Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix - Brian Lamb, EDUCAUSE Review

A music track that lays a vocal from Madonna over guitars from the Sex Pistols. 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. 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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