Mashups for your Mancunian masses

A couple of months back at the CETIS 2008 conference I participated in a session entitled Technological Innovation in a world of web API’s facilitated by Brian Kelly and Marieke Guy from UKOLN and featuring contributions from Tony Hirst, Ian Ibbotson, Wilbert, myself and many other good people. The slightly cooler sounding subtitle Eduglu perhaps summed it up more aptly. It was shamelessly techy and delightfully free: “Does this need to have educational value? No it just needs to be cool!”. Floating on the waves of endless open APIs rather like Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo from Maggotbrain we were really feeling that aetherial #edufunk/#eduprog mashup goodness.

Funkadelic's classic album: Maggotbrain

Funkadelic's classic album: Maggotbrain

Emboldened and inspired by this I re-purposed many of the things I talked about (and even shamelessly stole the session title from the previous year: Mashup Market) to run a session at Manchester’s Social Media Cafe last Wednesday night. The #smc_mcr as it likes to be known for short is Manchester’s branch of the Tuttle Club, a mixture of media types, bloggers and technology enthusiasts and a fair few ed-tech folk with things to say and ideas to germinate. The ed-tech force was in fact particularly strong this time with David Bird from MMU also running a session on social media in education in parallel with me.

While we may not have got quite as baroque as one would have at CETIS it was excellent to be sharing the wealth with a wider community.

Walk this way the full writeup of the SMC_MCR Mashup Market on Samscam