Flickr: Photo Sharing and Community Building

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Flickr: Photo Sharing and Community Building: "Flickr is a photo sharing and photo community site that delivers on the promise of building community around images. At its most basic level, Flickr allows people to upload images, describe them, and then allow others to discuss them. Throw in a bunch of features such as slide shows, notes, RSS/Atom feeds, groups, tags and weblog integration tools, and you have one of the best community building tools found on the web.

Over at Ed-Tech Insider I've added a post about Flickr, the photo sharing and community site. I'm finding Flickr to be a great tool with some interesting applications in the K - 12 world. Also it is a great way to keep up with family and friends. My daughter posts images from her graphic arts projects and I have nieces and nephews sharing images. Recently Tom Hoffman traveled to London and posted images from his trip.

Life After Head Start...

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Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21IDEA.html?oref=login">The New York Times Magazine > Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start

Not only has the Perry study set records for longevity, but it also asks the truly pertinent question: what is the impact of preschool, not on the test scores of 7-year-olds but on their life chances? The answer is positive -- a well-designed program really works.

An article from the Sunday New York Times Magazine that highlights the most recent findings from the Perry Preschool Project. The study examines the lives of 123 African Americans born in poverty and at high risk of failing in school in Ypsilanti, Michigan.The subjects were randomly divided into a program group who received a high-quality preschool program based on High/Scope's participatory learning approach and a comparison group who received no preschool program. In the study's most recent phase, 97% of the study participants still living were interviewed at age 40.

The Times article does a nice job of outlining the findings... mainly that adults at age 40 who had the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool. The Perry Preschool Project Fact Sheet gives a good overview of the main research questions answered by the ongoing study.

New Book From O'Reilly... Wireless Hacks..

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oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Wireless Hacking Just a few of the things you'll learn from this book...

* Use existing Ethernet cables to provide low-voltage power to Access Points with no additional source of electricity. * Install Linux and FreeBSD on low-cost (under $150) Soekris single-board computers. * Modify the firmware of your Linksys WRT54g. * Construct Solar Powered Access Points and Repeaters for your Wi-Fi network. * WarDrive for wireless access points with tools like Kismet and NetStumbler. * Install an antenna without killing yourself or changing the earth's orbit. * Expand your Wi-Fi network beyond one box and 50 users with MESH network topology.

I'm really interested in learning how to do the first one...

Flat Stanly Project at Lewis

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Flat Stanley Weblog
At Lewis Mrs. Crouse's 3rd grade classroom is taking part in a Flat Stanley activity with a classroom in Vancouver, WA. The idea behind this is that students share a paper Stanley and then write about the adventures of the visiting Stanley and share these adventures with the partner classroom. This can be accomplished through traditional mail, email or in our case a weblog. We looked at ways to make it easy for Mrs. Crouse's classroom and the one in Vancouver to share their stories. After much discussion we decided the easiest thing to do was to set up a weblog in Moveable Type running off the Lewis server and to then set up a Flickr account for the Flat Stanley classrooms to post their images to. Flickr allows users to upload images via email and also post a description from the body of the email to a blog using the XMLRPC interface. The classrooms taking part in the Flat Stanley project just have to send an email and the post will automaticly appear on the weblog along with the attached image file.

OS X Home/Classroom Library Catalog Tool

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OS X Home/Classroom Library Catalog Tool: "Delicious Library (note: the name has nothing to do with del.icio.us the social bookmarks manager.) is an Macintosh OS X application that allows for the cataloging of a home or classroom library collection, a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. You can import your information by hand by title or author, or if you have an..."

Over at the eSchoolNews weblog I have posted about Delicious Library. A very interesting home/classroom library cataloging tool with a confusing name. It allows you to cataglog books, music CD's, video's, and video games. The information can be entered manually, or you can use an iSight video camera as a scanner and scan in the bar codes of your items. It then searches Amazon for the information and returns it for cataloging. I am planning to help a few teachers at Lewis Elementary set this up for check out of their classroom library books.

Intelligent Agents power Student Support 'Chat-bots'

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Intelligent Agents power Student Support 'Chat-bots': "The South Orange County Commuity College District has put intelligentagents to work fielding questions from students through instant messaging.  Students are able to ask questions about classes,their college and resources available to students in"

(Via EDUCAUSE Blogs -.)

Cyprien Lomas points to an interesting support approach utilizing an instant messaging format to providing access to resources and sharing information. I subscribe to a similar service called Smarter Child. Smarter Child is a commercial service that allows you to use check sports, weather, news and other such information. It is interesting to think of institutions using this approach to provide access to their knowledge bases.

1001 - A Desktop Flickr Client...

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Kula: 1001 1001 is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr, the online photo-sharing website. 1001 not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what's new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos. (Via Joi Ito's Web.)

This is pretty nice. Another interesting use of Flickr that demonstrates the hooks they have built into it for use by developers. I've got it running and it is kind of nice to see pictures pop up as they are posted to the Flickr site...

New Flickr Features...

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flickrinline.jpgFlickrBlogTwo new features from Flickr, the photo sharing/community site. First, in-place editing for photo titles and descriptions. You can now edit the title and description information while looking at the photo in context.

Another feature is tag relatedness. Flickr already allows you to assign tags to your images to help keep them organized. They have added a feature where related tags are also posted. For example going to the Flickr site associated with the word VOTE, and you will get all the images that have been tagged with that term. Also listed on the page are links to related tags... election, Kerry, Bush...

Podcasting and Bandwidth Usage...

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Russell Beattie Notebook - 25GB

I know I'm going to learn from experience. The next time I decide to put out a potentially popular media file like that, it'll definitely be on BitTorrent first.

Russell Beattie discusses a possible downfall of becoming a popular Podcaster... bandwidth usage/charges. There has been lots of talk about Podcasting, positioning audio for easy incorporation into devices such as an iPod. While I think the opportunities for time shifting are great and would love to see more existing audio content available via this method of distribution, I'm not that excited about the do it your self variety. It sounds to me a bit like Wayne and Garth without the basement set...

Smaller High Schools

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AssortedStuff: It will be interesting to watch these "small school" experiments as they unfold, although it will probably take years to see the total effect. There is one advantage of a high school with less than 500 students, however. They won't be able to field much of a football team and that will remove a major distraction.

Tim Stahmer discusses recent moves in Chicago and Los Angeles to redesign large high schools into smaller learning communities. Joe Luft of Flushing International High School, and Tom Hoffman of Feinstein High School in Providence have some experience in this area. Also Portland's Marshall High School has recently begun a reorganization as part of a Gates Foundation grant. The Northwest Regional Educational Lab describes their progress in an article entitled Anatomy of Change in the latest issue of Northwest Education.

Flickr Notes...

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flickr object: "

Alan Levine talks about the use of "Notes" in Flickr, the photosharing/community web space. Flickr has a feature where a user can assign notes to parts of an image. For example if you had a picture of a group of students, you could assign a note to each student which when moused over would reveal their name. A nice feature for a substitute teacher.

Alan talks about creating learning objects with Flickr. I think Flickr is a very interesting platform for education. For example at Lewis, some classrooms will soon be involved in the Flat Stanley Project. Flat Stanley is a book character and a rich tradition has grown up of students creating a paper version of Stanley and then sending him via postal mail to another school for a visit. In the process students at both schools share email (or a weblog post, or now, Flickr posts...) about Stanley's adventures at the visiting school.