Watching a Google Tech Talk presentation by the Yahoo team responsible for Pipes (?!;-), which made it clear that Pipes was intended to be used by the 10% of the Web 2.0 creator pyramid, I was struck by the phrase disposable application(s) used to describe apps that are built to be used only once or twice.
(The tiniest bit of digging also turned up a post commenting on the disposable nature of presentations.)
My department - the Dept of ICT - is currently in the middle of Faculty reorganisation that sees us joining with a couple of other departments (Systems and Technology Management, but not Computing (don't you just love their URL?) - which is coming into the new Faculty (name tba), but is to be colocated in another part of the campus along with IET).
As a consequence of the reorganisation, we have a chance to reinvent ourselves yet again (over the last 10-15 years, the dept. has gone from being an electronics dept, to the Dept of Telematics, to the current Dept of ICT. (Computing always and, I suspect, ever shall be 'Computing', though their offerings have changed over time (e.g. they do less computer science than they used to, I think?).)
The department's reinventions have been pretty successful over time, and our courses remain attractive to employers as well as students. A move into work-based learning (e.g. through Foundation Degrees), certified training with academic credit (e.g. with Cisco) and web applications development, backed up by courses addressing hard technology as well as 'softer' social issues, demonstrates a commitment to ongoing innovation in our curriculum.
The question is - where do we see the next 5-10 years going?
Turning back to the idea of 'disposable apps', one area we might consider is developing the idea of ICT users as creators - not only of content, but also of functionality.
As content becomes ubiquitous, the perceived barriers to entry to creating content are lowered.
The explosion of content on the web has many roots of course - content providers making back catalogues available online, broadcasters and the media making a land grab for eyeballs, and so on. As well as Jo Public publishing too, of course, facilitated by one-click web publishing systems (blogs) and online graffiti boards (comments and reviews, etc.;-)
But now we are starting to see one-click application development, too. As well as Yahoo Pipes (designed just for the top 10% remember), I also came across the Zoho Creator today, one of many database application creators that have appeared over the last few months (dabble db is another one worth trying out).
Content is everywhere, and increasing numbers of people are adding to it as they are tempted to "just give personal web publishing a go".
Data is everywhere too. And it's getting easier and easier to collect. And harder and harder to manage...
...unless we start manipulating it as and when necessary.
Most of us cope with content glut by asking Google to do our hard work for us and find relevant results to our simple search queries.
But how do we cope with data glut? (We don't - we ignore the data...)
I think one thing to aim for is a time when writing data queries is as easy as Googling (did you pick up that Google acquired the Gapminder Trendalyzer?)
And another is finding one-click ways of plugging appropriate data visualisation tools (think IBM's Many Eyes, and then some) into appropriate data sets that have been obtained via search box queries.
Data literacy? I think we should want some of that...
And disposable apps? We're all going to need to be our own developer...
Posted by ajh59 at April 4, 2007 02:33 PM