Flickr Wish List 1

I’m a big fan of Flickr and am constantly looking for educational applications of the content found there. We have begun to use Flickr content in our digital storytelling projects and the quality of the photography has dramatically improved the look and feel of the completed digital stories. To be more specific, we’re using photos from the Attribution and Attribution-Non Commercial Creative Commons pools so that students receive a lesson on intellectual property rights in addition to the storytelling. Using these photos from these pools will also allow us to share the completed digital stories online because we have effectively addressed copyright.

Many new tools that take advantage of the open source code of Flickr have emerged. One of my recent favorites is Flickr Magazine, which enables a user to take a photograph from Flickr and convert it to a magazine cover.

But I’m waiting for something like a Flickr Sequencer(in Flickr lingo, it would be called Flickr Sequencr), that enables a user to organize photos in a sequence, or perhaps organize them even non-sequentially. This system would also allow a user to overlay text. Is this just an online PowerPoint? Perhaps. But more and more tools are becoming Web-based as the Web transforms to Web 2.0. I would also think that this might be the forerunner of online digital storytelling, something that could potentially make digital storytelling much more ubiquitous. (to see a potential example, go here and select slide 28 of the PowerPoint to see Storymixer).

I would like to see teachers, for example a science teacher, use such a tool to help students make a visual argument (don’t look now, a science application of digital storytelling). Imagine a student writes a script about some aspect of genetic engineering (e.g. stem cell research), and that script contains the student’s perspective or argument, and the product that is produced is an online, visual argument using Flickr photography, but it’s done all online.

Flickr has tremendous potential to help students become more visually literate. Developing more effective educational instructional uses, as well as more education-based online tools, would be a step in the right direction.