Mark Frydenberg

I was teaching about Cloud Computing in IT 101 – or maybe I should say my students were teaching about Cloud Computing in IT 101.  I posted a slide deck up on VoiceThread, and asked them to read enough about the topics that they could add two comments to the slides.  Together, they would come up with the lecture.   They had to watch the collaboratively constructed lecture before class, and then in class, we talked more about some of their comments, clarifying buzzwords they might have used, or discussing questions that arose as a result of their readings and presentations.

Listen in here.

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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Bill VanderClock and I spent the day making a 5 minute video describing the four IT101 options available to incoming freshmen at Bentley. The video will be played at orientation five different times. I wonder if it would have been easier to give the presentation in person. Lucky for me, we didn’t save the blunders.

Ever since the day when my flash drive failed, I’ve become a big Dropbox fan.  Dropbox is a cloud storage application that automatically synchronizes files on your computer to the cloud, and other computers on which you’ve installed the Dropbox application. Files inyour My Dropbox folder under My Documents are automatically synchronized. It just works.

There’s also a phone app so you can look at your files on your smart phone. Dropbox starts you off with 2G of storage, and you can earn more for free by promoting Dropbox on Facebook, Twitter, and with your friends.

I read this  article on Lifehacker describing ways to get more free space on Dropbox. I knew that if you refer a friend who installs Dropbox, you and your friend each get 250 MB of additional storage space for free. I thought I was good, using Dropbox for about two years now, I managed to accumulate 8.25 GB of storage.  I referred a new friend yesterday, and received confirmation of my increase in storage space.

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Check out my interview in the May/June 2011 issue of  BizEd Magazine on using Twitter in the business education classroom.  It followed a presentation I gave on the topic at last year’s Cengage / Course Technology Conference.

The Vanguard, Bentley’s student newspaper, has a story this week about how some of my students volunteered to work with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation of New England to record their annual research briefing event.

Lauren Shields, public outreach manager for JDRF New England, found me five years ago through an article in the Bentley Observer about my IT 101 class. Her husband is a Bentley alumnus, and she was reading about how my class at the time was learning to create podcasts.  She wondered if we might help JDRF podcast the event.  The idea of podcasting was very new then, and I was teaching students to make podcasts in my Technology Intensive IT101 class.  We have been doing it ever since.

The first few years, we recorded the presentations with audio only, and then posted the presentations online.  More recently, as web and video technology evolved and it became easier to create and share video online, we started recording videos of the presentations, and posting it online along with the presentations. Watch for their videos on the JDRF New England Blog (http://jdrfne.blogspot.com) along with the speaker’s presentations.

While I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, Jim O’Neil and Edwin Guarin from Microsoft spoke to my CS 299 class on Windows Azure and Platform as a Service.  We worked together to develop an assignment for our students to interact with some of the PAAS features of Windows Azure.  Jim walks students through completing the assignment in this video.

I asked my CS299 students to speak about a browser presentation technology in 60 seconds. Here are some of their videos.

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In class today, we were talking about “an internet of things” and how many different devices are now connected to the Internet. One student showed a screen shot from LaundryView.com, which monitors the washing machines and dryers at in the dorms at Bentley.

On my last day in Timisoara, I taught Diana Andone’s Multimedia class at UPT. These students are English speakers and will be working on a collaborative project with my honors IT 101 students, to evaluate multimedia or collaborative software applications and produce a short demo describing the application, and its potential business uses.