WordPress as Mashup Machine
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The Non-Programistan Manifestoon
The Manifesto (Animated and Mashed Up)
Mashups: Towards a definition
Comrade Sue Teller defines the Mashup for Non-Programistanis throughout the World Wide Internet…
Mashing Up Japanese Internment
The Non-Programistan Mash Up is not about filthy programming and sordid data, it is about fomenting the revolution fo student creativity and imagination!
For example, Capitalist lies about Japanese Internment on YouTube, originally uploaded to the Internet archive*, finds way into student blog post at the People’s University of Mary Washington…
*Original video was on the Internet archive here, <strike>yet as of March 30th, 2008 the page was giving an error –further suggesting the value of rsources like YouTube for archining resources for presentation and reuse</strike> it is back up as April 3, 2008.
It soon becomes part of a rap song created by students in this class explaining the “mashed up situation” of Japanese Internment, re-mixing and incorporating tracks from the video.
Listen to the song below.
Download Japanese Internment Rap Song
Or, see video and song mashed up. First come excerpt from archival video then students’ song from the People’s University of Mary Washington:
Mashups: The Future of the Past?
“History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” Karl Marx
If true, then the possibilities of a digital history class at the People’s University of Mary Washington have made such a pursuit of one’s aims increasingly easier. As government agencies like the Virginia Department of Historical Resources utilize user-friendly, popular, and somewhat open applications like Google Maps to share resources, Non-Progamistani everywhere can simply copy and paste geo-tagged embed code for just about any historical marker located in Virginia. So students not program, students think and create while smart government programs.
Historical Markers Group Project for Prof Jeff McClurken’s Adventures in Digital History course.
Ingredients: Google Maps, Flickr, Google Maps Quicktags Embed Plugin, and WPMu
UMW Centennial Blog
Flickr + WordPress = Easy Pulishing and Presentation of Photos to everybody in Non-Programistan. Plugins provide the modular functionality key to an open, flexible framework for presenting your loyalties to the rich and illustrious history of the People’s University of Mary Washington.
As you can see, by putting images on Flickr, the possibilities for embedding become rich and great with free and easy tools made for and by the people, such as flickrSLidR (featured below) highlighting the grand history of the “Long Revolution” at Mary Washington.
Ingredients: Flickr, Flickr Photo Album plugin, and WPMu
Aggregating Blogs as Educational Community Mashup
Front page of UMW Blogs, interdisciplinary RSS feed driven mashup of blog posts from around People’s University of Mary Washington, tracing minds from around the university as a collective feed of insight, strength, and intellectual power free for the world to enjoy. And thanks to honorary Programmer citizen of Non-Programistan, Andre Malan, citizens are free to enter this revolutionary stream of rhetoric as they see fit –for the power must be in the hands of the people!
Ingredients: BDPRSS Aggregator Plugin, Andre Malan’s BDP RSS Add Feed widget, WPMu
SPAM, RSS, Aggregation, and the Mashable Blog
Non-Programistani believe in ease of sharing; difficulty makes for struggle over scarcity leading to information strife and famine. Tony Hirst at the Open University is honorary citizen of Non-Programistan (despite his tremendous programming prowess), for his mashed up code makes life easier for people of Non-Programistan. Take for example the RSS feeds he fashioned for the courses in the OpenLearn OER, which when re-syndicated with a spam plugin (such as WP-O-Matic or FeedPress) create beautiful, wonderful resource below in a minutes time with no code!
Once the resource is cleanly removed from the repository and re-published in WordPress, it becomes a simple process to both augment and Mash Up this resource to suit the needs of various courses and contexts. WordPress as educational spammer, and easy mashup machine!
Ingredients: A RSS feed from Open University’s OpenLearn OER, WP-O-Matic Plugin (or FeedWordPress plugin), and WPMu
Non-Programistan Rating
Open:
Not only is it open source, but the community is strong and the extensibility of the platform to incorporate third-party plugins that are shared freely throughout the “World Wide Internets” and make the sharing and mashing up of ideas amongst the citizens of Non-Programistan that much more likely. Openness is a virtue, not a technology!
Friendly:
Perhaps the strongest feature of WordPress as Mashup Machine is its simplicity. Compared to most publishing engines, it is extremely user-friendly, providing powerful tools for integrating and presenting from a wide range of web-based applications like YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc. with the click of a button. The promise od ease of use, an elusive beast in the online world, is by far the greatest asset of this model.
Portable:
The model depends up bringing data easily into and out of Wordpress easily, and for that it proves a highly portable application for mashing up various resources and presenting them. Yet, ability to export all your data from an Application like WordPress and re-import it elsewhere is still in need of some fine tuning, and while strong, it must work harder to ensure its positive Non-Progamistan rating.
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