouTube for a year now titled "Creating a New American University." It's been the homepage video that plays each time you go to ASU's YouTube channel. Yesterday they uploaded a new video that seems to be kicking off a marketing campaign around the theme of ASU being the new American university.

The New American University homepage opens with a big honking Flash movie (for future visits you may want to skip the movie - there's a text link atop the video). For me, the movie has the feel of a couple of those viral YouTube videos from a couple years ago. Did you Know? and Information R/evolution. They each have a certain reading component to them, a sort of flash cards with catchy phrases that make you think -- quickly.

Within the website, check out the Video Projects. This is something other colleges and universities could be doing. That is, featuring videos of students, faculty, and researchers but speaking to current and prospective students, and definitely speaking to parents ... and maybe to Regents and legislators as well. There's a strong personalized feel to this approach and I think that in 2009 it touches visitors far more deeply than static web pages can and do.

Download the usage stats for last wee: Public Site and Private Site.

There are three more videos uploaded to the Physics Colloquium series' on iTunes U.

• Dr. James S. Brooks' 2007 lecture "Fields Available at the Intergalactic Magnetic Lab." Dr. Brooks is Professor of Physics and Director of CMS-Experimental Condensed Matter Science at Florida State University. His main research interest is the Electronic and Magnetic Mechanisms in Low Dimensional and Novel Material. April 6, 2007.
• Dr. Berndt Mueller, "Why is Quark-Gluon Plasma A Perfect Liquid?" Dr. Mueller is J. B. Duke Professor of Physics, at Duke University. His research area is Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics. He presented on April 20, 2008.
• Dr. Douglas Natelson, Rice Quantum Institute, "Single-Molecule Electronic Properties." Dr. Natelson is Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Fellow, at Rice Quantum Institute in Houston, Texas. He presented on September 26, 2008.

We have new videos in two of the UA's most popular iTunes U courses, Architecture Lecture Series and Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series.

Architecture Lecture Series

On January 23rd, Margaret Griffin of Griffin Enright Architects, Los Angeles, presented "Hidden Agenda(s)." Details from CALA's website:

Margaret Griffin is founding partner of the Los Angeles-based firm Griffin Enright Architects, established in 2000. Griffin Enright Architects' practice fuses interests in innovation and experimentation with a desire to explore cultural complexities relative to the built environment. Its versatile practice includes projects ranging from large-scale commercial and residential commissions to furniture design and gallery installations. The work moves beyond the traditional scope of architectural practice, underscoring connections with the surrounding urban fabric and landscape by reinforcing existing conditions or creating new ones that allow architecture, urban context and landscape to be experienced in new ways. Griffin Enright's comprehensive approach to design depends on the simultaneous blurring and exploitation of distinctions between inside/outside, built form/landscape, site/urban context and theory/practice. The firm is the recipient of numerous awards for design excellence including, most recently, the 2006 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum."

Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series

On Thursday, January 22, 2009, Mary Jane Jacob presented "In the Space of Art." From the College of Fine Arts website:

Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the most nonconformist U.S. curators of the last 20 years, Jacob has critically engaged the discourse around art in public spaces with such innovative exhibitions as Places with a Past, Charleston (1991), Culture in Action, Chicago (1993), Conversation in the Castle, Atlanta (1996) and Evoking History, Charleston (2001-present).

Away from large-scale sculptures on public plazas, Jacob supports a form of art in public space that explicitly deals with the history and the current realties of the locations in which she works. With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, she has furthered her research into the nature of artmaking today and the forthcoming anthology, Slow: Experience into Art, will deal with the art experience and its relation to pedagogy.

Jacob's lecture will draw upon her own practice as a curator; creating spaces and situations for art to be made and experienced in cities and communities, as well as in galleries. Importantly, she will ground her remarks in the work of artists who cross cultures, some following the Buddha, others reaching points of wisdom along other paths, and all of which move beyond national or ethnic identity to speak on universal terms. It will include the work of Marina Abramovic, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kimsooja, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bill Viola.

Video of Pres. John Schaefer's lecture Next: An Enormous Picture of the Universe, the first of the College of Sciences' new series Science that Transforms is available on iTunes U. I recommend that anyone interested in the series go to Science that Transforms on iTunes U and click SUBSCRIBE. That way the next videos will automatically be sent to your personal computers/iTunes.

I also created a webpage similar to previous lecture series. This is where people with patience can download the MPEG4 video file. It's 230 MB, so IMO it's fruitless to do this on a dial-up modem unless your name is Job.

I've uploaded Pres. Schaefer's lecture to YouTube as well. This is much easier for low-tech people to watch -- there's no downloading and it just plays in their browser. The resolution is much lower since, as you know, YouTube compresses the video to Flash. But YouTube also stores a high quality MPEG4 version that they send to people accessing it with portable devices like iPhones and Blackberries. Looks great on those devices. The URL to the page with Schaefer's video is not yet ready. Given file is 230MB, it'll likely be another hour or two before it finishes processing. If you want to watch it on YouTube, search on the words in the title to find it or go the COS playlist in our UA YouTube channel.

click the image to go to the UA's iTunes U main page

Our iTunes U main page feature is now "Celebrating Black History Month." The featured section is one that I change regularly to promote different videos and audios in our iTunes U collections. Last week I featured three new videos in the Through Our Parents' Eyes podcast on ranching in southern Arizona and histories of the railroad in Tucson & southern AZ. Incidentally, these videos came from our partnership with Pima Community College's Discovering Southern Arizona series.

For Black History Month, we are featuring an Art & Identity lecture - "Investigating Racial Stereotypes" presented by artist Michael Ray Charles. His lecture, nearly two hours long, is delivered in two parts and has been downloaded 15-20 times a week since uploaded last December. The second is the lecture Dr. Deborah Whaley gave a few years back as part of the Faculty Fellows Lecture Series. Deborah was in Africana Studies at that time and has since gone to the U. of Iowa. I found her lecture particularly interesting. The third featured site is audio from a 1987 video that is part of the Tucson Meet Yourself Festivalarchive in the main library. It was digitized about 5 or 6 years back when I had a UA grant to develop content from the TMY archive for the Music of the Southwest site. The video is too poor to feature so this morning I exported it to WAV using QT Pro and then brought the WAV file into GarageBand so I could add the Through Our Parents' Eyes branding image.

I think these videos and the audio track are ones that many people will find as interesting as I have. Check them out and pass this info on to friends and colleagues.

Here they are, right on schedule. Download last week's spreadsheets for our iTunes U public and private sites.