Sharing in Education Using Collaborative Tools
Today’s blog combines the thoughts of both Whitney and Yvette. (Since this section is on SHARING, we thought that would be fine.) Yvette works with Whitney and wanted to discuss the topic of sharing. So, here are a few of our thoughts.
It was fun to go through and play around on Flickr, Delicious, and Photo Bucket. I (Whitney) already had a Flickr account (Here is the link to Whitney’s Flickr account - http://flickr.com/photos/55881894@N00/ - Search under soraransom). I have used it for a while, but recently I received a notification that said I had uploaded 178 photos, and once I reach 200, I need to upgrade to a Pro Account. Now, once I saw that, I immediately decided that I would upload the rest of my pictures elsewhere. (Sorry, Flickr, but there are many sites that offer free hosting of photos – such as Photobucket.) Now, I have to admit that I have never used, nor heard of Photobucket. I checked it out and was impressed. They claim to be the number one photo sharing site in the US. Wow! People can upload their photos for free, and they also have a place where you can browse the photos that others have posted. Going back to Flickr, we both enjoyed viewing the interesting pictures on the site. I actually loved it.
In the process of researching these collaborative sharing spaces, we discovered Woophy. I (Whitney) actually sent Yvette a little card of a beetle I found. It was very easy to send and arrived in Yvette’s inbox in a matter of moments. Yvette actually loves beetles (for they are the workers of the earth). When I first met her, she showed me a book she had purchased on beetles. I did enjoy going through the pictures and never realized that so many species of beetles exist. In fact, one in every seven species is indeed a beetle. Could be one in ever 3 (more research is needed to clarify that thought. If someone wants to SHARE the answer, that would be great).
Here is the picture of the beetle:
Using Woophy, you can see a map that shows the photo distribution of those who have contributed photos throughout the world. It is also designed so that you can search by keywords. This is a great educational site and allows users to search by categories, such as animals, culture, landmarks and buildings, objects, nature, and people.
And now moving on to Delicious…which is very difficult to remember where the periods are in that word. (Alas, when we looked to see where the dots were located in the word, they have indeed been removed. They knew intuitively that it was difficult for them and others to remember where the dots fell in the word Delicious as well.) Delicious is pretty cool. It was actually rated number one, in the top 100 educational tools by 209 educators. We were quite surprised when I saw these results. It passed up educational tools such as PowerPoint, Skype, Word Press, Firefox, Google Search, etc. Here is the link, if you want to read the article and see for yourself the rankings: http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html
The tagging article,The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems, as part of our assignment was useful in several ways, although much of the content we thought was common sense. Yvette and I have not been avid users of tagging, although when we first started our job, it was a requirement to use Delicious as a collaborative tagging tool for our research team. We can see the value in tagging. We learned from the article, that tagging is about sensemaking and that “collaborative tagging is most useful when there is nobody in the ‘librarian’ role or there is simply too much content for a single authority to classify.” (See article above.)
As part of our assignment, we were asked to talk about educational uses of these tools. There are many educational uses in using Flickr. For example this article, Using Flickr in the Classroom discusses a variety of ways that they are using this tool. For example, it can be used to build literacy skills in students, to do geographical locations of the source, or to study a particular place, to create virtual field trips, or even for students to use the photos for presentation. It can also be used to teach students about copyright issues. One fun feature for students and faculty is that Flickr has an RSS feed where subscribers to any account can be notified when new photos are added.
Delicious can also be used in a variety of ways for education as well. In fact, many librarians are also finding it relevant and useful. Here is a link that describes some of the ways. This link also shows the periods as deli.icio.us. There it is. Using deli.icio.us., the students and faculty can manage the Web resources they use for research. Students can share their research with others. Schools can share with other schools their tagging for certain courses. They can also organize research for the next semester. It is also good for personal knowledge management. There are many more ways, but you’ll have to read the article to find them out. Have fun!
October 18th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[…] Whitney and I worked together to research and write on the class topic of SHARING. You can find our learnings in a blog post on Whitney’s site. Within that post we mention my love of beetles and a book I have about beetles. I thought to put in some further explanation about this fondness on my blog and mention how I think beetles and their work is a great metaphor for sharing. […]