In January, a correspondent, having heard that I was about to publish a book on mashups, wrote me, saying that he would “love to find out more what [I’m] thinking”. Flattered to be asked, I replied. Here I quote an edited version of what I wrote. (I tend to like what I write in email because my writing tends to be energetically conversational.)
Let me tell you a bit of what I’m thinking and where I’m coming from. Obviously, I think that the topic of mashups is a big deal given my willingness to write a whole book about it. The element that excites me most is the power that individuals and small groups of people now have to recombine data and services — to use mashups to make sense of the world — particularly in the corner of the world in which I’m immersed (teaching, learning, and research in the context of higher education, libraries, and museums). When I first learned about XML and web services, I thought — wow — this is going to change the way we do research and way we teach and learn. I spoke about this topic at the O’Reilly ETCon in 2003.
I’ve built a research prototype (called the Scholar’s Box) to enable scholars to gather data from different sources, create personal collections, and share them with others. (I’m an advisor to a project called Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) — which provides a Firefox plugin to enable people to manage bibliographic collections within the web browser — and ultimately to share their collections.)
I teach a course at the School of Information at UC Berkeley call “Mixing and Remixing Information“. This semester will be the third term I teach the course. It’s a project-based course, in which the focus is on helping students build their own mashups (see http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s08/class-projects/ for some mashups from [this] year’s class) . A good number of my students have next-to-no experience with web programming. I have found that showing students the power of mashups — to get people excited about the possibilities — and then teach them how to make mashups is an excellent way into web programming. I’ve taken this approach with teenagers with some success last summer — I taught a six week course on the Berkeley campus.
In addition to master’s students this semester, I’ll be teaching a six week hands-on course to campus IT staff about building next-generation campus IT services — again by studying things like Flickr and Google maps and Yahoo! Pipes, getting them to build mashups, and thinking about how we can do things like that on campus — for administration and for research.
Now that I’m finished writing my book, I’m thinking about other opportunities. Perhaps it’s just the geek in me, but I really do think that some combination of Web 2.0 mashups, a bit more rigor from SOA, imagination, and some understanding of real problems can transform the worlds of education and research (and other worlds too — but education and research are something I know about.) I’m setting out to build a small company whose goal is to help the educational community effectively use Web 2.0 ideas (with a specific emphasis on remixability) to change the way we do things in that community. I will confess that my business plan still needs to be written, however…. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with a mix of teaching, consulting, and building software. (Some collaborators and I have a grant proposal in to enhance the teaching and learning of art history by integrating Flickr into the computational fabric of the classroom.) Most of all, I believe in the power of ideas — hence, I wrote a book to teach others.
Lots of questions remain however. (Now that my teaching jobs have come to an end, I now have some serious amounts of time to plot out my next steps. Writing is a great help to me in sorting out my thoughts, especially when I’m writing for a public audience. I would like to build a business but am unclear on exactly what it should look like. Undoubtedly, there will be details that would be unwise for me to share publicly– but I believe that a lot of my thinking would benefit from putting my ideas out there.