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he lowest for administrators were "unlimited student access to the Internet" (12%) and "games/virtual simulations" (15%). The lowest for teachers were Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and wikis (10%) and unlimited student access to the Internet (11%).

The Speak Up survey is conducted annually to assess views on current issues in education, and results are shared with state and federal policy leaders.

for the first time this year, administrators have participated in the survey. The group had expected about 325,000 individuals to participate in Speak Up 2007, a goal that was exceeded by some 42,000 participants, which included 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents, and 3,263 administrators.

76% of gaming teens play games with others at least some of the time. 82% play games alone at least occasionally, though 71% of this group also plays games with others. 65% of gaming teens play with others in the same room.

76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.

12-14 year olds are equally as likely to play Mature and Adults Only rated games as their 15-17 year old counterparts.

“Gaming is a ubiquitous part of life for both boys and girls. For most teens, gaming runs the spectrum from blow-‘em-up mayhem to building communities; from cute-and-simple to complex; from brief private sessions to hours’ long interactions with masses of others.”

A focus of the survey was the relationship between gaming and civic experiences among teens. The goal was to test concerns that gaming might be prompting teens to withdraw from their communities. It turns out there is clear evidence that gaming is not just an entertaining diversion for many teens; gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:

Moreover, the survey indicates that youth who have these kinds of civic gaming experiences are more likely to be civically engaged in the offline world. They are more likely than others are to go online to get information about current events, to try to persuade others how to vote in an election, to say they are committed to civic participation, and to raise money for charity.

Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”

The study also found that these civic gaming experiences occurred equally among all kinds of game players regardless of family income, race, and ethnicity. These data stand in contrast to teens’ experiences in schools and others community situations, where white and higher-income youth typically have more opportunities for civic development.

“This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.

A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.

76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.

gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:

“Games that simulate aspects of civic and political life may well promote civic skills and civic engagement. Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”

This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently

They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.

The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork.

Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded.

A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources

The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form—photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites.

Using similar approaches, online conferences and symposia can offer session archives that persist over time; simply request that participants use a particular tag when they post related content, and the widgets will continue to update the conference page as new content appears.

Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.

A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world.

An educational technology course at George Mason University uses Pageflakes as the hub of a learning community. Content is dynamically assembled from a variety of timely sources, integrating it with student work from Flickr and other sources, all via RSS.

The Flat Classroom Project (flatclassroomproject.ning.com) uses a Ning workspace to create a sense of space that is shared by students located in the U.S. and in Qatar.

to allow faculty to collaborate on course materials and leverage one another’s work.

Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software.

In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained.

Nonetheless, while there are abundant examples of personal and professional uses for mobiles, educational content delivery via mobile devices is still in the early stages. The expectation is that advances in technology over the next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education.

hat, exactly, constitutes a valid, original work? What are the implications for how we assess and reward creativity? Can a college or university tap the same sources of innovative talent and energy as Google or Flickr? What are the risks of permitting or opening up to this activity?

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.

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

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.

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.

Yet the technology developments of the past century have clearly corresponded with a new attitude toward the "aura" associated with a work of invention and with more aggressive attitudes toward appropriation. It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording.

Educational technologists may wonder if "remix" or "content mashup" are just hipper-sounding versions of the learning objects vision that has absorbed so much energy from so many talented people—with mostly disappointing results.

The question is, why should a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did?

when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.

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.

Discoverable Resources

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.

It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limits of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.

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.

Part of making a resource reusable involves making the right choices for file formats.

To facilitate the remixing of materials, educators may want to consider making the source files that were used to create a piece of multimedia available along with the finished result.

In addition to choosing the right file format and perhaps offering the original sources, another issue to consider when publishing content online is the critical question: "Is there an RSS feed available?" If so, conversion tools such as Feed2JS (http://www.feed2JS.org) allow for the republication of RSS-ified content in any HTML Web environment, including a course management system, simply by copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code. When an original source syndicated with RSS is updated, that update is automatically rendered anywhere it has been republished.

