Recently in Updates Category

Last summer's Taskforce on Undergraduate Education recommended that these departments/staff - University Teaching Center, Learning Technology Center, Director of Assessment, Transfer Curriculum and Articulation - form a new unit called the Office of Instruction and Assessment. Monday, November 16, 2009, marked the first day of our new unit.

Members of the Learning Technologies Center are currently in a few locations at this time awaiting our link in the chain of organizational change to open space for us all in the Manuel Pacheco Integrated Learning Center (ILC) area. Professor Debra Tomanek, The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is the new Vice Provost for OIA.

Report and Recommendations from the Taskforce on Undergraduate Education, Gail D. Burd, Ph.D.,
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost,
July 26, 2009

This morning I met with Sue Kroeger, Director of the UA's Disability Resource Center, and Carol Funckes, DRC's Associate Director. The meeting was a follow-up to Carol's message to the campus community about the new service DRC was providing for adding captions to videos. Over years we've wanted to do much much more with adding captions to our videos but the costs were prohibitive. Heather liked the voice-to-text capabilities in more recent version of Virage, a product we bought around ten years that synchronizes the indexing and encoding of streamable media and content, and are woefully many versions behind. Unfortunately, a proposal to fund the requisite upgrade and licensing was not approved. And vendors who do captioning charge $15 a finished minute. The videos we've added captions to in the past have been enormously labor-intensive and time-consuming and required working from a transcript.

DRC has contracted with Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) whereby we can send videos and expect only a 3-day turnaround time for videos without transcripts. If we have transcripts, it may only take a couple hours. This is impressive and a tremendous service to the campus community. At this time, DRC is putting an implementation plan together. I'm going to be looking at the most viewed videos that we have on the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U. DRC will be meeting with other units on campus that create videos: Arizona Public Media and UA News to name two big-time providers.

Most recently, LTC's Media Services added captions to the UA's Arizona Days Arizona Nights marketing video. Here's a screenshot but follow this link to view the video with captions embedded in it.

It was good being off for nearly two weeks. Over the break I made a lot of progress in learning how to rip a DVD and end up with a MPEG4 file to use in iTunes U podcasts. It took a lot of trial and error and involved: using HandBreak to convert the DVD to an AVI file that I could open in QuickTime Pro and export to a QT movie. Then I opened the QT movie in iMovie. Because I had to select particular sections of those videos and delete other parts, it was a tedious process. But once I found where iMovie placed the final version I could open that movie in QT and export it to MPEG4 with H.264 compression.

What I've been able to add are six video tracks to Through Our Parents' Eyes podcast in iTunes U. Pima Community College is capturing lectures given as part of its Community Education Lecture Series and send me DVDs. As a result, we have added some excellent content to Through Our Parents' Eyes. There are videos from January 2008's Promise of Gold Mountain lectures about the experiences of three Chinese American families in Tucson in the video section of our own Promise of Gold Mountain website and also digital story version in the Digital Stories section. The LTC's media services unit converted those and I constructed the digital stories from audio extracted from the videos and keyed that edited audio to pictures from the PowerPoint presentations.

Here are the new tracks added to Through Our Parents' Eyes on iTunes U.

• Buck Ryberg of the Desert Sons performing Cool Water and Man Walks Among Us
• Bill Kalt and Richard Dick's histories of the railroad in Tucson
• Diana Hadley's lecture on 300 years of ranching in Southern Arizona
• Casey Dennis lecture about the Riggs family and its involvement in cattle Ranching in Southern Arizona

Using HandBrake I ripped a DVD from Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs of eleven videos from GIDP's open forum with Provost Hay and added those to the GIDP iTunes U site.

Almost forgot that I also got an email from David Salafsky in Campus Health Service with a dozen new SexTalk MP3 audio files. I brought each into GarageBand, added the branding image and metadata, and uploaded each to the Campus Health Service SexTalk iTunes U site.

Last week more new content was added to to iTunes U and the UA's YouTube Channel.

Physics Colloquium Series [view in iTunes U]

Heather encoded and added the UA branding to nine of the Physics Colloquium DVDs and I set up the site in iTunes and uploaded the videos. More will be added in the coming week as the time-consuming process of encoding and branding is completed. This is excellent content to get out to the public and further enhances the UA's sciences section in iTunes U. Dr. Elliott Cheu, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Physics, wrote: "Thanks so much for pursuing this. We really appreciate it and will continue to work with you on expanding this."

