Mash-Up Personal Learning
Environments
Part 2 – Workshop
Hannes Ebner, KTH
Fridolin Wild, VUE
TENCompetence Winter School 2009, Feb 1-6
1

Overview
• Introduction
– Mashing up
– Services and Tools (brief rundown)
• How could your PLE look like?
– Discussion in groups
– Visualize your ideas (maps, flipchart, ...)
• How would you realize it?
– Would it work with your favourite applications?
– Which environments are suitable?
– Mockup, ppt+slideshare concept, ...
• Presentations/discussion
2

Creating mash-ups
• Various approaches
– Data extraction and integration (visual, non-visual)
– Data processing and visualization
– Frontends: code- and/or command-based; visual
– Combination of all or several of the above
• Typical workflow for mash-up construction
– Fetching resources (e.g. feeds)
– Constructing widgets out of resources
– Combining widgets to applications
(Piping and wiring)
3

Piping and Wiring
iX 10/2008, Enterprise Mashups, p. 99
4

Yahoo! Pipes
http://pipes.yahoo.com
• Based on feeds
• Feed construction
– Data extraction
– Page scraping
• Content analysis
• Data filtering/manipulation
• URL construction
• Feed aggregation/mashing
• Manual input
• ...
5

Dapper
http://www.dapper.net
• Data mapper
• Based on “Dapps”
– RSS feeds (in and out)
– Widget creation
– Alerts, ...
• Existing Dapps can be
shared and reused
• Combination of Dapps
6

openkapow
http://openkapow.com
• Based on robots
• Automates what a person can do in the browser
• Robots are used to extract data, functionality or
parts of the UI
• Can be used if feeds and APIs are missing or just
parts of a site should be reused
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Ubiquity
http://ubiquity.mozilla.com
“An experiment into connecting the Web with language”
• Language-based instructions
• On-demand, user-generated mashups
• Own commands can be easily created (e.g. jQuery)
Examples
email “what a scary site” to greenwool
map innsbruck skiing
8

Chickenfoot
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/
• Firefox extension
• Superset of JavaScript
• Web page manipulation
• Automation of tasks
9

Sprout Builder
http://sproutbuilder.com
• “Web Content Builder”
• Widgets, mini-sites, mashups, ...
• Supports various social networks
• Reuses static components as well as web
services
• Hybrid between web publishing and mashup tool
10

More
• Apatar
• Google App Engine (Google Mashup Editor)
• IBM Damia
• IBM Mashup Center
• Marmite
• Microsoft Popfly
• SAP Research Rooftop
• Serena Mashup Suite
• ...
11

Task 1: How could your PLE
look like?
• Discussion in groups
• Visualize your ideas
– Flipchart
– Mind maps
– Conceptual models
– ...
12

Task 2: How would you realize
it?
• Would it work with your favourite applications?
• Is there an API?
• Which data formats are used?
• Can you get a feed?
• Which environments are suitable?
• Mockup, ppt+slideshare concept, ...
13

Links
http://delicious.com/tag/tcws09+mupple
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