Smartphones: Teaching Tool or Brain Candy?

Fun, Publications, Technology,

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.

 

Inside the Box

CIS Sandbox

Observer Winter 2012

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.

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Text, Touch, Swipe, Learn

Conference, Speaking, Technology

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.

First on the List

Publications,

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.

R.I.P. GoogleLookup

Technology, Web 2.0 Concepts and 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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Sandbox News

Bentley CIS, CIS Sandbox, Quoted,

bentley newsroomcampus technology article

The Bentley Newsroom wrote a short article published todayannouncing to the campus community that we’re open.

Campus Technology interviewed me about the technology, online, and collaborative aspects of the Sandbox in an interview that appeared on Nov. 2, 2011.

Lots going on that students are doing in the Sandbox these days. In addition to helping students with their classes, we’re offering a workshop with Microsoft on xbox development, and one next week on phone development. There’s a logo contest (the winner gets an ipod) and lots of other good information!

ISECON Windows Mobile Phone Development Workshop

Attending, Conference, Speaking, Technology

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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