http://flickr.com
The web has, if nothing else, re-energised society’s involvement with and appreciation of the still image, after many years in which film and television had presented the world as a moving image. Flickr fashions a space where the still image becomes the focus: deploying this focus, however, challenges students and teachers for whom visual literacy may not be as familiar as the written words which remain dominant in scholarly work outside of a few specific disciplines.
The basics
Flickr involves uploading images, either for public, private or limited distribution, which can then be tagged and arranged into collections, and, when linked to a group, provide a shared gallery for discussion and comment. Flickr is well established, easy to use, and offers rich controls to create a niche space, among all the public interactions, for a particular community to emerge, working together on a particular set of images.
Pedagogic Challenge
Flickr is so widely used by people for its explicit purpose – sharing and discussing photographs – that it can be hard to repurpose it for education. However, the underlying community features, and the fact that Flickr emphasises visual representation, mean it has considerable affordance for learning. Crucially, flickr can be used to get students to interact with their world via photography (using digital imaging devices that are now very common); then, because there are discussionn threads for photographs, students can interact with each other, in response to those images. The real challenge is to get students to see how creating digital images (which can also include videos, animations, non-photographic images) is actually part of the learning process. While flickr provides a deeply realistic learning environment for courses in art and design, where the visual image is clearly part of the subject matter, there may be challenges in moving
A discussion of the use of Flickr has been produced by COFA in its Learning to Teach Online series:
Alternatives
There are many alternatives to flickr for photo sharing (7 are listed at the Photography Bay blog). However, for educational purposes, Flickr should be used.
Read…
One example of the use of Flickr is discussed in the report of Gray et al.’s ALTC project on WEb 2.0