Jack Schofield

Guardian Unlimited

"An API provides an interface and a set of rules that make it much easier to extract data from a website. It's a bit like a record company releasing the vocals, guitars and drums as separate tracks, so you would not have to use digital processing to extract the parts you wanted."1

What's new about mashed-up application development? In a sense, the factors that have promoted this approach are the same ones that have changed so much else about Web culture in recent years. Essential hardware and software has gotten more powerful and for the most part cheaper, while access to high-speed connectivity and the enhanced quality of online applications like Google Docs have improved to the point that Tim O'Reilly and others can talk of "the emergent Internet operating system."15 The growth of user-centered technologies such as blogs have fostered a DIY ("do it yourself") culture that increasingly sees online interaction as something that can be personalized and adapted on the individual level. As described earlier, light syndication and service models such as RSS have made it easier and faster than ever to create simple integrations of diverse media types. David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet, explains: "With mashups, fewer technical skills are needed to become a developer than ever. Not only that, the simplest ones can be done in 10 or 15 minutes. Before, you had to be a pretty decent code jockey with languages like C++ or Visual Basic to turn your creativity into innovation. With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there's a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked."16

The ability to "clone" other users' mashups is especially exciting: a newcomer does not need to spend time learning how to structure the data flows but can simply copy an existing framework that looks useful and then make minor modifications to customize the result.19

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.

"My Maps" functionality

For those still wondering what the value proposition is for offering an open API, Google's development process offers a compelling example of the potential rewards.

Elsewhere, it is difficult to point to significant activity suggesting that the mashup ethos is taking hold in academia the way it is on the wider Web.

Yet for the most part, the notion of the data mashup and the required openness is not even a consideration in discussions of technology strategy in higher educational institutions. "Data integration" across campus systems is something that is handled by highly skilled professionals at highly skilled prices.

Revealing how a more adventurous and inclusive online development strategy might look on campus, Raymond Yee recently posted a comprehensive proposal for his university (UC Berkeley), in which he outlined a "technology platform" not unlike the one employed by Amazon.com (http://aws.amazon.com/)—resources and access that would be invaluable for the institution's programmers as well as for outside interests to build complementary services.

All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation.

those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. 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?

We provide ample support and encouragement to "trailing edge" students whose online capabilities barely extend beyond e-mail, but at the same time, we leave the door open for those at the leading edge to suggest innovations that we ourselves would be incapable of imagining, much less of implementing.

By recasting students as researchers and teachers, we invite them to participate in what is arguably the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of university life: the production of new knowledge (Exhibit 2).

We would be hard pressed to name a profession—including academe itself—that does not demand some ability to interact effectively with other human beings. Yet higher education remains, especially in the humanities, a highly individualistic enterprise. In a typical English course, students write their essays for an audience of one—namely, the instructor who does the grading—while "group discussions" frequently consist of individuals talking directly to the teacher with little regard for their peers. In a discipline built around the ideal of the lone genius, our epigraph to this section remains as wishfully subversive today as it was a century and a half ago.

Teaching to the future involves harnessing the collaborative impulses already at large in digital culture and directing them toward educational ends, so that "group work" shifts in our students' perception from an eyeroll-inducing educational gimmick to a cutting-edge skill worthy of cultivation and scrutiny.

Later, they take part in a formative peer assessment exercise during which we project draft versions of their final projects onscreen while classmates ask questions and provide suggestions for improvement. The success of this "Live Crit" session (a concept borrowed from architecture and the fine arts) reflects the atmosphere of collaboration and trust that we have consciously cultivated among the students all semester

Exhibit 4).

Higher education is an aquifer, not a spigot.

"The Poem of the Contents of Everybody's Pockets"; on the second day, we send them off around campus to chalk poems on the ground in public places; on the third day, we engage them in a critical analysis of both events, prompting them to come up with inventive ways in which such multifaceted live performances might be recorded (photographed? taped? videoed? narrativized?) for posterity.

(Exhibit 7).

with the students' enthusiastic permission—as permanent exhibits in the Archives section of our course Web site

Exhibit 3

"In the coming decades," warns hypertext theorist Jerome McGann, "the entirety of our cultural inheritance will be transformed and re-edited in digital forms," a monumental task for which both we and our students remain, by and large, seriously underprepared (2005, 181).

to teach our students not to follow in our footsteps but to outstrip us.