College of Computing Professor Mark Guzdial was appointed Vice-Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Education Board and Education Council at a meeting of the ACM Council in New York last week.

Guzdial is active in ACM education activities, having served on the Education Board and Council for the last year. He is currently serving as Program Co-Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 2008 Annual Symposium, the largest computing education conference in the world with 1300 attendees and over 300 papers submitted.

According to the ACM website, the general scope of the ACM Education Board is to promote computer science education at all levels and in all ways possible. The Board oversees the activities of the Education Council and initiates, directs, and manage key ACM educational projects, which include the promotion of curriculum recommendations, the coordination of educational activities, and efforts to provide educational and information services to the ACM membership.

Mark Guzdial is is a member of the GVU Center, the Cognitive Science program, and the EduTech Institute. He was the original developer of the CoWeb (or Swiki), which is now one of the most widely used Wiki engines in Universities around the world. He is the inventor of the Media Computation approach to learning introductory computing, which uses contextualized computing education to attract and retain students. He is the author of three computer science textbooks with Prentice-Hall, which are used in over 50 universities around the world.