The Lowdown on Mashups!

My students and I are investigating the educational use of "mashups" in dental hygiene. The use of podcasting and vlogcasting has become mainstream practice for educators to present students with classroom information. Conversely, students have started to create their own pod and vlogcasts for both personal and/or academic gains. With the creation of YouTube, students are able to post their created media to the web and get a variety of responses. As such, a new phenomenon has developed where people are utilizing the existing media available on YouTube and redeveloping it into something new or better than the original. This reworking of existing media has been dubbed a “mashup.” Our investigation into “mashups” has been centered on the ease at which they can be created, the potential gain in esoteric knowledge of mashup content and the educational benefits of student created mashups.

We have discovered that it is not so easy to use other people's videos on YouTube as we had assumed. As such, we have had to go to other websites that have less restrictions on the use of content. We discovered jumpcut which allows users to copy and grab the video of other members to edit. We created a very simple rudimentary dental hygiene mashup there and would like you to see it. Follow the link: brushing mashup. Tell us what you think!