Recently in UA on iTunes U Category

The spreadsheets for last week's iTunes U usage came this morning. Here's some things I noticed.

Dr. Bernard Baars is teaching an online course for the Center for Consciousness Studies, a Center in the Psychology Department. He has his first track, Introduction to the Webcourse, in the iTunes U course site and it was downloaded 74 times last week and browsed 35 times (browses are when students and other visitors double click to play the track in iTunes instead of downloading it directly to their computer). I think that shows the kind of public exposure that an iTunes U site can bring.

Dr. Elaine Marchello's Trad104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present podcast for "Animism and Totemism and Animals in Mythology" had 131 downloads and 73 browses. This is one of the fall 2009 Centennial Hall courses, so it's interesting to track the students use of podcasts.

Download the Public site spreadsheet and/or the Private site.

In last week's iTunes U Update Newsletter, Apple posted the latest members posting content to iTunes U. It's a long list so I posted it in the "continued" section of my entry.

Go to iTunes U [iTunes link] to see any of these.

When Gregory and I were logging off the PCs in the UITS training lab after yesterday's workshop, Gregory said to me, "Today's workshop wasn't anything like Monday's." I know I felt like I didn't cover 80% of what I would have liked to. On the other hand, I think you got a lot of hearing Scott Hessell and Suzanne Westbrook speak.

I've written up responses to the questions we jotted down on the white board and referring you to some webpages we have about iTunes U and podcasting. Feel free to contact either us for more information.

Contact Gregory to set up a Podcast Producer workflow that streamlines getting your audio and/or video onto iTunes U.

As a consultant on learning technologies, I'll be glad to talk to you how to fit podcasting into your pedagogy, what other resources might work instead of, or in addition to, podcasting, and examples of podcasts in your discipline.

If you prefer to download a Word version of this entry, you may download it here:
Podcasting Workshop Follow-Up

• LTC's Podcasting Website Faculty page
• What is the UA's iTunes U?
• UA on iTunes U FAQs
• Stuart's Blog

Gates Stoner, who works in the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, sent a link to an article appearing in the November 9th Inside Higher Ed: "Fans and Fears of 'Lecture Capture'." I encourage anyone who has read this far in my entry to take look at this short article and read the comments that followed. The comments mirror questions and statements I've heard from faculty members here at the UA. The article summaries a presentation at the 2009 Educause Conference.

• At Stanford University's School of Medicine -"Well-attended lectures were well-watched; poorly attended lectures were not watched. ... If you're bad, you're bad. If you're bad online, you're bad in lectures, students don't come."
• "Our students at Berkeley tell us that this is supplemental material, and it doesn't affect their decision to attend class."
• In 2008, 78 percent of undergraduate respondents to a University of Wisconsin at Madison study said they think having lectures available online would help them retain lesson material, and 76 percent said they believed it would help them improve their test scores.
• Two-thirds of the respondents to this year's annual study on undergraduate IT habits from the Educause Center for Applied Research strongly disagreed that having lectures posted on the Web would encourage them to cut class.
• At Purdue University, which is attempting to put standard lecture capture technology in 280 classrooms by next semester, faculty members said they would not even be willing to press a button at the beginning of class to initiate the recording, according to David Eisert, the manager of emerging technologies there.

Apple was a bit late in sending out the weekly spreadsheets this week. They rarely miss distributing them on Mondays but this week's just arrived. Here are the public and private site spreadsheets showing the number of downloads and browses to the UA's iTunes U.

What stands out in that week's usage? There were 206 downloads of the most recent Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series track, "Repetition and Differentiation -- Lorna Simpson's Iconography of the Racial Sublime," 90 downloads of the mostly uploaded Linguistics Lecture track "Understood complements and com," and 81 downloads of the audio track " 34 Reoviridae" for Dr. James Collins VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology class lecture. On the private side, Elaine Marchello's TRAD 104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present " Exotic Animals and HIstory of the Zoo" was downloaded 189 times. Her previous four lectures averaged ~175 downloads.

"iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?," is a study appearing in Computers & Education 52 (2009) 627-623. It was conducted by SUNY Fredonia Department of Psychology professors Dani McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck, and Elise S. Luber.

The study compared the test scores of introductory psychology students - some watched a recorded lecture available in iTunes and others attended the traditional classroom lecture. The results? Students who watched video scored an average of 71%. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62%, and students who watched the video and took notes scored an average of 76%. Apparently being able to use the pause button accounted for the difference. Can't pause the prof giving the lecture and replay the last five minutes.

My conclusion is that attending the lecture and having video of the lecture for students to review is a way to enhance student learning.

Download a copy of the Public site and/or Private site spreadsheets.

Here are the past two weeks iTunes U spreadsheets, less the Oct. 11th-17th private site. I was out of the country and managing email with my iPhone and wireless access. It appears i accidentally deleted that one. Webmail is darn small even when you pinch and expand.

Public site week of October 11-17, 2009

Public site week of October 18-24, 2009

Private site week of October 18-24, 2009

Last week I wrote about how having one of our UA videos included on Apple's main iTunes U page guarantees a lot of downloads. I also reviewed what the browse stats mean on the spreadsheets. Ellen Lupton's D.Y.I. video continued being featured on Apple's iTunes U main page all last week and received another 535 downloads and 7,768 previews.

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

Download the spreadsheets for the UA's iTunes U Public site and/or the Private 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.

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.

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.

Download the Public site spreadsheet and/or the Private site spreadsheet.

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.

Download the spreadsheets for the UA's public and private iTunes U sites.

Here are the spreadsheets for last week's iTunes U
public site and private site.

Download last week's spreadsheet for the UA's iTunes U public site and private site.

The three most recent videos added to the Physics Colloquium Series are:

"Nanodevices and Maxwell's Demon" presented April 17, 2009, by Dr. Supriyo Datta, Purdue University

"Puzzle: Mass and Gravity," presented April 24, 2009, by Dr. Greg Landsberg, Brown University

"Comprehensive High Frequency Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Studies of Single Molecule Magnets," presented January 23, 2009, by Dr. Jonathan Lawrence, University of Arizona

Download the iTunes U spreadsheets for the UA's private site and/or public site.

Here are the most recent iTunes U spreadsheets. Download the public site and the private site.

Download the UA's iTunes U spreadsheets for last week.

Public Site

Private Site

Download the spreadsheet for the Public Site or for the Private Site

Download the spreadsheets for July 5 - July 11, 2009 for the public site and the private site.

With the new iPhones and accompanying new OS for older iPhones, you can now access iTunes U on your iPhone. What I've discovered, however, is that for many videos in iTunes U and for most of our UA videos I get "This movie format is not supported."

We probably have 1,000+ videos in our iTunes U site and they have worked correctly in iTunes; they have synced correctly and played on video iPods, including the Touch. Our videos have conformed to Apple's required specs: MPEG4 with H.264 and Heather, who leads the LTC Media Services team, has established guidelines for settings (data rate, frame rate,& key frame) that result in the best quality for 640 pixel wide displays while achieving the lowest file size. For example, Paul Cohen's "Science that Tranforms" lecture is 54 minutes long and is 264MB [bit rate=103kbps, total bit rate=674kbps, profile=low complexity, channels=stereo].

I consulted with an Apple iTunes U manager who said that our videos are "out of spec for iPods or iPod app on iPhone or iPod touch" and pointed me to the admin guide http://tinyurl.com/lgyn22 where it says "it is recommended that your source file is at least 640 pixels wide and that you use the built-in iPod converters in Compressor ("H.264 for iPod"), QuickTime Pro ("Movie to iPod"), or iTunes ("Convert Selection for iPod")." When I converted the Paul Cohen lecture in iTunes using "create iPod or iPhone version" it took approximately two hours on my new iMac . The file size for the converted version is 484MB. If we face a ceiling of 500MB for files, this is not an attractive solution. Plus, it greatly increases download time for users and we face breaking our videos into parts. Dividing video of a lecture into parts is something that we have avoided unless the videos are over an hour long. Heather can also create the video according to Apple's requirements for playing on the iPhone but it will take much longer to compress/encode.

