Recently in UA's YouTube Channel Category

Over the past week, Apple changed the day it sends out usage reports from Monday to Wednesday.

Campus Rec has produced a promo about the 2010 expansion to the Rec Center. It's Coming: The Rec Center 2010 Expansion. A copy is also in the Campus Rec iTunes U section.

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

Dr. William Crist, VP for Health Affairs

UA Scorpion Antivenom Study Featured in NEJM

UMC Opens New Trauma Center and Emergency Department

When the Scorpion Stings

If you've heard my pitch to participate in the UA's YouTube channel, I've mentioned the staggering number of videos viewed that comScore reports from time to time for YouTube. Most recently, as reported in a New York Times article, "YouTube surpassed 10 billion views in a single month in the United States."

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

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

Arizona 4-H Youth Development produced a video that is simply outstanding. If you are the parent of a teenager (or aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, ...) or know a mid- and high-school teacher, show them Mr. Extreme's "The Extremely Extreme Desert."

This video cleverly teaches kids about the plant and animal life in the Arizona Sonoran desert. Topics covered include adaption, biodiversity, invasive and exotic plants, and xeriscaping. The Arizona 4-H Youth Development is out of the University of Arizona's Arizona Cooperative Extension in the College of Ag & Life Sciences.

On September 10th, YouTube added three new features to its Insight analytics tool that add to our understanding of just how our videos are being viewed. The new features are 1) Discovery over time, 2) Views from mobile devices and 3) Views from subscribers.

Here's a screen shot from one of our most viewed videos, Dean Ruiz public lecture, "Earth Evolution: The Formation of Our Planet." [9,733 views]

With Discovery over Time, YouTube engineers changed the Insight graph making it easier for us to see how search, related videos, embeds, and other areas of YouTube drive our viewership. In a nutshell, what they did was take the existing ways viewing videos were tracked - by view count and popularity over time and data on how viewers found our videos.

Something my colleagues and I have discussed many times is making our resources mobile device ready. We are seeing a big jump in the number of devices students are using with wireless access, such as the iPod Touch and smart devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys. YouTube engineers report: "tens of millions of views every day from mobile phones, and since the beginning of the year YouTube uploads from phones have jumped 1700%." In the above screenshot, you can see that Dean Ruiz video has been downloaded and viewed on mobile devices 42 times. This should mean 42 times since YouTube began tracking downloads to mobile devices. BTW, if you've not held an iPod Touch or an iPhone in your own hand, you probably don't realize that they come with access to YouTube conveniently on the homescreen.

The third new analytic,"views from subscribers," is designed to help draw better conclusions about how views lead to subscriptions.

Dr. Elaine Marchello, Veterinary Science and Microbiology

After watching video Dr. Elaine Marchello's August 14th sample lecture in Centennial Hall, I got the idea of starting a new playlist in the UA's YouTube channel called Great Courses Great Teachers.

Remember that our YouTube channel's primary audience are high school students, college undergraduates, parents & family members, and the people of Arizona. Let's show them the great teachers we have. Dr. Marchello has 800 students enrolled in her class, given this semester in the technology-enriched Centennial Hall. The reason she has 800 students enrolling in her course is because she is a dynamic, engaging and highly interesting teacher. Watch the video!

If you know of a department or college that has captured video of its faculty like this, let me know. It is also possible that the LTC could assign its video crew to capture a lecture for our YouTube channel.

The Eller College MPA program is taking great advantage of YouTube to recruit students. Eller has an exellent MBA program and is routinely highly ranked. But is Eller MBA sitting back and waiting for new students come knocking on the door? No! They continue to market the program and market it where prospective students are.

Eller MBA produced short marketing videos about the MBA program. One is an introduction and three others highlight specific programs: full-time, evening and executive. These videos were sent to the LTC as DVDs and our media services crew converted them to MPEG4 with H.264 compression for YouTube. What this also means is that Eller is leveraging its investment in producing the videos. DVDs can be mailed to prospective students, schools and advisors. They can easily be used by recruiters, converted for YouTube and embedded in webpages. BTW, by uploading them as MPEG4 videos, anyone accessing these videos with an iPhone, Touch, or Blackberry (or similar device) downloads a high quality copy.

