The Arizona Health Sciences Center (AHSC) has featured several videos on its homepage that were uploaded to the UA's YouTube channel. These videos are well suite for the YouTube channel because of their value as public information pieces.

Dr. William Crist, VP for Health Affairs

UA Scorpion Antivenom Study Featured in NEJM

UMC Opens New Trauma Center and Emergency Department

When the Scorpion Stings

There is a good deal of literature available that shows that students do not cut class because audio and/or video of class lectures are available. We also have anecdotal information from UA faculty who are podcasting course lectures who tell us that they have not observed a decrease in class attendance. In fact, these faculty members report that students appreciate having the lectures available and use them to review for exams, clarify difficult points, and catch up when they miss class for legitimate reasons.

Download a PDF of my report Podcast Your Lectures or, why students will still attend class.

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics by Jill Gordon appears in the blog Best Colleges Online. The post correctly points out that Twitter "has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education" and offers 100 tips on getting started, Twitter etiquette, strategies, ideas for instructors, benefits for students, tips for the class, assignments using Twitter, suggestions for people and things to track on Twitter, Twitter tools, Twitter tools for use in academia, andinding people in academia to follow.

Twitter.edu: Resources for using a micro-blog application in an academic setting is Elaine Edwards of Kansas State's blog devoted to using Twitter in higher ed. It's current and includes posts titled "ech Tips for Educators," "Suggested K-State Twitter Guidelines," and "Examples of Twitter Usage from other Universities."

Twitter Fan Wiki is an actual Twitter site that was "set this up as a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter. Share anything you've found that you think the Twitter community might be interested in!" This site also has a directory of higher ed Twitter sites.

Public site week of October 11-17, 2009

Public site week of October 18-24, 2009

Private site week of October 18-24, 2009

Apparently Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's founders, wrote a blog entry saying YouTube gets 1B views a day and the Times article pointed out how that equates to roughly 30B a month - meaning a lot of views from outside the U.S.

If you've not heard me drone about these numbers, think about how that speaks volumes to reaching prospective students, family members, and the general citizenry. If, as a comment to the article wrote, 90% of those views are of smut, that still leaves, what, 100M viewers to target.

Take a look at the top browses from last week. This is really interesting data. (browse means that rather than downloading by clicking GET MOVIE, users double-clicked the title and watch the video in iTunes) These stats tell us something about student and/or user behavior. There are many more previews for these lectures than downloads.

Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series "D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself" 7768 previews
Campus Health Service SexTalk. "SexTalk Anal Sex 567 previews
Pediatric Grand Rounds "Pathology of the Pediatric Airway" 563 previews
"College of Pharmacy Convocation part 1" 550 previews
"Pharmacy Practice 845 August 25, 2009" 503 previews
Dr. Jim Collins' VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology "11 Virus Structure I" 441 previews
"CoM Events "Issues in Rural Health" 370 previews
Dr. Jim Collins' VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology "Virus Receptors" 332 previews
"College of Pharmacy Convocation part 2" 324 previews
CALA GIS National Parks Service Lectures "Google Earth:Telling the Story of Your Data ..." 315 previews
College of Medicine Advances in Aging Research "Pain Management Modalities for Older Adults" 228 previews
Dr. Jim Collins' MIC205A General Microbiology "17 Recombination and Biotechnology" 212 previews
Dr. Jim Collins' VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology "Introduction to Retroviruses" 143 previews

Download the spreadsheets for the past week. Private site | Public site

Want to understand these reports better? Follow this link to Apple's Understanding iTunes U Reports in the iTunes U Admin Guide.

One of the most downloaded videos we have in our iTunes U site is Ellen Lupton's September 2006 D.Y.I. Design It Yourself [iTunes link] in Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series [iTunes link]. Opening the public site spreadsheet this morning, I saw that it was downloaded 341 times over the past week. So I thought, let's look on Apple's iTunes U to see if it is one of the featured videos this week. And, sure enough, it is. If you look at the bottom of the home page, (before Apple replaces this feature) you'll see

In addition, there were 3,191 previews. Apple tracks previews as "user double-clicks a track in a Course page to preview a file instead of downloading it." Being feature on Apple's main iTunes U page draws enormous attention to one of our videos. Finally, there were over 1,000 browses. I created a page to feature this video (I've done this for many others to feature them on our UA main page). When someone clicks the link on Apple's main page to Ellen Lupton's thumbnail, it goes to this page [iTunes link]. And we see from the spreadsheet that there were 1,015 times visitors went to this page. On this page, the visitors might then have previewed or downloaded the video.

