Mashup? What's a mashup??

Though a ‘mashup’ was originally a term used in the music industry, these days, a mashup refers to a new breed of Internet applications. A mashup utilizes Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that traditionally allowed programmers to interface a CPU (Central Processing Unit, aka ‘the brain’ of a computer) with a peripheral and/or a component of the computer system, such as the file management system. Internet developers have taken this concept and have now created APIs on the Internet. Companies such as Google, eBay, and Amazon have created these APIs so that motivated Internet users can combine different interfaces, therefore creating completely new, integrated applications. Taking APIs from multiple websites and merging them (or ‘mashing’ them) together creates a new, innovative application that has never before been found on the Web. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9sENSA_sjI)

Mashups are just beginning to find their way into the education arena and the trend of utilizing mashups and creating ones that are specifically focused on educational methods are not that distant in the future. According to The Horizon Report – 2008, which was just recently released by the New Media Consortium (2008), mashups could quickly become a pedagogical tool within the next two to three years.

Mashups…will largely impact the way education institutions represent information. "While most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety of data," …"it is not difficult to picture broad educational and scholarly applications for mashups." Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and the University of Minnesota are examples of higher education institutions using mashups for learning resources and other projects. (New Media Consortium, 2008).

Because mashups do not require a lot of sophisticated programming and intricate development, The Horizon Report highlighted that faculty will be able to custom create applications to illustrate different concepts as they teach. From this same report, the following are examples of current education-related mashups (New Media Consortium, 2008):

• Interactive Learning Resources at Michigan State University. MSU offers a set of webware applications that allow faculty to mashup interactive language learning resources on the fly.
• Research at Pompeu Fabra University. Researchers at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona are mining the spatial-temporal data provided by geotagged Flickr photos of urban locations.
• Interactive Map Tool. This web-based authoring tool, developed at Johns Hopkins University, supports digital field assignments and allows students and instructors to create custom mashups using a wide variety of digital media, text, and data.