May 2009 Archives

If you're at the UA, you may already know this. But if not, you'll be interested in knowing that the UA is going to Google Apps for Education for its students and is exploring going to the suite for the rest of us. (I really hope we do this).

Google Apps for Education is a suite of products: Google mail, Docs, Calendar, Talk, and Sites. If you're not familiar with any of these, google (verb meaning to search for information about a specific person through the Google search engine) them to learn about them. When the Google (uppercase G) rep was here on campus on April 9th, said that Google provides this for free as public service. Remember, Sergey and Larry came up "don't be evil" as Google's corporate motto early-on. They have a track record of doing trying to do good. I asked Lisa Stage in UITS for an update today and she said that exploration of using Google Aps throughout campus is being evaluated. What is it competing with? MS Exchange.

Google Aps is not just for higher ed, mind you. It is being used in more and more business environments. There is a component for Google video that can be restricted in-house, that is, within one's intranet. Lisa told me that the calendar interfaces with mobile devices like the Blackberry and iPhone. I got an iPhone in March which means I can't synch my Meeting Maker calendar to my mobile device the way I have been sync'ing it to my PalmTungsten the past 6 years. This is important to me and, personally, I do not want to go to Exchange and take on a new MS product after replacing my home PC with an iMac in January and my work PC with an iMac (May). Sorry Bill, but I am trying to exit Gatesville for Jobsville.

A couple weeks ago the Google blog posted an entry about a company deploying Google Aps. Here's a copy/paste that explains the advantage in a nutshell. Valeo is "using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive." Here's a link to a short video about using Google Aps to share video across your intranet.

This is a good article to blog on: The Excellent Inevitability of Online CoursesThe Chronicle of Higher Education. Has 8 points that I can easily copy/paste here. The author writes "Here are eight reasons that colleges should proudly -- and without apology -- offer online courses:"

1. We want our students to be actively engaged in learning.
2. We want to reach students with diverse learning styles.
3. We want our students to have a variety of experiences outside the classroom.
4. We want to teach our students how to do independent research.
5. We want to make college more accessible to students.
6. We want to make attending college more affordable.
7. We want to teach our students values and ethics.
8. We want our students' degrees to be valued by employers.

Margaret Brooks, the article's author, adds to each of these points. Worth checking this out. Here at the UA, I understand that TRIF grants for this coming academic year all involve online instruction.

Okay, not everywhere, but you're seeing more and more websites taking advantage of it. For instance, ...

I just finished reading Steve Lopez's The Soloist and took a look at the trailer on The Soloist movie website. If you are not familiar with the story, Steve Lopez is a journalist for the L.A. Times and he came upon Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man who had studied at Julliard. The book combines a moving story of these two men and the place music played in their relationship, with a vivid depiction of life in L.A.'s Skid Row and mental illness. On the website you get the trailer, information about the movie, a selection of Flash movies about making the movie, clicks, interviews - I'm sure you'll find them on the DVD in 6 months. There are videos of Lopez and Ayers recalling how they first met and a few anecdotes. Seeing the real Nathaniel Ayers is special. Okay, back to point.

The website navigation includes sections for "GET INVOLVED" and "WHAT DOES MUSIC MEAN TO YOU?" GET INVOLVED includes: 1) TakePart, where one can "TakePart in the issues of Homelessness and Mental Illness." 2) an invitation to "submit a photo of that you think best represents L. A. to you." The L. A. Times is going to have a Soloist section at some point and will include selected photos. 3) a link to read Steve Lopez's columns on Ayers, 4) a place to express how you are affected by music that is wrapped into a contest. Another tab, "WHAT DOES MUSIC MEAN TO YOU?" opens an new window with Jamie Foxx's image as Nathaniel Ayers playing the cello and a box where you can write your personal feelings about what music means to you.

Here's another good example. Stanford has a Facebook page. But instead of populating it with brochure-style information, they engage visitors to comment, look for something new with each visit and even give stuff away. Stanford has teamed up with iTunes to give away 30 free songs for becoming a Fan of Stanford University on Facebook!" [you need to log in to Facebook to get to this page.

Visit the UA's main iTunes U page to download any of these three videos.

Are you a fan of Dan Brown, author of Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code? Planning on seeing the movie version of Angels & Demons? Then you will want to watch Dr. Erich Varnes' public lecture, "Angels & Demons Science Revealed: The Science of Antimatter & The Large Hadron Collider." Dr. Varnes, Professor of Physics at the UA explored the fantasy and reality behind Angels & Demons' plot.

Dick Hebdige is Director of Arts and Interdisciplinary Programs, Palm Desert Graduate Center, University of California, Riverside. On Thursday, April 30th, he presented "From Anarchy to Otaku-Youth Subculture Thirty Years After Punk." This lecture concluded School of Art
Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series for the school year. The School's announcement includes this on Hebidge.

"Dick Hebdige has written extensively on contemporary art, media and culture and has published 3 books: "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" (1979), "Cut 'n' mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music" (1987) and "Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things" (1988). He taught through the 90's at CalArts before moving first to UC Santa Barbara then last July to UC Riverside where his title is Director of Arts and Interdisciplinary programs at UC Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center. His current interests include writing for performance, writing across media and the emergent interdisciplinary field of Desert Studies.

The third featured video this week is from the Eller College of Management Distinguished Speaker Series. P. Brett Hammond. Managing Director, Chief Investment Strategist, TIAA-CREF, presented "End of the Free Market? America's New, New Deal." Hammond's lecture addressed: "What does the government's role in solving the current economic crisis mean to the markets, the economy and your investment portfolio?" and was given on April 2nd.

