Consulting an Expert Player

To help with my exploration of the world of photosharing I interviewed my 20 year old son about what photosite he uses and why. Tom is a mac-man through and through. It was his love of mac that led me to order my own, one week into this U of A course. Kind of a steep learning curve to begin exploring a new computer while taking my first on-line course....but hey, nothing like immersing oneself to see how well you float!

Anyway, Tom takes and stores photos on his mac and he seems to share images through Facebook as much as anything. He tells me he has used photobucket and found it easy enough. I gave it a whirl and found it straightforward and appealing. Lots of options to view and use(?) other people's photos. I must admit that my initial worry about being confronted with images of scantily clad young folks was somewhat appeased. Useful parts of photobucket are the links to myspace. This seems to be a full service site, but Im not sure just when you start to pay for what you use.

I spent some time on the Flickr site too. Very similar possibilities. I really liked the tour and I was immediately interested in the creative commons details. Sharing art, giving artists both credit and control over how their art is used AND the possibility of comments from a wide audience---this is the internet at its best. The possibilities for students to create, manipulate and display all kinds of work is exciting. I can imagine applications for just about every subject area. Creating videos, which we look at next, could be used to teach processes,(e.g. baking a cake, performing a science experiment, choreographing a dance, giving a speech or even researching in a library!).

My sense is that using multi- media would make any assignment more engaging for most students.