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