Week #3 - Mashups

This week I was glad to finally learn about mashups. I have heard of the term, but never knew exactly what it was until now. I explored a few examples of mashups mainly via Flickr and all its services. I have used Flickr for photo sharing, but more recently switched to Shutterfly. Revisiting Flickr enabled me to see all its capabilities ie: photostream, the commons, picture links and much more. It's use of tags is much like Delicious and is a very user friendly system for organization and retrieval.

I attempted to apply my new understanding of mashups by creating a trading card. I met a library from Penn State who had an awesome superhero-like trading card and thought it would be fun to generate one for myself. Unfortunately the layout was too simple for my taste and didn't seem jazzy enough to intrique a teenager.

So I went to plan B. I created a movie poster of a book I recently read for this summer's Teen Lit course. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers was a realistic portrayal of an African American young man in Vietnam during the war. Myers's story was stirring and vivid. Making the movie poster was easy, fun and I thought a new way of getting students to share reading experiences with classmates. Technically speaking making the poster was easy. The trickiest part was locating and finalizing an image. I did this by doing a tag search of Flickr's common. I saved the image I liked and added it to my photostream. This took a little trial and error,but now that I know the path it will be easy to repeat. Mashups are not that complex after all!