Technology Intensive IT 101 Overview
IT 101 is an introductory technology course at Bentley, a leader in business education located in Waltham, MA. Every first-year student must enroll in this course, which includes topics such as how to use the Internet, maintaining a personal computer, hardware and software, creating and posting web pages, multimedia, spreadsheets, and emerging topics in information technology.
The theme for the current offering of the course is “Learning Information Technology through the Lens of Web 2.0.” In addition to the topics in the standard course, students will actively use (and therefore learn about) blogs and wikis, subscribe to and create original podcasts, collaborate via Skype, monitor RSS feeds, use social networking applications, and learn about tagging and other topics.
Mash-ups are a major component of Web 2.0, but are often difficult to create without any previous programming knowledge. PopFly provides the ability to create mash-ups with little or no programming knowledge, and may motivate students to take additional courses in JavaScript, web-design, and related areas so that they might be able to do even more later on.
The World (Wide Web) is Changing
Classic programming examples teach students to create programs to play simple number-guessing or matching games, or calculate areas of geometric shapes, costs of overtime pay, and convert from one unit of measure to another. The data that students interact with today, however, goes far beyond lengths, widths, and heights of triangles, time and half, and the number of liters in a gallon.
Today’s students interact with images, FaceBook, maps, You Tube, and Google. Their data is much more complex than the sides of a triangle. They are connected everywhere on the Internet, and want people to know what they are doing at every instant. They live in a Web 2.0 world.
The reality is that most students in a business school won’t become programmers. However, as future 21st Century information technology professionals, they will be involved in projects that require them to work with application developers and database designers, and deal with data from several different sources.
Therefore, today’s students need to develop skills in critical and analytical thinking, and traditional concepts related to programming: objects, methods, parameters, “black boxes” (or in PopFly’s case, red), compiling, source code, etc. Today’s students also need to understand why the orange RSS icon that appears on practically every web page today opens the possibility to new business models in a distributed world. They need to know the technology behind the icon.
My hope is that PopFly will empower students to create their own applications that use real data – their data – and share the applications that they create in their online worlds: on their blogs and web sites, wikis and FaceBook pages.
Why PopFly?
It’s new. It’s slick. It’s relevant. It opens the door to understanding software issues that extend beyond programming skills.
I have shared my intentions to incorporate PopFly with the current and former chairs of the Computer Information Systems Department at Bentley. Both were impressed with the ease in which it is possible to create a simple application. They support my use of it in the classroom, and share my excitement about the possibility of using it as a tool to introduce application development concepts within the information technology classroom.
With PopFly, I hope to teach the same basic principles of algorithmic thinking: sequence, selection [via a Filter], repetition [via a Timer] that I have taught previously using a programming language. Its graphical user interface makes the concepts of input, output and processing obvious. The notion of data typing is still relevant.
To have an understanding of how this works, and where the data is coming from, one must have a basic understanding of XML and RSS. While PopFly hides this important aspect from the user [an XML option on the BlockOutputInspector block would be a great teaching tool] there are other ways to examine this data, so students can see where their data originates, and in what format.
I’m hoping students will find that some of the predefined blocks don’t do exactly what they want them to do. This would motivate them to learn to modify existing blocks or create new ones. I would like to learn to develop some simple blocks to format data, or to perform basic calculations, probably of the classic “area of a triangle” variety, using JavaScript. (It’s on my list of things to do…) By looking “inside the box” at the steps required, and understanding that there is source code behind it all, students zoom in one level of abstraction deeper from inputs and outputs to focusing on the steps necessary to solve a smaller problem. This may motivate them to participate in further study.
In addition, PopFly provides a framework for teaching other important areas traditionally found within an introduction to technology course. As many software applications evolve from the desktop to the web-browser, issues related to deployment and maintenance, and installations and upgrades constantly arise. In a Web 2.0 world, O’Reilly says that software applications are constantly in a state of perpetual beta. By creating, modifying, and sharing their own applications with others and in other web applications, students experience first-hand on a small scale these software lifecycle concepts in a distributed environment. No longer does all the data for an application live in one place. The very act of sharing a mash-up requires an understanding of the roles that clients, web servers and the Internet play in the process.
Introducing PopFly in IT 101
I plan to introduce PopFly during the last four or five classes of the semester. I will demo a couple of simple mash-ups, and then discuss many of the underlying concepts presented here. Possible assignments and class exercises include:
· Create a mash-up that displays photographs (from Flickr, another web page, etc.)
· Create a FaceBook mashup (and share it on your FaceBook page).
· Create a Mapping Mash-up using the Geo-Lookup and Virtual Earth blocks.
· Mega-Mash-ups: Create a mash-up that uses four (or more) blocks.
· Share mash-ups by posting them on your blog or web site.
· Create a mash-up using a block that the instructor did not demonstrate in class.
· Create or modify a block (by writing or pasting in supplied JavaScript code) to understand that there is code driving all of this and it’s not magic.
· Have students rate or comment on each other’s mash-ups.
Why Web 2.0 at Bentley?
Bentley is a business institution in Waltham, MA. Its areas of distinction center on arts and sciences, business and technology, ethics and responsibility, and global commerce and culture. Web 2.0 touches all of these areas. As user created content continues to increase on the internet through the forms of blogs, podcasts, videos, it will be even more essential that today’s graduates develop skills in writing, communication and media. The companies that they will start and work for will almost certainly face the challenges that O’Reilly argues redefine “the web as platform” if they are to succeed. The notion of “Data as the next Intel Inside” points to the value of a company’s intellectual property as one of its most important assets.
Using and licensing data effectively and legally, understanding new copyright protocols (such as Creative Commons) will be essential. Bentley students take a business core curriculum. They also major and may minor in a specialized field (including accountancy, marketing, and computer information systems) and also double major in liberal studies. This combination prepares students to develop the skills necessary to make sense of new technologies in an ever-changing business world.