...or my weekend. Whatever.
I have been playing on Flickr like a maniac, and I just have to show off my stuff.
To get my feet wet, I created a "set." I uploaded a bunch of pictures around a theme (in this case, fun things to do in the summertime). Sets are basically personal photo albums. You don't have to have photos in a set, but I thought it would be nice. I played around with tags and geotagging. I couldn't get the map function to work - this would allow there to be a map showing exactly where the photo was taken just to the right of that photo. Maybe it doesn't agree with Firefox. Here is a link to my set, The Joys of Summer.
After that, I created a gallery. If sets are personal photo albums, galleries are the albums you make with other people's photos. Galleries are my absolute favorite part of Flickr. I think the galleries are where this overwhelming mass of mostly mediocre pictures becomes a place for art. My gallery isn't the most amazing out there, but I like it anyway. I did a sort of pictograph version of the lullabye poem "Wynkin, Blynkin, and Nod" by Eugene Field. It was definitely fun to do, although it took a really long time. Here it is.
Finally, I played around with annotations. If galleries draw the artists, annotating draws the educators. Annotations allow you to place a little box around one specific spot in the photograph and then place a note about the thing in the box. I used a couple of photos we took in San Francisco from the Coit Tower, a huge tower set on top of Telegraph Hill. I tried to identify some of the sights, and maybe add a little interesting fact about them. The end result is pretty cool, although it took FOREVER to do. I was hampered by the fact that I don't actually know San Francisco, so I was trying to figure out the names of the buildings using Google Earth and Google Maps. Here is the first picture and here is the second.
I could think of a bunch of educational applications. You could identify plants in a picture of a garden or forest. Or parts of a plant (or animal). In the zoo field, you could identify good (or bad) aspects of an exhibit. Or particular traits of an animal which help it to adapt to its environment. Annotations would really only be useful, however, if you wanted to investigate parts of a whole.
Setting up these Flickr "exhibits" is really work-intensive, though. I spent hours on the gallery and the annotating. I'm not really sure how useful Flickr really is in terms of educating. But it is cool. I'll give it that.
I really enjoyed your Flickr creations, especially "Wynkin, Blykin and Nod." Did trying to match pictures with the lines of the poem cause you to reflect more deeply on the meaning of the poem? The combination of the pictures with the lines "And the wind that sped them all night long ruffled the waves of dew, " and with "Til down from the skies came the wooden shoe, bringing the fisherman home," were particularly intriguing for me. I've told a number of people about Flickr after seeing what you've done with it.
ReplyDeleteI am really enjoying your blog and look forward to reading your new posts.
Thanks, Walt. :) I did start thinking of the poem more deeply as I was putting together the gallery. It became much more than a simple lullabye, and started to "feel" like a real work of art. Which I guess is kind of a backhanded compliment for Mr. Field - why CAN'T a poem that uses simple imagery and simple language be a work of art?? But I never really thought of it as such until I really started to imagine what each line might look like.
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