Last night the students in my grad seminar Teaching History in the Digital Age gave their final project presentations. The results were very impressive and proof that when you give good graduate students the tools they need, they come up with excellent results.
The first example I want to highlight is the work of Ken Albers. Using the image mark up tool in Flickr that I’ve already discussed here, Ken created the Currier & Ives Race Module. This simple module offers a good example of how easy it is to use the Flickr image markup tool to create a digital image analysis assignment for students. The module offers a couple of marked up images that help the students begin to decode these complex images, engage in a discussio nof the images, and then begin to do their own marking up. Using the tags Ken first inserted with each image, the students can then begin to search the Flickr database for other images tagged “racism”, for instance. A quick search on this tag last night resulted in images of neo-Nazis in Texas and of anti-immigrant posters at a political rally. Finding this other content could lead to some very interesting discussions of the ways that others make sense of topics posed by the instructor.
As created, Ken’s module makes the images and their discussion public. Flickr allows users with a premium account ($25 per year) to make their images private and available only to their “friends and family”. If the instructor wanted to make the images and discussion of them private, he/she would simply need a premium account and then to designate his/her students as “friends”.
Ken’s module also addresses a recent finding by researchers at Wesleyan University who found that the respondents to their survey of faculty use of technology in teaching reported that the single most important source of digital images they used in their teaching was their own personal collection of images. The report’s authors recommend the creation of tools to allow faculty to manage their own image collections and use them in teaching.
As Ken’s module shows, this would just be reinventing the wheel. Flickr already provides all the tools the typical faculty member needs.