Mashup

I'm on a technology kick right now.

It started at the end of last semester when I was researching some technology for the AALS panels on Millennials and on laptops in the classroom. I was trying to find things that you can use with a student's laptop in the classroom -- something that keeps them engaged enough to stay away from the Internets. As usual, I discovered that I, as a law professor, was pretty much the last to know. By the time law schools get to something, it's more table knife than cutting edge. So I've been "researching" (i.e., surfing the web when I should be doing other things) what technology is being used in elementary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities.

A recent post from Campus Technology summarizes a report on what the cutting edge will be over the next five years. I haven't decided for myself yet at what point I just give up and decide thast I know all the technology I'm ever going to know, but I'm thinking it might be before I have to say "Today in class, we'll be using a mashup" with a straight face. Here's what the future looks like:

In the near term--that is, in the timeframe of about a year or less--the technologies that will have a significant impact on education include grassroots video and collaborative Web technologies. Grassroots video is, simply, user-generated video created on inexpensive consumer electronics devices and edited and encoded using free or inexpensive consumer- or prosumer-grade NLEs. Internet-based services supporting the sharing of these videos have allowed institutions to mingle their content with consumer content and "will fuel rapid growth among learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the viewers are," according to the report. The second near-term trend, collaborative Web technology, is already in wide use in education at all levels. The complete report provides further details.

In the mid-term, mobile broadband and data mashups will make their mark on education. Mashups, according to the report, 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," the report said, "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. Mobile broadband too is in the early stages of adoption for educational purposes, from project-based learning activities to virtual field trips.

Further down the road, according to the report, come "collective intelligence" and "social operating systems." Collective intelligence includes wikis and community tagging. A social operating system is "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking" and "will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know," according to the report. The time to adoption for these last two will be four to five years, the report said.