Download the spreadsheet for the Public Site or the Private Site
Check out these numbers!
Linguistics Lectures most recent track is "Understood complements and com" and was downloaded a whopping 234 times last week. The newest Art & Identity track was downloaded 171 times. I have this one in the featured section on our main page so that might have brought it to people's attention. Or there may just be nearly 200 people subscribing to the RSS feed. Pretty impressive numbers.
Arizona 4-H Youth Development produced a video that is simply outstanding. If you are the parent of a teenager (or aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, ...) or know a mid- and high-school teacher, show them Mr. Extreme's "The Extremely Extreme Desert."
This video cleverly teaches kids about the plant and animal life in the Arizona Sonoran desert. Topics covered include adaption, biodiversity, invasive and exotic plants, and xeriscaping. The Arizona 4-H Youth Development is out of the University of Arizona's Arizona Cooperative Extension in the College of Ag & Life Sciences.
Download the spreadsheet for the UA's iTunes U public site and the iTunes U private site.
Here is something for those of you interested in the podcasting set up this semester for Centennial Hall's large classes. Elaine Marchello's TRAD 104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present realized 99 students downloading the last lecture from last week, "traders continued." The lecture before that one, " Ancient animals part one" was downloaded 96 times. This shows that students are definitely interested in having lectures available as podcasts. This course's podcasts are available in the UA's Private iTunes U, so these numbers only reflect students enrolled in that class - no one outside of the class.
On September 10th, YouTube added three new features to its Insight analytics tool that add to our understanding of just how our videos are being viewed. The new features are 1) Discovery over time, 2) Views from mobile devices and 3) Views from subscribers.
Here's a screen shot from one of our most viewed videos, Dean Ruiz public lecture, "Earth Evolution: The Formation of Our Planet." [9,733 views]
With Discovery over Time, YouTube engineers changed the Insight graph making it easier for us to see how search, related videos, embeds, and other areas of YouTube drive our viewership. In a nutshell, what they did was take the existing ways viewing videos were tracked - by view count and popularity over time and data on how viewers found our videos.
Something my colleagues and I have discussed many times is making our resources mobile device ready. We are seeing a big jump in the number of devices students are using with wireless access, such as the iPod Touch and smart devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. YouTube engineers report: "tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%." In the above screenshot, you can see that Dean Ruiz video has been downloaded and viewed on mobile devices 42 times. This should mean 42 times since YouTube began tracking downloads to mobile devices. BTW, if you've not held an iPod Touch or an iPhone in your own hand, you probably don't realize that they come with access to YouTube conveniently on the homescreen.
The third new analytic,"views from subscribers," is designed to help draw better conclusions about how views lead to subscriptions.
Download the Public site spreadsheet and/or the Private site spreadsheet.
Yesterday I was one of four to attend a webinar in the presentation area from the Gartner Group. Gartner's Managing Vice President, Raymond Paquet, discussed "Technology Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore." Paquet presented the ten technology trends driving major changea in business processes or revenue streams, consumer behavior or spending, or IT industry dynamics. Those ten are:
Paquet sees these as "disruptive trends that are reshaping the information technology and business landscape." Companies must identify the disruptive technologies that will impact their users and their business and develop plans to address these disruptions." And he presented what he considers the top 10 technologies and related trends that will drive significant disruption over the next five years.
FYI, disruptive technologies is a concept brought forward by Clayton M. Christensen in his 1995 article "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," and his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. I read the book and have a copy in my cubicle if anyone would like to borrow it. Just a week ago I bought a copy of his latest, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns which I hope to start this weekend.
Tom Rees and Rob MacArthur also attended the webinar. Robert directs IT for the College of Ag & Life Sciences and I was not surprised when he said that he was pretty well versed on these trends. What I'd like to know more about is what UITS is doing in relation to these ten trends.
I jotted down some notes on the ten trends that Paquet presented. He went through them quickly so I regret I did not do a better job taking notes.
Dr. Elaine Marchello, Veterinary Science and Microbiology
After watching video Dr. Elaine Marchello's August 14th sample lecture in Centennial Hall, I got the idea of starting a new playlist in the UA's YouTube channel called Great Courses Great Teachers.
Remember that our YouTube channel's primary audience are high school students, college undergraduates, parents & family members, and the people of Arizona. Let's show them the great teachers we have. Dr. Marchello has 800 students enrolled in her class, given this semester in the technology-enriched Centennial Hall. The reason she has 800 students enrolling in her course is because she is a dynamic, engaging and highly interesting teacher. Watch the video!
If you know of a department or college that has captured video of its faculty like this, let me know. It is also possible that the LTC could assign its video crew to capture a lecture for our YouTube channel.
The Eller College MPA program is taking great advantage of YouTube to recruit students. Eller has an exellent MBA program and is routinely highly ranked. But is Eller MBA sitting back and waiting for new students come knocking on the door? No! They continue to market the program and market it where prospective students are.
Eller MBA produced short marketing videos about the MBA program. One is an introduction and three others highlight specific programs: full-time, evening and executive. These videos were sent to the LTC as DVDs and our media services crew converted them to MPEG4 with H.264 compression for YouTube. What this also means is that Eller is leveraging its investment in producing the videos. DVDs can be mailed to prospective students, schools and advisors. They can easily be used by recruiters, converted for YouTube and embedded in webpages. BTW, by uploading them as MPEG4 videos, anyone accessing these videos with an iPhone, Touch, or Blackberry (or similar device) downloads a high quality copy.
Here are three that were uploaded to the UA's YouTube Channel today. [fourth added September 14th]
Download the previous week's iTunes U spreadsheets for the
public site or the private site.
BTW, we had over 44,000 visitors to the public site last week.
Wednesday morning the Arizona Technology Council hosted Innovation Through Intersections - Solving Today's Technology Challenges on campus so I decided to take advantage of the convenience of attending a lecture that sounded pretty interesting. The speaker was Mary Contini Gordon who worked for 20 years for Hughes/Raytheon. Over the past seven years she's been in Tucson leading an innovation center staff and working with "technology and business development leads to create and apply approaches to solve tough problems."
Dr. Contini Gordon recommended two books during her talk - I ordered one and bought the other Wednesday afternoon. The first is Franz Johanssen's The Medici Effect and the second is Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Education. Christensen wrote The Innovator's Dilemma which I read several years ago and found extremely interesting.
If you ask me what is one thing I brought back from her lecture I'd say it is the idea of Wicked Problems. Wikipedia explains wicked problem as "a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems." The simpler way to see it is through its relationship of having both societal and technological pieces. Often we see the technological solution without considering the impact it has on people. then it is that impact on people that becomes the overriding concern and often counters the intended benefit that the technology brings.
The Webinar I attended was hosted by Higheredhero and Higheredhero announced and sold it as "Advanced Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." The presenter, though, titled it " "Podcasting on Campus: Special Considerations for Coursecasts." Since it turned out not to be advanced I didn't get much out of it. There's some info that I'll pass along to Ron Landis in the event he needs to look at recording lectures in more classrooms without developing the sophisticated set-up that was placed in Centennial Hall.
This semester we have created course blogs for
Interested in using a blog to further communications with your class? contact the LTC for more information or visit our Best Practices and Case Studies website to see how instructional blogging has been used by your UA colleagues.
