Mash - Up Information

2.0 web apps must have really made it because CNN Money is today carrying a listing of the Next Net 25, a list of the 25 most influential, emerging web 2.0 companies .

Interestingly, they seem to get it:

"The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.

The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million."

Mashing up information, reformulating it for personal purposes is a driving force behind a lot of this work. Grease Monkey, Flickr, Craigslist remixed with Google maps, Suprglu. What information we are choosing to mash up and pull together would be an interesting study. Playing hackers, these applications give us the ability to play, to mix, to produce something new relatively easily out of what we have been given. IT Conversations has an interesting podcast on remixing information and how a few start - ups are looking at this.

They have hit a few key ideas head on: "collective wisdom," "deeply collaborative," "rapidly tweaked." The article looks straight through the hype and the hyperbole to the centre of web 2.0; it's finally about us. it is about the information that we produce, want to use, and can play with. It is about remix culture and bringing us to new places. 

This brings us around to classrooms filled with kids.

In many classrooms, simply learning to use the net safely, learning to handle the information that is out there, and working with the massive mountain of data is challenge enough. But at the senior levels of K - 12 school, there certainly are opportunities where kids could be remixing their information, creating new possibilities and new understandings by placing bits and pieces into new containers allowing something completely new to emerge.

I even learned a new word: "screenscraping," which is taking the information from several sites and placing it together, a la Suprglu. 

 

 

technorati tags: information, remix, learning