EDUCAUSE REVIEW | July/August 2007, Volume 42, Number 4

A classroom portal that presents automatically updated syndicated resources from the campus library, news sources, student events, weblogs, and podcasts and that was built quickly using free tools. A Web site that takes crime data from the Chicago Police and applies them to Google Maps, without being affiliated with either. Each of these is a product of the stunning growth in online materials available in reusable formats; each is energized by the character of digital culture; and each may be described as a mashup.

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A classroom portal that presents automatically updated syndicated resources from the campus library, news sources, student events, weblogs, and podcasts and that was built quickly using free tools. A Web site that takes crime data from the Chicago Police and applies them to Google Maps, without being affiliated with either. Each of these is a product of the stunning growth in online materials available in reusable formats; each is energized by the character of digital culture; and each may be described as a mashup.

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As the term suggests, mashups involve the reuse, or remixing, of works of art, of content, and/or of data for purposes that usually were not intended or even imagined by the original creators. Although the historical roots of remix and mashup culture are deep, the properties of digital media are what have given ordinary individuals the power to reshape works on an unprecedented scale. In recent years, with the emergence of Web 2.0, the ability to copy, to combine, and to remix has been extended. Increasingly, it's not just works of art that are appropriated and remixed but the functionalities of online applications as well.

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A Note on Terminology

Oliver Paradis, writing in Wired magazine, recently complained: "The truth is, mashup is a manufactured buzzword, and like any buzzword, it drips with tacky artificiality, marketing innuendo, and vague implications. I have lately observed the application of this metaphor to the most unlikely subjects, including art, video, laptops, cell phones, movies, sneakers, cars, toothbrushes, and who knows what else. I look forward to the moment your writers properly address this particularly trendy and overused word by jettisoning it from your hallowed pages."¹

Without apologies, I am pleased to apply this "manufactured buzzword" to the subject of education as well. But for readers unfamiliar with the term, or ones confused by the indiscriminate usage that Paradis justifiably complains about, I offer here some definitions. Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.

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But for readers unfamiliar with the term, or ones confused by the indiscriminate usage that Paradis justifiably complains about, I offer here some definitions. Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.

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lectronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.²

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Questions of originality (origins of a work) are rarely clear-cut. In his recent Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.³

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Confronted with this reality, Lethem concludes: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."

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Lethem's article is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, creativity, and intellectual property. It brilliantly synthesizes multiple disciplines and perspectives into a wonderfully readable and compelling argument. It is also, as the subtitle of his article acknowledges, "a plagiarism." Virtually every passage is a direct lift from another source, as the author explains in his "Key," which gives the source for every line he "stole, warped, and cobbled together." (He also revised "nearly every sentence" at least slightly.) Lethem's ideas noted in the paragraph above were appropriated from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Craig Baldwin, Richard Posner, and George L. Dillon.

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Artistic and scholarly works build on the work of others.

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Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"⁴ it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan⁵), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.

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The ease of copying and manipulating digital media naturally supports the sampling and recombining of materials. Like participatory media genres such as blogging, media production tools have gotten cheaper and easier to use even as they have become more powerful. The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous media artists who are reimagining the iconography of popular culture, unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube.com to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers.⁶

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The "remix" of digital content can happen in any number of ways. As Tony Hirst has argued: "The easiest remix is not really a remix at all, and barely counts as a reuse, though it is a republish or represent—just take a direct copy of someone else's content and make it your own property/publish it on your own site, in your own content area . . . at least it shows someone else cares enough to take a copy. And it's another place for eyeballs to see that content."⁸ From there, one might delete or edit irrelevant references, add and update links, perhaps embed an appropriate online video, and link to a podcast. Maybe a dynamically updated RSS feed from a relevant blog or del.icio.us tag can be rendered on the sidebar to provide a steady stream of fresh content. Hey . . . now we're mashing it up!

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The question is, why should a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did? What's the difference? I would argue that for one thing, the standards/practices relationship implicit in the learning objects model has been reversed. With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.

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lthough the disappointing impact of the learning objects approach is easy to criticize, Web 2.0 remix won't be any more significant on campus unless certain conditions are met:

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Open and Discoverable Resources. Internet users enjoy a wealth of available resources from a vast range of sources. In addition to the surprising effectiveness of free text searching in Google, emergent communities provide a steady stream of socially filtered and recommended materials via blogs, social bookmarking tools, and networking nodes such as Twitter. Whatever one thinks of Wikipedia's epistemic legitimacy, it is an astonishing resource that provides an excellent starting point for research on almost any subject. Essential to the circulation of all these sources is that they are readily found on the open net and can be linked to directly. Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.

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Open and Transparent Licensing.

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Open and Remixable Formats. In order for educators to reuse other educators' materials, they need to be able to customize or adapt the materials—maybe because they need to make a resource more applicable to their local context or maybe because they have a new idea, one that the original creators never imagined.

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The potential payoff for using open and discoverable resources, open and transparent licensing, and open and remixable formats is huge: more reuse means that more dynamic content is being produced more economically, even if the reuse happens only within an organization. And when remixing happens in a social context on the open web, people learn from each other's process.

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the term data mashup describes a Web site or application that combines the data and functionality of multiple Web sites into an integrated experience.

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Perhaps no single development illustrates the increasing simplicity of mashup programming more dramatically than the introduction of Yahoo!'s Pipes service (http://pipes.yahoo.com/). Described by O'Reilly as "a milestone in the history of the internet,"¹⁷ the Pipes interface is a remarkably intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows the user to bring in resources from Google, Flickr, and other data sources, manipulate the resources, and generate outputs that can be implemented in most Web environments.

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In other words, this Pipe can create a filtered search of trusted domains that are relevant to a particular course, and the filtered search will adjust automatically as new links are added to the course materials. Of course, this added functionality requires open content and a reusable data format in order to work properly. If the course unit in question is locked away in a course management system behind a password firewall, Pipes cannot access the data required to create the customized search. As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.

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Moving toward the Mashup

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We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication. In an excellent article in the March/April 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph listed a number of campus activities that could benefit from engaging social networking technologies.²⁶ What might happen if we allow our campus innovators to integrate their practices in these areas in the same way that social networking application developers are already integrating theirs? What is the mission-critical data we cannot expose, and what can we expose with minimal risk? And if the notion of making data public seems too radical a step, can APIs be exposed to selected audiences, such as on-campus developers or consortia partners? However educators choose to respond, and whatever educators think of the term mashup, the complex relationships between individuals, organizations, content, data, and applications will never be the

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