I've been looking at other videos uploaded to the UA's iTunes U and found that UA News videos play on the iPhone. These videos average 2:30 and seem to be about 25MB. If you do the math, an hour using these encoding rates will run up to ~500MB. Michael Griffith in the College of Medicine told me that he has not used the pre-sets in the Podcast Producer he is running for College of Med videos to accommodate iPhones, likely to keep the file size down.

BTW, it is definitely not just our UA iTunes U videos that won't play on the iPhone. There are two icons on the iTunes U splash when I access it from my iPhone - one the U. Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum audio tracks about Darwin and UCTV's The Mind Body Connection. I attempted to view one of the UCTV videos and got the "This movie format is not supported" message.

I'm sure Apple engineered the iPhones this way for a good reason. We're discussing how best to manage this and will follow the discussion forum topic to see if any ideas come forward from other sites.

Download the Private Site spreadsheet and/or the Public Site spreadsheet

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

Leila Hudson's "Chess Was Invented in Iran" led all downloads again with 65 more this page week. Another public lecture that Leila gave, "Comedy and Counterhegemony," received 30 downloads. Within the top ten download last week were Linguistics Lectures.

I noticed today that the audio track of Dr. Leila Hudson's lecture "Chess was invented in Iran," was #1 on our downloads list. (look to the right of the UA's iTunes U main page. [iTunes link] Leila's lecture was downloaded 53 times during the 7 days of this report. It is undoubtedly related to the presidential election and subsequent events in Iran over the past 7 days and, I think, shows how people all over the 'Net will turn to iTunes U for quality information.

Our UA top downloads list changes almost daily. If you check it after today another track could be back on top. Leila's lecture was recorded three years ago and is included in Wildcatcasts. Faculty are invited to record their public/invited lectures for iTunes U. The LTC lends digital recorders with armbands and easy to follow recording instructions for these purposes. If interested, complete this short contact form.

Here are the spreadsheets for the Public Site and the Private Site

Download last week's private site spreadsheet or the public site spreadsheet

Download last week's iTunes U stats for the private site and the public site.

I'm happy to report that the final two lectures from the College of Science, Next: Science that Transforms series were uploaded this morning to iTunes U and this afternoon to YouTube. You can also downloaded these videos off the Podcasting website.

"Next: Visualizing Human Thought" presented on March 3, 2009, by Elena Plante, Professor and Head of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. [watch on Youtube]

The ability of the human brain to think and communicate one's thoughts is fundamental to our experience. For centuries, our ability to understand how human thought is represented and communicated had to be inferred from observing behavior following brain damage. The recent advent of new tools for noninvasive study of the normal brain has revolutionized our understanding of brain function, allowing us for the first time to visualize human thought. And we are only just beginning.

"Next: Really Intelligent Computers" presented on March 10, 2009, by Paul Cohen, Professor and Head of Computer Science. [watch on YouTube]

Halfway through its first century, artificial intelligence has delivered some astonishing successes on narrowly defined tasks: cars that drive themselves, airline reservation systems you can talk to, search engines for the Web. Yet these accomplishments have failed to match the general, flexible, adaptive mind of a two-year-old child. By understanding the differences between childlike and computer intelligence, we set the stage for the development of really intelligent computers.

I set up Google Analytics for the local page we have for people to get to the UA's iTunes U main page. I looked at the stats for approximately the dates when spring semester began to its end.

click this image to get a screenshot of the full page.

What does it mean? We can see that 1,767 visitors came to this page to click the blue button to go to the UA's public iTunes U site. Given the fact we average 50,000 - 60,000 visitors to our site a week, this tells me is that the vast majority of visitors are entering through the iTunes store. Google analytics also tells us that visitors arrived at itunes.arizona.edu this way:

* 37.27% Direct Traffic
* 48.71% Referring Sites
* 14.03% Search Engines

Download the Public site spreadsheet

Download the Private site spreadsheet

Last week I uploaded "From Anarchy to Otaku-Youth Subculture Thirty Years After Punk" to Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series. Today I noticed that it was downloaded 225 times. That's a lot for UA videos in iTunes U. Checking Apple's iTunes U main page I found that it is included in the Fine Arts New And Notable [iTunes link] feature, prominently positioned on that page.

Apple reports the following institutions are participating in iTunes U.

Albany Medical College
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Asbury Theological Seminary
Appalachian State University
Azusa Pacific University
Bacone College
The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement
Château de Versailles
CSU Long Beach
De Anza College
Eastern Michigan University
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
FORA.tv
Full Sail University
Kauffman Foundation
Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS)
George Mason University
Georgetown University
Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik (HPI)
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
McGill University
McNally Smith College Of Music
Nobel Biocare
Northwestern University
Ohio
Poynter Institute
Rubin Museum of Art
RWTH Aachen University
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
SUPINFO International University
Tate
Teachers TV
UNIL - Université de Lausanne
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
University Of Maryland, Baltimore
University of Massachusetts Boston
Université Nice Sophia Antipolis
Université Paris Descartes
University of Minnesota
University of New Hampshire
University of San Diego
University of Warwick
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Virginia Department of Education
Wheaton College
Wesleyan University

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)

Download the public and/or the private stats spreadsheets.

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?

Download the stats to the UA's iTunes U public and private sites.

I noticed more activity in the Art & Identity series in Apple's public site report [above] and took a look at Apple's iTunes U Fine Arts section [iTunes link]. Art & Identity is included in the featured page and again shows that when Apple features one of our sites, the downloads increase.

Humanism in Exile during World War II: Hitler's Refugees in the United States Imagine the 'One 24 downloads
D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself 21 downloads
Drift: From Design Process to Resolution 18 downloads
Artists Books: Structure and Content17 downloads
Art for the 21st Century 16 downloads
Beguiling Deception: Women, Allegory and Portraiture in 18th-Century France 15 downloads
Michael Ray Charles: Investigating Racial Stereotypes. Part I 15 downloads
Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke 15 downloads
Lecture for the 30th Annual Visual Communications Exhibition 15 downloads
and more ...

Download the spreadsheet for the public site or the private site.

I noticed 141 downloads for the video I uploaded April 9th of last week to the Art & Identity series: "Humanism in Exile during World War II: Hitler's Refugees in the United States Imagine the 'One World Order'." I noticed it included in Apple's iTunes U > Fine Arts > New and Notable. Click on See All to find it. Also, Ellen Lupton's D.Y.I. was downloaded another 18 times. This video has been in Art & Identity for 2-3 years and continues to be the most popular.

Here are the most recent spreadsheets on usage for the public site and the private site.

Robert T. C. Goodwin's November 7, 2008, lecture "Crossing the Continent, 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South," was added to the ArizonaNativeNet [iTunes link] series. Dr. Goodwin is an internationally recognized scholar and expert on the history and culture of Early Modern Spain. He earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from King's College London, and has served as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Spanish American Studies there. His most recent research has focused on accounts of captivity written by Spaniards during the early modern period and his most recent book, to be published in October 2008, Crossing the Continent, 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South (HarperCollins) focuses on Alvar Nú˜nez Cabeza de Vacaos Naufragios, an account of the first 'European' crossing of North America, during which a black African slave named Esteban and three Spaniards were enslaved by Native Americans.

