Today, educators of every ilk are learning to leverage the Internet, and more specifically Web 2.0 tools, to add value to the classroom experience. While today’s technological advances offer a plethora of functionality that could easily be implemented into learning, many are often cautious when considering some of the unintended consequences that can arise with such adoption.
One of the earliest and most popular resources available online is Flickr, a free photo sharing website. Flickr lets users upload photos, share their photo collections, and comment on the pictures submitted by others.
Already, I have found a whole host of ways to use Flickr in the classroom with activities ranging from recognizing athletic merit in afterschool sports, to celebrating individuals demonstrating school spirit, and even learning Geography through Flickr’s Geotags functionality.
While activities such as these seem fairly straightforward and easy to implement, concerns do exist whenever students are searching and posting material on the Internet. As such, I believe that the critical barrier for implementing outside technologies like Flickr in the classroom is not the actual scope of the activities themselves, but the fear of using open and public Internet web sites with young people. However, I’m learning that many of the concerns that one might have with using an a resource like Flickr in the classroom can be mitigated.
First, accounts can be set up as private. This prevents individuals from outside the invited account from interacting with the group. If an instructor creates a group that is designated by a classroom or course section, no public users could interfere or raise privacy concerns that some may have with young learners. Furthermore, instructors have the opportunity to turn off the commenting features that are included with files posted into Flickr. Furthermore, specific tags can be established within the site to limit the types of pictures and viewable files that can be seen the group. In combination, all of these tactics can be used to limited student exposure to outside materials that are deemed too mature for certain contexts while also protecting the privacy of minors using the world wide web. I didn’t realize these functions and filters existed until recently, and I think explaining these protections outright through Screenflow or Power Point presentations would help in easing administrators, parents, or other faculty into using this power tool.
As such, I’m inspired to raise these issues with my administration in order to implement Flickr next semester. For the last several semesters, I’ve been teaching a marketing course at the Institute for Production and Recording. Within the context of marketing, we discuss art, graphic design, and aesthetics in order to better understand how to leverage print design and even merchandise development. While students are generally excited about the material, I’ve found it difficult to help them internalize topics as diffuse and diverse as “aesthetics” and “taste”. Yet with Flickr, I’m interested in designing an assignment wherein students are required to take pictures of good and bad design materials they find throughout their daily lives on billboards, televisions, magazines, or other computing devices. I would create a group for the class, and require the students to post, view, and comment on each other’s work between classroom sessions.
Later in class, we could process the merits of submitted pictures and start to draw themes, commonalities, and techniques used within effective and ineffective advertising and marketing campaigns. I think this process would increase student interest, further refine their visual processing abilities, boost inter-personal communication skills, and help develop design recognition attributes like color, balance, and kerning. Again, I think it the sharing and interactive nature of some of these resources provides an absolutely critical learning environment for young adults soon to enter the work place.
In all, I’m really enjoying some of these activities and I’ve appreciated the progression of the course wherein we’re gaining a richer experience with a few applications rather than trying to survey the entire scope of Internet technology. Web 2.0 tools like Flickr are immensely powerful, and I’m looking forward to including them in my classroom practice.
What amazes me about the internet, sometimes, is not what I don't know about the internet but what I think would be sensible for the internet that may or may not already exist.
ReplyDeleteFor Flickr to have a means to create private files (referenced in 5th 'graph) allows the possibility, for instance, for a school yearbook staff to collaborate remotely on the photographic selections for a yearbook publication. Students' brains do not always "fire" at a prescribed point in a school day, while other students require a lower-key environment to process their thoughts in the context of much visual and interpersonal stimulation; these participants can be massive contributors from computers elsewhere. The paradigm of the internet allows what originally caused prior generations literally to shy away from collaborative activities to provide valuable input.
Moderators--not the youth editorial staff, but the teacher/sponsor of the collaboration--has extra keys that open new opportunities for those educators who seek to foster the rounded growth of their charges:
-give each participant a passcode that tags each piece of input. Hold participants accountable to steward that passcode. A participant who is negligent with his or her account is treated as having submitted that material himself or herself. The downside is the sense of feeling cheated, but the upside is the wisdom of future responsibility with personal information, รก la identity theft, but without the scars on the credit report;
-GIGO--"garbage in, garbage out," becomes GIGT: "Garbage in, garbage trapped." If the moderator is the only one who can release the collaborative result, an outside agent who would try to cause injury to individuals or the effort before it can be filtered. This prevents inadvertent malice from bringing the whole house down. This also permits the collaborator, whose security has been compromised, to feel the sting of accountability without his or her fellow collaborators getting to share evidence of unfortunate choices/results with the outside world;
-"mistakes," such as a photo that a collaborator would have rather cropped differently, are also temporarily "trapped in the web." In this case the process, rather than merely the product, is evident;
-a trained moderator could extrapolate from the time-tags of each young participant's activity who seems to do better in off-site contexts. Student privacy is not the issue here. Rather, it is adult observation of the young individual to assess and address life-skill issues while still letting the participant be productive and allowed to grow by existing strengths.
Moderators, particularly in the last example of potential benefits, are even more responsible to collaborate themselves with colleagues skilled in the assessment of youth development for their own sakes. The implications, though, for watchdogging inappropriate materials and replacing their release with a microcosm of developmental wealth are enormous.