A Teaching Case Using Google Docs to Illustrate Cloud Computing Concepts
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Information Systems Educators Conference 2011 ISECON Proceedings Wilmington North Carolina, USA v28 n1641 _________________________________________________ The Silver Lining: A Teaching Case Using Google Docs to Illustrate Cloud Computing Concepts Mark Frydenberg [email protected] Computer Information Systems Department Bentley University, Waltham, MA 02452, USA Abstract As Cloud Computing becomes an increasingly important technology strategy and solution for businesses, it is important for today’s students to be aware of the various services that the Cloud offers. While many first-year college students have heard of the term Cloud Computing and used Google Docs, a popular web-based office suite of applications for collaboration, their knowledge of how the Cloud is used in a business environment is limited. This paper describes an introductory lesson that builds on student familiarity with Google Docs to illustrate the concepts of Infrastructure, Software, Data, and Platform as a Service. The paper concludes with student reflections on their learning from this lesson based on anecdotal and survey data. Keywords: Cloud Computing, Google Docs, Web 2.0, learning, classroom case study 1. INTRODUCTION The use of the term “cloud” probably originates Cloud Computing, the delivery of software and with network diagrams in college textbooks computing services over the Internet, has where a cloud represented the complex changed the way in which people interact with connections between computers on a network, the Web. The increase in popularity of mobile and later, the Internet, “in order to conceal the devices, smartphones, and tablets has created complexity that lies behind them.” (Sultan, an expectation to always have access to data 2010, p. 110) and applications across multiple devices. In 2008, the Pew Internet and American Life “Cloud Computing grew out of our never-ending Project released a study on how Americans use hunger for ever-faster and ever-cheaper Cloud Computing applications and services. It computation.” (Pallis, 2010, p. 71). Applications was reported that while 69% “use webmail deployed in the Cloud offer scalability, a “pay as services, store data online, or use software you go” business model where customers pay programs such as word processing applications only for the computing services and storage they whose functionality is located on the web”, actually use, and simple mechanisms for “most internet users are unlikely to be aware of providing software updates. These features the term ‘Cloud Computing.’” (Horrigan, 2008) make Cloud Computing an attractive paradigm for developing and deploying both small and Two years later, the Pew Internet and American large scale Web applications. (Agrawal, Das, & El Life Project (Anderson & Rainie, 2010) reported Abbadi, 2010) that “by 2020, most people won't do their work _________________________________________________ ©2011 EDSIG (Education Special Interest Group of the AITP) Page 1 www.aitp-edsig.org Information Systems Educators Conference 2011 ISECON Proceedings Wilmington North Carolina, USA v28 n1641 _________________________________________________ with software running on a general-purpose PC. courses across the disciplines have incorporated Instead, they will work in Internet-based learning activities that integrate their use. applications such as Google Docs, and in Blogs, wikis, and podcasts were among the first applications run from smartphones.” (Anderson wave of Web 2.0 collaboration tools that have & Rainie, 2010, p. 8) found their way into college classrooms (Davi, Frydenberg, & Gulati, 2007); (Chan, Lee, & The IS 2010 model curriculum (Topi, et al., McLoughlin, 2006), and now collaborative 2010) notes that “service-oriented architecture, authoring tools such as Google Docs, which have Web services, software as a service, and Cloud been found especially useful in group projects. Computing are all important elements in the new (Frydenberg & Andone, 2010), (Broin & Raftery, way of organizing the fundamental architecture 2011) for computer-based systems and solutions that is gradually becoming the dominant paradigm of Such collaborative software as a service organizational computing.” (p. 6) Given the applications have become popular in many projected rise in usage and popularity of Cloud college classrooms because they provide free or applications in the next decade for consumers low-cost software solutions that require little or and the enterprise, Cloud Computing is an no set-up or maintenance. Users access the appropriate topic to present in the introductory services or applications via a Web browser. information technology classroom. Cloud Computing is generally characterized by While the literature is rich with examples citing several computing services (Software as a the use of web-based collaboration tools, and Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as specifically Google Docs in educational settings a Service, Data as a Service), a discussion of as well as Web development courses that teach which are often left to advanced computing Cloud Computing concepts to advanced courses. Cloud Computing as a topic is omitted students, little has been published on effective from the IS 2010.1 Foundations of Information teaching methods to integrate Cloud Computing Systems course. It first appears in the core IS concepts in the introductory information 2010.4 IT Infrastructure course (Topi, et al., technology classroom. This paper develops a 2010), where students learn to write and deploy teaching case for presenting Cloud Computing applications to the Cloud. concepts and terminology to introductory IT students. The lesson described in this paper Hollingsworth and Powell (2010) introduce Cloud builds on the experience that digital students Computing topics in a Web programming course have using collaborative Cloud applications, where students write and configure applications specifically Google Docs. (Frydenberg & Andone, deployed to Google’s Cloud (App Engine). Malan 2010) (Gehringer, 2010) (Sultan, 2010) (2010) created a network of virtual machines hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud platform for Three research questions guided this study: students to explore cloud concepts and build applications in an introductory computer science What do introductory college students course. Rehman and Sakr (2010) chose know about Cloud Computing? Microsoft’s Azure platform to design an How can students who have little or no undergraduate-level course in Cloud Computing programming background build on their where students learned about public and private experience with collaborative Cloud clouds, virtualization, MapReduce and Hadoop applications to learn about complex parallel processing technologies, and other cloud Cloud Computing concepts and technology concepts. Each of these courses terminology? requires programming knowledge in order to Will such a lesson using consumer Cloud complete the projects. tools help students understand how to apply Cloud Computing concepts in a 3. WHAT FIRST-YEAR COLLEGE STUDENTS business context? KNOW ABOUT CLOUD COMPUTING 2. CLOUD COMPUTING IT 101 (Introduction to Information Technology IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM and Computing Systems) is a first-year required course for all students at Bentley University, a As web-based collaboration tools have become business university in Massachusetts. The course more widespread in recent years, college introduces students to topics such as using the _________________________________________________ ©2011 EDSIG (Education Special Interest Group of the AITP) Page 2 www.aitp-edsig.org Information Systems Educators Conference 2011 ISECON Proceedings Wilmington North Carolina, USA v28 n1641 _________________________________________________ World Wide Web, hardware and software, operating systems, storage, HTML and Web pages, wireless networking, multimedia, and problem solving skills using Excel. Bentley University offers several sections of IT 101 each semester. Surveys were given to 101 students (57 male, 43 female, one preferred not to say) from sections taught by four different instructors one week before and one week after the lesson to ascertain their learning about Cloud Computing. As shown in Figure 1, students understand the Cloud as supporting online storage and applications for collaboration. Figure 2. Students tweet about Cloud Computing. Students’ tweets about Cloud Computing are consistent with the experiences they described in Figure 1. From their tweets it is clear that Figure 1. Student Experiences with Cloud many students associate Cloud Computing with Computing Applications. online storage of documents and data (“stuff lives on the internet”), and software applications Students also identified Facebook, YouTube, “that do not require a download in order to run.” Huddle, Blogger, Prezi, and SumoPaint as popular Cloud applications which they have This sample of tweets is representative of those used. from the rest of the class; most do not mention more technical Cloud Computing capabilities Prior to the start of the in-class lecture during related to virtualization or scaling, or specific which Cloud Computing concepts would be providers of Cloud platforms. This suggests that presented, one instructor asked students to most students are only familiar with consumer share their definitions of Cloud Computing on and collaborative Cloud Computing applications. Twitter. Appending the class hashtag to their tweets made it easy to gather all of their tweets in a search; a sample of