Barbara McCloskey presented "Humanism in Exile during World War II: Hitler's Refugees in the United States imagine the 'One World Order'" on March 26, 2009, as part of the School of Art Visiting Artist and Scholar Series. Dr. McCloskey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 and Artists of World War II. Professor McCloskey has also published catalogue essays, journal articles, and anthology contributions on the subject of art and politics in German 19th and 20th century culture. She is currently preparing a book-length study of German artists and intellectuals in American exile during the World War II era. Video of her lecture is in Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series [iTunes link]

Download the Pubic Site stats and/or the Private Site stats.

Catching up today with an update on the newest additions to the UA's iTunes U site and YouTube channel.

OED Innovation Day Honorees
I wrote last Thursday that I uploaded the Leading Edge Researcher and Innovator of the Year videos for the Office of Economic Development's Innovation Day event. Later in the day, Veronica passed along the audio tracks to the full interviews. You will find the full interviews in the Technology Innovation Awards in the UA's iTunes U site. They run from 30 minutes to 50 minutes. I keep the Innovation Day videos featured on the main page until Friday when I feature three of the new ones.

Race Track Industry Program (RTIP)
RTIP is one of the sites I show people from campus programs. It's a great example of how to utilize the YouTube channel to reach/recruit prospective students (maybe Jim Livengood ought to have a channel directed to coaches), as well as iTunes U. There are three sections: RTIP Guest Speakers, RTIP Student Internship Program, and RTIP Alumni. Back in December, RTIP held its annual Symposium which is well attended by people in the industry from around the country. It was held at La Paloma and among many of those attending are RTIP graduates. Heather and I went to La Paloma for the afternoon and she shot video of seven grads being interviewed by Denise Pharris, RTIP's marketing director. Veronica then edited these videos beautifully. The idea is that if you are student considering attending a program in the race track industry, you will watch graduates of the UA's program and see not only how well they speak of the experience but how successful they are because of it.

I encourage to you watch any and all of the following six short videos featuring UA researchers who were honored last week on UA Office of Economic Development's Innovation Day. Dr. Victor Hruby received the Innovator of the Year Award; recognized as Leading Edge Researchers were: Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, Dr. Emmanuel Katsanis, Dr. Eugene W. Gerner, Dr. Charles Falco, and Dr. Jennifer Barton. These videos are also in the OED's UA iTunes U site [iTunes link] in the Sciences topic section. I also have three set up as the main feature on our UA iTunes U homepage (see above image).

What I'd like to add is that Tony Gallego shot the video and Veronica Rodriguez did an outstanding job editing the videos. They exhibit the high quality the LTC's Media Services unit provides the campus.

Read UA News article on the awards.

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.

Download last week's private site stats and/or the public site stats.

View the public site stats | view the private site stats

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.

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.

Public site | Private site

Here are the spreadsheets from Apple for the past week. Download the and/or the private site stats.

The spreadsheets for last week came this morning. Apple must have observed President's Day. Download the stats for the public site or the private site.

A Look At This Week's Stats

The public stats are interesting. It tells me that people are finding the Physics Colloquium series and starting subscriptions. The way I can tell this is that the last one I uploaded at the end of last week was Dr. Berndt Mueller's (Duke) "Why is Quark-Gluon Plasma A Perfect Liquid?" and it's been downloaded 25 times. Dr. Douglas Natelson's (Rice) "Single-Molecule Electronic Properties" was downloaded 21 times. Dr. Elliott Cheu's (UA) September lecture here at the UA that followed the first test of the Hadron Collider, "From the Big Bang to Dark Matter: Turning on the Large Hadron Collider" received another 17 downloads. This one has been downloaded regularly each week. If you look at the top 5 download list on our iTunes U mainpage, you see Dr. Cheu's in top five just about each day. I had uploaded Mueller's, Natelson's and Dr. James Brooks' (FSU) "Fields Available at the Intergalactic Magnetic Lab" the end of last week. His received 17 downloads.

The week before, CALA Lecture Series: Margaret Griffin's "Hidden Agenda(s)," received 231 downloads and another dozen this past week. That also indicates a big following for the CALA Lecture Series.

As usual, the Linguistics Lecture Series was heavily downloaded relative to our entire site. Eleven of the top 25 downloads are from that series. Kudos to Amy Fountain in Linguistics for faithfully recording these lectures and uploading them to iTunes U. The presence of these lectures obviously has a huge following within the Linguistics field.

Download the usage stats for last wee: Public Site and Private Site.

There are three more videos uploaded to the Physics Colloquium series' on iTunes U.

• Dr. James S. Brooks' 2007 lecture "Fields Available at the Intergalactic Magnetic Lab." Dr. Brooks is Professor of Physics and Director of CMS-Experimental Condensed Matter Science at Florida State University. His main research interest is the Electronic and Magnetic Mechanisms in Low Dimensional and Novel Material. April 6, 2007.
• Dr. Berndt Mueller, "Why is Quark-Gluon Plasma A Perfect Liquid?" Dr. Mueller is J. B. Duke Professor of Physics, at Duke University. His research area is Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics. He presented on April 20, 2008.
• Dr. Douglas Natelson, Rice Quantum Institute, "Single-Molecule Electronic Properties." Dr. Natelson is Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Fellow, at Rice Quantum Institute in Houston, Texas. He presented on September 26, 2008.

We have new videos in two of the UA's most popular iTunes U courses, Architecture Lecture Series and Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series.

Architecture Lecture Series

On January 23rd, Margaret Griffin of Griffin Enright Architects, Los Angeles, presented "Hidden Agenda(s)." Details from CALA's website:

Margaret Griffin is founding partner of the Los Angeles-based firm Griffin Enright Architects, established in 2000. Griffin Enright Architects' practice fuses interests in innovation and experimentation with a desire to explore cultural complexities relative to the built environment. Its versatile practice includes projects ranging from large-scale commercial and residential commissions to furniture design and gallery installations. The work moves beyond the traditional scope of architectural practice, underscoring connections with the surrounding urban fabric and landscape by reinforcing existing conditions or creating new ones that allow architecture, urban context and landscape to be experienced in new ways. Griffin Enright's comprehensive approach to design depends on the simultaneous blurring and exploitation of distinctions between inside/outside, built form/landscape, site/urban context and theory/practice. The firm is the recipient of numerous awards for design excellence including, most recently, the 2006 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum."

Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series

On Thursday, January 22, 2009, Mary Jane Jacob presented "In the Space of Art." From the College of Fine Arts website:

Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the most nonconformist U.S. curators of the last 20 years, Jacob has critically engaged the discourse around art in public spaces with such innovative exhibitions as Places with a Past, Charleston (1991), Culture in Action, Chicago (1993), Conversation in the Castle, Atlanta (1996) and Evoking History, Charleston (2001-present).

Away from large-scale sculptures on public plazas, Jacob supports a form of art in public space that explicitly deals with the history and the current realties of the locations in which she works. With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, she has furthered her research into the nature of artmaking today and the forthcoming anthology, Slow: Experience into Art, will deal with the art experience and its relation to pedagogy.

Jacob's lecture will draw upon her own practice as a curator; creating spaces and situations for art to be made and experienced in cities and communities, as well as in galleries. Importantly, she will ground her remarks in the work of artists who cross cultures, some following the Buddha, others reaching points of wisdom along other paths, and all of which move beyond national or ethnic identity to speak on universal terms. It will include the work of Marina Abramovic, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kimsooja, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bill Viola.

Video of Pres. John Schaefer's lecture Next: An Enormous Picture of the Universe, the first of the College of Sciences' new series Science that Transforms is available on iTunes U. I recommend that anyone interested in the series go to Science that Transforms on iTunes U and click SUBSCRIBE. That way the next videos will automatically be sent to your personal computers/iTunes.

