Mashups
On this page:
What are they?
A mashup is a website or application that aggregates information from multiple sources to provide a holistic experience. Emerging from the web 2.0 (link) world mashups have grown due to the availability of publicly accessible data and web services. A mashup takes two (or more) different independent sets of data that are linked in some way perhaps by a time or a geographical component and creates a mash-up of those two different data sets into a novel format. Usually a mashup sends the data to a third party web service that presents the data back to the viewer in a web browser as a new visualisation. A common example is linking maps with geographical information. The [ http://www.educause.edu/ Educause Learning Initiative’s] (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About... series contains a useful guide to mapping mashups.
How can I use them with my students?
The main power of mashups is to allow the sharing and presentation of material in new ways that might facilitate different insights. Taking the classic epidemiology example of the connection between cholera and fecal bacteria in drinking water by John Snow in 1854, when he discovered that an outbreak in London was associated with a specific water pump. It would be quite easy to replicate this study using modern health data and links to geographical locations of water sources.
Examples
Timeline is an interactive web-based timeline generator. This service takes a series of dates and displays a labelled, scrollable timeline in a web browser.
There is a group for discussing Flickr and Geotaggingto facilitate visualizing photographic material geographically perhaps sorted by appropriate tags.
There is useful blog post on Educational Mashups and E-Learning from the e-learning queen.
Where can I get them?
A number of commercial companies have opened up their web applications so that outsiders can take advantage of them. For instance Google allows you to write applications that take advantage of its Google Maps and Google Earth software. Media hosting sites such as Flikr also facilitate this process.
What else do I need to know?
To someone with some programming skills mashups can provide powerful tools for little development cost. Mashups offer a big wow factor for a relatively small amount of programming work as you're taking advantage of someone else's service and just passing data to it, usually in an XML format.
