Mashups & Expression

It 7:55 and the conference hall is still quiet.  Lot’s of people, but they are mostly quietly enjoying their continental breakfast.  Calipso is playing on the presenter’s computer, here in Kannapolis B, at the far end of the conference facility.  In about 20 minutes Lizbeth Coleman, of Durham Academy, will be talking with us about web mashups, about using them and making them.  Very cool.

Pretty Foods I’d like to insert here, though, the expression part of this post — and this echoes a lot of what Daniel Pink and Richard Florida talk.  This morning I was thumbing through the ubiquitous hard cover book about spending money in the city of your current leisure.  I, understandably,  slowed down when I got to the section on food and restaurants.  As I was looking, rather longingly, at the pictures, I had to remind my self that I was just seeing some fish, rice, a few green peas, and some sprigs of grass.  Yet it looks like this (to the right).

So much about what we do and the decisions that we make is about the visual and auditory pleasure of the experience.  It’s why I keep hammering that at the same time that we need to be putting more emphasis on math, technology, engineering, and science, we need to be putting just as much emphasis on the social studies so that we have a context, and JUST AS MUCH effort, funding, and expectations for art, music, drama, etc.  We aren’t going to enjoy the tech experience unless we have something pleasing and useful to enjoy through it.

Lizbeth Colman Liz teaches computer science at the upper school of the Durham Academy.  She’s shown some video mash-ups, some popular song with dancing Peanuts Characters.  She’s also showing how the federal government has set up a space in Second Life where you can click out web pages.  I’ve not thought of that as a mash-up, but I guess it is, where you’re mixing virtual environments, and the Web.  She also describes iGoogle as a mash-up.  Interesting.  Again, I hadn’t thought about it.

Now she’s showing Programmable Web, a directory of Mash-ups, current 2860 sites available through here.  Mapping mash-ups are the most common mash-ups.  Geotagging your Flickr photos enable them to be connect to a map.  I’ve not done this before, and I guess I should be geotagging my photos.  She’s showing www.flickr.com/map, with a map of the world and recently geotagged photos.  Now we’re looking at photos tagged as Paris, and a map of the city shows up with dots that link to the photos.  (The conference Internet is down.  This is bad.  I loaned the presenter my Hhonor’s number so she’s able to show, but we can’t follow.)

OK, Coleman is showing a geography quiz that is built on a Google Map mash-up.  She’s also showing a virtual tour of Toronto, which is a mash-up between Flickr and Google Maps.  She’s using existing mash-ups.  Someone asked if we could make your own, and she beams.  “Yes!”

Getting concerned, now, about the Internet. 

Lizbeth went on a Civil Rights Tour through the south, and she created a Google Maps interface for recording the tour.  Again, someone asks, “How can we do that?”

Here’s how you do it. 
1. Start with Google and register an account if you don’t have one already.
2. Click on [Maps].
3. Click [My Maps] where you can save your own maps and also browse a directory of other maps.
4. Click [Create a Map]
5. Title it and make it public or unlisted (you can share it either way)
6. Make a pen, and then zoom in to where you want it to stay, and title it.
7. A text box opens where you can type in text, rich text, or even HTML.  There’s a tool bar for formatting.  This is cool!
8. If you want a photo to be part of this spot on the map.  The photo has to be on the web, and you create a link to the photo.  Click the insert a a photo button, and enter the URL of the image.

Here is a bookmark page with resources: http://del.icio.us/ellejaycee/presentation
And here is a Camtasia demo: http://scrap217.googlepages.com

7 thoughts on “Mashups & Expression”

  1. David, Thanks so much for this post! Some of the things your presenter describes as mashups I would never have thought about either. Even the pictures of delicious-looking food hadn’t crossed my mind. But, you’ve given me a great idea for a video for my students about how they must learn to take content and reconstruct it for their own purposes. Mandated testing seems to emphasize taking bits and pieces of food and just rearranging them on the plate. “Learning” should require students to take the raw materials and create something useful for themselves and/or others. I can’t wait to get started!

  2. After this session, I think that they are. Mash-ups encompass many types of mixing things up. It’s really a hard term to put into a single box.

  3. I think the idea of using mash-ups for kids to express themselves is wonderful. However, shouldn’t we be mindful of copyright infringement? The Peanuts dancing to Outkast is probably making Mr. Schulz turn in his grave. Shouldn’t presenters and attendees at a technology conference be more careful of the examples they show?

  4. I agree with you Bea. I advocate the idea of students remixing content from a variety of sources, using this type of activity as an opportunity to helps students learn to respect other people’s intellectual property. It one reason why it is important that their works be made available to real audiences. They will want others to respect their work.

    Thanks for commenting!

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