I also created a webpage similar to previous lecture series. This is where people with patience can download the MPEG4 video file. It's 230 MB, so IMO it's fruitless to do this on a dial-up modem unless your name is Job.

I've uploaded Pres. Schaefer's lecture to YouTube as well. This is much easier for low-tech people to watch -- there's no downloading and it just plays in their browser. The resolution is much lower since, as you know, YouTube compresses the video to Flash. But YouTube also stores a high quality MPEG4 version that they send to people accessing it with portable devices like iPhones and Blackberries. Looks great on those devices. The URL to the page with Schaefer's video is not yet ready. Given file is 230MB, it'll likely be another hour or two before it finishes processing. If you want to watch it on YouTube, search on the words in the title to find it or go the COS playlist in our UA YouTube channel.

click the image to go to the UA's iTunes U main page

Our iTunes U main page feature is now "Celebrating Black History Month." The featured section is one that I change regularly to promote different videos and audios in our iTunes U collections. Last week I featured three new videos in the Through Our Parents' Eyes podcast on ranching in southern Arizona and histories of the railroad in Tucson & southern AZ. Incidentally, these videos came from our partnership with Pima Community College's Discovering Southern Arizona series.

For Black History Month, we are featuring an Art & Identity lecture - "Investigating Racial Stereotypes" presented by artist Michael Ray Charles. His lecture, nearly two hours long, is delivered in two parts and has been downloaded 15-20 times a week since uploaded last December. The second is the lecture Dr. Deborah Whaley gave a few years back as part of the Faculty Fellows Lecture Series. Deborah was in Africana Studies at that time and has since gone to the U. of Iowa. I found her lecture particularly interesting. The third featured site is audio from a 1987 video that is part of the Tucson Meet Yourself Festivalarchive in the main library. It was digitized about 5 or 6 years back when I had a UA grant to develop content from the TMY archive for the Music of the Southwest site. The video is too poor to feature so this morning I exported it to WAV using QT Pro and then brought the WAV file into GarageBand so I could add the Through Our Parents' Eyes branding image.

I think these videos and the audio track are ones that many people will find as interesting as I have. Check them out and pass this info on to friends and colleagues.

Here they are, right on schedule. Download last week's spreadsheets for our iTunes U public and private sites.

Over the past few days I uploaded three more videos to the Physics Colloquium Series.

• Dr. Ken Schafer, Louisiana State University, presented "Attosecond Science" on Dec. 5, 2008. Dr. Schafer is a theoretical AMO physicist who specializes in strong field physics. An attosecond is 1/1000 of a femtosecond, and attosecond sources are the shortest light pulses ever made. Lecture presented Dec. 15, 2008.
• Dr. Dan Hooper, Fermilab, presented "Direct and Indirect Searches for Particle Dark Matter (The discovery era begins)" on September 12, 2008. Dr. Hooper is a scientist with Fermilab's Particle Astrophysics Center.
• Dr. Michael Brown, Professor of Chemistry Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Professor at the UA. His lecture, "Dynamics of Membrane Proteins Studied by Solid-State NMR Relaxation," was presented October 3, 2008.

Download last week's Private site stats and/or the Public site stats.

Here are the most recent spreadsheets from Apple.

UA's Private Site

UA's Public Site

Download the public site spreadsheet or the private site spreadsheet.

I was interested in seeing the iTunes U public report for last week, since it was a week that a lot of people are off from work at educational institutions and there are no classes in session. Would that time off spark an increase or decrease in visits among our invisible users? What's your guess? The answer is a decrease. As noted previously, we have been averaging about 70,000 visitors a week to our public iTunes U site. Last week we had approximately 55,000. College of Medicine's Surgery Grand Rounds "Where Do I Begin?" had 65 downloads - I'm going to check that one out. It's not the most recent uploaded and was recorded in July 2008. It may a video that is recommended to in-coming med-students which would account for the interest. I don't see it featured on the main iTunes U Health and Medicine section, but maybe it was up last week and since removed.

• Download the public site spreadsheet
• Download the private site spreadsheet

Download the spreadsheet for the Private Site or the Public Site

Dr. Deborah Bass, Deputy Project Scientist for the Phoenix Mars Scout Mission

Jacob Egan of the Phoenix Mars Mission added four new videos of interviews: Deborah Bass, Michael Hecht (in two parts), and Leslie Tamppari. The interview with Deborah Bass was downloaded 624 times. Lots of people subscribing to the Mission's podcasts! VIsit the Phoenix Mars Mission's site on the UA on iTunes U.

Download last week's spreadsheets.

Private site

Public site

Here are the spreadsheets for our public and private sites on iTunes U.

Last night something with WebAuth broke our ability to log in to UA on iTunes U. This only had an impact on the private site where the med school has six secure sites. That was repaired at 10:26 p.m. Tuesday night. This morning the entire store crashed. I've not seen this before ... I like the broken link image.

click for larger version

Check out last week's stats for the UA on iTunes U.

Public site | Private site

Download last week's spreadsheets for the UA's iTunes U Public Site and Private Site stats.

Here are the spreadsheets for last week's iTunes U usage. Download the public stats and the private stats.

The Physics Dept. has held a Colloquium for a number of years. Fortunately, Larry Hoffman in the Physics Dept. has been capturing the lectures on video and creating DVDs of the lectures. Larry passed DVDs of 2007 and 2008 on to me and I've been reviewing them with the goal of hosting them in iTunes U. What I've been doing is noting where to edit out extraneous video from the beginnings and the end of each video, writing each of the speakers requesting permission, and following up by attaching the UA's release form to email. So far, we have received 17 positive responses and only 3 negatives. The next step is for Heather to convert the DVDs to MPEG 4 video, edit the parts noted, add an intro and the UA logo to each frame to brand the videos. This content certainly adds to the UA's iTunes U Science section and makes excellent content easily accessible to students and researchers.

Private stats

Public stats

Download the UA's iTunes U
public and private spreadsheets for the week of October 26 - November 1, 2008

Interesting that on the public site, Linguistics Lectures and the Architecture lecture series regularly receive the most downloads. Shows a lot of interest on the Net for these resources.

Here are theprivate site and public site spreadsheets for October 19 - 25, 2008.

Dawn Hunzicker, Assistive Technology Coordinator in the UA's Disability Resource Center, passed this news on.

National Federation of the Blind and Commonwealth of Massachusetts Announce Agreement with Apple to Make iTunes Fully Accessible

"Baltimore, Maryland (September 26, 2008): The National Federation of the Blind and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley today announced a cooperative agreement with Apple, Inc. to make Apple's iTunes software, iTunes Store, and iTunes U more accessible to the blind. On September 9, Apple released iTunes 8, which contains significant accessibility improvements. Under today's agreement, Apple will make iTunes U (a dedicated area of the iTunes Store for content provided by colleges and universities) fully accessible by December 31, 2008, and will ensure the full accessibility of the iTunes software and the rest of the iTunes Store to blind people using both Mac and Windows operating systems by June 30, 2009. Over the next three years, Apple will continue to work with officials in the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General and the National Federation of the Blind to ensure that the iTunes services remain accessible to the blind and that accessibility issues are resolved. Apple has also agreed to contribute $250,000 to the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind to assist the agency in providing adaptive technology to blind residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

Upload the UA's Private iTunes U or the Public iTunes U

Download last week's iTunes U use stats:Public site stats | Private site stats

The Vistas of Gender Utopia

There were 148 downloads for the new Art & Identity lecture series video track, The Vistas of Gender Utopia [click to download 206MB MPEG4 video], I uploaded on Thursday, 10/2. I didn't feature it on the main page so what that tells me is that there likely are upwards of 140+ subscribers to the podcast.

