Blog #1: Photosharing

Reflections on the process of learning about Flickr

To explore photosharing, I chose to sign up for a Flickr account. I had used Flickr in the past to search for photos, but had never taken time to explore the site and think about the uses for teaching and learning. My personal photosharing needs have been met in the past by Facebook and Kodak Gallery. What more could Flickr possibly have to offer?

As with most other popular sites, Flickr was easy to sign up for and, because I already had a Yahoo! login, I was relieved not to have to remember another user ID and password. With speed and a touch of ho-hum, I set about creating my profile and uploading pictures. "But why?" a small part of me asked, "how is this going to make my life better?"

For the purposes of this course, I chose a public profile and used my real name for the account to help classmates and the instructor find my pictures. I also used the same icon as my profile picture on Flickr, Twitter, and Blogger to foster cross-platform recognition. These two choices made me very aware of how public and accessible these photos could be: for students, parents, and future hiring committees!


Discussion of Flickr for my own personal learning

In terms of nuts and bolts, I appreciated the following about Flickr:

• easy to sign up for and start using.
• 100MB uploads per month for free - my 5 un-resized pictures came to 7.08MB, meaning I could upload about 70 photos a month without resizing.
  
• when uploading photos, the screen displayed a check mark for completed photos and a progress bar for remaining photos. This helped me gauge how much time I could spend multi-tasking before returning my attention to Flickr.
• geotagging.

As the video in our trailfire this week explained, Flickr keeps your photos "safe, organized, and findable," and "makes taking pictures fun by making photos social." My ENTIRE collection of personal photos is stored on our home laptop, the laptop which overheats, turns itself off without warning, and will someday soon become useful only as a boat anchor. We back up our files periodically, but I am still haunted by the impermanence of our archive of memories. If I uploaded all our pictures to Flickr, I would take comfort in knowing that our wedding photos are not only on our unreliable storage device, but also 'out there' and findable.

My husband does not like to have pictures of himself or our home publically available on the internet. Out of respect for this, I created a completely private set for our wedding photos. These pictures will not show up on my profile to anyone other than me, but constitute the bulk of my Flickr account.

The more time I spent reading about Flickr, the more I wanted to explore. I have this thing about baby camels, and I was able to indulge myself with 3,772 pictures of baby camels. Scrolling through the photos, I noticed that there were also pictures of wool and knitted items. "Hunh," I thought, "you can make stuff out of camel fur. Who knew?" This was a great example of how Flickr can facilitate learning, where "a tag search will change the context of individual images, showing an image alongside others tagged in the same way and thus reflecting something about the meaning of the term" (Davies and Merchant, p.39).

The photos I did make public were of me eating a huge burger in a vintage joint just north of Spokane, WA. I played around with titles, tags, geotagging, and notes. The geotagging made me curious about what pictures were posted in my hometown and local area, and I quickly realized the beauty of living in a small town: not many pictures geotagged. This discovery made me want to get out and take local pictures with new eyes. I could relate to Davies' discovery that "her partcipation in online communities had an effect on the way she behaved offline and influenced the way she saw the world" (Davies and Merchant, p.43).


Discussion of Flickr in terms of teaching and learning

Pros:

• easy to use for students and teachers
• ability to control privacy settings for photos and groups
  
• accessible from anywhere with internet connection
• no password required to view photos
• can store images for blogs
• segues nicely with the basic tenets of SMART learning
• can be used by those with emerging literacy skills/young learners
• opportunity for student discussion to extend learning beyond photo assignment
• potential global audience
• if a picture is worth a thousand words, educators can quickly convey a lot of information about their teaching practise with each other, creating a vast pool of knowledge
• great for visual learners
  

Cons:

• searches can reveal photos inappropriate for the classroom
  
• all terms, guides, and policies are subject to change without notice to or approval by users
• collection of user information
• site may be blocked in some schools
• easy to get distracted
  

The pros of using Flickr for teaching and learning outweigh the cons. I started to think about how I could start using Flickr for my career, and how my husband, a high school woodworking teacher, could take advantage of my new knowledge too. I joined a group for classroom displays, and another for school library displays. These groups are a much more efficient way to get ideas and inspiration for classrooms and libraries than a general google or bing search. In the future, I'm sure I'll seek out new groups as my needs and interests demand.

For the woodworking teacher, Flickr could be used to gather project ideas. Although no public groups currently exist for Woodworking/Technology Education high school programs, this venue would allow teachers to share information without getting too wordy or spending a lot of time. I was able to find another woodworking teacher, and thus have the potential to add him as a contact and subscribe to an RSS feed of his image uploads. For students, Flickr could be used in woodworking to collect ideas for projects they would like to do, and create a visual diary of their project as it progresses over time, an "online portfolio of work" (Richardson, p.22). A class group of woodworking photos could be sorted by project, or by time elapsed, allowing students to view how they are progressing as compared with other students and what projects are happening in other grades and classes.


Conclusion

For the classroom, Flickr is a much better tool for photosharing than Facebook or Kodak Gallery. Students do not need a password to get rolling and the geo/tagging features allow for the whole world to be shared, catalogued, and discussed. Flickr makes my life better because I can connect with other people who are passionate about the same things to share ideas and discussions. And of course, I can indulge my predilection for baby camels.