Here are three that were uploaded to the UA's YouTube Channel today. [fourth added September 14th]

• An Introduction to the Eller College of Management MBA Program
• Eller College of Management: Full-Time MBA
• Eller College Evening MBA Program
• Eller College of Management: Executive MBA

The iPhone OS upgrade is now available. Among the many useful and cool things it provides is acces to iTunes U. For us UA folks, this means mobile access to the approximately 2,000 audio and video tracks in our iTunes U site.

Here is more info.

Mobile Learning and iTunes U: Now download directly to iPhone and iPod Touch and there is a short video on this page showing how to access iTunes U from the iPhone and Touch.

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.

Darwin 200th Birthday Celebration

On Feb. 12, 2009, the University of Arizona's Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department led The Darwin 200th Birthday Celebration. There was a Darwin Look-A-Like contest, wonderful live music performed by Charlie D and his Natural Selections, poetry readings (including an evolutionary poem written by the attendees), and exhibits showcasing research being done in the department. This video is a great example of what we want to get up on the UA's YouTube channel. It features students and educates viewers about E&EB and research conducted in this department.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have four new videos added to the UA's YouTube Channel from the College of Pharmacy.

Clark Lantz, SWEHSC, Describes Pilot Project Grants
Clark Lantz, deputy director of the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center, describes the center's pilot projects program, which awards seed money (up to $40,000 per year to investigators to obtain preliminary data they can use in other grant applications.

Catharine Smith, Pharmacy, Describes Her Pilot Project
Smith, associate professor at the College of Pharmacy, talks about her research involving the role that progesterone plays in the progression of breast cancer, and how she received a pilot project grant to continue her investigation.

Vaillancourt and Brooks Describe Their Pilot Project
Richard Vaillancourt, associate professor at the College of Pharmacy, and Heddwen Brooks, associate professor at the College of Medicine, discuss their joint research interest in how arsenic might play a role in causing diabetes. They also describe how they applied for and received a pilot project grant for their research and give advice to others who are considering applying.

Zhao Chen, Public Health, Describes Her Pilot Project
Zhao Chen, associate professor in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, describes her research in arsenic exposure in women's health, and how she learned about, applied for and received a pilot project grant to further her studies.

Everyday I get at least several emails sent by YouTube advising that someone has subscribed to the UA's channel. I often click the text link to retrieve the new subscribers YouTube page and 9 times out of 10 it's either a porno site, some commercial site, or a site that defies description. People notify you of their subscription just to get you to look at their YouTube channel.

Once in a while I will see one that seems to be legitimate. Today, the third subscription notice (it is only 08:55 after all) is from someone in S. Korea who lists his/her age as 20 years old. There is no content but what this person is using YouTube for is to track different US colleges. Perhaps this person is interested in US universities with English as a Second Language programs and found the UA CESL's videos on YouTube. Perhaps he/she is looking for excellent science programs. In any case, he/she is examining the UA through the videos we have on our channel.

Here are some screenshots to step you through what I've seen.

Screenshot of YouTube user's channel homepage

Screenshot of this users's recent subscriptions. Note the other schools he/she has subscribed to

Expanded view of all his/her subscriptions

click image for larger version

YouTube has a site within YouTube that has a directory of "university enhanced channels." Found this in a chat session of an Educause ELI Webinar. Why YouTube doesn't announce to us is a head scratcher.

Anyway, you can find a directory, list of most subscribed and most viewed here.

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.

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]

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."

Here's another good use of our YouTube channel. Among the cuts in the State's proposed budget cuts is the Poison Center. Karin Lorentzen, Assistant Director of Communications at the UA College of Pharmacy, was emailed on Friday afternoon about adding video of an Access Tucson interview discussing the Center. Vicki Evans interviewed Jude McNally for Access Tucson. McNally is Managing Director of the Arizona Poison & Drug Information Center. Also participating was Liz Barta, Poison Education Prevention Specialist. The interview also served as an opportunity to publicize the Alliance to Save the Poison Information Center blog.

