Week 3, Thing 6

Looking at all the information on mash-ups has my brain feeling mashed up. One thing I quickly noticed is that Flickr has changed spelling conventions. The suffix “r” now seems to mean a mash-up created by interfacing with Flickr technology. I thought I would have to educate my spellchecker, but the Word 2007 that my husband loaded last night (talk about a techno-chock—how could the link to Word not work?!) seems to already be aware of this.

I found the easiest place to try some mash-ups was http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/. Many of the apps look like fun and I the curriculum planning wheels are churning as I looked at them. On the other hand, it is easy to get caught in the techie aspects and spend a lot of time doing something like my magazine cover, that I could have done as quickly in Publisher or even Word and had things precisely where and the colors I wanted.

The same is probably true for this picture I modified in Bubblr.

My library science students could have lots of fun creating a comic book on library etiquette or search techniques. Combining special effects from Photoshop used on stop action pictures and captioning would allow even students who hate to share their drawings producing professional looking comic books.