Recently in UA Event Category

As I type this entry, the Phoenix Mars mission landing is 3 days, 7 hours, 56 minutes and 33 seconds away. For many of the people working on the project it's been in the works 4-5 years. The UA is hosting a number of events this weekend. Here are some links to UA News articles and the mission's website.

• Mission homepage
• LPL's Landing Celebration
• Mars University

New! from UA News: Phoenix Spacecraft is Healthy and this audio podcast Interview with former NASA astronaut Frank Borman

We've featured the Phoenix Mars Mission in the UA's iTunes U's Featured Programs window. Today I added a number of those videos to the UA's YouTube channel and created a playlist for Phoenix Mars Mission. Also this morning, I uploaded the last of LPL's evening lecture series events for spring semester, Prof. Alfred McEwen's April 22nd talk "New Vistas of the Moon and Mars." You can download this video from the LPL Evening Lecture series on iTunes U. I added this podcast series to Featured Programs yesterday.

In addition the UA's activities, websites, and videos, check out the many videos that NASA has uploaded about the mission on YouTube - search Phoenix + Mars.

In case you didn't notice it, KUAT has a new name and a brand new web interface. The new name is Arizona Public Media and the new interface and new address is http://www.azpm.org/. Visit the homepage and read GM Jack Gibson's explanation about the name change.

APM's Hector Gonzalez, who I think has been the lead for the website re-design emailed that: "What you see now is basically a platform that better represents the services offered by the organization. It's built using a Django framework that departs a bit from the conventional LAMP model for building websites." Hector added that "We also wanted to facilitate the publishing of information to the site by those closest to the information - not webmasters. That's where we will be focusing our attention next. First the internal users, then everyone else."

Congrats to Arizona Public Media.

This morning (Thursday, May 4th) Paul Hagner, Associate Program Director EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, delivered the keynote address at the Learning Technology Showcase. The title of his keynote was "Mobile Learning, Immersive Technology, Emerging Technology and Successful Learning." Dr. Hagner's PhD is in Political Science and he comes from a faculty background.

But before I write about that, I'll tell you that the Showcase is given each year and features faculty who have used technology in innovative ways. Take a look at the page about featured projects. Now, what did Hagner say? He opened by showing how technology is bring change at exponential rates. Up until this time, change happened only incrementally. He pointed out that our current semester structure was fashioned out of living in an agrarian society. And two phrases he used throughout his talk were "digital immigrants" and "digital natives." Digital natives are the young people who have grown up with technology all around them--they were born into it. The issue in academia is that we have digital immigrants teaching digital natives.