The UA's Writing Program sent over two DVDs with four videos that were produced in the spring of 2007. LTC's Media Services converted/encoded these videos and I uploaded them yesterday to YouTube. I created a new playlist for them: "First Year Composition: Orientation Videos for ENGL 101, 101" Drew Kopp, a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric, Composition & Teaching English, provided the titles and descriptions. You can view these directly at: ENGL 101 Orientation Video,
ENGL 101+ Orientation Video
Honors Composition Orientation Video, and The Southern Arizona Writing Project. I think these videos are also appropriate for the UA's iTunes U site and hope the program will agree.

Another new video is "Brad Casper: Leaving the Comfort Zone." This was a lecture given October 23, 2008, for the Eller College of Management Distinguished Speaker Series. Eller has had Media Services editing/encoding the Distinguished Speaker Series videos for some time and we have a lot of them on YouTube and on iTunes U. Great content and they promote the MBA program very well.

Will Sikes is a junior and plant science major is in Adaptive Athletics and competes in Men's Wheelchair Basketball. Will's video is the first in a series the LTC is doing on Adaptive Athletics. We hope to have at least one video for each sport. Hat's off to Tony and Luis Carlos for the excellent work that they did on these and the Peace Corps video in the next para.

"Amanda Kucich: Peace Corps Samoa Islands 2003-2005" is our latest video for the UA's Peace Corps Fellows program. BTW, one of the important reasons for campus departments to participate on the UA's YouTube Channel is to reach college-bound undergrads and undergrads looking at grad schools. On December 2nd, Georgia Ehlers, coordinator of internships and community engagement at the Graduate College, wrote: "In case you are wondering...the UA is the top recruiting school for Peace corps in our western region....I expect the you tubes help!"

Georgia Ehlers, who directs the UA's Peace Corps Fellows program for the Graduate College (among other things) wrote on Friday that she has been asked to speak on our You Tube and other social networking efforts this week at the Peace Corps Fellows Coordinator's meeting. Georgia noted that for our seven posted videos have had over 5000 views. I emailed Georgia some YouTube Insight screenshots and explanations of what they mean for Beau and Brooke's videos.

It leads me to note that if you have videos on the UA's YouTube channel, feel free to contact me about getting you Insight stats. Insight is the name of the analytics that YouTube provides to each of our videos. Not all of it is useful (or of any use for that matter) I find most useful the ability to see what search terms someone entered to retrieve a given video. Next to that, the anecdotal information we get showing which U.S. states and which foreign countries viewers were located in when viewing the video is interesting and in some circumstances potentially useful. Click the following image to retrieve a version that is 1016 pixels wide.

Arizona Student Unions is a YouTube channel that Office Automation Specialist (gotta love those UA HR job titles) Stephanie Cunningham has developed. Stephanie is producing the video and managing the YouTube channel. She's also uploading videos to Becoming a Wildcat on the UA's iTunes U site.

Yesterday around 5 p.m. - time is of interest as you'll see - Magan Alfred, Assistant Director for Marketing & Communications at the UA's Student Affairs, emailed that ASUA's Tommy Bruce video has gone viral. Magan wrote: "As of this moment, it's received 6,752 hits." Roughly 19 hours later it is up to 8,029. It's so big it's gotten the attention of a blogger. Is this due to its popularity among UA students, Tommy Bruce's Internet cult following, or could it be part of a UA student initiative to push it's numbers up on YouTube. YouTube features videos that it has tracked as the most viewed. BTW, it's not getting that much attention on iTunes U. It only had one download according to the stats for August 24 -30. I'll check on Monday to see if that's changed this week.

I've embedded the code below but you should really watch it on YouTube and help push those stats up!

I sent the following to the UA's Journalism department and to the student newspaper's editor. Seems like there must be more students who will be interested in particpating so I'm writing an entry. Pass this information on to anyone you think might be interested. BTW, if you're at the UA, alert others to OSCR's Gear to Go.

Scott Cason, the UA's Director of Marketing in Enrollment Management, sent over two videos that his office produced. One is a two and half minute trailer of a 17 minute video. These are really slick and highlight student life at the UA in a way that I don't think any previous videos have realized. Watch the trailer below and try to make time to watch the full version of Arizona Days Arizona Nights. Arizona Days Arizona Nights is the video that you'll want to share with family members of prospective students. Here's the trailer.

