The Strength of Weak Ties

Everyone participates. Everyone contributes. Leveraging the power of digital networks to connect people, resources and ideas to drive creativity and innovation forward...and actually accomplish something!

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Sandburg meets Flickr

I was looking at Flickr today as was intrigued by the quotes (the one I saw was from Mark Twain) with words that had been hyperlinked to various Flickr tags to represent the content of the quote. Cool idea, as I am always looking for ways to use Flickr for an instructional purpose. Being from Chicago, I took my favorite poem from Carl Sandburg and used the same technique to first hyperlink tags to the words of the poem, and in the second case, link actual photos from Flickr.

Tag Version

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders


Photo Version

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders

As I was doing this, I was thinking of all the interpretive possibilities with literature and with the shear volume of photography at Flickr, the endless possibilities to create visual stories with Flickr, that could link Flickr photography with works from authors like Sandburg, or of course, our students.

Could we have students write original stories in a wiki and then have others add visual content? Certainly. Could the students then explain why they used the photography the way they did through a metacognitive evaluation process? Absolutely. What if every student was given the same piece of writing and was asked to apply photography from Flickr? It certainly would be interesting to examine the differences in interpretation that each student would have. Imagine taking a piece of beautiful photography and a likewise beautiful poem and merging the two together in a 21st Century product....that would be the result of 21st Century open source thinking and learning.

1 Comments:

  • At 9:42 AM , Blogger Teach42 said...

    It looks like it isn't working right now, but there is a tool called flickReplacer that provides you with a cool bookmarklet that would fit right in with this idea. You highlight a word, click on the bookmarklet and it will replace the word with a random photo tagged with that word. It basically turns your text into a rebus. The problem is that since the photo is randomly chosen from words with that tag, if you used it on the word "Gray" you could get something with the color gray or a picture from the civil war. Great idea though, and it would be interesting to see the Sandburg poem with the actual photos substituted in instead of words with hyperlinks. It would make for a very interesting lesson in interpertation. "What word do you think he was thinking of when he chose this picture?"

     

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