BOF session: Teaching Open Source

Presenters: Heidi Ellis, Sebastian Dziallas, Mel Chua, Karl Wurst

The session is on how to involve students from a wide range of backgrounds in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. The notes of discussion can be found at

http://openetherpad.org/tos-bof-sigcse-2012


Teaching open source link (POSSE):
http://teachingopensource.org

Open source projects can be found at the following links:
http://xcitegroup.org/
http://hfoss.org/
www.ohloh.net
www.sourceforge.net

50 ways to be a FOSSer
http://xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.php?id=f:50ways

Online Collaboration: Classroom Salon

I found this paper very  interesting. The presentation was done by John Barr, Ithaca College and Ananda Gunawardena, Carnegie Mellon. Classroom Salon is an on-line social collaboration tool that allows instructors to create, manage, and analyze social networks (called Salons) to enhance student learning. Students in a Salon can cooperatively create, comment on, and modify documents. Classroom Salon provides tools that allow the instructor to monitor the social networks and gauge both student participation and individual effectiveness.
It is very similar to Facebook, but it has analytic components to allow instructor to see how many comments has been posted by each student.
Link to create your own salon.

http://www.classroomsalon.org/

SIGCSE Supporter session by Microsoft

I am at SIGCSE in Raleigh for next 3 days. Right now, I am sitting is a session on Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone, being presented by Rob Miles from University of Hull, UK. This is a very interesting session. His website is www.robmiles.com . He has published books on Java, C# and Windows Phone programming. They are available for download from
http://www.csharpcourse.com/
Microsoft has presentations setup at their booth on the following:
TouchDevelop
Pex4fun
Project Hawaii
Kinect for Windows
Try F#
.NET Gadgeteer
XNA Game Studio 4.0
Kodu
Windows Phone
Windows 8
Imagine Cup
Academic Search
Windows Azure
DreamSpark

I will try to find about all these products and how I can use them in my courses. As educator, you can join Microsoft portal for educators at
www.microsoft.com/faculty

Microsoft has another session Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching.
- Kinect has 4 microphones.
- You can write Kinect applications from C++ or .NET code.
- Kinect can be used from WPF, XNA also.