Web’s second phase puts users in control
Steve O’Hear (Guardian)
God introduction to web 2.0 or I should say e-learning 2.0 technology. The main focus is on using weblogs, video blogs (youTube) and image annotation (flickr).
A great introduction.
“The “new” web is already having an impact in class, as teachers start exploring the potential of blogs, media-sharing services, and other social software, which, although not designed specifically for e-learning, can be used to empower students and create exciting new learning opportunities. These same tools allow teachers to share and discuss innovations more easily and, in turn, spread good practice.”
This is a fantastic illustration of how to use Flickr in terms of image annotation. I’ve quoted it in full since it make good reading as a whole.
“Flickr (flickr.com), a web service that has already had various mentions in this journal, makes it very easy to publish and share images, with many possible uses - from being a place where students can publish and discuss digital photography to a way for students to find images relevant to a particular subject for use in their coursework.
It also has a lesser-known feature that has many potential uses for teaching and learning: the ability to add annotations to an image. Once an image has been published on Flickr, users can draw hotspots on the image and then attach a note to those hotspots. Then, whenever a user moves their cursor over any of the hotspots, the annotations appear.
Beth Harris, director of distance learning at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, has used Flickr to enable her students to annotate and discuss a series of paintings as part of an online art history course.
“The problem when you teach online is that you can’t, for example, point to a part of a painting in the way you would in a face-to-face classroom,” she says. “So it occurred to me that I could use Flickr’s annotation function to have students engage more directly with the work of art itself.”"
So I’ve given this a go myself and annotated an image of myself and Paul Hudson meeting in Second Life. The image was uploaded to flickr late last year. I added the annotations to today. Click on the image* and (move your mouse cursor over the characters in the image. *you’ll be taken straight to Flickr.
This is a great feature for projects and field work. Imagine students talking photos with their mobile phone cameras and uploading them to flickr. They can then add further information through using the annotation feature. A further aspect is of course you can embed your images stored on Flickr into your blog (which is what I’ve done above, but note the annotations are not carried across).
So on to video blogging (via youTube).
From the article “…students were asked to research and produce a three-minute video blog entry on a new media technology of their choice - anything from the fashionable social networking website MySpace to MP3 players like the iPod.
“This meant they would not only be researching new media but also using it and, hopefully, get a better grasp of what it is and how it works,” says Fraser.”
“…each finished production was uploaded and published on the video-sharing website YouTube where it can be viewed and commented on by the wider YouTube community. Students were then required to re-publish their YouTube-hosted video on their own Blogger-based class weblog, a process that involves cutting and pasting a snippet of code from one service to the other.” And there are plenty of examples of this in this blog - most of the embedded videos are added in this manner.
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