Chicano art is not a well-known genre, perhaps becasue the form is usually viewed as political, folklore, too vibrant, unrealistic, and abrupt.

During summer 2012, several UK football players had the opportunity to visit the Lexington Farmers Market for the first time. Each student recorded his impressions of the market, combining words and images collected from market visits.

Demarco Robinson's reflection. Demarco is from Atlanta and plays Wide Receiver for UK.

Bookie Cobbins' reflection. Bookie is from New Orleans and plays Wide Receiver for UK.

Teven Eatmon-Nared's reflection. Teven is from Mansfield, Ohio and plays Offensive Guard for UK.

"Documenting Lexington Farmers Market History," WUKY. February 10, 2012. 

The A&S Podcast team is diligently working on an audio tour of campus! Designed to be smartphone and web-compatible, the tour is run through an app called AudioBoo. It allows you to record stuff wherever you are and share it (much like other audio sharing apps), but it also has a handy geotagging system integrated into its interface. This means we can upload stuff and make sure the file is associated with the right spot on the map! So far we only have a couple of locations on campus up, but we're making good progress and hope to have all of our entries done by K-Week. I wonder if other Colleges at UK will do this, too? It could be a great navigational/informational resource for freshmen, newcomers and visitors!

Some of you may have noticed a new little piece at the end of each podcast listing that looks like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

These little boxes with letters in them are Creative Commons Licenses - meaning that we, as the A&S Podcast team, have decided to indicate clearly what type of copyright we would like to exert over our own work. The "Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike" license means that people may use the podcast for non-commercial purposes (ie, to share for free, for educational purposes, remix for whatever purposes they wish, etc), they must attribute the work to its originator (whoever is listed as the producer for the podcast), and is obligated to share their derivative work under a similar CC license. 

Roughly a year ago, the primordial nebula of A&S administrators, designers, podcasters, videographers, instructional designers, software developers, and help desk support workers was tasked with coming up a name to reidentify and unify our staff. Prospective names came and went. Finally, it was decided - the Hive. As you may have heard from some of our podcasts, the Hive is A&S' newly unified team of both creative and technical services which provides the College with support on web and print media projects, public relations, and computing and information services. We are organized into 13 structured, yet fluid teams. We are a higher education-multimedia-information-technology-powerhouse.

On Friday, before the scorching Memorial Day Weekend, A&S Hive team members Derek Eggers, Amelia Stevens, Carly Germann, Russ Caldwell, and myself made a special visit to TiER 1 Performance Solutions in Covington, KY. Almost immediately, the similarities between the culture and workflow of TiER 1 and the HIVE were easy to spot. The HIVE, a fusion of creative and technical services does everything from designing and leading the online education offered by the College to producing video and audio content for all of A&S. Rooted in instructional design, TiER 1 organizes itself into teams (just like the HIVE) to satisfy the needs of their clients.

It's no secret that technology influences student life. From the ways in which we take in information, retain information, and synthesize information, technology provides a helping hand in each of these processes. I recently came across an awesome infographic from Presta Electronics that maps college students' relationship with technology. I encourage you to look it over. Some of the stats may surprise you, as well as some of the useful apps for education. 

I've hit the more-than-halfway mark for my trip to China this summer, and it's been really great so far! One thing that Dana Rogers (the Hive's photographer) and I got to do was visit Yiwen Chen, our Chinese Social Media Specialist, at her grandma's house in Wenzhou, about five hours south of Shanghai by bullet train.

Dana took some photos (many more to come), but you might want to take a look!

The past few days have been a whirlwind, meeting up with other UK students and faculty and participating (or, in my case, getting audio from) various seminars and group discussions on all sorts of topics relating to cultural exchange and Appalachian art & study in particular. When I return there will be a few podcasts from this event, so stay tuned!

Dear Friends,

As the 2011-12 academic year comes to a close let me thank you for all the incredible work, dedication and commitment you have exhibited throughout the year.  Without a doubt, our faculty and staff rival those at the most prestigious institutions in the country. 

Over the last year we have welcomed and educated a record-number of new students; we have successfully launched a new general education curriculum (UK Core) and a new residential college (Wired); we have made progress on shortening time-to-degree through our online and summer school initiative; we have greatly expanded our international efforts through faculty exchanges, short-courses, new education abroad programs, and our passport to the world initiative (Year of China); among many, many other successes. 

Our faculty and staff have been recognized by countless national organizations and agencies, as well as by the University community.  The following are just a handful of the many successes achieved this year: