Mark Frydenberg

A paper that I wrote with John Miko last year entitled First on the List:  Search Engine Contests as Authentic Learning, and presented at CELDA 2010 in Romania was published recently in Towards Learning and Instruction in Web 3.0:  Advances in Cognitive and Educational Psychology, a volume edited by Pedro Isaias, Dirk Ifenthaler, Kinshuk, Sampson, J. Michael G. Spector and J. Michael Spector and published by SpringerLink.

The abstract follows.

Abstract
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) describes a set of techniques applied to a Web site over time so it achieves a desirable position with a search engine’s rankings. SEO is an important strategy for organizations and individuals in order to promote their brands online. This paper describes an online learning activity that mimics a popular real-world event known as an SEO Contest. SEO Contest participants make use of a variety of techniques in order to compete for the top position in a search engine’s results when searching for a specified word or phrase. Results from this study show that teachers can leverage an SEO Contest as an authentic learning environment to effectively develop college students’ competence in implementing SEO techniques.

We had an open house last week in the CIS Sandbox. Lots of people came by to check out the space, and the demos that our students were offering, sharing their special projects at work or in their CIS courses. Here are some photos from the event.

A map of student demos after the jump.
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I learned today that Google Lookup is going away at the end of the month. Google Squared is gone too. Both are related to the phasing out of Google Labs applications.  I wrote about both of these technologies in Chapter 6 of my Web 2.0 Concepts and Applications book as great examples of APIs and the Semantic Web.

My favorite demo to do with GoogleLookup was to enter the name of a US President in cell B2 of a Google Spreadsheet, press the CTRL key and drag it down a bunch of rows… using Google Sets  to generate the names of several other famous Americans (Ben Franklin makes the list, and he was never a president.) Then the formula =GoogleLookup(B2, “place of birth”) entered in cell A2 returned the birth places of

each.   This sets up the values to easily plot on a map.

More screenshots after the jump.

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Pat Sendall, Anthony Serapiglia, and I are presenting on Social Media: Beyond Facebook and Twitter at a panel at ISECON 2011.

Earlier at ISECON I presented a paper on The Silver Lining: A Teaching Case Using Google Docs to teach Cloud Computing Concepts.

Slides and a Mind Map on Social Media and Web 2.0 Tools after the jump.
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The Bentley Newsroom wrote a short article published todayannouncing to the campus community that we’re open.

Campus Technology interviewed me about the technology, online, and collaborative aspects of the Sandbox in an interview that appeared on Nov. 2, 2011.

Lots going on that students are doing in the Sandbox these days. In addition to helping students with their classes, we’re offering a workshop with Microsoft on xbox development, and one next week on phone development. There’s a logo contest (the winner gets an ipod) and lots of other good information!

I’m speaking on Tuesday along with Chris Hallberg from Microsoft at the Bentley Business Networks alumni event. The theme for the evening is “Business Transformation:  The Impact of Cloud Computing.”

My talk shares some research about what Bentley sutdents know about the Cloud, and then I will share a cool demo of data from the Azure DataMarket, that I plot on a Bing map.  Here are my slides.

I’m leading a workshop at ISECON 2011 in Wilmington  on Creating Windows Mobile Phone Apps.  The workshop will be held on Friday, November 4, from 9:30 am to 11:55 a.m.  This post is primarily intended for participants, as it contains instructions on what to bring, read, download, sign up for, and do to prior to the workshop.

Learn how to create mobile applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform using Visual Basic and C# in just a few hours. By the end of this workshop, you will create and customize a phone app template developed by the presenter that combines information from your school’s Web site, RSS feeds, and other online sources to create a phone app for your school. Best of all, you don’t need to write a single line of source code to do this! You will also learn how to submit your apps to the Microsoft Marketplace. For those with some programming experience, we will review application code to interact with RSS feeds, display maps, and invoke Web services. We will also introduce Silverlight markup for designing a mobile application’s user interface. For those with no programming experience, we will also present web-based development tools to create mobile applications on iPhone, Droid, and Windows Phone 7 platforms.

Details about software and setup after the jump.
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Check out the latest list of Web 2.0 collaboration tools in this month’s Campus Technology magazine.  I was one of the “self-confessed web 2.0 junkies” interviewed for the article. The others were:

Matt Brinton

Matt Brinton is the interim assistant director of student activities at Metropolitan State College of Denver, as well as the NASPA Region IV-W technology knowledge community representative.

Kimberly LaPrairie
Kimberly LaPrairie is the coordinator of the Master of Education in Instructional Technology program at Sam Houston State University (TX), and an assistant professor in curriculum and instruction. She uses numerous web 2.0 tools in her courses, most of which are completely online.

Alexandra Pickett
Alexandra Pickett is the associate director of the award-winning SUNY Learning Network, the asynchronous learning network for the State University of New York. She also teaches Introduction to Online Teaching in the online CDIT master’s program at the University at Albany (NY).

This year’s batch of collaboration tools includes amplify, audioboo, dropbox, eventbrite,  factual, glogster, join.me, jumpscan, pbworks, quora, voki, and zamzar.  How many do you use in your class?

In June, I wrote about the tutoring facility we started remodelling over the summer, and posted a photo of what it looked like before we started.

Our grand opening is next week. Here’s something I wrote about our hopes for the new CIS Learning and Technology Sandbox.

I was asked to write about why we created the Sandbox, its goals and purposes, how students will be using it, and what other universities have similar facilities. As we prepare for our grand opening on Monday, September 26, here’s some insights into what we were thinking.

The CIS Learning and Technology Sandbox is the newly remodeled and re-envisioned “CIS Lab” located in Smith 234.

The term “Sandbox” in industry refers to an environment for experimentation and trying new things. That’s our vision – to create an inviting, collaborative space for exploring and learning new technologies, and to support student learning for our courses, in ways that resonate with today’s digital students.

The Sandbox marks a formal transition from the individualized “computer lab” layout with computers around the perimeter of the room and students facing the walls, popular in the design of computer labs of the 1980’s and 1990s, to a more informal space where learning takes place around small tables or in a lounge setting.

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I’m presenting today at NERCOMP’s WordPress in the Liberal Arts workshop in Norwood, MA organized by Baynard Bailey of Vassar College. My topic is “Teaching and Learning with WordPress” and more generally, blogging in the classroom.

Here’s my presentation.