SIROW [view in iTunes U]

Last Tuesday I met with Bridget Ruiz, Associate Research Professor in the University of Arizona's Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW), about adding a video SIROW produced (and staff starred in) about the importance of sleep. The video is produced with students as the intended audience. In addition to creating a SIROW site in the iTunes U's SBS section, I made a featured page for the video in the Students section. Heather re-encoded it because the version provided skipped on a number of PCs due to the bit rate used when the video was created. The new version works nicely and is available in iTunes U and also YouTube.

Dr. Andrew Weil [view in iTunes U]

We also got a video up in iTunes U of Dr. Weil's talk at the November 20th WellU program. Since Dr. Weil didn't use any visuals, I opened the video in QT Pro, converted it to a WAV audio file, brought that into Audacity, edited out the first several minutes of introductions and uploaded an MP3 audio version in addition to the video version. Good talk to sync to one's iPod and listen to in the car, while taking a walk, or working out.

Revised Main Page Features

Thurdsday, I revised the UA's main iTunes U main page to feature Dr. Weil, Snooze Fest and Brad Casper's Eller lecture (see Dec. 4 entry).

Coming later today Arizona Wet/Dry

Erin Westfall, a GIS Analyst at the UA's Water Resources Research Center, dropped off a DVD called Arizona Wet/Dry that was produced for the Arizona NEMO project. I used HandBrake to convert it. It was pretty big and Heather showed me a couple things to change that made the file size reasonable. This one will go up on YouTube and I'll set it up as a featured video on iTunes U as well.

E-Learn 2008 was held in Las Vegas, NV, the week of November 17th. It is billed as a "World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education" and the sponsoring organization is Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. The organizers reported that this conference had a record attendance of 1,100 more than 200 more than ever before. Download my report (RTF)

ELearn 2008 report

Last night MT version 4.2 was installed. We expect to see improvement on the system side of things and little on the public side. All looks good at this point.

If you remember Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, hum it to yourself as you read this. If you don't remember Marvin Gaye, dig this video on YouTube.

I find myself writing for the Through Our Parents' Eyes blog and my IRLS 573 professor's blog and feel that I've neglected this blog. Maybe I should be doing trackbacks. In any case, here's a ballpark update on what's happening in my "day job."

The LTC is taking the lead on campus in implementing The UA on iTunes U [banner designed by Maritza Wright] and I've been working on getting it set up for public consumption. Not quite ready to share the URL with you but it ought to be soon. The LTC has led a podcasting initiative on campus for nearly two years now and we have a number of excellent resources. Once iTunes U gets publicized on campus, I think we will find far more involvement from academic and administrative departments and, hopefully, instructors and faculty.

If you're not familiar with iTunes U, fire up your iTunes and click on the link to the Store. Once the Store opens, you'll see a link to iTunes U. If it's new to you, I guarantee you that you'll want to spend a good bit of time in there. Duke, Berkeley and Stanford have robust sites.

While iTunes U has been a big part of the past few weeks, I've been working a good bit on getting new content developed for Through Our Parents' Eyes, particularly the University Neighborhood website. I'm not exaggerating when I write that I've scanned and edited close to 200 images in the past couple weeks. Patricia Stephenson, who is a community member with an amazing collection of photographs and artifacts, has been sharing them with me. I blogged about some of this earlier today. If it sounds interesting, follow this link to the Through Our Parents' Eyes blog entry. I'm building discrete websites and webpages for all these artifacts and feel pretty lucky to have had them fall into my lap.

Patricia has said to me that she's the most cooperative person I've ever worked with and it's true. While she has never surfed the Web and once asked her husband, "what's a Google?" she understands clearly how sharing her photos and artifacts through the Web brings them to students and the community in ways that a book doesn't. She's creating an enormous legacy to Tucson, southern Arizona and the extended Internet community.

IRLS573 is IT in Libraries and we are almost through the fifth of ten weeks. It's a nice, small online class with some good students. I'll have a week once it ends before the fall semester class begins so must get started updating it from the spring semester offering.

I have a long list of Web 2.0 resources I have wanted to play around with, Iwant to draft an article to submit to the Journal of Education in Library and Information Science about how I've been using podcasting in my SIRLS classes the past 2+ years, and am getting requests to support blogs in fall semester (roughly five weeks away!). Of course, most will come the first or second day of fall semester, asking for 25 individual student blogs and wanting them yesterday. I'm sure you know the drill.

Between work projects, good wine, good friends, and good cigars, life is pretty good.