WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Flickr is a place where you can ’store, search, sort and share’ your photo’s. You can ‘tag’ your photo’s, which are then searchable by others (if you want them to be). It knocks spots off Google Images for some things. Over at the Smelly Knowledge blog, Jeremy Price comments on Retrievr:
Retrievr is an interface which allows you to find Flickr photos by drawing a rough sketch (see the screenshot). It may not be as accurate as, say, a search on Google with words, but it’s also not bad.
As Jeremy says, the applications for this are potentially massive:
I think that this method of search holds some promise for learners, as I said above, who may have trouble expressing themselves or processing information in words. It may also be a boon for those who simply prefer images and visualizations to words…
Having pupils sketch out what they want to get from Flickr is one way of preventing them from having to wade through a lot of irrelevant results. Students have to contend with a lot of information nowadays - more so than any generation before them - and they need to find quickly which pieces of information they need. Over at Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson discusses this information overload, quoting the following quite scary factoid:
They say that in 1900, we encountered 1000 pieces of significant information per six months. In 1960, it was within one week. Today, it’s within one hour.
It brings up the question of how we are training students to find, process and retain information. Having to deal with so much information requires a different approach to the traditional trawls through encyclopedias, books, journals, etc. The teacher, as I mentioned in another post, can be seen to be like a DJ - building a collection, selecting, and mixing for a particular ‘audience’. Will Richardson also discusses this and, with the upcoming Martin Luther King day links to this playlist on MLK’s speeches. It’s a flexible approach meaning that teachers can pick and choose, ‘mixing’ different clips together for their particular classes.
Including video and audio clips in your teaching is just one way of building a multimedia classroom, and this is the subject of EdTechTalk’s Brainstorm 17a (podcast). Academics from the US and Canada discuss what would be in their perfect multimedia classroom if money were no object. It’s an interesting listen and you can follow this up with reading or adding to the comments on the relevant comment forum.
.Of course, integrating ICT and other teaching and learning tools in the classroom is worth nothing if it doesn’t benefit the individual student. Personalized learning is the current buzz phrase, and for good reason. Over at the Incorporated Subversion blog, James Farmer discusses Personal Learning Environments, going so far as to mock up what the product of one would look like:
He sees Wordpress (which powers this and countless other blogs around the Internet) as being a step in the right direction towards this, allowing non-technical users an easy way to publish and categorize their work.
Finally, whilst we’re looking at the future of educational technology, Andrew Field comments on the BETT Show 2006 over at FlashICT.net. He says that the show left him feeling as if something was missing in the world of educational technology:
Perhaps it is because I’ve been for a few years now, but I didn’t really discover anything there that I felt could change the way we teach using ICT. In the past I’ve been amazed at new technology and innovations. This year it felt much more like ‘more of the same’. All the major companies were there, each showboating their latest innovations. I personally feel I learn much more online that I do at these events.
I think that large companies trying to make money out of education by specific subject-related packages are going about things the wrong way. We should be teaching students to learn software packages that they will encounter in the ‘real’ world, not be tying ourselves down to commercial closed-source software. I’m all for tools which aid teaching and learning, but the aim should be the betterment of mankind, not shareholder profit…
Popularity: 3% [?]
1 Response to “News from other blogs”