Mashups

Today I've been doing some reading and surfing regarding Web mashups. Though I don't subscribe to Newsweek, I'm told that Newsweek already declared 2007 to be the year of the mashup. In a fine bit of syncronicity, the topic of mashups is exacly what Tim Lauer and I will be presenting on at NECC this summer in Atlanta. Our hope is to provide an introduction to understanding and creating web mashups for our attendees.

As for my recent research, I've come across a few interesting sites during my snowed-in work from home time:

• Mashup Camp
• Programmableweb - I've been reading this site for some time, but it belongs on the list
• Widgipedia

At NECC, I don't imagine we'll be going into quite as much detail as, say, Mashup camp, but I hope we can get some educators interested and paying attention to these tools. One of the simplest ones, is Quikmaps - a build your own Google Map mashup that I use often.

As a bit of an aside, Tim and I came up with this topic during a discussion with David Thornley who attended our workshop last year in San Diego. Essentially, I contended that NECC and education-technology in-general is about two years behind what "the rest of the world" is doing. For instance, blogging took off in 2001, but it wasn't until 2003 (at least) that blogs began to even appear in discussions at NECC. I recall presenting in 2002 and mentioning blogs and no one in my workshop had even heard of them. Ditto for Podcasts - just about 2 years behind. So, what we came up with was to essentially take the O'Reilly ETech conference theme from two years ago - remixing (aka mashups) - and submit that as our NECC workshop. It was accepted and, I imagine, will be on the cutting edge of NECC.