Mashup learning and learning communities Luigi Colazzo, Andrea Molinari Dip. Informatica e Studi Aziendali Università di Trento, Italy luigi.colazzo@unitn.it ; andrea.molinari@unitn.it Paolo Maresca Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy paolo.maresca@unina.it Lidia Stanganelli DIST - University of Genoa, Italy lidia.stanganelli@unige.it Abstract The web 2.0, when meeting the virtual communities (VC), creates many issues when communities are closed, but have a great potential if they take advantage of the inheritance mechanism normally implemented in (advanced) virtual communities systems. When a community platform is in place, the system should provide a lot of basic services in order to facilitate the interaction between community’s members. However, every community has different needs, every organization that implemements a VC platform needs some special services, every now and then users or organizations request new services. So, the VC environment is very fertile in terms of personalizations / evolutions / new developments, especially in learning settings. In order to fulfill these growing requests, the developers of e-learning applications have different possibilities: a) build the personalization “from scratch” b) create new web services for the new requests c) using a mashup approach to respond to the requests. In this paper, we will explore the promising perspectives of the latter option. Mashup is an interesting approach to new data / services development, and we will investigate its perspectives in e-learning field. Mashup seems to have a great appealing since it is devoted to the reusing approach that is a typical job in VC ongoing. 1 Introduction Today, the Information Technology scenario is having a deep evolution, under the uncreasing pressure of Market, that every days shows new needs. This change is led by technology evolution process, which offers innovative business opportunities due to new discoveries. The Software production sector for enterprises is certainly one of the most interested scenarios by this changing: next to the Enterprise Applications, developed by IT as solution to the largest part of an enterprise business problems, there is the need for Situational Applications, software built ad hoc to manage particular business processes linked to the different realities. Very often the resources destined to the production of these applications are limited, because of the lower relevance that they have in the global mission. The tendency is to adopt low quality software or to use non conventional alternatives, using software built for other purposes to achieve own goals The main difficulty to invest in the production of software of this kind is in the “artistic” and “social” nature of the business processes to model, in the sense that their particularity and specificity do not allow their implementation in Enterprise Applications. So, the challenge is to provide very flexible, agile and low cost methods and processes to develop Situational Applications, in order to exploit the business opportunity represented by the “Long Tail” [0].The possibilities offered by web 2.0 technologies are some of the most accredited solutions to this problem. In this scenario Mashups have a great relevance. A mashup is a lightweight web application, which allows users to remix informations and functions belonging to different sources and to work with them to build software in a completely new, simple and quick way. The users can efficiently model their own business process under the own vision of the problem, achieving a result so particular and specific that is impossible to obtain with the older technologies. As a initial experiment we would like to discuss following of mashup learning since this could be one of the real case in which we need to adapt the learning requirements to all user needs using a different concept much more relates to web service than the most known functional services offered by learning platform. Learning platform, in several cases, could be viewed as “Hibernate knowledge collection” from which students can learn