I had to revise some iTunes U handouts and did a quick count of the number of tracks that we have uploaded to iTunes U. I counted up 1,124 audio and video tracks within all the categories other than Open Courses. I estimate that we around 300-400 tracks in Open Courses. We have ~1,500 tracks available.
March 2009 Archives
Download last week's private site stats and/or the public site stats.
View the public site stats | view the private site stats
So you've read the prev entry about Twitter but you're still not sure what to make of it? See it through the eyes of a 20sumthin. Watch this.
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users.[2] A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.Wikipedia article
I mentioned a few weeks ago that Colleen Lin had explained Twitter to me in a way that I could understand. Months and months ago I got an account and since then hadn't been seeing past the individual dig-me side of it. I'd heard reports of how the server crashed when millions of people went to it for updates on people and events during a natural disaster. I think it was the tsunami or fires in CA. In any case, the way to understand its value is as a resource to short bursts of information. You get 140 characters for your message. As I type this, I've been following Colleen's tweets. She's at what appears to be a conference re: social networking software. She's tweeting - short bursts of text - about what the panelists and presenters are saying. She had sent me a list of people using Twitter so that I might follow some to see who I connect with. And she recommended Tweetie, a $2.99 app I got from the iTunes App Store for my iPhone.
Who else is Tweeting? Edustyle has a list of academic social networking sites. Down the page are colleges and universities who use Twitter to push into out to anyone interested enough in following them. Okay you UA folks. True or false, the UA has a Twitter site? To quote Lily Von Schtupp, "it's twue.... it's twue!" I am sure that the tweets are coming out of UA News. If you visit the UA's Twitter site, you'll see links to UA News articles. BTW, I see that the UA's Twitter has 639 followers. Followers are people who are subscribing to the site's RSS feeds.
So, if you're still reading this entry you have a good idea of some of the reasons that Twitter is popular. Sure you can use it to connect to family, friends, colleagues, organizations and groups with similar interests. Read that Wikipedia article to ingest more examples. I have a lot more to learn about Twitter, tweeting, ...
Dr. H. Jay Melosh
On February 25, 2009, Dr. H. Jay Melosh delivered the Blitzer Award Lecture, "Are We All Martians? The Meteoritic Exchange of Life Between Planets." Dr. Melosh is University of Arizona Regents' Professor of Panetary Sciences and recipient of the 2009 Leon and Pauline Blitzer Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Physics and Related Sciences. This award is given to members of the UA physics, astronomy, atmospheric sciences and planetary sciences faculty.
Dr. Melosh says that the mechanism by which large impacts on Mars can launch boulder-sized surface rocks into space is now clear. Both theory and direct measurements on some of these rocks tell us that living microbes could have survived both the launch and travel in the vacuum of space for periods long enough for them to have arrived intact on the surface of our planet. The reverse journey of surface rocks launched from Earth and landing on Mars is likewise possible. Read the UA News article "Are We All Martians? It's Possible, Blitzer Award Winner Says."
Watch video of Dr. Melosh's lecture on iTunes U. [note: iTunes link]
Here are the most recent spreadsheets to our iTunes U site ready for download.
Download the public site.
Download the private site.
Haven't seen any posts about this today so I thought I should bring it to your attention. Arizona PodCats (March 12, 2009): Interview with Limell Lawson, Derek Masseth, University Information Technology Service, on student technology fee.
Download the public site and/or the private site.
Media Services is cranking out the videos! On YouTube, we now have:
Kathryn Maxwell: "Framed by Appearance"
Kathryn Maxwell is Professor of Art at Arizona State University. Her art explores connections and relationships that both bind and divide humankind through the visual ephemera of social strata, culture, and time. In her solo exhibition entitled Framed by Appearance, Maxwell addresses perception, often framed by race, religion, gender, and genetic biology as a means to decoding humanity. Artist talk given January 20, 2009, The University of Arizona Joseph Gross Gallery. This video is also in iTunes U in the UA Museum of Art's site. [iTunes link]
Lesley Newman: University of Arizona Peace Corps Recruiter & Lesley Newman: Peace Corps Volunteer Dominican Republic. We broke Lesley's videos into two videos because she spoke about her volunteer services and her role as the UA's Peace Corps recruiter.
On iTunes U, we have Dr. Pagie Beeson's lecture before the Spring Forum Lunch Series, "How the Brain Supports Language." Dr. Beeson is a faculty member in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences so I uploaded her video the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences iTunes U site. [iTunes link]
If you are interested in watching any of the first three Science that Transforms lectures read on.
Video of the first three lectures are available on the UA's iTunes U [note: this link opens iTunes]. This week these three videos are our featured videos on the main page - they may also be downloaded by selecting the Topic Sciences > COS Lecture Series > Science that Transforms.