UA's External Relations has produced a new video feature the UA that we are using for the "featured video" on our UA YouTube channel. I think it is outstanding. Check it out here, or go to our YouTube channel. BTW, this is the kind of video you see at halftime during PAC 10 football games.

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.

Announced today on both Google's blog and YouTube's blog is: "Today we've added some new features to Insight. One is a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience."

I've been looking at the data for about a dozen of the UA's videos and can report that more times than not, "no viewing data is available for this video." When there is data, it's been 100% for a particular demographic. For instance, Scott Well's Race Track Organization Structure has been viewed 32 times since it was added on May 8th. Here is a screen shot of when the Demographics tab is selected for this video. Note that it shows 100% Female.

According to the YouTube blog entry, the data tells us that 100% of the viewers were female in the age range of 0-18. This is determined by YouTube tracking the personal information attached to the individual(s) viewing the vdieo. When you create your own page you enter personal information. I haven't been able to tell how many viewers this data is said to represent. Maybe there was one person who fit that criteria and YouTube could not track the rest of the views. I'm hoping that this feature is just too new to provide useful. Time will tell.

"I have shared these with parents of freshmen to be, and they love them!" These are the words of Keith Rocci, Advising Specialist in the College of Education.

One of the themes that I've been exploring related to our UA YouTube channel, has been how these resources can help those parents who are involved in a student's college selection process. With news of campus tragedies being all too familiar, many parents are evaluating prospective universities around perceived safety issues. In the September 2006 University Business article "Helicopter Parents Take Flight in College Recruitment Process," results of a study indicated that since "the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, parents understandably were fearful about their teens traveling long distances to college, especially when travel involved flying. A spike in parent concerns about safety in an earlier study reflected those fears." With the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois in the past 12 months, educations might expect parental safety concerns to become renewed or even elevated. At our own campus, none of us forget the murders in College of Nursing several years ago.

In shaping our use of the UA's YouTube channel my primary vision has been to feature videos that present the UA in a positive way to prospective students. By featuring videos of current students talking about their experiences - academic, cultural and social - we can do much in leading a high school student to a favorable impression of the UA. It appears that our YouTube channel also has the potential to win over parents as well. Might be a good time to contact the Parents Association. If anyone has other ideas on promoting our YouTube channel, let me know.

Two excellent videos were added to our UA YouTube channel. One is Mario Thomas, a senior in aerospace engineering, speaking about his experiences over the past several years in the MLK, Jr. Center. This video's title is Mario Thomas: Seeing the MLK Center Flourish. The second video is Shakayla Byrd: Whatever You Need Is Right Here. Shakayla is a freshman who speaks enthusiastically about the Center's resources and services for students. Bruce Smith, African American Student Affairs director, told me that both Mario and Shakayla composed their talks own their own. Two terrific videos promoting the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Center. Check them and email others about them.

Jim Austin pointed me to a a blog entry about about YouTube Insight, a brand new tool from YouTube that enhances our capability to learn who is viewing the videos on the UA's channel. I Googled "Insight" and found an announcement on YouTube's blog Broadcasting Ourselves ;) On March 26th, the YouTube Team posted, "YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool for All Users." "Today we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks." This has the potential to be very useful, unless they all turn to be like the emails I get from YouTube about recent subscribers (hint: porn).

Scott Fiddelke from External Relations sent over the six videos that are part of the Thanks to the UA campaign to add to the UA's YouTube channel. If you visit the UA channel, you'll see them in the videos window on the main page and you'll also find them in a playlist called, aptly, Thanks to the UA.

The theme of the campaign goes:

• "thanks to the UA" we have Ansel Adams collection at CCP
• "thanks to the UA" we have artificial hearts
• "thanks to the UA" we have lunar landings
• "thanks to the UA" we have Pima Cotton, a better kind of cotton for clothing
• "thanks to the UA" we have the mirror lab making the largest telescopes in the world
• "thanks to the UA" we have tree-ring research and the ability to conduct better research global warming and water supply.

Here's something I find interesting -- the number of times the videos up on our UA YouTube channel are viewed. Go to our UA channel on YouTube and in the window displaying thumbnails to the videos, select Most Viewed. This will arrange our (currently) 74 videos in order of the most viewed.

