At this year's UIT Summer Institute for Teaching with Technology, faculty participants were intrigued with the variety of opportunities and challenges Web 2.0 technologies and mashups are presenting to higher education. Guest speaker Joan Getman, Senior Strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell took us on a whirlwind tour of the world of possibilities and David Grogan, UIT Manager, Curricular Technology Group, demonstrated creating a mashup with Spark blog and wiki tools, RSS feeds and Google Maps.
In my web wanderings this week, I came across two mashups that demonstrate wonderful examples of interactive learning. These examples came from the Web Designs for Interactive Learning site (WDIL), a "community-driven source of information and inspiration for developing interactive educational websites."
This site is sponsored by the Informal Science Education program at the National Science Foundation, and maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) and the Exploratorium.
The first mashup that intrigued me was The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr.
This online exhibit explores photographer John Collier Jr's work depicting daily life in America during World War II and was developed with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "Flickr mashups are used to pull in photographs that make up the Collection and one of the interactive activities. In addition to exploring Collier's photographs, visitors can create their own short videos using graphics, photographs and clips from that era."
Another mashup example from WDIL is KQED's Quest site.
KQED, a PBS affiliate in the San Franscisco Bay area, created this multimedia website with Google Map Mashups to "deliver high-resolution television clips, radio segments, and 'explorations'-investigations of various parks, nature trails, and other sites around Northern California. This interactive map "geotags locations and images where QUEST segments were filmed and recorded. The site also encourages "visitor participation via Flickr uploads."
Another aspect of the site is "a new community science blog with daily contributions from scientists, experts, teachers and students with a different Bay Area perspective ."
It will be interesting to see how higher education follows the lead of these interactive mashup sites with the new innovative social software tools that are becoming increasingly popular.
Comments (2)
Google Maps is another part of the google empire. I bet within the five years there will be a google operating system and I bet it will actually compete with Microsoft!
Posted by Jay Wollmann | June 8, 2007 11:49 AM
Posted on June 8, 2007 11:49
Interesting blog post, I like the mashup of blogs and photos for the American Image site. The appeal of those photos intrigue me because it shows how life was during World War 2, like the family that was picking beans out of the farm. Pretty soon a huge number of sites are going to Web 2.0 with the dynamic portions being pulled from other sites and stopping the boring functions of some sites right now. Great post.
Posted by Westwood College Student | June 14, 2007 5:09 PM
Posted on June 14, 2007 17:09