BP4_2009112_Web 2.0 Tools: Introducing "Middlespot"

Give a kid a tool with the ability to do "mashups," and they'll likely know what you mean, even if you don't. While students may have experience using multiple music files to create mashups, they can serve an educational purpose as well, such as those that can be created using Middlespot.

Mashups, semi-loosely defined, combine information or functions from multiple sources in order to create a new product. In the case of Middlespot, students employ a virtual canvas onto which they can save, organize, label and mash their research sources, including web pages, images, music, video, files and more, into one central location.

Figure 1. Middlespot: Leadership Lessons from Shakespeare's Hamlet

The Middlespot mashup above would be created by students in eleventh grade language arts classrooms in Michigan, where the State Curriculum suggests connecting the lessons on leadership, both positive and negative, to Hamlet's course of action throughout the play.

A document within a "stack" will pop open when the cursor hovers over it. The user can then expand their view while remaining on the mashup canvas, or click the source to go back to the web page from which it was retrieved. The three webpage stacks in Figure 1 are collected, from left to right, into encyclopedic information, reviews from performances (including a linked video), and connections being made in the world of leadership and politics to leadership lessons from Hamlet.

As an educational tool, the mashup acts as a one-stop resource for students who sometimes struggle to keep all their references in one easy place. Certainly, students can bookmark their reference sites using Delicious, or create folders within Evernote, but Middlespot allows all those references to be collected on one workspace, allowing the student to quickly access any and all of the information they have researched literally at the touch of a button.

One of its great advantages lies in the fact that students at my school more and more report being visual learners. This kind of aggregation and organization plays directly to their learning styles. Instead of struggling with stacks of notecards and source cards, or creating outlines which, for today's students, are a great mystery compared to idea webs and the like, this kind of information aggregation is right up their digital sleeves.

References

Middlespot: Leadership lessons from Shakespeare's Hamlet [Screenshot]. Captured Nov. 2, 2009 from http://middlespot.com/search.php?wpKey=8cHP5KD4QP7dYkP2WQJyP5&wpName=Hamlet:%A0Leadership#