Listen in here.

The article begins:

In today’s world of near-ubiquitous connectivity, in which ordinary people have almost instantaneous access to unlimited stores of information and the ability to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime, what does it mean to be an effective citizen? What skills and knowledge do our students need to participate fully in a world transformed by technology? What role should our schools play in developing effective digital citizens?

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.

Shortly after we opened the CIS Sandbox last fall, Caleb Cochran from the Bentley Observer asked if we could do a photoshoot of the CIS Sandbox to give people a sense of our new space. The panoramic result above appears in the Winter 2012 Bentley Observer magazine.

The photo shoot was scheduled just before Thanksgiving, so it was quiet in the Sandbox that day, as many students had already made plans to go home for the holiday. We mustered up a few students to help out with the photo shoot.
A few photos of how this shot was captured, and a video tour of the
CIS Sandbox featuring Matt Somma and Dylan Sumiskum, after the jump.

Photographer prepares for photo shoot.

Matt and Dylan recorded a video tour to accompany the photo spread.

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.

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.

A map of student demos after the jump.

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.

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.

This mindmap is on Web 2.0 tools.

Here are the slides for the Cloud Computing paper.

As Cloud Computing becomes an increasingly important technology strategy and solution for businesses, it is important for today’s students to be aware of the various services that the Cloud offers. While many first-year college students have heard of the term Cloud Computing and used Google Docs, a popular web-based office suite of applications for collaboration, their knowledge of how the Cloud is used in a business environment is limited. This paper describes an introductory lesson that builds on student familiarity with Google Docs to illustrate the concepts of Infrastructure, Software, Data, and Platform as a Service. The paper concludes with student reflections on their learning from this lesson based on anecdotal and survey data.