As you know, you can click the SUBSCRIBE button to automatically receive any new podcast when you subscribe. Subscribing uses an RSS feed. It is sooooooooooooooooooo much easier this way than the original way of needing to past a RSS URL into iTunes.

Several videos were added to iTunes U this week.

Topic: Sciences, Section Programs, Seminars and Events. I created a new section for Anthony B. DeFeo Lectures. These are annual lectures given by invited speakers. Heather's Media Services unit shot video last year's lecture by Dr. Leonard LaPointe and I've had it in the Wildcatcasts section. With this year's in the can I thought it worthwhile of a section in Section Programs, Seminars and Events. Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences faculty are involved in some outstanding research and I am glad to find a way to feature the department in iTunes U. This year's lecture: H. Eugene Hoyme, M.D. "The Role of Genetic and Malformation Syndromes in Autism Spectrum Disorders" Casey went out and captured an image of the building to brand the new section nicely.

Topic: Arts, Section The Arts and Artists at the University of Arizona. Two new videos added! One for Art & Identity: The Artists Lecture Series and one for the UA Museum of Art. Jenny Schmid's "The Vistas of Gender Utopia" is part of one of the best podcast series we have on the UA on iTunes U, Art & Identity. Follow the link to read more about it. "In the Shadow of a Famous Master: Maestro Bartolomé's Innovations in the Altarpiece of Ciudad Rodrigo" is the title of Dr. Barbara Anderson's lecture on behalf of the UA Museum of Art.

"Following two years of groundbreaking research and technical analysis, the University of Arizona Museum of Art's magnificent altarpiece of Ciudad Rodrigo has returned to Tucson. Since the fall of 2006, this exquisite group of 26 Spanish medieval paintings has undergone ultraviolet light and X-ray examination, as well as infrared reflectography at the Kimbell Art Museum's Conservation Studio in Fort Worth, Texas. The resulting scientific and art historical research have unlocked 500-year-old secrets about the altarpiece's creation and realization."

Here are the iTunes U spreadsheets for the week of September 21-27, 2008. public stats and private

Of most interest is the 935 downloads for the UA Phoenix Mars podcast of Will Holst's video of Ira Flatow's Science Friday live broadcast at Mar Mission HQ. I put it on the main page as a featured video and, of course, anyone with a subscription to the Phoenix Mars Mission podcast received it.

Download the Public use spreadsheetand the Private side spreadsheet

Download use stats on iTunes U for the past week.

iTunes U public stats

private site stats

Follow-up from my previous post: Tommy Bruce video on iTunes U had two downloads last week, which confirms for me that the big push is on YouTube and about making it appear among YouTube's featured sites. Here are the public stats for last week.

download the public spreadsheet | download the private speadsheet

Public site BTW, I wrote last week that Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit's Faculty Fellows lecture was included on Apple's iTunes U main page in a highlights feature. His lecture was downloaded 13 times but what I am also noticing is that eight other Faculty Fellows lectures were also downloaded, and more times than Rozenblit's. It tells me that visitors followed the breadcrumbs back to see what else was available in the Faculty Fellows series.

Private Site

As I've written before, iTunes U's main page regularly features topical sections and pulls different podcasts from the thousands and thousands submitted by the member institutions (like us!) Today I noticed that section called Highlights and on includes Dr. Jerzy Rozenblit's Faculty Fellows presentation "From Artificial Intelligence to Cognitive Computing: Can We Build Very Smart Systems?" Dr. Rozenblit's talk was given during Fall Semester 2005 and is one of 22 talks included in the Faculty Fellows Speaker Series.

Last summer I was talking with Steve Wilson, Apple iTunes U Producer, and he said, "can you believe I get paid to do this." It has be hard to keep on task when you're going through all the fabulous content on iTunes U.

Download last week's iTunes U private stats or the public stats

If you click the subscribe button to set up a podcast in iTunes U, you do not get the title of the podcast but rather what one other iTunes U administrator called "Ugly URLs." I noticed this on Wed and checked the iTunes U Site Admins discussion forum to see if anyone else had reported it. There was an entry on Tuesday the 19th that included

For example, one of our podcast series should be showing up as T4: Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology. Instead, when you subscribe, what you get is http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/nau.edu.1622217296.0162...

Thanks for reporting this. This does indeed appear to be an issue. If you go into "Edit Track Preferences" and set the default location for track downloads to "Individual playlist per course" you will be able to work around the issue. We've noted the issue and will get to work on a fix.

Download this week's spreadsheet

download the spreadsheet for August 3-9, 2008

It's Monday so we have a new spreadsheet showing our usage stats. download the spreadsheet

During this past week, there were 1,377 downloads for Will Holst's "Phoenix Mars Mission Student Profile: Stephanie Barnes." This probably means that there are about that many subscribers to the Phoenix Mars Mission's podcast series on iTunes U. I'd say that's pretty darn good.

Jody L. Liller is the UA's Campus Rec Public Relations and Information Coordinator. She's been taking advantage of the talented students we find here at the UA to create some excellent videos for the Campus Recreation iTunes U podcast and for the UA's YouTube channel.

Campus Rec's latest video is terrific and IMO it is perfect for its target audience. It's called Don't Beat Yourself Up: You'll Fit Right In at The Rec Center. Take a look - it's 41 seconds.

Congratulations go out to Gregory Anderson, SSA, Sr. in OSCR, who is our Podcast Producer guru. Gregory was dealing with a challenging problem - automatically posting tracks to iTunesU from Podcast Producer workflows. Yesterday he discovered Mac OS X 10.5.4: Cannot post podcasts to iTunes U in an Apple Support resource for Mac "OS X 10.5, Mac OS X Server 10.5" that solved the problem. I think he had previously contacted Apple tech support about this but hadn't found anyone who knew this solution. He also shared his find on the Apple support forums for iTunes U administrators.

So, what does this mean to you, to me, to faculty on campus. A key aspect of Podcast Producer's routines goes like this. Professor Snarf is in the ILC teaching a gen ed class to 223 students. Prof. Snarf has been set up in Podcast Producer so that he starts a recording process for a class lecture and when the class/recording is over, the audio is sent to the server, processed and with Gregory's fix, it is automatically passed along to his course podcast in iTunes U.

Here's an example. The Linguistics Department's Dr. Amy Fountain has been recording guest speakers the past year and uploading the audio to iTunes U. Linguistics has quite the robust podcast series going with over 30 tracks. Gregory can set Podcast Producer up to manage these lectures and, we think, significantly streamline the process.

During fall semester we'll be piloting Podcast Producer. I am optimistic that this resource will pave the way to a great increase in the number of faculty and departments who participate in iTunes U.

download the spreadsheet.

Download the spreadsheet for July 13-19, 2008.

I noticed last week that there is a "Science & Religion" section featured on the main iTunes U page. The College of Science's Evolution Lecture Series is one of the six prominently featured podcasts. This week, Michael Worobey's lecture "Disease Evolution: The Example of HIV" was downloaded 73 times. The next closest, one of the Phoenix Mars mission videos, was at 27. You can see how being featured by iTunes U can draw a lot of attention to one's content.

download the spreadsheet for July 6-12, 2008.

The most recent spreadsheet for our iTunes U site is available for download. Seems we had somewhere around 60,000 visitors the past week. Downloads are getting back to normal, however. New content from the UA's Phoenix Mars Mission podcast has slowed, although Phoenix is still by far the leading download site. Download the report

Download the usage report forJune 22-28, 2008 Check out the number of visitors. It was around 65,000!

