From Open, Connected, and Social
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Dr. Mashup or: why educators should learn to stop worrying and love the remix
Oliver Paradis, Wired Magazine: "The truth is, mashup is a manufactured buzzword, and like any buzzword, it drips with tacky artificiality, marketing innuendo, and vague implications. I have lately observed the application of this metaphor to the most unlikely subjects, including art, video, laptops, cell phones, movies, sneakers, cars, toothbrushes, and who knows what else. "
A brief digression on content mash-ups
Jonathan Letham, The Ecstasy of Influence, A Plagiarism: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."
Thomas Pettitte, Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis, quotes Robert Green in 1592 on a "provocative" new rival, a "mere player who considers himself to be the only shake-scene in the country," and who thinks that he can "bombast out blank verse" in the manner of university-trained playwrights... "merely an upstart crow beautified with our feathers."
Glenn Gould, Strauss and the Electronic Future (1964): "One of the certain effects of the electronic age is that it will forever change the values that we attach to art. In fact, the vocabulary of aesthetic criteria that has been developed since the Renaissance is mostly concerned with terms that are proving to have little validity for the examination of electronic culture. I refer to such terms as "imitation," "invention," and, above all, "originality," which in recent times have implicitly conveyed varying degrees of approval or censure, in accordance with the peculiarly distorted sense of historical progression that our age has accepted, but which are no longer capable of conveying the precise analytical concepts they once represented."
Rick Prelinger, his archive, On the virtues of preexisting material
(More notable online learning videos, mashed and otherwise, here).
The following is indebted to David Wiley's presentation Openness, localization and the future of learning objects
Do mashups and the notion of content remix finally fulfill the promises once made by proponents of learning objects? But instead of instructors being sidelined by automation, this process places them in the roles of creators, or remixers. What is required for this promise to come through in education?
Discoverable resources (does not mean repositories, but does mean openness)
Transparent open licensing, such as Creative Commons, already fostering a new information abundance
Open remixable formats (ie an MP3, not a RealAudio stream) --
- at this moment at least RSS is a must! Darfur portal, Blog post to WebCT
- The glory of embed code. YouTube has a restrictive user policy, but allows portable content, has a built-in mixer, API allows Mojiti and other 3rd party tools.
- enhanced cultural and technical literacy -- data literacy -- not just an ability to reuse materials, but a willingness to do so
Data mashups: definitions and examples
- "a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. ...Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API, although some in the community believe that only cases where public interfaces are not used count as mashups. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript."
- Housing maps - combining Craigslist vacancies and Google Maps.
- LibraryLookup - by Jon Udell
- http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups - good comprehensive list of mashups, site also lists APIs
Data mashups: others have said it better...
Dion Hinchcliffe: "With pervasive and widespread connectivity, lots of bandwidth, growing comfort with creating and consuming user generated content (this being blogs in particular), the maturaton of online communities, rapidly improving Web skills, and awareness of what's possible on the Web, and you have a complex but potent recipe for the people side of the Web to drive major improvements in the way the its is used, on a massive scale.
"The technical side has improved recently too with lightweight service models like RSS making it extremely easy to wire things together, the proliferation of lots and lots of good Web services (partially driven by Ajax and RIAs in general, which demand pure services to function), and even tools and ready information to support creating mash-ups, has led us to a place where everything seems just about perfect for mashups to take off."
David Berlind:
"Back in the old days, for example, to put a packet on the network, developers had to write thousands of lines of code. Today, it's basically one line of code that calls the networking APIs that in turn, do all the hard work so developers don't have to.
"Because, with mashups, fewer technical skills are needed to become a developer than ever. Not only that, the simplest ones can be done in 10 or 15 minutes. Before, you had to be a pretty decent code jockey with languages like C++ or Visual Basic to turn your creativity into innovation. With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there's a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked."
Jack Schofield: "An API provides an interface and a set of rules that make it much easier to extract data from a website. It's a bit like a record company releasing the vocals, guitars and drums as separate tracks, so you would not have to use digital processing to extract the parts you wanted. But whereas record companies are generally hostile to having their stuff re-used, and respond with "cease and desist" orders, web-based companies seem to love it."
Tim O'Reilly: "Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor t
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hat allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone."
Examples from Tony Hirst
- delisearch - a site limited search over the domains listed in a delicious bookmarks feed
- OpenLearn Unit Outlinks Search Hub Pipe - "extract all the outgoing links from a course unit, then feeds these into a Yahoo Search pipe, which uses the domains as search limits for the search"
See also Microsoft's Popfly, and the Mashup Editor. Comparison of the three major services at More Signal, Less Noise: The Power of RSS Mashups.
My Maps from Google: "You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos -- all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We'll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps. "
Raymond Yee: "Once we gain experience with web services, we can look at building a larger framework for the deployment and consumption of web services and SOA fashion. At that point, I would advocate for the building of a Berkeley Technology Platform (BTP) that exploits XML and XML web services to create an underlying service-oriented architecture for the campus. By the BTP, I mean the equivalent of the Amazon technology platform, a set of services and infrastructure available to both internal programmers to create web interfaces and access data and for external audiences to build complementary services on top of ones provided by the platform."
"...we should invite students to be active co-developers, to use our web services and show us, what can be done with them. If we are doing things right, we will be surprised by how people will use it. Several years ago, I hired a student who made a name for himself in web scraping the Berkeley course catalog system to create an alternative and reportedly superior, interface. Ideally, we can create our systems so that student should not have to web-scrape our systems, but have an API to access the data and wrap their own interface."
Scott Leslie: "While more and more Web2.0 companies (holy cow - 291 on this list) are offering APIs that are being mashed up (arguably often with a still-unknown value proposition) is your IS department publishing the API for your SIS on your campus website? You CMS? Why would they do this? Well, that's the other side of the mashup phenomenom - often-times the companies making their data available don't yet know all the ways it could be used, but appear to be correct in the belief that if you publish it, it will get used, often in unexpected or improved ways."
- See Scott's 10 minute movie on Client-side extension and educational resources, "starts to shift the locus of control back to the learner and away from centrally provisioned server tools."
BBC Feeds and APIs - "the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent. Content feeds are available for people to build with on a non-commercial basis."
Chronicle of Higher Education: "as more and more student programmers develop Web portals of their own, colleges might have to find a way to work with those projects, not against them." Witness the case of the Crimson Connect.
Breaking news: The Facebook platform (more here). Whatever one thinks of Facebook, the possibilities opened up are tantalizing. Already a powerful means of connecting past, present, and future members of a community as an ad hoc time folding engine, it may serve as a hub for all manner of activities that can benefit from a social networking context.
Whether or not FB is the platform, the EDUCAUSE Review article 'Social Networking Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services' suggests ample opportunities for a mashup approach to enhance student engagement on campus.
Are educators ready to mash it up? Some modest proposals...
Example: Mashup for high school biology
- Does the content need to be password-protected?
- When choosing a content management system for a campus project, can RSS support (for full-content feeds) be a consideration?
- Can we discuss what data can be exposed and what cannot, rather than a default nothing?
- Can APIs be exposed to selected audiences, such as on-campus developers or consortia partners?