The one with Angelina Cabrera and Antoine Cason has been viewed over 1,700 times. This is the 30 second clip that was up as our main page for only a couple weeks so it's not incrementing whenever someone hits the homepage. Are those pro football coaches searching on Antonine? Two of the most viewed are lectures from COS' Evolution series from 2006. Gary Seitzer's Homonymous Confusion of Planes, 2007 has been viewed a lot more than other videos from the UAMA series.

When I upload a video to YouTube I first have to complete a template that includes a title, a description and keywords. If you're not aware of this, people most likely are finding these videos by searching within YouTube on particular keywords rather than coming to our UA YouTube main page and selecting from the videos window. There's no demographic breakdown on who is viewing these videos. Suffice it to say that it is good to see our videos getting so many hits.

I mentioned before that back on Feb. 20th, Tony shot video of about ten presenters at the 21st Undergraduate Research Forum. Yesterday, Tony got the first five processed and I've added them to a new playlist on the UA's YouTube channel. I really enjoyed seeing these students describe their research projects on the 20th and again on the video. Tony, of course, did a great job editing the video and it is one more reason for these students to feel proud of what they've accomplished.

Check it out on the UA's YouTube channel playlist: Honors College Undergraduate Research Forum.

Last fall, Learning Technologies captured video of a RTIP guest speaker Joe Harper, President and GM of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, and added it as a podcast track in Wildcatcasts. Tuesday morning I met with Denise Pharris, the marketing and graphic design specialist for the College of Ag & Life Sciences' Race Track Industry Program (RTIP). BTW, if you're not familiar with RTIP, here's a synopsis from its website.

The Race Track Industry Program (RTIP) at the University of Arizona is the only program of its kind. We offer two paths based on student interest. The Business Path prepares students for employment in the areas of race track management, regulation and pari-mutuel racing organizations. The Equine Management Path prepares students for employment in areas dealing with racing and breeding animals.

We've made good progress on adding content to the UA's YouTube channel. One reason is that the UA's External Relations is sending over videos produced by UA News' of Award Winning Professors who have been named Regents' Professors and University Distinguished Professors. We're adding the "Edges of Life" lectures to the College of Science Lecture Series playlist and have begun a playlist for Peace Corps Fellows/USA at The UA. As soons as we get the videos from the undergraduate research forum ready, we'll start a new playlist those.

I also started a small website for the UA's YouTube channel that includes an FAQ and a page with links to other universities' YouTube channels. Check these out -- maybe you'll get ideas about how your department, program, or college might participate. Click the link at the beginning of this paragraph or the image atop this entry to visit it.

One thing that bears mention is that uploading videos to our UA YouTube channel has been more problemmatic than anticipated. While YouTube accepts a number of formats, it has not accepted MPEG-4 videos encoded for iTunes U, using the H.264 codec. And it's not processed other MPEG-4 videos that we thought it ought to accept. Heather has been researching this and trying out different approaches. The bottomline is that it has added to the workload, since media services has to encode the videos at least twice for a number of videos - once for iTunes U and once for YouTube.

Tony Gallego and I were at the 21st Annual Undergraduate Research Forum this morning. Tony captured video of about a dozen of the students reviewing their research project and we'll be adding it to the UA's YouTube channel in a couple weeks.

Listening to these incredibly bright young people explain their research findings was a treat. Plus, featuring the videos on our YouTube channel gives this exceptional UA program exposure among high school students and undergraduates. After all, how many universities give undergraduates the opportunity to spend a year conducting research alongside scientists, post docs, and senior faculty. Darn few!

UA News wrote about the event on Feb. 1st, "Research Forum Acknowledges Undergraduate Scholarship."

Back in October, I bought an iPod Touch. If you're not familiar with it, follow the link. I like to describe it as an iPhone without the cell phone. One of the widgets that comes on the Touch is YouTube. So long as you are online via a wireless connection, you can search YouTube and play its videos. What I've noticed is how incredibly sharp the video quality is. More on that in this YouTube video.

Here's a quick update on a couple prospective campus players in the UA's YouTube channel.