I took a deep breath, selected open and it worked! Here is last weeks iTunes U spreadsheet, ready for you to download

Here is the report that includes the past two weeks. Miguel at Apple wrote that the "good news is that we think we tracked down the issue and this shouldn't be a problem moving forward. Thank you for your patience with this." download the spreadsheet

For the week of June 1st-7th, three of the Mars mission tracks were downloaded well over 2,000 times. AND! 24,963 downloads for the landing animation the previous week. That was the video that made it to number 2 on the iTunes U most downloaded list. Not our list, Apple's.

The spreadsheet files that I received for last week's stats were again corrupted. Miguel wrote this morning that Apple is "trying to figure out the root of this. We are not sure if something is breaking on creation or in the delivery process somewhere. It also seems to only happen to a small portion of our sites." I had checked this week's on my desktop PC, my iBook, and one of the Center's PCs. I usually figure I'm doing something wrong but not in this case. Bottomline - no stats for last week.

download spreadsheet

Miguel sent a working version of the spreadsheet that Apple sent out last Monday. It works and you can check out your stats for that one-week period. He has not heard anything more on the one for the previous week that was also corrupted.

I wrote last week that the spreadsheet showing our activity was corrupted and Apple was notified. I checked in again with Miguel yesterday. He had sent it to the tech staff for analysis but as of 12:18 a.m., they'd not yet replied. When I tried to open this week's "public" spreadsheet, I got the same corrupted file message. I made a screenshot of the message, attached that and the spreadsheet to an email message to Miguel. I'll post about it if/when I hear more.

It was inevitable. With all the colleges and universities jumping onto iTunes U, Apple had to do something about the main iTunes U page. Otherwise that left column listing the participants was going to run from Cupertino to L.A.

A month ago, I received instructions from iTunes U HQ to start categorizing our tracks. I dutifully did this but I also shared my concern with Apple's iTunes U manager. I find the categories that we can select from extraordinarily limiting.

click to retrieve larger version

I think we have our Apple rep Glen Banks and Miguel Young, iTunes U's project manager, to thank for this. "iTunes U adds Phoenix Mars Mission movies" appeared today in MacWorld. Glen wrote that it's the first time that he has ever seen an iTunes U article about a particular University.

As I type this entry, the 3rd most downloaded track within the entire iTunes U is the one minute eight second video "Phoenix Entry, Descent and Landing Teaser Trailer." In the words of Mel Allen, How about that!

On May 13th, I set up our itunes.arizona.edu page with Google Analytics. I've got a lot left to learn about using Google Analytics but took a look this afternoon to see what has been happening since the 13th.

Here's a map that Google Analytics creates showing the locations of cities in the USA that were tracked coming to this page.

for the period of May 13 - May 28

• 106 visits via 39 U.S. cities
• visits from 17 different states in the U.S.
• 90 different visitors making 117 visits from 10 different countries
• Countries: Brazil, Australia, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Italy, Canada, and Switzerland

Okay, spot quiz. If we are only getting a little over 100 visitors from our itunes.arizona.edu page, then how are the thousands of other visitors to our site accessing the UA on iTunes U?

This morning's iTunes U's mainpage began featuring a link to the UA's Phoenix Mars Mission podcast series. When you go to the mainpage, there are selected sites featured atop the page that rotate. The above screenshot captured Phoenix. It seems to come up with the first three before the next line skates on to replace it.

download the spreadsheet.

download the spreadsheet.

I try to keep up on collecting data for my annual report as the year goes along so that I don't go nuts when it's due in June. Today I did another count of what we have on iTunes U. As of today, Tuesday, May 13, 2008, we have a total of 552 tracks in our iTunes U. Of that 552, 284 are video tracks and 268 are audio tracks.

Following is a breakdown.

download spreadsheet

download spreadsheet

download spreadsheet

Last week, Apple ran a features window On Evolution atop the iTunes U mainpage. I'd commented when first seeing that the College of Science Evolution lecture series was the first of the items featured that I couldn't wait to see the use report. I'd also noticed that Rick Michod's "Social Evolution" Evolution Series lecture track was the 16th most downloaded track on all of iTunes U last Friday and is still holding down 16th place. (On Evolution is still the feature, if you'd like to look). It's also realized four times (406) the number of downloads than our previous high (99).

download the spreadsheet

Big jump in the number of visitors last week. We've been averaging ~11,500 but last week had 21,048 visitors.

Download the spreadsheet for the week of April 6 - 12, 2008.

BTW, the new Noteworthy window on iTunes U includes our Museum of Art Lectures. We're in good company, too. The other institutions represented in Noteworthy are MIT, Yale, American Public Media, ideastream, The NY Public Library, Loyola Marymount's Law School, and U. Michigan.

Our Apple rep is working with OSCR to put an event together on April 24th at the UA Bookstore. The gist of it, according to an email I received a couple weeks ago, is that OSCR staff will conduct "a general primer on capturing audio and video for podcasts" at the Bookstore on April 21st and 22nd. The Bookstore will then host a series of lectures and other events on the 24th highlighting the Mars Mission. Apple and the Bookstore plan to tie these events together and put the spotlight on iTunes U by offering some informational chats and opportunities for the public to practice capturing and posting podcasts. I'll be giving an overview of our UA on iTunes U and had to provide our Apple rep with a paragraph. So I went into our iTunes U site and counted the number of tracks we have up.

What a surprise! There are just over 500 tracks in our iTunes U site. That's a heck of a lot of content.

Download spreadsheet Here is the spreadsheet for the past week.

Here are the first full week's stats with our "public features" interface. You'll recall last weeks' spreadsheets were corrupted. I sent them to the Apple contact sub'ing for our regular rep. Our regular rep, Miguel, was on vacation. I never heard back. So, here's is the most recent data: download spreadsheet

The first thing that I see is 99 downloads for Ellen Lupton's Art & Identity lecture. Last week, this lecture was featured by Apple on the iTunes U main page. Having content featured by Apple on the main page is a sure way to attract visitors. You can see our Top 5 Downloads on our UA iTunes U main page. First, of course, is Ellen Lupton's D.I.Y: Design It Yourself, then one of Jim Collins lectures, the Architecture Lecture Series track I added last week - Desert Architecture, and Eller's video about the MBA program - Not Business As Usual. The Eller video is an "overview of the Eller Executive MBA program focused on ROI: return on investment." On the spreadsheet it shows 9 downloads which ranks far behind many other tracks for 3/23-3/29. This should mean that a lot of visitors downloaded it yesterday, 3/30. We can check next week's spreadsheet to compare.

If you're waiting for this week's stats - me too. The spreadsheet came attached to email around 15:00 but won't open in Excel. I checked the forums to see if anyone had a similar experience. If I don't get one that works by tomorrow morning, I'll email our iTunes U contact.

Apple migrated us to the public features interface last night and it looks great! Check it via the iTunes Store or go to our newly revised webpage. Kudos to Maritza for revising this page and the related pages and to Casey Boettcher for getting the code set up to make it work. As noted before, hats off to Casey Ontiveros for all his work on the images.

If you stop at the iTunes U main store, you'll see that Ellen Lupton, one of our featured lectures is included in Apple's new feature, Art & Design. This increases visits to our site because when someone clicks on Ellen Lupton's image, it brings that person into our UA on iTunes U site where they are more likely to notice and follow the breadcrumbs leading to our Arts section and/or main section.

Just spoke to Steve Wilson, Apple's iTunes U Producer. Steve will be bring the new interface - public features - up tonight. So come Tuesday morning, our new, attractive UA iTunes U will be out there for the world.

March 9 - 15th use stats.

On related news, the new interface - Apple calls it public features - will be installed on iTunes U overnight.

Learning Technologies will have a new webpage in place when the interface change is made. We will be using a more standard UA image provided to us by External Relations with the public features interface and with our revised webpage. I will also be working this week on a new, more standard UA interface for our Learning Technologies podcasting website.

