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.

Here’s my presentation from the NBEA Conference in Boston. I was asked to talk about teaching Cloud Computing. I had some fun writing the description of my session.

Foggy about the Cloud? Clear up your understanding of software, infrastructure, platform, and data as a service in an easy lesson you can teach using familiar Google productivity tools. Learn how the Cloud precipitates from consumer apps to the enterprise. The forecast also calls for a flurry of cool applications to share in your classroom.

Campus Technology‘s February2012 issue includes an article that my ISECON colleagues Pat Sendall and Wendy Ceccucci wrote on the use of smart phones as teaching tools.

Here’s the full article.

Let’s get one thing straight. Smartphones are a permanent feature of college classrooms, whether you like it or not. Most students already have them, and it’s just a matter of time before the rest follow suit. From ordering a late-night pizza to posting pictures on Facebook of their roommates eating it, students rely on their phones for everything.

Yet students’ attachment to these devices is not necessarily a bad thing. Like any internet-connected computer, smartphones can play a valuable–even exciting–role in teaching and learning. What better way to reach students than via a device they treat like their significant other? At the same time, smartphones do have a dark side. They are the ultimate obsession of today’s students–a wonderland of games, friends, apps, and YouTube videos. Does the bored kid in the back row really need such easy diversions? As educators work to come to terms with these devices, the challenge will be to find ways to accentuate the positives while minimizing the distractions.

I’m speaking at the Cengage Chicago and St. Petersburg Forums on the topic “Text, Touch, Swipe, Learn” – showing some cool ways to include cell phones and tablets in your classroom.  The session description:

Students today are constantly on their cell phones—texting, browsing, or updating their Facebook pages. Learn about the difference between native and web-based mobile apps, find out how to turn your class blog or Web site into a mobile app, explore cool phone and tablet apps with which to create learning activities, find out how to build your own phone apps using Windows Mobile Development tools, and web-based platforms that require no coding.  Be prepared to tell us your favorite apps and how you use them in class.

And here are the slides.  What’s missing are the stories that I told about some of these applications.

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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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’ve talked a lot about how I like to use join.me to share my screen or help students by watching what they are doing. One of my students and I were sharing our screens with each other today. This is what happens when I looked at his screen looking at my screen on join.me :