Keynote Address: From Computational Thinking to Computational Values

Hal Abelson, MIT received award for outstanding contribution for computer science education. He delivered the keynote on Mar 3, 2012. He has written a book Structure an Interpretation of Computer Programs. Google has Ngram Viewer, it is like a time machine for word play.

Links:
http://books.google.com/ngrams
An article about it appeared on cnet:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20025979-93.html
A research paper Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptise Michel appeared in Science magazine.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644

MIT has made very large number of courses ( 2745 as on date) available free under its OCW program.

MITx is a new online tutoring initiative, it will be launched on Mar 5, 2012.

DSpave@MIT is MIT's institutional repository built to save, share, and search MIT's digital research materials including an increasing number of conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, preprints, technical reports, theses, working papers, and more.

There is a book discussing the issues of copyright of academic work, Who Owns Academic Work ?

BOF session: Teaching with App Inventor for Android

Presenter: Jeff Gray, Univ. of Alabama

App Inventor for Android is a visual blocks language for building mobile apps. Like Scratch, the language’s drag-and-drop blocks interface significantly lowers the barrier to entry. Beginners can immediately build apps that interface with mobile technology (e.g., GPS, Text-to-speech, SMS Texting) and build apps that have a real-world impact. App Inventor has moved to MIT Center for Mobile Learning from Google.

I have used it myself, it took me 30 minutes to create an example app. I did it when it was still hosted at Google App Inventor website.

New link of App Inventor
http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/  This has a lot of useful resources to teach from middle school students to Master level students.

There is a book App Inventor: Create Your Own Android Apps available for sale at amazon.com .

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 2012: Lunch at The Pit Barbecue

I joined Maureen Biggers (Indiana University), Monika Witoslawski (Michigan State), Chunbo Chu (Franklin University) on lunch at The Pit Authentic Barbecue , close to convention center. Surprisingly, I could find many vegetarian entrees. I ordered their barbecue tofu with fried okra and sweet potato fried, enjoyed eating them. It was a lot of food, I could not have finished this whole plate myself. Interestingly, when the plate arrived, tofu looked like chicken, but I was told that it was made out of raw soya, hence texture looked like chicken.
Website of the restaurant:

http://www.thepit-raleigh.com/

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.

Cloud Computing

As per NIST’s draft definition:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”

Cloud Computing is different for different people. For a non-technical user, it is about storing your data on an external source, which is accessible from anywhere, but from a technical perspective, it can be viewed from service models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS): Use of applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS): Deploy consumer-created applications on a cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

What are the essential characteristics of Cloud Computing?

·         On-demand self-service

·         Broad network success

·         Resource pooling

·         Rapid Elasticity

·         Measured Service

What are the deployment models?

·         Private cloud

·         Community cloud

·         Public Cloud

·         Hybrid Cloud

Cloud Computing has evolved from several different technologies and business approaches over a period of time. Some of them are Utility Computing, Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing, Platform Virtualization, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and such.

Cloud Service Examples:

Salesforce.com

Amazon Web services

EC2 commercial services offered by Amazon to small companies

Microsoft Azure

VMware

Google

Open-source Cloud Platforms:

Eucalyptus: http://open.eucalyptus.com/

Nimbus: http://www.nimbusproject.org/

Enomaly: http://www.enomaly.com/

Abiquo: http://abiquo.com/

Xen: http://www.xen.org/

For more information:

http://csrc.nist.gov

Cloud Security: A comprehensive guide to Secure Cloud Computing, Ronald Krutz, Russell Vines, Wiley.