Last month we added three videos to a new site on iTunes U, ArizonaNativeNet. If you're not yet familiar with ArizonaNativeNet, here's a description from its homepage.

ArizonaNativeNet is a virtual university outreach and distance learning telecommunications center devoted to the higher educational needs of Native Nations in Arizona, the United States and the world through the utilization of the worldwide web and the knowledge-based and technical resources and expertise of the University of Arizona.

Over 11,600 visitors the past week and we did this without performance enhancing drugs! Looking over the clubhouse leaders this morning, I noticed that the Linguistics Lecture series again is up at the top of the "most downloads" list. Since these stats are strictly for the most recent seven day period reported, it has me wondering if instructors in Linguistics are assigning these lectures to coursework. If not, our Linguistics Lectures series has a following around the 'Net who are tuning in. Kudos to Linguistics. I also noticed a number of Leila Hudson's lectures downloaded this past week. I bet she gave an exam last week.

Download the spreadsheet

Glad to report that we have made progress on migrating our UA on iTunes U public pages to the new interface. This is the interface that institutions coming up live on iTunes U are using and that iTunes U flagship institutions like Duke and Stanford implemented months ago. There have been some issues getting the authentication and editing privleges in place. Casey Boettcher, the LTS' computer programmer working on the tech side of our iTunes U, has been grappling with these.

Over the coming week, Casey Ontivares and I will be uploading tracks to the sections in the new interface. Unfortunately, we have to do each of these one-by-one since there is no way to move content from the current UA iTunes U site to the new one. We would like to have this site in-place over spring break. You should be able to follow this link to get a look at the new interface. Of course, you'll need iTunes installed to get there.

Attached is a spreadsheet containing a report of the activity on arizona.edu's iTunes U site for the past four weeks. Please note that there are multiple worksheets that contain information about different weeks. The main worksheet, Summary, contains a week-by-week overview of our site activity.

For those of you tracking downloads of your content, here is the most recent iTunes U Usage Report from Apple Inc.

It appears that Apple had some troubles getting this one out. It arrived twice today, Tuesday, and one of the spreadsheets had no data in it. The second appears to be up-to-date. Over 10,000 users visited the site and we saw double-digit downloads for many different tracks. There were 20 for the Michael Hammer's April 18, 2006, "Human Evolution: Tracing Our Origins with DNA" COS Evolution series lecture. Download the spreadsheet for more details and to see the number of downloads for any of your tracks.

Download use stats for Jan. 27th - Feb. 2nd

I can see that we're getting more visitors from campus because the Users spreadsheet has about 300 logins via WebAuth. This is only taking those folks to the UA on iTunes U's public page unless they've been set-up with privileges to upload to iTunes U and/or edit a particular page. We're just rolling this out and so far have only established privs for Prof. Jim Collins to upload tracks for his MIC205A course. I'm meeting this morning with Chris Jansmann in Career Services to see if his privs are working and we're setting up privs for a couple others. Jim Collins' experience has required some additional attention from Casey Boettcher, the LTC's programmer/developer, who has been working on the authentication piece. It worked fine when I met with Jim last Thursday but then didn't work on Friday when Jim tried to upload a new track.

We had 9,388 non-WebAuthvisitors tracked by Apple.

Apple's weekly spreadsheet came this morning. [Download spreadsheet]

I was interested to see if Apple featuring the COS' Evolution Lecture series on the iTunes U main page last week would pump up the number of downloads. Apple selected six series to feature in the topic of "Science and Health." There were five downloads for two of the videos and four for the other two. Thought there'd be more than that.

This week's stats reflect the first week of the semester and what I see are some of the more "student-oriented" tracks being download. For example, there were 11 downloads for OSCR TV's episode 3 and 7 for one of Campus Health Services SexTalk tracks. Jim Collins is recording his MIC205A lectures and there were 8 downloads for his second lecture.

Overall there were 400 downloads this week and a record 10,621 visitors who visited a UA on iTunes U page. Note: if you look a the users stats page, you'll see other who visited our iTunes U webpage and went in via WebAuth. This did not give them any additional privleges, as it only passes them to the public page unless they have privileges created by Casey Boetcher, our LTC programmer/analyst who manages authenticated access to UA on iTunes U.

It's Monday morning and the latest report is in from Apple on the number of downloads on UA on iTunes U. This report covers January 1-January 6, 2008. There were a total of 338 track downloads during this week. Below are the most downloaded. FYI, downloads count both new subscriptions and individual downloads off a given podcast's main page, as well as a new track added to a series that someone may be subscribed to. The main thing is that these are just for this 7 day period. BTW, Apple tracked 7,629 visitors over this week.

Linguistics Lectures
Who did what to whom: A cross-linguistic investigation 7
Genetics and the Acquisition & Structure of Language 7
Expression, Truth, Predication and Context 6
Issues in Database Construction: A Research Experience for Undergraduates 5
On the Difference Between Showing and Exhibiting: Morphosyntax, Morphophonology and
Double-Objects in English 4
Tense Parameters 4
Benjamin Smith Lyman and His Law 4

CREST
Hardest Decisions Part I 6
Hardest Decisions Part II 4
Hardest Decisions Part III 5

Apple sends a spreadsheet each week giving some usable data on our UA on iTunes U site. Here is some info on the report that came today covering the week of December 24-30, 2007.

Apple tracked 7,463 "visitors" to the UA on iTunes U during this week. By comparison, the previous week (12/17-12/23) Apple tracked 7,479. That's 7,463 for the week between Christmas and New Year's which could indicate that iTunes U is a known resource to the invisible Internet community.

I was interested in seeing that tracks from the Spring 2006 Faculty Fellows series were downloaded. For instance, Oscar Martinez lecture, "Why Is Mexico Poorer Than the United States?" was downloaded six times; William Broussard's "Facing the Facebook Phenomenon: The Impact of Cyber Communities" four times; several of the lectures from the COS Evolution and Global Climate Changes series were similarly downloaded. These stats count either individual track downloads off a series' main page or via a new subscription.

If you go to the iTunes U main page, you'll see that the COS Globabl Climate Change Lecture Series is one of six series that Apple is featuring on the main page under the feature "A Changing World." We're in good company, too, with an NPR series, another from Yale, one from Duke Law, one from Stanford, and one from American Public Media.

Here is a copy of the download count spreadsheet, if you want to browse through it. Let me know if you have any questions. I can be emailed at stuartg@email.arizona.edu.

It's been a busy few days for populating our UA on iTunes U. As usual, LTC's media services folks are cranking out a lot of the content.

Visit What's New on UA on iTunes U -- November 2007 for more on what has been added the past few weeks. Totally new this month are Career Services, Linguistics Lectures, and two new sections for the College of Law.

(Follow the links to open the respective iTunes U pages)

Topping the list of new additions is President Shelton's State of the University Address that you will find available in Wildcatcasts.

Career Services has two series, Quiz Mz. Liz and This Week @ Career Services

The Department of Linguistics' Linguistics Lectures brings a series of lectures about the study of language and linguistics, in which a variety of internationally known scholars are invited to participate.

College of Law's three sections are its Lecture Series, which has seven new tracks from its October 26th Program on Economics, Law, and the Environment Symposium; Court Visits at Arizona Law featuring visits from the Arizona Court of Appeals, the Arizona Supreme Court, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals; and guest lectures for the Law Criminal Justice & Security Program. I will add two more tracks for the LCJ&SP series next week.

The newest addition to UA on iTunes U is the UA Department of Linguistics, featuring Linguistics Lectures. Follow this link to the Linguistics Lectures main page on iTunes U.

Description: The Department of Linguistics offers a series of lectures about the study of language and linguistics, in which a variety of internationally known scholars are invited to participate. These talks, which are open to the entire university community, feature in-depth discussion and state-of-the-art analysis of various topics in linguistics - including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, language endangerment and preservation, language acquisition, and more.