I was meeting with Georgia Ehlers in the Graduate College. Georgia is listed as the coordinator of Office of Fellowships, Internships and Community Engagement. She is the UA person who works with the Peace Corps Fellows/USA at The University of Arizona.

She is looking for a good way to communicate and involve 60 fellows and is trying a blog. We were meeting about the blog and talked about the UA's YouTube channel. Georgia immediately saw its potential to promote the program. In fact, within a couple hours, she had outlined what content we could look for in videos of our UA fellows. Sounds great, don't you think? Heather Lares and our LTS media services group will shoot the video (probably do a little producing on the spot) and edit the video for YouTube, and possibly for iTunes U.

From our afternoon UITS meeting in Gallagher Theater, I went to BIO5 to meet with Daphne Gilman, Events Coordinator, Senior, BIO5 Marketing & Communications. BIO5 has a strong outreach mission and Daphne sees the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U as excellent ways to reach out to the public. Check out BIO5's website to understand what this impressive collaboration among UA scientists is accomplishing.

Over the past week I added more videos to the UA’s YouTube channel. http://youtube.com/arizona. It’s taking shape nicely. When you visit the homepage, you’ll see a window showing a selection of the 32 videos we now have up. The most recent are perfect for our YouTube channel and came over from External Relations’ Enrollment Management office. Enrollment Management created a number of short videos featuring undergraduates and alumni. See what you think.

In addition, I started to upload the College of Science’s past lecture series Evolution and Global Climate Change. These have been quite popular, as you know. They’ve been presented to a packed house, like the current Edges of Life series, and have been available as podcasts since first given. Interestingly, one of the four Evolution lectures and all seven of the Global Climate Change lectures failed to upload successfully to YouTube. YouTube has some great technology behind handing the many different video formats it accepts and convents to Flash movies. Heather thinks they might have been encoded for MP4 in a way other than how the other MP4 movies I’ve uploaded successfully and is going to re-encode them according to our most recent standards.

Brett Bendickson, a Web Developer in UITS, dug into YouTube's Help information and provides us with an RSS feed with which to subscribe to the UA's videos. The RSS feed URL is http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/arizona/videos.rss

I set up a feed in Firefox and it works nicely. This first screenshot shows that I pasted the URL into my location bar, hit enter and Firefox opened its "Add Live Bookmark" box letting me select where to add the Live Bookmark.

I chose to add mine to my bookmarks toolbar - see where the arrow is pointing.

And when I click on my Live Bookmark for YouTube : : Videos by ..., you can see that it displays the names of the videos in our UA YouTube enhanced channel (below). If you select one of the videos, it opens Firefox to that page in YouTube.

My thoughts on why YouTube does not feature RSS feeds is that they have developed the resource around subscriptions. If you have your own YouTube page, as millions do, you visit another YouTube page and can subscribe to the videos to your own page. This, in fact, is what I anticipate a lot of alumni and high school and undergraduate students doing with our UA channel.

I am glad to report that following a meeting with External Relations' Kate Jensen, I received approval to go public with the UA's YouTube Enhanced Channel.

YouTube's enhanced University Channel is pretty new and as far as I know there aren't that many sites participating. I've pretty much modeled our site after the way that USC and UC Berkeley have developed their channels. Since I have videos coming in for the UA on iTunes U, I am able to select ones appropriate for our YouTube channel.

Through YouTube the UA can feature campus events and programs that high school and undergraduate students are interested in following. Imagine if you will, that a high school student considering which college to attend is looking for videos about his possible choices. That student can subscribe to our videos on her/his YouTube page simply by clicking the subscribe button.

I am meeting with different folks on campus to discuss creating videos featuring UA students and faculty that would appeal to high school and undergrad students. For instance, today I met with Rafael Meza in the Honors College. The College of Science has an excellent program for research opportunities for undergraduates and Gail Burd and Glenda Gentile in COS are excited about the prospects of creating video for the YouTube channel of UA students talking about their experience. I am going to contact the directors of different cultural centers next - African American, Chicano/Hispano, Asian Pacific, and Native American - with similar proposals.

If you have any suggestions, please come talk with me. Of course, I'll be glad to talk with anyone on campus about the UA's YouTube enhanced channel.