"Remember, slow and steady comes in 29,000th." - David Letterman

This quote taken from the "Top Ten Thoughts of New York Marathoners" simply pokes fun at the way I'm plodding along, steadily mastering the Web 2.0 tools. However, unlike a marathon that has a set route to follow, I've discovered that the journey toward information literacy is not lineal at all. To begin my investigation of photo sharing this week, I started with our course Trailfire. The In Plain English video about online photo sharing is a tremendous tool to use with beginning students because it so beautifully creates a scaffold on which to attach new knowledge acquisition. Will Richardson's textbook account of "Creating, Publishing and Using Images Online" further enhanced my understanding but once I began following the What Can We Do with Flickr? presentation he recommended, all sense of order degenerated. The process of investigation seemed to morphed out exponentially to encompass a plethora of other interesting online websites and blogs, leading me deeper and deeper into the world on photo sharing. I’m sure that there is a term to describe this phenomenon in the online world but I haven’t come across it yet. If you have, please let me know because I’ve been there this week.

At times I became so confused with this "all over the map" approach to information gathering that I resorted to jotting down notes on paper to help me to remember the trail I took, record new ideas, and help me focus my thinking. I admittedly became hopelessly lost a few times but the back button usually helped me to pick up the original threads. I have also noticed a shift in my thinking this week after experiencing this multi-directional bombardment of information. I have felt much more comfortable about exploring freely, taking chances, attempting new activities and testing the possibilities without worrying so much about “making mistakes”. I have been frantically writing lists of topics I need to investigate further such as including hyperlinks into text (I may be on my way with this one), embedding documents into websites and creating slideshows. I have been making more use of the Help button features in the sites and trying to find my own answers to questions.

Back to Flickr… Tips for Flickr Beginners was worth reading for basic tips. The Jeff Utecht Photo Sharing Using Flickr tutorial was more practical, and although I had difficulty getting it to play through smoothly, I highly recommend it. Jeff demonstrated how to use the direct blog feature, how to plot images on a world map and explained tags and their uses. Jeff also suggested uploading Flickr to speed the interface process and showed how to capture and transfer multiple images. These tips helped as I found that my first attempts at uploading my photos took considerable time.

After joining Flickr I also explored the site capabilities of my blog provider as I tried to implement various Flickr features into my blog. I tried the PicNick editing software that works with Flickr to easily resize several pictures. I admittedly didn’t have much opportunity to explore other photosharing sites. My son led me through ImageShack, the image organizer he uses but we found it has limited features compared to Flickr.

As for classroom applications, there are so many ways online images may be used. Photosharing could be used to highlight field trip pictures, capture class moments in a yearly album, add visuals to online learning logs or keep in touch with a class member who was convalescing. I recalled a class pen pal activity I tried the “olden days” of regular post and could see the possibilities of a class today studying the Arctic using online technology to communicate and exchange photos with a class in the North. I recently received a friend’s slideshow of her Ironman experience and this opened up a realm of possibilities for classroom applications. Imagine exploring topics such as the nature of texture in an art lesson or geometry in the world around and allowing students to capture or retrieve digital images to create a slideshow devoted to their topic of study. WebTool4U2Use includes a additional list of classroom applications and information also worth investigating.

Flickr has indeed has “sharing at its heart” and offers an incredible collection of photographs available for public use. Richardson said that tags can be used to locate photos on almost every subject and all my attempts proved this to be true. One caution to teachers, when I checked out the “Interestingness” feature I did notice a number of photos that included partial nudity. I also wondered about the ethics of publishing photos of students and making these available for public use. I repeatedly tried creating a slide show with my own photos (I ended up using file pictures) but, of course, was unable to add the slideshow to my blog without making the photos public. It would be important to refer to district policies and guidelines about student privacy before beginning activities involving photo sharing and spend time educating students about what they can and can’t use as images as well as issues of privacy.

I feel like I have only scratched the surface of Flickr. Although I successfully started my photo files, and established a connection between Flickr and my blog, I am frustrated with my inability to create slideshows from selected groups of photos and will need to fiddle some more with this aspect. However, I found it very easy to locate photos from the Flickr library and incorporate these into slideshows. Overall I was very impressed with Flickr's capabilities and can understand why blog comments from users overwhelmingly support purchasing a $24.95 yearly subscription.