These videos are also available on YouTube and easily found within the UA's YouTube channel. YouTube is sometimes the preferred way for people who are bandwidth-challenged, iTunesU-challenged, and using an older computer to watch them. The three videos are:
Next: An Enormous Picture of the Universe, John Schaefer, UA President Emeritus and President of LSST Corporation. "Being built now, with "first light" planned for Fall 2015, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be very large and very different. Unlike previous telescopes, LSST will photograph the entire sky every night recording all movements and brightness changes and producing unprecedented volumes of data. Observing change is a key to answering pressing questions in astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. LSST will provide the fastest, widest, deepest eye of our new digital age and may also help us understand when Earth may next be at risk of being struck by an asteroid."
Next: Unlocking the Mystery of Matter, Elliott Cheu, Professor of Physics. "Since the time of the Greeks, humans have sought to understand the most fundamental constituents that make up all things. The 27 km circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built in a tunnel beneath the French/Swiss border, is designed to smash protons into each other as they race at 99.999999% of the speed of light. The recent start-up of the LHC could allow mankind to journey further into the mystery of matter as we probe the processes of the first second of time following the Big Bang. Hear how UA physicists' involvement in this historic experiment is key to the LHC's potential."
Next: A Great Leap for Bioresearch, Vicki Chandler, Regents' Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Plant Sciences; Director of Bio5 Institute. "Plants, from mosses to giant trees, are essential for human life on earth - we eat them, wear them, live in them and every breath we take depends on them. Our ability to understand plants - from their most minute cellular processes to their roles in ecosystems - is critical for the long-term sustainability of life on our planet. Based at the UA, the iPlant Collaborative will provide global reach - bringing together scientists from many different fields to build a deep data infrastructure within which researchers can tackle some of the toughest problems facing life."
Quite a few new videos have been added to the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U site. Here's a look.
Steven Toyoji: Track and Road Racing is part of the Adaptive Athletics Series.
Matt Carter: Internship with Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, Joseph Riesgo: Internship with Paul Jones Racing Stable, and Nikki DeBasio: Internship with Greg Fox Racing Stable are part of the RTIP videos. These three present a new theme promoting the RTIP student internship program. They are also up in the RTIP site in iTunes U in a new section.
Dr. Elliott Cheu, Professor of Physics, presentation given on Feb. 3rd for the College of Science's Science that Transforms Lecture series. The video was uploaded to the lecture series' iTunes U site and also to our YouTube channel. I don't upload that many public lectures but we've found these COS lectures are extremely popular among our invisible users and it makes sense that students looking for good content on any of these topics would find these videos useful.
One minute after first publishing this entry, Heather emailed that Vicki Chandler's Science that Transforms lecture "Next: A Great Leap for Bioresearch" was ready for uploading. I'm uploading now (3/2/09 14:44 MST) So if you're reading this after 3:30 on Monday, it is uploaded to iTunes U and being uploaded to the YouTube channel.
We have four new videos uploaded to an new site in Architecture & Landscape Architecture's iTunes U section called CALA GIS National Parks Service Lectures. These lectures feature the work of Natl Park Service's Historic Landscapes Survey (HALS) Program and will be of interest to anyone studying history or working with geographical information systems. Added to the main CALA Lecture Series is John Peterson's Feb. 13th lecture "Exploring Models of Practice." Peterson, AIA, is founder and president of Public Architecture in San Francisco, a national non-profit that recasts designers as problem-identifiers in addition to problem-solvers, mobilizing them to advance the public well-being.
Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series' newest video is "Artist Lecture: Daniel J. Martinez." Martinez lecture is part of CFA's Transculturations: Cultural Hybridity in American Art. On the website, it describes Martinez and his work this way: "A strategic provocateur, Daniel J. Martinez deploys the full range of available media in his practice, having used at various times text, image, sculpture, video, and performance to construct his uniquely tough-minded brand of aesthetic inquiry. Using forms of strategic engagement and illusion, Martinez employs mutation and schizophrenia as a form of confusion directed toward the precondition of the coexistence of politics as radical beauty. Ongoing themes in the work are contamination, history, nomadic power, cultural resistance, dissentience and systems of symbolicxchange."
UANews uploaded videos of the most recent Regents' Professors. I have featured three on the iTunes U main page the past week. Others can be found in the UA News Videos podcast, also found on the main page. The new Regents professors are Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Dr. Elizabeth Vierling, Dr. Howard Ochman, Dr. Paul Wilson and harpist Carol McLaughlin.
Two videos were uploaded to the LPL Evening Lecture Series. Dr. Dante Lauretta's "The Science and Exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids" and Dr. Richard Greenberg's "Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon."
Down the spreadsheets for last week.
