Barbara Rockenbach welcomed everyone to the Collaborative Learning Center, an entity created to bring together course supporters and others across campus interested in teaching and learning. After remarking on the great turnout for our “spring break edition” of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays, Barbara introduced Ian McDermott, Visual Literacy Fellow in the University Library.

Ian’s topic was Flickr (www.flickr.com), a website on which users can store, organize, and share their own photos and search photos shared by others. Users can attach metadata to their own photos, including tagging them with keywords, and they can also contribute to Flickr’s usefulness by adding tags to others’ photos. Ian began by asking for a show of hands to see how many people use Flickr now. About half of us in the room use it already, mostly for posting our own photos or looking at other people’s personal collections.

One of Flickr’s strengths is in tracking the copyright status of images, which is helpful when looking for copyright-free photos. By default, when a user uploads a photo, it is designated “All Rights Reserved.” However, users can change the status (for example, to “Some Rights Reserved”) and associate an image’s copyright status to the license restrictions defined by Creative Commons (creativecommons.org). Flickr links directly to the Creative Commons website and explains how you can legally make use of images uploaded by others, and what conditions govern this use.

Ian demonstrated some useful examples of finding Flickr content:

1) Pingnews.com – Public Information Network Group – This is a group that aggregates a lot of public domain images from government, military, and other public sources. The entries are pretty thorough; for example, they talk about how to cite their images in your own works. Sometimes individuals who post images on Flickr put up good pictures, but their entries lack the metadata they need to be useful. That’s the advantage of groups like Pingnews; they include detailed tags and other info, and then individual users can always increase the value of the collection by adding their own tags.

2) The Library of Congress – Ian demonstrated two big LoC collections – 1930’s and 40’s in Color, and News in the 1910’s. These photos include extensive notes from LoC, including the entire record from the LoC’s online catalog, and again, Flickr users can add more tags.

3) Ian showed some examples of using Flickr to find photos of Yale & New Haven architecture. He showed the Paul Rudolph A&A building, which led him to photos of other Rudolph designs outside of New Haven, posted by various individual Flickr users.

Ian, Joe, and Stace Maples from the Map Collection also shared some technical specifics about Flickr:

1) Flickr has a Tools section, which includes tools you can use to connect Flickr to other things, such as a cell phone with a camera, Facebook, or iPhoto. Users of iPhoto can upload images to Flickr directly from their own iPhoto collections.

2) You can designate other Flickr users as your contacts, and this will allow you to keep up on what photos they are posting.

3) Flickr has a discussion board on which users can post topics for discussion and reply to one another’s messages.

4) Flickr offers a publicly available API. This means that computer programmers can create their own software that interacts with the collection of images stored on Flickr. One example of this is flickrvision (flickrvision.com), for which someone created his own website that displays Flickr images–and the locations in which they were taken–in the context of a world map.

5) Flickr images can be geocoded, i.e. tagged with location information so viewers know where they were taken. Geocoded images can then be matched up with maps or globes. The Flickr website has some capacity for this mapping, though others are also developing software that ties into this capability. Some digital cameras (and cell phones with built-in cameras) have GPSs and can be set to tag photos automatically with their locations so that this information is already associated with the pictures when they are uploaded to Flickr. (Stace described the software GPSWatch – http://www.i10n.com – which can be used to turn a cell phone into a GPS receiver.)

6) Flickr accounts are free, though free accounts include some limitations on the amount of content users can upload. A Flickr Pro account, which allows unlimited storage, is $24.95/year.

Next, Mary Miller, Vincent Scully Professor of History of Art, talked about how she uses Flickr in her teaching. For example, in her Pre-Colombian Architecture course, Mary uses Flickr to find images of Machu Picchu to show her students. She demonstrated that a simple search for Machu Picchu yields over 118,000 results (many not very useful), but she then narrowed her search by using names of specific buildings. If she finds one image she likes, she looks at other images posted by the same person in the hopes of finding other useful ones in the collection. Another characteristic Mary looks for is the image size; users can post images of various sizes and resolutions, and she needs ones that are large and detailed enough to be useful when projected in the classroom.

Mary cautioned that many pictures in Flickr (such as those taken and uploaded by tourists) may be mislabeled. Therefore, it is most useful to someone like a professor who is familiar with the topic and who can select the most appropriate images. While students may want to use Flickr to find images of topics they are studying in class, they might need some guidance in understanding their findings and verifying their accuracy. (Likewise, students might upload and tag their own images as part of their coursework.)

Once Mary finds images she wants to show her students, she downloads them to her computer and stores them in iPhoto so she can find them quickly during class. With regard to the copyright status of the photos she uses, Mary is careful to ensure that her use of photos she distributes to students or posts on a website is consistent with the license restrictions. However, she may show copyrighted photos from the Flickr website in class.

Finally, Barbara mentioned the PictureAustralia project (www.pictureaustralia.org), through which the National Library of Australia has assembled photos representative of Australia and Australian culture. The project partnered with Flickr and Yahoo, particularly as a way for viewers of the site to upload their own pictures and designate their copyright status in the context of the Creative Commons license structure.