The business school at Bentley College offers a mandatory Introduction to Technology from a Business Perspective course for incoming freshmen. For students who do not need the standard introduction to IT concepts and Microsoft Office, they offer special sections. One of those, the "technology intensive" section, is taught by Mark Frydenberg. The course varies from term to term, but Frydenberg is trying to present basic IT concepts through the lens of Web 2.0.
You can review the syllabus, class wiki, and student blogs and contributions at the course Web site, but let me highlight a couple of items.
Freydenberg encourages the students to take control of the course via the class wiki. For example, students are assigned to post and revise class notes on the wiki each week. They are also encouraged to suggest exam questions, with answers and discussion. You can hear Frydenberg discuss their use of the wiki in this two-minute audio excerpt from a longer video interview.
Frydenberg also includes a taste of programming in his class. The emphasis is on algorithmic thinking and programming concepts like input-process-output, object, method, property, parameter, data type, and repetition, selection and sequential execution.
In past semesters, he has used simple VB.NET assignments to illustrate these concepts, but, with his focus on Web 2.0, has switched to Microsoft Popfly. He has developed two simple applications -- a coin toss program and a mashup between Microsoft Virtual Earth and an RSS feed of real estate listings. These not only illustrate the programming concepts he teaches, they illustrate aspects of Web 2.0 -- RSS, a mapping mashup, and easily incorporating an application into a Web page or blog post.
They also illustrate the power of building an application on top of network resources -- the students are surprised by how easy it is to create a complex application -- these Popfly programs are surely more impressive than the temperature conversion programs Freydenberg used when teaching with VB.NET. (This is similar to our contrasting an application developed using an Internet database service with the equivalent ASP.NET application).
Freydenberg demonstrates these applications and discusses his use of them in teaching programming concepts in this video.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Mark Frydenberg -- using a wiki and Popfly
Friday, April 18, 2008
Teaching Internet writing in a recreation and tourism managment course
One of the skills we might consider as part of computer literacy 3.0 is writing for the Internet.
We have also asked whether computer literacy should be spread throughout the curriculum or taught in one or more dedicated core courses
Larry Beck's course Wilderness and the Leisure Experience provides a good example of teaching Internet writing skills as part of a non-dedicated course. Beck provides small groups of students with the rough outline of a report, and they research and write it using a wiki. In doing so, they practice organizing themselves for collaborative writing and learn the mechanics of wiki and image processing software. Beck describes his course here, and you can see examples of student work here.
Beck spends a little time on a simple overview of the mechanics of using the wiki, and the students figure out the rest on their own. Someone in the group can usually help the others with the technology if need be. He gives them general instructions on the report outline and writing process, and requires periodic progress-check meetings with them.
See this presentation for an assessment Beck's experiments. (The writing portion begins with slide 23).
Monday, April 7, 2008
Today's computer literacy 3.0 courses
The following people teach courses that set the stage for computer literacy 3.0. Note that some are upper division or somewhat technical courses, but the material in those courses will be refined and winnowed for presentation in general computer literacy classes. (The first time I taught a computer literacy 2.0 class, it included such things as how to use DOS, 123, and Wordstar, but it was a graduate course -- such topics quickly moved to the undergraduate curriculum).
I include links to the courses and blogs of each professor.
Mark Frydenberg, Bentley College
Michael Wesch, Kansas State UniversityThis list is doubtless incomplete. Please send updates.
My name is Larry Press. I am information systems professor and have seen the application development and delivery platform move from batch processing to the mobile Internet. Each platform demands different IT literacy concepts and skills.
