Social Learning Platform Enables Education Mashups
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Cerego has taken its first step toward opening its iKnow! social learning platform, a technology from aimed at integrating collaboration and learning into Web-based content, with the launch of the iKnow! Developer Portal. It's designed to allow users to create mashups using iKnow! content and is aimed particularly at "education-focused social communities."
For the new effort, Cerego has partnered with Web services and API management solutions provider Mashery to provide "a robust, scalable" API offering. According to Cerego, "The move marks the company's first phase in its pledge to open iKnow!'s platform, content, and service. It also creates a new paradigm for education-focused social communities, where people work together to teach, learn, and mash-up valuable information dispersed across the Web."
"iKnow! is among the exclusive group of forward thinking companies we work with that recognizes the inherent value of APIs to drive both product innovation and business development," said Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, in a statement released last week. "By basing their API on standards such as REST and OAuth, and also enabling for loose integration via the likes of JSON, iKnow! is contributing to an increasingly open, inter-operable, and ultimately ubiquitous, Web."
Initially, the Developer Portal will provide iKnow! content feeds to help populate new study and review applications. It will also provide "early-stage [English and Japanese] linguistic tools, which allow for sentence and item lookup and the extraction of iKnow! items from any text. This will enable developers to create learning content in new ways, including adding sentences, audio, and images to any of the hundreds of thousands of existing iKnow! items."
Further information can be found here.