Educational Mashups

"We recognise that we're not a developer of geospatial software. Our expertise is in the data. The challenge for us is whatever you want to do from a geospatial perspective, that you can get the data into that."

"In the past," says Steve Willett, a specialist at DIA, "our analysts would have to check multiple sites to access the information they needed, because HTML pages with relevant information were scattered through many agencies."

Iterative launches The best way to launch web products is to first release the smallest parts that will be useful and which can stand up as a "product." Then, follow this up by watching user behavior closely and letting your users steer the product toward the real demand while adding more features. Leave your product in "beta" for a year or more if you want.

The biggest problem with the old "big release" model is that it required design and development teams to go quite far down the road of development before seeing any real-world user action, which meant that the builders had to make many more predictions about how users would behave before seeing real user behavior.

Mashup-ability Mashups add value when two or more web apps have more meaning mixed together than the component parts did separately. If the mashup doesn't add considerable value, it's not worth doing. Unless you're doing it for fun.

Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web

What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage.

A new challenge for e-learning is to create collaborative learning spaces in which informal learning can thrive.

Stephanie Pace Marshall notes in her "Principles for the New Story of Learning." Learning is an incremental process of acquiring information. Learning should be credentialed by the amount of time spent acquiring information. The purpose of formal learning is to acquire information rapidly, cover content, and reproduce facts. Content segmentation is the more efficient and effective way to learn a discipline. Only that which can be quantitatively and easily measured is true knowledge. Competition and external rewards are the most powerful motivators for learning.

As organizations rapidly move their training focus to virtual environments, a proliferation of methods to support formal learning has appeared: teleconferencing, videoconferencing, e-meetings, and online courses

Although more formal forms of instruction such as the classroom and e-learning will be around for years, it’s becoming more and more important to watch and harness the more informal methodologies that our students are utilizing. Most of these methods have been around for years, but have gone unnoticed by the training community.

Informal methods of learning are often found right in the work environment. They are seen as techniques that a learner can take advantage of right away and with work-related resources. Another reason these methods are so popular is because they are often very short. Advanced learners tell us that they don’t have the time or budget to attend more formal learning. Even the immediacy of e-learning is seen as something that will take too much valuable time. Finally, learners have matured to a point where they want to drive their learning in a more meaningful and self-directed manner. These informal methods are seen as more student-driven and job-relevant than most formal options.

Two of the most common informal environments used today are e-communities and, of all things, the learners’ neighbors sitting all around them. E-communities, often called communities of practice, are made up of threaded message boards, frequently asked question (FAQ) Web sites and chat environments. They have existed under the radar screen of most training programs for years. Many have grown to have huge followings of subject-matter experts (SMEs) and super-users.