At the end of last week, I uploaded the last video in Art & Identity, Tam van Tran: Lecture with the Artist [iTunes link]. This video was downloaded 205 times, which tells me that there are probably that many subscribers to the podcast series.

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.

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.

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.

1. Virtualization
2. Data Deluge
3. Energy &Green IT
4. Consumerization & Social Software
5. Unified Communications
6. Mobile & Wireless
7. Complex Resource Tracking
8. System Density
9. Mash Ups& Enterprise Portals
10. Cloud Computing

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.

1. Virtualization (critical time now) - a server uses 65% power doing nothing
2. Data Deluge (critical time now) - estimated data growth is 650% in the next 5 years; expect 40 exabytes of new data over the next 5 years which is greater than all the data of the past 5,000 years; this means we need to re-think our storage infrastructure; great buzz word data de-duplication; thin provisioning; automated tiering; HSM principles; virtual tape; important: it is demand driven - more access creates more data; issues that affect us involve compliance, back-up, audits, security
3. Energy & Green IT (critical time 2009-2010) - this trends forces reveiws of IT efficiency; it intersects between facilities and IT; pushes for a corporate social responsibility; and moves power issues up the food chain
4. Consumerization & Social Software (critical time 2009-2010) - I've seen this stat before and it's a good one, particularly on the university campus where when you try to raise awareness of social software you often encounter this response: "I know the students do that but I don't." 62% of new social software users are between 39-51; the impact on new technologies is important because it drives use, demand and adoption; Paquet says "you can't stop users from bringin it in through wireless and smartphones; this then drives our decisions and need to accept it and support it; social software is a factor inside and outside the enterprise; it has an impact on collaboration (examples he gave are wikis and blogs), content sharing (good that we have gone with Google for students and hopefully we'll see this extended to staff and faculty), content aggregation, and social validation.
5. Unified Communication (critical time 2011-2013) - there are 6.7B text messages sent every 24 hours around the world; this means we must tightly integrate communication applications such as text/SMS, IM, email, wireless, VOIP, VTC, ATC, mobility, PBX, Presence, and workspaces
6. Mobile & Wireless (critical time 2010-2012) - there are thousands of new applications coming online; people use phones to text message and update their social network sites; we need to be able to manage this; however, we are currently lacking adequate tools to manage it and need a plan on how we can do this; it means being able to manage our own environments
7. Complex Resource Tracking (critical time 2011-2013) - we need to manage energy consumption, visualize power consumption of resources, automate energy usage to optimal levels, and dynamically move workloads
8. System Density (critical time 2011-2012) - within 3 years the cost to operate a server will exceed the cost of that server; blades will become many different things, such as servers, storage switches, memory, I/O, ...; and at this time blades are still highly proprietary; virtualization is critical to success and it is key to engage your facilities team
9. Mash Ups & Enterprise Portals (critical time 2010-2011) - maybe there is a new phase for portals but we've been talking about portals for some years; UA is just behind most of higher ed in implementing one; work is currently underway in UITS enterprise computing to implement a campus portal soon; Robert MacArthur talked about mash ups I'd say 3 years ago but it have been too complicated until recently to attempt. I hope this means tools to make the process less labor intensive are now available. I think it is also very important to have standardized the relevant data, on this campus let's say campus maps, to make this work across the enterprise
10. Cloud Computing (critical time 2010-2012) - [I remember Larry Rapagnani our CIO back in the early to mid-90s talking about cloud computing] "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using internet tools." we have private clouds improving our collective business agility and we can use cloud computing to focus on results [Dr. Ray Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*.] evaluate cloud delivery models for internal uses [you can see I was getting tired of madly jotting done Paquet's points]; agility enables delivering more service. "cloud computing" he said is the number one term searched on the Gartner Group website.