Download the most recent spreadsheets: Private Site | Public Site

Here are a few new videos added to iTunes U and YouTube/

Also uploaded this week is video of P. Brett Hammond's Eller College Distinguished Speaker Series lecture: "The End of the Free Market? America's New, New Deal" We feature lectures from the Distinguished Speaker Series in both iTunes U and YouTube.

RIAA Recirculated Integrated Agriculture Aquaculture
This is from Eller College and is another excellent video for the YouTube channel. It shows how students at the Eller College are creative, successful, and contributing to the greater good. Consider how an undergrad who is evaluating the top MBA programs will react to this video. She/he might think, "this is what I can be doing at the UA's Eller College." Great way to market the college.

On April 19, three University of Arizona students - Eller College MBAs Kyle VanderLugt and Mauricio Torres-Benavides, and environmental science graduate student Rafael Martinez - topped the P3 Student Design Competition for Sustainability in Washington, D.C. The competition, sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, encourages college students to apply technology in innovative ways to tackle global environmental challenges. The trio was awarded $75,000 in prize money, which will be used to fund implementation of their project in collaboration with the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco in Mexico, beginning this summer.

And there are a couple additions to the Physics Colloquium.
Dr. Michael Chandross, Sandia National Laboratory "Molecular Simulation of Nanoscale Friction in MEMs"
Dr. Peter Levy, New York University, "The Origins of the Spintronics Revolution" audio only (the camera must have been bumped on this one because it became very blurry around 42:00 minutes in)

This morning I attended a webinar: YouTube on Campus: Applications, Tools & Tips for Your College. Blurb: "Creating effective YouTube videos provides your University with many opportunities to communicate with your current & prospective students. What type of content should you post online & what types of videos best connect with your students? " It last about an hour and 15 minutes, including 30 minutes of Q & A after the presentation.
It was hosted by Higher Ed Hero and cost the LTC $199.

The presenter was Justin Ware, the assistant director for broadcast and new media at the University of Minnesota. Ware's bio on the UMN website explains that he is "working to expand the use of multimedia communications by creating video news releases, b-roll and a variety of other visual and audio material. He also works with university departments to enhance their media presence, conducts media training for University experts and helps connect local television and radio stations with University sources." Nice to see that UMN has that level of support and guidance for the campus.

Ware began by talking about a UMN video specifically produced for YouTube. In this video, UMN physics professor James Kakalios discussed how he was tapped to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. What Ware says Kakalios did, was to bring research and education to entertainment. Here's the UMN video. To whet your appetite, 2:42 into this video Prof. Kakalios says "Dr. Manhattan, presumably, is able to do this through his control of the quantum mechanical wave functions."

As he began discussing how to use your YouTube videos to leverage the investment made in creating them, Ware made an interesting observation. He said college age students are only in the third tier of the most watched demographics of watching YouTube videos. He said that 45-54 year olds and the next older group are ahead of college aged students. I need to email him to ask where this data comes from. If it's from YouTube's InSight analytics of the UMN videos, then it could be skewed a bit.

He also said to engage students by using campus mascots in the videos and UMN's example is using Goldy Gopher in a video about getting flu shots. In addition he suggests contests and using popular media to attract your target audience.

He touched on admissions recruitment videos, something I am keenly interested in seeing the UA do much more on. Not long ago I read an interview with an enrollment consultant who was speaking about how universities need to be hooking into social software to reach prospective undergrads. This consultant said that the most important part of your campus website is the admissions site, not the campus' homepage. So create videos that highlight what your college is known for and what you want your college to be know for.

Remember that UMN's main YouTube channel is managed out of the campus News office. So Ware says that these should be polished videos but that there is room for less polished videos. He encourages the colleges, departments and other units to have YouTube channels. These he says are good places to house lectures and student work.

Download the public and/or the private stats spreadsheets.

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology hosted four lectures that I've added to the EEB site in iTunes U [iTunes link]. Actually, I cut 10 minutes off one of the four to make a fifth. Follow the links [all are iTunes link] to go to an individual track for downloading. Once there, scroll to the right and click GET MOVIE. These videos download, so allow a little time since most are 200+MB

Three of these are re: conservation efforts around the Vaquita. You can read more about the Vaquita on Wikipedia.

José R. Campoy F. "Saving the Vaquita: Conservation Efforts"

Barbara Taylor, "Vaquita Expedition 2009: Developing Acoustic Monitoring World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal"

Peggy Turk Boyer, "Vaquita Recovery: Images in Time"

Tad Pfister, "Implementing Ecosystem-Based Research & Management of Fisheries in the Gulf of California"

Richard Cudney Bueno, "Marine Reserves, Community-Based Management, and Connectivity in Northern Gulf of California"

Download the UA's iTunes U usage spreadsheets from last week.

Download the Private Site

Download the Public Site

Our Media Services student worker Katie Gault encoded three more Physics Colloquium Series [iTunes link] lectures for iTunes U. Katie has changed the settings to make the presentations easier to view. Sometimes we've not seen the details show on the screen. It means greatly increasing the file sizes so she's also broken the lectures into two parts. All three are from Fall 2008.

"Solar Energy and Photovoltaics," by Dr. Joseph H. Simmons, U of A.
"Strong-Field Control of X-Ray Process," by Dr. Linda Young, Argonne National Laboratory
The Nuclear Force Problem: Is the Never-Ending Story Coming to an End? by Dr. Ruprecht Machleidt, University of Idaho.

These are found in the 2008 tab.

Here are last week's stats showing downloads, etc., on the UA's iTunes U.

Download the public site spreadsheet and/or the private site spreadsheet.

Interesting to see that a track in the CALA Lecture Series, "Wasting Money Wisely" about the 1939 World's Fair, was downloaded over 150 times last week. It is the most recent uploaded so anyone subscribing who had not opened iTunes for a week or so would have received it automatically. Maybe there's that many subscriptions?