Archive | March, 2010

YouTube EDU one year on

26 Mar

YouTube EDU the repository of lectures, video clips and webcasts from mainly US universities has been with us for a year.

During that time we’ve seen …

  • 10 countries join the service
  • Over 300 institutions adding their videos to the repository
  • 350+ full courses added to YouTube EDU
  • 65,000+ videos and video clips made available
  • Millions of videos viewed

The most popular video is from the late Randy Pausch and is a moving, but funny last lecture.

It’s perhaps worth taking a step back and revisiting some of the issues from our original blog post  looking at the launch of YouTube EDU and see how things have shaped up.

Subject access has improved with a very basic topic based classification of videos, but if your subject is not listed there, then you will still be reliant  on tags on individual videos – so while a search for Economics will yield hundreds of results, you’ll still miss out on videos that have not been correctly tagged and other educational material from organisations that aren’t in the YouTube EDU directory – for example the World Bank.

The most viewed videos page shows that while there may be full length lecture videos from over 350 courses, the shorter form videos appear to be more YouTube friendly – the TL:DR problem finding a new expression in video form. Plus it helps if you are Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs or talking about a hit movie like Watchmen, if you want to get noticed.

However, the YouTube bandwagon keeps on rolling – my own institution the University of Bristol, has launched their YouTube channel recently and there can be clear benefits, such as the Periodic Table of Videos from the University  of Nottingham, that have been viewed millions of times and increased applications to their Department of Chemistry by 40 percent.

… but it looks as though YouTube EDU is here to stay after a pretty impressive debut year.

Intute features more academic Internet resources from YouTube.

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ESRC Festival of Social Science

12 Mar

The ESRC Festival of Social Science is happening from 12-21 March 2010 as part of National Science and Engineering Week.

The 2010 Festival of Social Science features over 130 events happening in 7 regions and in over 40 different cities in the UK.

You can follow what’s happening at the Festival via:

It celebrates some of the country’s leading social science research, giving an exciting opportunity to showcase the valuable work of the UK’s social scientists and demonstrate how their work has an impact on all our lives.

Events are aimed at a range of different audiences, including policy makers, business, the media, the general public and students of all ages. Events come in a variety of formats from traditional lectures and exhibitions to theatrical performances, film screenings, topical debates and even a trip to Second Life.

Intute features more Internet resources from the Economic and Social Research Council about the Social Sciences.

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How does the Internet see you?

1 Mar

Personas asks the question – how does the Internet see you?

Try the Personas search, see it build up a categorisation of how the Internet sees you on the fly and see how that matches your reality.

Personas is a critique of data-mining that demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

Below is a short film showing a Personas search for Intute captured using Screenr – a browser based screencasting tool. A larger version can be seen via the full screen icon or by viewing it from the Screenr website.

This gives a fairly true snapshot of how Intute is described online – with plenty of good descriptions of what we do, some nice reviews from users and a few things you may not have encountered – primarily because it uses Yahoo for the search data rather than Google.

Try a personal name rather than a corporate identity and you may encounter some different results. It was gratifying to see that I was identified as the Economics Editor of Intute on the very first selection – but the categorizations seemed rather bizarre.

It certainly succeeded in getting me thinking about whether data mining is really technologically neutral or just dependent upon how creators of algorithms choose to model the world and which inputs / outputs they use, plus it is a timely reminder of the trail of data we leave online.

While academics may be more concerned about how their identity is represented in traditional academic outputs – see the Mimas / British Library Names project – their online identity may be just as important.

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