7 things you should know about Flickr
The article entitled 7 Things you know about Flickr is a useful article describing the key ideas to explaining what the idea of Flickr is, as well as the use for it.
The seven key information ideas include;
1. What it is – Flickr is a website which enables anyone to upload and tag photos.
2. Who is doing it – “Some faculty have begun using Flickr images in their courses, and art schools, biologists, and others use the site to share, critique, and analyze visual information”
3. How it works – Flickr offers anyone to join up for free. The free accounts have limits on bandwidth as well as the number of groups in which each photo can be included. A registered user may upload their photos to the site, assign tags, and indicate whether the photos are public or private. You may even select whether you would like the photos copyrighted.
4. Why it is significant – With photo sharing sites, they offer you many different collections of images, which are not available anywhere else as they are owned and contributed by individuals. Therefore not only are the photos put on original, but also the range of visual resources for a specific topic are enormous.
5. The downsides – The main downside which doesn’t just relate to Flickr, but anything that is an online service is that the host’s content raises questions about the reliability of the service and its terms of use. It states that “Institutions of higher education are generally wary of depending on a commercial service for academic content, which potentially limits Flickr’s usefulness in teaching and learning.”
6. Where it is going – “Flickr is known for being responsive to the user community, which is at the heart of successful Web 2.0 applications, and the site might in this way put pressure on colleges and universities to develop tools that are similarly attractive to students and faculty”
7. The implications for teaching and learning – Flickr provides an easy, comfortable platform for students to engage with content and a community in the process of collective knowledge creation.
Flickr seems to be a very useful online site that allows groups to create their own Flickr site, where their photos will be stored as their group’s photos. This can be useful for teaching purposes as you could create a class account, and have students take photographs of particular items, whether it is related to a topic which they are learning about at the time.
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