Web feats 6: Photosharing

There was a time when you had to sit down people down, plonk an album in their lap and make them sit there for a while, to share your holiday snaps or photos of your sister's wedding. The alternative was to bore everyone to death by putting on a slideshow of your favourite photos in a darkened room - remember the Kodak Carousel? Either way, to enjoy your photos, they had to be in the same room. All that has changed with the advent of Flickr and Picasa and other online photosharing services. Now you simply send a link on Facebook or Twitter, or your e-mail, and hundreds of friends, family and even those you don't even know, can come in and view your photo collection when it's convenient to them.

The great thing about these Web 2.0 photosharing sites is that they constitute their own specialist social networks - and these are organised around an appreciation of great photography, and an interest in talking about images. I don't mind admitting that I have at least 6 Flickr accounts, some to share personal photos, family and friends stuff, and others to share professional content. One of my Flickr accounts contains photos of all my overseas visits and conference presentations.

How do teachers use Flickr? I have seen some very interesting uses including one where a biology teacher used the tagging facility on Flickr to teach human anatomy. She produced some pictures of the human body and asked her students to tag the various internal organs - it worked very well, and all the students enjoyed the experience greatly. Others use Flickr to encourage students to be creative in the generation of content. If the feedback they receive online is constructive, they learn a lot by sharing their photographs. One encouraging feature is the hit counter which shows students how many times their images have been viewed, and how many people have favourited their photos. A lot of photos on Flickr are licensed under creative commons, so, with fair acknowledgement of the source, many can be freely used and repurposed depending on the type of licence assigned to them.

Image source

Web feats 6: Photo sharing by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Capturing the moment

Photographs are very powerful things. I was looking through some old photographs this week, from my youth group days. An old friend was good enough to scan them and post them up to Facebook so we could all share the memories. I still remember the teenagers I spent time with, as they were then, frozen in time. I have lost touch with many of them, and I probably wouldn't recognise some of them now, but my memories of them then, as they looked then, evoke all sorts of emotions. The picture of me on the left was taken around 1980 (from another photo collection), capturing a personal moment in time for me. I wonder what happened to that old combat jacket?

When I trained as a photographer back in the early 70s, everything was done manually, in a dark room, with developing and fixing tanks, enlargers and various grades of printing paper. Photography took time. We had to learn all about lens apertures, parallax errors, film speeds and polarising filters. With the introduction and rapid take up of digital photography, a lot has changed. Photography is now more or less instant. It is now so much easier to create, edit, and share images over social media. Sites such as Picasa, Flickr and Facebook are full of shared images, many that have been posted to the web within seconds of being taken. The social web is an instantaneous, rich and fertile environment for sharing memories, capturing moments in time and preserving them for ever. Even the British Monarchy has this week widened its digital footprint by publishing a number of previously unseen images on its new British Monarchy Flickr site.

Never before have we been able to make the statement - this is me! - in such an emphatic and meaningful manner. Digital photography, when linked with social media, can offer endless opportunities for people to engage with each other. The discussion over the old photos of my youth group posted on Facebook last week has prompted a flurry of comments, tagging and sharing from us all - and although many of us had lost touch with each other - the images have brought us back together again, wherever we are in the world. That is priceless.

There is an undeniably emotional - and even spiritual - dimension to this kind of shared imagery. Capturing moments in time that will never be again. Sharing them, and talking about 'the old times' is not just about nostalgia, and remembering a time that once was. It's also about celebrating the 'here and now', marking the event, because it will quickly be gone. It is about recognising that although time is a constantly onward moving stream, we are able to share our common thoughts, emotions, hopes and aspirations as we encounter each other within it.

'You cannot step into the same river twice' - Heraclitus

Image source

Capturing the moment by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Flickring about

I've been playing around with Flickr during my holiday, and I'm quite impressed at how quickly you can upload images, tag them, geomap them (locate photos on a map to show where they were taken) and publicise them to all and sundry. In just three days of being a Flickr member, I have posted 27 photos, received 50 views and about half a dozen comments, all very positive, about my artistic expertise and skills in photogenic composition (here's one I made earlier - know where it is anyone??). If you want to see some more, you go to my photo collection and have a look. This is all very encouraging and affirmative stuff, and must be a key reason why Flickr is so addictive. Flickrites are just so darn nice!

Anyway, it got me thinking about all the teaching and learning posibilities of Flickr and other photo-sharing/social networking services. A big selling point is the fact that the discussion centres upon an object - in this case an image - which could be any kind of learning object. Another useful feature is that there is the facility to 'favourite' an image - this counts as a kind of polling or voting function - another useful learning tool.

Now I've got the hang of it, I'm busying my little mind on how I can possibly harness the potential of Flickr (and Picasa, and others) to enhance my teaching sessions, and enable students to become more creative in their learning endeavours.