Ten years ago, the Bentley Vanguard reported that I started teaching a new class where students bought Pocket PCs instead of textbooks. There were no iPhones or iPads. Today, nearly every student owns a mobile device, and I am an author of their textbook. Who would have predicted?
10 yrs ago, my students used PocketPCs instead of textbooks. Today most have smartphones & I authored their textbook. pic.twitter.com/ZtQlSB9jfU
— Mark Frydenberg (@checkmark) November 4, 2014
CIO Phil Knutel and I share tech tips to be successful students #preparedu @bentleyu http://t.co/rCxNsIutmN
— Mark Frydenberg (@checkmark) June 29, 2014
I happened to be speaking to Mary Grush, Conference Program Chair and editor at Campus Technology Magazine about my presentation last week on Tools for Teaching and Evaluating Big Data at the Cengage Course Technology Conference. She asked if I would be willing say more about the topic, in a Q&A for Campus Technology Magazine’s C-Level View Feature. She sent me the q’s; I sent her some a’s.
The feature explores tools for teaching big data as well as the implications of big data in higher education, and is now online. I need a new picture. 🙂
Here’s a teaser quote:
When Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty first described the Web 2.0 phenomenon back in 2005, one of the characteristics they cited for business models for the next generation of software was “Data as the next Intel Inside.” As companies and their applications moved to the Web, data gave them power. Today, data is at the center of a company’s value: Tweets, searches, and Likes give Twitter, Google, and Facebook information that determines the advertising you see when you use their services and provides revenue from advertisers that keeps these sites available at no cost to users.
I hope to offer a workshop on this topic at the Campus Technology Conference 2013 in Boston this summer.
I was interviewed tonight for five minutes on the radio about the flipped classroom.
Last night I received an email from Todd Smoot, Executive Producer of News and Programming at KCBS Radio 740 in San Francisco. He wrote:
Hi Professor Frydenberg… We saw the article in the Sacramento Bee about the increasing practices of “flipping” in education. We were wondering if you might have a few minutes tomorrow for a brief telephone interview about “flipping” … What it is? How it works? Why it might be a better method of teaching? The interview would be live on the phone with our anchors and last about 5 minutes. The best times for us are 5:20p, 7:30p or 9:30p (all times Eastern).
I sent them my phone number and asked to be on the 9:30 pm broadcast. At 9:30 pm, the phone rang. A producer told me the anchors’ names, Jeff Bell and Patti Reising. 60 seconds later I was on talking with them on the radio. 5 minutes and 4 seconds they brought the conversation to a close. The producer thanked me, and I hung up the phone. A few minutes later, they sent me an email message with the audio file.
Their questions… why flip? how can you tell if students watched the videos? what about the digital divide? Listen in and see what I had to say.
Thanks to KCBS News Radio for the recording, and for permission to share it.
Diana Lambert of the Sacramento Bee contacted me last week because she was writing an article about the flipped classroom phenomenon. She saw my paper that I presented at ISECON in November about Flipping Excel, and wanted to know more. Her article ran in the Sacramento Bee yesterday.
Todd Smoot from KCBS Radio in San Francisco saw the article and invited me to talk with their news anchors about this topic on the radio tomorrow evening, Feb. 20, at 9:30 pm EST. You can listen in at http://cbssf.com .
Bentley provost Mike Page (at right) awarded professors Denise Hanes, Mystica Alexander, Jay Thibodeau, George Fishman, and me Bentley’s Innovation in Teaching Award for 2012 at the faculty meeting this morning.
My application was for the innovative teaching and learning that happens in the CIS Sandbox. It was an unconventional application: Usually these awards are associated with specific courses, and usually the teachers of those courses are actually teaching. In my case, not this time.
The innovative teachers and dedicated learners who made this recognition possible are the CIS Sandbox assistants and students who have embraced the changes we have made, and turned the CIS Sandbox into a place where students gather to teach, talk, tutor, touch, and try technology.
This is my 4th innovation in teaching award at Bentley. I received one in 1999 with Wendy Lucas for a web application we implemented to create personalized course pages that let students check grades online (before the days of Blackboard), in 2005 for introducing Pocket PC’s to IT101, and 2006 for introducing student-created podcasts to the curriculum as a learning tool.
A summary of this year’s application follows the jump.
Continue reading
I have been teaching using the “flipped classroom” model in some of my classes at Bentley, and wrote a preliminary paper about the experience which I presented at ISECON 2012 in New Orleans. The paper received a Meritorious Writing Award .
Bentley’s IMPACT: The Power of Ideas blog, published an essay I wrote about the Flipped Classroom today. Have a read.
The first time I offered a flipped classroom activity, I asked students what they thought of the experience. One student said, “I finished the project. I learned more about Excel than I ever have in my life. To be honest, I hated it … but it sure beat a lecture.”
It was 2004. I was teaching IT 101 using Pocket PC’s. Here Greg Smith, who developed a Pocket PC application called Feeder Reader, spoke with me about teaching using student-created podcasts. This was before the age of iPhones and the mobile revolution.
I stumbled on this video interview we staged at on the roof of a restaurant in Lexington, MA, while looking for something else online.
Campus Technology Magazine profiled the CIS Sandbox in the November 2012 issue with video interviews about how the CIS Sandbox uses collaborative technologies to encourage students to explore careers and other opportunities.
More videos after the jump.
Sometimes I wonder who reads my blog. Recently I received an email message from Jennifer Funk, a writer for EdCetera. She saw a blog post about how we used VoiceThread to create an interactive lecture on cloud computing in IT101 last year, and asked more about it. I told her how we also used VoiceThread in the CIS Sandbox and with my colleagues in Romania. She wrote a blog post, “How a Prof Used 1 Tech Tool to Build 3 Co-Learning Spaces” which appears in the EdCetera blog, a blog about educational technology. Thanks for sharing the story!