“Flickr already provides all the tools the typical faculty member needs”, Edwired concludes an interesting discussion on the use of Flickr in teaching. I agree, the tools are there and the collection of images is really great and tagged and everything.
I really like this web2.0-meets-education development as an alternative to learning management systems, and have been using blogs and del.icio.us in my teaching for years. Once I understood that the thing was to not only post myself to the course blog but also have the students blogging and del.icio.us-tagging during their paperwriting, interesting things started to happen, I think. Soon, some colleagues and I will host a workshop on blogs and similar technologies in teaching and research.
Only, there’s this slightly uneasy feeling I get about using a tool that is free but not open and that charges you extra for things like making your collection private. Personally, I would like to see alternatives to the Yahoo-owned Flickr, perhaps driven by academics, built on top of archive.org or something similar.
Hi:
I completely agree that it would be preferable to have something open source/open access to do the same sorts of things that Flickr and other commercial products provide. I think I’ll try out this image analysis approach in my Western Civ course in the spring, but since I’ll be requiring the students to purchase a Flickr account, I plan to drop a book from the set I’m asking them to purchase, so that the cost for the course remains the same.
I’d be interested to hear from you what some of those “interesting things” were that started to happen once your students started blogging more. Also, I’m always interested in ways to get them to take more ownership of the blog, rather than just responding to prompts from me. What worked for you in getting them to blog on their own?
Mills
I run a blog on the introductory STS course and the second module is a paper writing module. The students blog the whole paper writing process, from the first week up until the finalized version. The weekly seminars then get going a bit more quickly, since the students (and I) know what the others are doing prior to the seminar. Also, regular blogging seems to take out a bit of the stress out of the writing process, at least I hope so. Prior to this, it seems the paper writing process more was something going on between teacher and student, now the whole group gets a bit more involved.
Now, I should not overestimate this and some students respond with too little activity to the prompts from me. Still, when it works, it is a kind of improvement.