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Web 2.0 In Action
Using Mashups to Teach IT Concepts at Bentley College
2/6/2008
The students are first-year students at a business college on their way in most cases to a business degree. So, using Popfly to demonstrate not only the technical concepts around application development, but also the nature of development communities, helps Frydenberg's students understand software development and deployment concepts in a sophisticated manner earlier in their college careers than was possible before.
Frydenberg uses Popfly to help beginning students at Bentley interact with Web 2.0 tools. When students use Popfly to create mashups -- such as geotagged photos of mountains from Flickr mashed up with Virtual Earth data to place the photos of mountains on a map in the countries where they lie -- they see an illustrative example of Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 principle that "Data is the next Intel Inside." Being able to enhance core data sets used by Internet companies and thus create a unique new data set is a competitive advantage. In Mark Frydenberg's class, students just starting their college careers get to see this particular "impact of technology on business practice" that is a key part of the Bentley mission.
[Editor's note: Bentley College professor Mark Frydenberg teaches IT concepts through the lens of Web 2.0. See Frydenberg's Web site -- http://cis.bentley.edu/mfrydenberg -- to see more of his thoughts about the educational value of Popfly.]
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently Co-Lead for the Web2ePortfolio Initiatve (W2eP), a Senior Associate with the TLT Group, and Editor of Campus Technology's Web 2.0 e-newsletter. batsontr@mit.edu
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