Each week I receive a spreadsheet from Apple that details usage information for the UA's iTunes U site. If you want to take a look at the most recent information, download the spreadsheet and read the two pages I put together from the Administrator's guide explaining what the categories that Apple tracks mean.

Here's a brief look from the report received today for the week of October 21-October 28. BTW, the Apple contact for iTunes says that the date of the report, in this case October 28th, indicates the week ending October 28th.

The Summary sheet gives an overview of the past four weeks. For example,
DownloadTracks 10/28:638 10/21:451 10/14:893 10/07:1024

iTunes tracked 6,838 users that logged in during this week to our site during this week. (week ending October 21st was 6,723) iTunes U does not use cookies, so each time a user visits, it is considered a new visit. I interpret this as a count to how many times anyone went to our main page or directly to one of the individual pages within the site.

There were a total of 638 tracks downloads during this week. The Tracks spreadsheet page lists each track that was downloaded and how many times an individual track was downloaded. For Apple, tracks includes each time a track (AKA podcast episode) was downloaded either as part of a podcast subscription or singly off that track's main page. BTW, I have the impression Apple has a corporate strategy that decrements the use of the word podcast in favor of the word track. Maybe Blackboard has filed a patent for the word podcast? ;>)

I'm still pretty foggy on how browse stats are collected. According to the Admin guide, the "browse sheet lists all the iTunes U pages users viewed that week." If this week's report indicates a total of 37 browses to a dozen different pages, where did the rest of those 6,838 visitors go? If you can clear this up for me, please email me at stuartg@email.arizona.edu. Maybe it's one of those things I'm looking to closely at to make sense of?

What else? Keeping getting the word out!

This week Jim Austin sent out a 3D Memo and news release to update the campus about UA on iTunes U. Always a good idea to keep drawing attention to it. The 3D went out on Tuesday and resulted in new contacts. It shows that you have keep promoting and marketing these services.

So, here's a look at what's happening with UA on iTunes U this week.

The UA Bookstore hosts numerous events throughout the semester. For example, this week the Bookstore has a cycling themed event with a local author, some guest speakers from Sabino Cycling and they are capping it off by giving away two Trek Beach Cruisers. Another Bookstore event is a Palestinian author talking about her book and a Day of the Dead celebration honoring Professor Lanin Gyurko (Spanish & Portuguese Dept) with Mariachi Mixteca, a Day of the Dead Altar, and speacial breads provided by La Estrella Bakery. I'll be meeting tomorrow with a Bookstore staff member about getting a podcast series going that captures these sorts of events -- I think it will have broad interest.

Jim got an email from someone in the Critical Response and Emergency Systems Training (CREST) program. CREST doctors provide emergency preparedness training to doctors, nurses, EMTs and other health professionals. In addition to in-person training, CREST has videos of the doctors' lectures on a variety of preparedness topics. One of CREST's videos, a bioethics video called "The Most Difficult Healthcare Decisions: Resource Allocation in Crises," has received a great deal of interest both in and outside of the medical community and the program they would like it in iTunes U. iTunes U is a natural step for programs like CREST. There's an opportunity to leverage an existing investment in creating instructional and informational videos. They just need to be encoded for iTunes (easy for me to say) and uploaded to iTunes U.

Unveiled in October, iTunes U's Beyond Campus features educational materials from sources other than colleges and universities. As of November 1st, Beyond Campus includes Smithsonian Global Sound, KQED, Little Kids Rock, American Public Media, the Museum of Modern Art, and Oyez - Supreme Court Media.

I have been poking around and am truly impressed by the content. For example, I went into Oyez - Supreme Court Media and downloaded "Bush v. Gore (Oral Argument), Part 1 of 4." The Oyez Project took the audio, added images to it and embedded links within the images.

This is done using Apple's GarageBand, an application that comes bundled on Macs in the iLife Suite. I've been using it with most of the podcasts for my classes the past couple years. You can pause the track, click the embedded link, and your browser is fired up and retrieves that webpage. Talk about "adding value."

I also went into American Public Media and explored the History section. There are over 100 tracks for the subjects: "Religious Roots of American Democracy," "The President Calling," "History: Days of Infamy, Daily Life," "Civil Rights: Voices of a Movement," and three others. If you drill deeper, you find audio/video and downloadable transcripts (PDFs). Some resources include suggestions for discussion points to support classroom use of the programs. By the way, if you're a fan of Garrison Keilor, his "The Writer's Almanac" is included.

Go to iTunes U and scroll down past the list of Universities. You'll see Beyond Campus just below the last university (today that is Yale).

With the excitement around Bruce Springsteen's a new CD coming out, you might have missed our news that the UA is now listed on the iTunes U list of participating institutions. This is great because it makes finding UA on iTunes U simple. Of course, you can still go to our iTunes U access page and click the button.

In the last couple weeks we have added tracks for the College of Law, UA Foundation, Artists Series, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and UA Museum of Art. We have a few tracks in the hopper right now too. I should have several new ones added by early next week.

I started adding information on what's new to a page called, you guessed it, What's New on UA on iTunes U and am managing it monthly. As this is early October, the October page includes tracks added this week. view September's What's New page.

While we're working on getting the authentication piece and webservices working for UA on iTunes U, I have to upload everyone's new tracks. This is not a big deal because I just have to start the upload process and it chugs away on its own. The good part is that I watch them and our two most recent additions are terrific. I highly recommend that you watch them too. Here's a little info on them.

This semester's first Art and Identity lecture featured Franco Mondini-Ruiz talking about his life and his art. Certainly one of the most entertaining and energized speakers the Artists Series has invited to present to UA students and staff. If you follow this link, it should open your iTunes software to the Art and Identity podcast series in our UA on iTunes U "store." Download the track for "Franco Mondini-Ruiz: The Story of My Work." Here's a little bit about Mondini-Ruiz I found on the Web:

"Franco Mondini-Ruiz is a native of San Antonio, Texas, who ives and works in New York. He is the son of an Italian father and a Mexican mother who grew up in San Antonio, Mr. Mondini-Ruiz gave up a law career to become a full-time artist in 1995. His 2005 book, High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales, "illustrates the meanings behind and within his visual works with 56 often-hilarious stories by the artist that illuminate the cultural divides and bonds that he faced and created during his Tex-Mex childhood. Each story is accompanied by an image of one of Mondini-Ruiz's installations, and this pairing, along with sparkling original text from author Sandra Cisneros, creates an entertaining book with broad cultural, artistic, and linguistic appeal."

UA on iTunes U has been up for two weeks now – here’s an update on where we’re at.

We have over 130 episodes within 15 podcast series. Because we already had developed excellent podcasts over the previous 1-2 years, we could hit the ground running (iTunes U's virtual ground). For example, the College of Science’s Global Climate Change and Evolution lecture series, the Faculty Fellows Speakers Series, and Art & Identity. I think we will find a lot of interest from beyond the UA once we get on the iTunes U list.

BTW, being on iTunes U is an excellent example way that the UA fulfills its mission to serve the community. If you talk with people on campus who are considering podcasting, be sure to mention this. It's great visibility and I'm sure our alumni will be happy to see us in the iTunes U Store.

This week the College of Engineering provided 18 videos for a podcast series featuring the College’s programs, students and faculty. I recommend this podcast series to everyone who has contact with departments, programs and colleges at the UA. It’s a terrific marketing tool.

We also began a podcast series for the Phoenix Mars Scout Mission with 6 episodes. Phoenix staff members have a plan to add more podcasts up to day of Scout's landing on Mars. Then they expect to do one a day (I think for at least the first week).